House: About Last Night…

I don’t know about you guys, but it’s been a long 2 weeks with no House. It seems the country had better things to last Tuesday night. Not that an election night recap, especially if you were watching Fox, wouldn’t have been interesting. I was watching NBC myself, but by the 15th time they showed Oprah bawling big fat tears of joy, I could’ve used a snappy Greg House one-liner to cut the warm fuzzies. So we’ve waited long enough–let’s find out what happened after the big smooch!

A guy is lying on the floor next to some roses when firefighters bust through his door. The room is swimming and underwater sound effects (and one of the firemen) tell us that he’s just had a seizure. As they pull him out of the house, he freaks and clocks one of them.

Take that, warm fuzzies!

Name That Disease: The Too Legit To Quit Round

Cameron presents the case to House. The Patient of the Week is having seizures. That part is boring. The catch: he has agoraphobia, and refuses to come out of his house. Louie wants to know just what Cameron is doing in here. The POW didn’t come in through the ER, which is where Cameron works now, except during these weekly abuse appointments in the Masochist Wing. Anyway, Cameron knows this patient because she talked to him through his door one time, and she’s into damaged people, so she’s going to be his personal advocate. Cuddy shows up outside the door. House dashes out to meet her and have the “about last night” talk. She thanks him for not taking advantage of her in her emotional distress. Which is nowhere to be seen today, BTW. Do House’s medical powers extend to curing grief? And… only first base? Did he have an attack of conscience, or did he chicken out? I bet it’s the latter. In any case, they come to the Obvious Decision: pretend nothing happened. And I’m sure it’ll work just as well as it does every other time it’s tried on TV. Vulnerability crisis averted.

Will you go with me? Check yes or no.

House makes a triumphant return to the kids, consults his Hip Hop Dictionary, and tells them “I totally hit that last night, and now she’s on my jock.” Must be the 1990 Edition with foreword by MC Hammer. I have that one myself, it’s ill. 13 thinks Cuddy looks pretty good for someone on Roofies, and I guess she would know. She’s probably planning to get game tips from House now. The Houseguests don’t believe him. Less importantly, how are they going to figure out what’s wrong with the POW unless they can get him to the hospital? House drops a cryptic hint involving diamonds, which Foreman and Cameron figure out first. “The Formster and the Camster, kickin’ it ol’ skool.” He shoos them all out so he can watch his old Yo! MTV Raps tapes.

Cameron and the 2.0 Houseguests knock at the armor-plated door. After some negotiation, the POW lets them in. Cameron gives the POW an exam while the rest of the Houseguests ransack the place. She tries to trigger another seizure with a fancy medical version of a disco light. He’s wearing a sensor thingy on his head that looks like a reject prop from Ghostbusters. This doesn’t stop him from flirting with Cameron in that sick-puppy way that she adores.

I am the Keymaster.

House tells Wilson to go away. Looks like that agoraphobia is contagious. Wilson asks House if he talked to Cuddy last night about losing the baby. House uses his gangsta phrase again. It’s not like him to recycle a line, so he must be preoccupied. Wilson, unlike the Houseguests, believes him and is all ‘OMG!! U GUYZ R MFEO!!!’. I have it on good authority that working in a hospital is just like high school except with better drugs, and here we have the proof. Also, Grey’s Anatomy. House admits it was just a kiss and complains that a mosquito bite kept him up half the night. He scratches his hand, then decides to break the skin and let the poison out. Poison from a mosquito bite? You’re in a hospital. Don’t you have, I don’t know, Benadryl or something a tad less dramatic?

Louie calls from the POW’s house, with no helpful info. House asks to talk to Cameron and, apropos of absolutely nothing, asks her about her relationship with Chase. Oh yeah, they’re together, remember? Pro tip: always leave a few plot threads lying around on the floor, because you never know when you might want to pick one up again 2 seasons later. 13 tries to change the subject, but Cameron says it goes faster to just tell House the truth. Watch and learn, rookie. Things with Chase are same old same old, and Cameron gives away that they always spend the night at his place, not hers. House knows a relationship issue when he sees one. He should, he’s a walking relationship issue. “Yeah, moves much faster this way,” scoffs 13.

Since the POW won’t go outside, House decides to try provoking the seizure by bringing the outside to him. He busts in accompanied by three random people off the street. The POW starts wigging out. Cameron thinks the trick is cruel, but House says it’s kinder than not finding out what’s wrong with him. I must have heard this same exchange fifty times during the first three seasons. That, peeps, is why Cameron’s been exiled to the ER. Meanwhile, the POW is having some serious indigestion.

Hey, is that Knox from Heroes? That show is doing worse than I thought.

Name That Disease: Dr. Sarcasm, In the Library, With An X-Ray

OK, so it’s not the library, it’s just the POW’s living room with lots of books in it. Still, I’m getting a definite Clue vibe. They decide they really need to get him in the hospital so they can do some real tests. I don’t know, I’m kinda digging the change of scenery. House tells the POW that he is FOS. That’s an actual quasi-medical term, according to Mrs. Copyhacker. I know because she says it to me all the time. They’ll have to fix it in the OR. The POW refuses. He’s FOS, he can act however he wants. The SOB says OK, we’ll bring the OR to you, like MASH. OMG. STFU with the acronyms already. House is going to set up a fake operating room in the POW’s place, put him to sleep and haul him off to the hospital. Cameron objects, because the POW won’t be able to make decisions about his medical care while unconscious. House thinks her dead husband is doing her thinking for her again. Cameron makes the astute point that House’s leg is screwed up because someone operated on him against his will while he was unconscious. Wow, our little Cameron is all grown up now. I guess the ER really ages you. Anyway, they setup this totally ET looking OR in the POW’s MBR, knock him out and drag him off to the House of Pain.

Wilson goes to see Cuddy to try and weasel the deets out of her. Before he can barely open his mouth, she tells him about the kiss. She harshes Wilson’s schoolgirl buzz by saying she doesn’t see House that way, because well, duh. Do we really need an explanation for why a sane woman would not find House attractive? What she actually says is a lot of rationalization which makes it clear that she’s thought it all out, which means she is into House. I guess the operative word in my question was “sane”. Wilson, all into this matchmaker thing, tells her she should go for it. She gets a convenient page and exits.

OMG, as if! ‘Lisa Cuddy House’ looked totally lame when I wrote it out 100 times.

Cameron and Chase are passive-aggressively arguing about whose place they’re going to stay at tonight. I thought Cameron knew better than to let House get in her head like that. Maybe the veteran Houseguests aren’t that much better at handling House after all. Their spat is interrupted by Cuddy, who found out about the MASH unit stunt. House doesn’t argue with her, which Cameron picks up on. Cuddy notices the mosquito bite on House’s hand (which is now covered by a bloody bandage) and asks him if he’s OK. If one kiss means we can skip the scene where Cuddy pretends to be outraged over House’s latest stunt, I’m all for it.

Cameron has a relapse of conscience, wakes up the POW, and tells him that he’s been admitted to the hospital. He freaks and pulls out an arterial line in his neck. Blood sprays everywhere. Are we at the halfway point already?

Cuddy chews out House, Cameron and Chase in her office and says the POW went home threatening to sue. She kicks them off the case. So we didn’t avoid the outrage scene after all. Oh well. Cameron knows by now that something’s up with Huddy. Don’t blame me for the name, I didn’t make it up. It’s on Fox’s web site. House sends Cameron on another house call to try more stuff on the POW. Chase knows by now that something’s up with Cameron. She blows him off, begs the POW to let her back in, saying she’s let a lot of people down today and she’s sorry he was one of them. And she’s totally crunching on that hollow-eyed look he’s rocking.

Wilson comes to see House and notices the mosquito bite is looking worse. “The Red Badge of Idiocy” is what he calls it. I’m glad they’re spreading the one-liners around the cast now. Why should Hugh get all the fun? Wilson says House is afraid of getting involved with Cuddy, and he should go out and carpe him a piece of that diem. House says it’s logic, not fear, and Wilson is trying to put them together because he doesn’t have the stones to go after the queen bee himself. He’s probably right.

Cameron calls House from the Bachelor Pad From Hell. House says they need to operate on location, and if Chase (he’s the only surgeon in the hospital, remember) won’t do it, then the Houseguests will just have to do it themselves. So Loumar fumbles through the surgery like the Two Stooges, while the POW’s lawyer watches from a chair, sans surgical mask. There’s a spectacular incident in which the cauterizing gadget sets some intestinal gas on fire. The Jackass guys would have a field day on this show. “Nothing to sue about,” says House to the lawyer.

Paging Drs. Beavis and Butt-head.

Chase comes to the POW’s house to see Cameron. He offers to stay at her place for the night. I don’t get it. If where they sleep is such a big deal, which one has the control issue? They’re making it out like it’s Chase, but anyone who watched Season 3 knows better. Cameron says no thanks. Yep, more to this than meets the eye. She has to stay here and watch her stray puppy, whose legs just went numb.

The diagnosis du jour is a wheat allergy. The Houseguests want a blood test. House says to force-feed him wheat until he has a reaction. Cameron says House really wants to cause the patient a lot of pain so they can get him back in the hospital. Foreman decides to do the blood test. Not sure why he’s in charge all of a sudden, unless it’s just that House has better things to do like sit around and pine over Cuddy.

Wilson, heart firmly attached to sleeve, tells Cuddy that he’s always had a thing for her. “Then let’s have dinner tomorrow night,” says Cuddy. “Or maybe it would be better if we just had sex in front of House’s office.” Wilson is just trying to make House jealous so House will pursue Cuddy. Busted. What kind of plan is that, anyway, and how did Cuddy see through it? Wilson is either the Urban Meyer of wingmen, or he’s just really weird. And BTW, If anyone on this show is MFEO, it’s Wilson and Cameron.

Speaking of Cameron, she’s still shacked up at Chez Crazy, trying to analyze the POW out of his agoraphobia while he eats a bowl of some kind of wheat stuff. She plays the “I lost someone too” card. The POW says he’s always had the agoraphobia. Why is this just now coming up? The whole mystery-symptom thing is really on the back burner this week. He gets physical pain, and panic attacks whenever he goes outside. When he was dating, he’d do it for the girlfriend, but it was tough. He starts to gag on his Wheaties. I can’t help but wonder if Cameron gets that reaction a lot.

House tells Louie to secretly replace the POW’s morphine with saline (or less-phine, as he calls it). He wants the guy to be in so much pain that he’ll beg to go to the hospital. Louie refuses, but House points out that all that’s waiting for Louie at home is a couch. Are we ever going to get any backstory on that?

Next we see House at home, turning on one of those propane mosquito foggers. He sees a mosquito land on it and whacks it with a rolled-up paper. He doesn’t get the bug, but knocks the gas hose loose instead. Then he whacks the stove knob, which lights the stove, and BOOM his apartment blows up. GOTCHA! House is just dreaming. Am I dreaming too, or did they really just blow most of their budget for this episode on a 10-second dream sequence?

House goes to see Wilson in the middle of the night to get his dream analyzed. “Ric Ocasek’ll kill me,” he says, which is an obscure and awesome reference to that Cars video from the ’80s with a fly in it. Lines like that are why I watch this show. He says he got the mosquito bite on the night he snogged Cuddy, and scratched it to death worrying about the sitch. Wilson tells House he’s imagining the mosquito bite, and he’s afraid to try anything with Cuddy, and he should either go home or go ask her out.

You MIGHT think I’m crazy.

Instead he goes to the POW’s house to see if he’s suffering enough to go to the hospital yet. Cameron tries to flip the POW over for another test and he flatlines. House casually calls the guy’s lawyer and says they’re going to the hospital at last. But Cameron zaps him with the paddles and all is good again. Sure, he was dead for a minute, but that’s no reason to go to a hospital. House wants to give Cameron her job back so he can fire her.

After a lightning Name That Disease round, House hears that the patient cleans his bathroom a lot, and thinks the cleaning chemicals are producing chlorine gas that’s making him sick. Bo-ring. We still have a few minutes left. Try harder, guys.

House thinks the POW needs a pacemaker. Chase still refuses to go operate on the POW at his house. He accuses Cameron of looking for an excuse to fight. Furthermore, he thinks she doesn’t want him over at her place at all. Every time he was there, she hurried him out. He can’t keep chasing her forever, he says. Hey, why not? It’s been a whole season and nothing has happened on that front yet. If Cameron is wearing the pants, there’s no hope for you, dude.

House finds out that Cameron found out he switched out the morphine, and that she switched it back without telling him. Lightbulb. He says the POW has… lead poisoning! Wow, have they really not used that one yet? House grabs a scalpel, slices open the POW and digs out a couple of lead bullets. It seems the original surgeon missed them the first time around. House also thinks the POW is lying about having agoraphobia and is just basically hiding out acting miserable. Remember the roses by his door? He went outside and visited his girlfriend’s grave on her birthday.

Cameron and Chase (Chaseron?) kiss and make up. She cleaned out a drawer for him. Wow, a whole drawer? I barely even get that much! She promises to work on her dead hubby issues.

House examines the sore on his hand while playing guitar. A mosquito lands on his other hand and he blows it away. He picks up his keys and goes biking over to Cuddy’s house as the POW ventures outside, and Chase moves into Cameron’s drawer, and Louie’s wife comes to the couch to give him a hug. Everyone’s learned their lesson as a just-indie-enough love song plays. Except… House watches Cuddy through the window, then chickens out and turns away. I call this the Scrubs Ending. All we’re missing is an earnest Zach Braff voiceover.

I can’t decide how I feel about this one. No real shockers, just your typical followup episode to an awkward-romantic-moment episode. Pretty good character stuff, though, and I do like seeing more of the 1.0 Houseguests. I guess it’s going to take House a few more episodes of pining to get up the guts to actually do anything with Cuddy. Who knows, Lucas might even be back by then. I want that slapping match!