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We already got a Wilson-centric episode this season, and now House serves up a Cuddy-centric ep this week. And unlike the Wilson episode, Cuddy’s seriously lacks in House and even more seriously lacks in being really interesting.
Cuddy starts her day off to a crying, sick baby and is running late to head to work with an important insurance presentation to make. Her detective boyfriend, Lucas, shows up just as she’s headed out the door, rarin’ and ready to go for a quickie. Cuddy attempts to put him off but then goes for it… For a solid minute, as indicated by the clock. Just before the petting gets really heavy, House calls Cuddy to find out where she is and why she’s running late.
Cuddy rushes out the door and later learns that House made a bet with Lucas that he couldn’t get a quickie in with Cuddy before she left and Lucas bet that she wouldn’t answer her phone if House called during sex. This does not go over too well with the already-stressed Cuddy. Compounding things, she finds out that double the prescriptions were ordered.
Just in time for Super Bowl week, House’s patient of the week is #77 on the field, #1 in your heart, a very large college football player who’s being scouted. As the kid — Daryl–’s mother talks up her son to a scout in the stands. Daryl is like a raging bull, charging across the field, plowing into everyone and everything in sight. The aggression doesn’t stop there. Daryl takes off his helmet starts beating himself in the forehead with it, drawing blood. Lots of blood. So much blood, in fact, that he’s whisked off to Princeton-Plainsboro for House and his team of crackerjack diagnosticians to figure out what’s wrong.
The team attempts the clock to discover what’s wrong with Daryl before his mystery malady kills him, and all before Saturday, when Daryl has a tryout in front of scouts in the hopes to kick off his pro football career. At over 6′5″ and 300+ lbs., House’s first reaction is that it’s a bad case of ‘roid rage or pituitary damage. When nothing shows on the scans, House wonders if Daryl “got his hands on the good stuff,” possibly HGH. As usual, the staff exhausts every possibility until House has his 11th hour epiphany that Daryl has melanoma located on his foot. Disguised by the fact that Daryl is black and melanoma rarely affects people of color, House sees the treatable spot on the football player’s foot.
This episode’s Patient of the Week manages to out-House House in the psychopathic, lack of emotion department. The viewer is dealt a neat little swerve in initially thinking that it’s going to be the puking drunk corporate lackey, Russ, who heaves his cookies in front of his douchebag tyrant of a boss and onto the shoes of his executive assistant. Wrong! Patient of the Week is the corporate assistant who drops to her knees in front of Douchebag Boss (get your mind out of the gutter) when her ears start ringing painfully. .
After Valerie, the Executive Assistant, is admitted to good ol’ Princeton-Plainsboro, House and his crew are on the case. House, in particular, finds the fact that attractive Valerie is married to a creepy cucumber of a guy and intends to unravel that mystery in addition to what’s causing her ear ringing. That is, when House isn’t busy dodging phone calls from a former college friend (or as close of a “friend” as it gets to House) or replacing Cuddy’s boyfriend’s head with that of a chimp in her office.
The underlying theme on this episode of House is that everyone is a big fat liar, and mostly everyone (or at least everyone who happens to be a doctor) has a lot of fun being a liar. Thirteen, Taub, and Chase decide to play a prank on Foreman, while House and Wilson find themselves competing for the attention of the same woman who lives in their building — and who thinks the two housemates are gay. Meanwhile, the Patient of the Week has been living a lie, harboring a secret for the past 16 months of his life.
Speaking of the Patient of the Week, viewers are introduced to Mickey, a drug dealer who finds himself collapsing to the ground whenever he hears a loud noise. His concerned friend/fellow dealer, Eddie brings him to good ol’ Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital. House, perplexed by his pusher patient’s sudden development of noise induced vertigo, nonetheless has a grand old time slamming his cane against things to make loud noises that drop Drug Dealer to the ground.
CBS easily won Monday night, again, with its insanely popular line-up of comedies. During its flagship night, the network defeated ABC and NBC in the 18-49 demographic and demonstrated series highs with The Big Bang Theory and the 100th episode of How I Met Your Mother. Starring Neil Patrick Harris, Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders and Alyson Hannigan, the show netted its best numbers since last spring.
Two and Half Men with Charlie Sheen also had its best 18-49 demo performance since last winter and also its best audience average since December of 2008.
This week, Wilson takes center stage doing what he does best: being everyone’s BFF and port of calm in the various storms that rip through the lives of those closest to him. In terms of diagnostics and perception, living with House has rubbed off on Wilson. Even better, the dear fellow is starting to grow a pair of his own!
Things kick off as Wilson wakes up to the mellow strains of House doing an acoustic guitar rendition of George Michael’s “Faith” at 6:33 in the morning. When he tells House that he’s going back to sleep and then going turkey hunting with his friend, Tucker, House interjects that Wilson’s buddy is a Self-Important Jerk. Pot. Kettle. Black. However, House maintains that even though he himself is something of a jerk, he at least has the decency to call Wilson “Wilson” or “James” and not “Jim” like ol’ Tucker does.
On House, this week’s Patient of the Week, a bona fide genius and M.I.T. grad who dumbed himself down to be able to live happily with his dullard of a wife, was boring. Once his illness was revealed to be the result of using cough syrup with a vodka chaser to numb himself to his mundane, yet “happy” life and deplete his brain cells to close the 91 I.Q. point gap between himself and his wife. Having attempted suicide several years ago by jumping, the Cough Syrup Savant broke his ribs and the ribs punctured his spleen, severing it into sixteen easy pieces, all of which needed to be removed instead of just the one that Chase had assumed was the problem.
Way more interesting than the episode’s side plot was House’s machinations to break up Cuddy and Lucas. Learning that she’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner at her sister Julia’s, House goes to great lengths to find out where Julia lives and tells Wilson he’s crashing dinner. After driving 3 hours, House makes it to Julia’s house, but she’s in Hawaii. Cuddy anticipated what House would do and instead, bought herself roughly 6 hours to have a holiday dinner with Lucas, her daughter, and the rest of her family at her place, free of any House interruptions.
It’s just another day on the set of a porno movie, when this episode’s Patient of the Week — a 30-ish, Jewish male porn star — has a severe reaction to light known as photophobia, collapsing on the set in a way that not even Viagra could revive. The woodsman is then sent off to (where else?) Princeton-Plainsboro.
Foreman, interim head of the Diagnostics department, wants to forgo Male Porn Star’s case in favor of a baby that has gone completely limp. (Insert your own joke here.) Luckily for the woodsman, Cuddy drops off the papers reinstating House as the department head and it looks like the staff will be working on his case instead.
This might not be as simple as it seems, since Cameron and Chase have both decided to leave Princeton-Plainsboro because Chase is reminded on a daily basis that he medically terminated Dibala. The happy couple can’t walk out just yet, not having given sufficient notice. Chase and Cameron set to work to discover what’s wrong with the Woodsman.
The colorful, potentially prevaricated antics of this week’s Patient of the Week, an ailing teenage Lolita, aren’t nearly as much fun as House breaking down and confessing his love for Cuddy in this week’s episode — and dressing up in 1780s fashions! Oh… And Chase finally tells Cameron that he killed that African dictator weeks ago.
Patient of the Week Jordan is a 16-year-old aspiring rock groupie/sci-fi geek whose hands and feet swell up after a night out on the town at a star-studded party with her best friend. Although Jordan’s BFF knows most of the real story, there are still some details that escape her. Initially, Jordan gives her other group of teenage friends a story that she spent the night with an eyeliner-wearing rockstar. In reality, Jordan and her friend hit up a party attended by both the aforementioned rock star… and a sci-fi director/auteur whose work Jordan and her friend greatly admire.
The episode (and ensuing intro to the Patient of the Week) begins with a bang, as a middle aged detective and a hotshot young detective are in hot pursuit of one of those roof-jumping French guys. It all reeks of Casino Royale! The young cop attempts to jump off one roof and onto the other after the guy, gets some airtime, and then falls several stories below. Things aren’t looking too good for him as he lies contorted in a pinwheel position with blood oozing from his mouth. A trip to Princeton-Plainsboro sees him propped up in a hospital bed with a leg cast and multiple contusions, telling the team that whatever they do won’t matter because, like his father and grandfather before him, he’ll die at 40. Oh. And he’s 39 now.
As usual, it’s never just about the patient at Princeton-Plainsboro. Nope. Chase keeps seeing Splat!Cop in the same room where his “international incident” went down and keeps having Dibala flashbacks. (What? Are you gonna kill him, too, Chase?!) Plagued by a guilty conscience, he hauls it to confession and is seriously bummed that the priest tells him the only way he can be absolved is to turn himself in to the police. Using logic, Chase realizes that turning himself in won’t solve anything, just bring down the wrath of the authorities on the rest of the staff… At least that’s what we can assume is going on inside his tousled, blonde noggin.
