Chase Wears Short Shorts!

I think House is a pretty good show, especially as far as procedurals go. The lead character is, obviously, compelling enough to carry the whole show, but he doesn’t have to since the supporting cast is also awesome. They’re all starting to interact more, and I especially love the scenes between Wilson and House. What I don’t love so much? Anything to do with Cameron. She’s one of the most unlikeable characters ever written. But I guess the actress should take that as a compliment – she is workin’ it! Only an awesome actress would make me want to cut her as bad as I want to cut Cameron. Anyhoo. Onwards.

We open up on a bike race. Some kids are super excited about it, a little too excited if you ask me, since it looks like a state fair. There are bales of hay scattered about. Oh boy, here comes the misdirection! The younger of two brothers is wheezing and his dad has to run back to the car to get his inhaler and…and… it’s totally okay. He gets his inhaler in time, and it’s the dude on the bike who passes out. The other racers jump around him to continue on the race, so we’re supposed to think they’re heartless, but I feel for them. There’s probably entire crates of Clif bars at stake here!
Commerical break: you know that Wal-Mart Christmas commercial with Destiny’s Child? It’s weird that Beyonce sings about her nephew and he’s in almost every shot, but Solange is nowhere to be found. Wal-Mart loves babies! But sluts can go straight to hell!

Back to the show. House is creating domino walls out of CD cases and having a grand old time when Stacy comes in worrying about boring things like renewing his credentials. Just like a woman! He says he liked it better when they were sleeping together, to which she replies that if she weren’t married, she’d be on him like “red on rice.” Ha! Oh, I love the women on this show who aren’t Cameron.

The cyclist, it turns out, is a world-class champion; he was just in that race for charity. House wants no part of the case because he doesn’t want to deal with the back-and-forth about steroid use that he’s sure will come with treating a pro athlete. Cuddy convinces him to talk to the patient by saying that he’s not denying drug use. House goes up the room, pretty much to prove a point: he immediately asks the cyclist if he’s on steroids. The guy says no, which causes House to gloat in Cuddy’s direction, until the patient says, “I do straight blood doping.” “Plot twist!” shouts Cuddy gleefully.

This is when House decides to take some of his painkillers. I’m not sure what he’s trying to prove by doing that. That he’s on the patient’s side? That can’t be.

The Outhouses are in the conference room offering their theories. They each have a different cause in mind for the respiratory distress, but it’s Foreman who comes up with the winner (and we can safely guess it’s wrong, since we’re only ten minutes in to the show, right?). He figures that given how many times a day the cyclist injects himself with various substances, he must have made a mistake at some point and let in air with the injection. This would be ironic, as House helpfully points out.

Foreman is running fancy tests on the athlete, but the guy hardly seems to notice – he just wants to know if his accident made the news. Cameron is off to the side being judgey, while Chase rationalizes steroid use by saying that we take drugs for falling asleep and that’s really no different, and Foreman is over it and telling the other two that it doesn’t matter anyway so shut up already. What’s that saying? Same song, different tune?

Turns out there was a bubble in Jeff’s lung (we have name, only eleven minutes in!). Chase is in charge of sucking it out, and we get lots of cool CGI effects that actually don’t gross me out. It’s all red and white and shiny and kind of looks like risotto. Now I am grossed out. Just when Chase thinks he’s got it, Jeff sort of goes comatose and starts drooling. Chase asks him if he “all right,” which I don’t think is a particularly good question for your doctor to ask.

Down in the cafeteria, House is stealing Wilson’s chips and flirting with him. Stacy wheels her husband Mark in (I admit, I totally don’t remember why he’s in a wheelchair) and House goes off on this completely detailed theory about how Stacy is still in love with him and secretly hates her husband. “You need to get some,” remarks Wilson. “Oh, I get some SOME all the time,” says House. Hee. I like it when he talks like a teenager.

Mark and House get into a pissing contest, as is their wont. It culminates with Mark stating, “it’s not the size of the muscle, it’s where you get to put it.” I do not buy for one second that Stacy would have let that misogynistic comment slide without whapping her husband upside the head.

House is on a downward spiral. He decides to crash Mark’s group therapy session. It’s led by Alanna Urbach, an actress who I believe has had more plastic surgery than Cher, and the fact that her IMDB profile only has recent pictures only enforces my belief. I must say, though, it’s a damn good surgeon she’s working with.

Back upstairs, Chase is nagging Cameron about her drinking coffee. If steroids are bad, why is caffeine allowed? She says it’s okay because caffeine is legal. I HATE it when people make that argument! Stupid Cameron! Legal, schmegal.

There are some other scenes that happen here, I think, but my brain is completely overloaded with images of Cameron being a dumb shit. Next they’ve got Jeff laying there with a needle jabbed into his spine and she starts pestering him about how he should feel guilty for lying to his fans. Let’s give it a rest there, Smugface Magee.
Whew, we get a break from her for two seconds while House puts in face time at the clinic. Oooh, his patient is Tom Lenk, aka Andrew on Buffy! Hi Tom! Smooches! I do love him so, even though he was one of the imposters who came in at the end and disrupted the flow of the Scooby gang. There’s just something about that little twink that I can’t resist! (Also – and I’m earning my fangirl gold medal here – he actually played a vampire in one episode before the Andrew character was introduced.) I’m really glad I got that out of my system. Moving on!

This scene is just a setup for Stacy to barge in and yell at House about crashing Mark’s therapy session. And from this point forward, everything is about relationships. Wilson brings in a note for Cameron, which says that it’s from the Times, returning her call. Wilson figures out her game immediately; she called the media to say that Jeff’s a doper. Just when I think she can’t get any worse, she brings the insanity to entirely new levels. Her reasoning for calling the paper? “Kids love him, and he’s not who they think he is.” You know who else is like that? SANTA CLAUS.

I wonder if the actress playing Cameron cries herself to sleep every night. Anyway, Wilson makes some tortured point comparing cheating in sports to cheating in love, and it’s weird, but we learn that he’s on at least his second marriage and is a habitual cheater. All of a sudden I’m attracted to him. Oh good, I’m one of those women.

While the doctors are discussing the new developments in Jeff’s case (he has cancer-no he doesn’t-run a test) Stacy and Cuddy come strutting in to shout at everybody. I love them so…but I do wish Sela Ward would rethink the Vulcan eyebrows. Cuddy knows there’s a leak in the group, since the media are calling her, so Stacy will have to monitor them all now. She tells House he’ll have to practice medicine responsibly now that there’s a lawyer watching, to which he responds with fury, “You know I can’t do that!”

House decides that Jeff must be doing steroids, even if he doesn’t know it. In fact, he so strongly believes that Jeff’s manager is slipping him drugs that he convinces Jeff to fire her. Of course later that night, he relapses while under new treatment, which means that he wasn’t on steroids after all. Cameron says that he was on steroids, but that he’s not getting better because “he’s been lying and cheating and now it’s coming back to bite him in the butt.” You’ve got to be kidding. I have nothing snarky to say about this character. She’s blowing my mind with her uselessness.

It’s nearing the end of the show, so House has one of his breakthroughs and orders a seemingly random test on Jeff that ends up finally showing the illness that he actually has. Turns out he’s been sick for a long time, but with the blood doping he’s basically been giving himself daily blood transfusions that have kept the illness at bay. House gives him a shot that magically cures him long enough to figure out that his manager hadn’t been doping him after all. The positive effects of the shot wear off after five minutes, but it proves that Jeff will be fine as long as he gets blood transfusions every two weeks.

OK, all that silly doctorin’ business is out of the way. House goes to talk to Stacy, and she tells him that she hates him and she loves him, but she just loves Mark. And in another part of the hospital, Cameron confesses to Wilson that she fell in love with her husband’s best friend while her husband was dying. But she didn’t sleep with the guy, because she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself. Wilson gets the best line of the evening: “You’d be surprised what you can live with.”

For the closing montage, we get scenes of Cameron looking at her wedding pictures, Wilson alone at night in his office, and House…sigh…House snooping through Stacy’s file from therapy. Setting aside the fact that I highly doubt Stacy would get therapy at the hospital, I think House has gone over to the darkside with this. He’s done bad things before, but this was the first time I shouted at him (rather than Cameron) during the show. What about you guys?