The audition experiment continues as House splits the pretenders to Chase, Cameron, and Foreman"s thrones into two teams of five to diagnose a man with SMA, a degenerative disease that may or not be affecting his ability to swallow and causing him to faint. Whoever wins is, presumably, not fired. That one pinchy-faced woman switches to the other team, sucks up to Cameron and Chase as a means of trying to get the diagnosis first, and is undiplomatic at every turn, so...she"s the Chase, I guess.
Meanwhile, House"s clinic patient, who was recently in a car accident, wants to repeat his near-death, go-to-the-light experience -- which he does by plugging a knife into a wall socket. The guy survives, and tells House there"s something bigger out there.
Neither team can figure out what"s wrong with SMA Guy, of course, and there"s the predictable hijinks and guessing -- worms from the patient"s trip to Thailand, melanoma of the eye -- while Kal Penn dickers over the terms of the prospective firings, so I suppose he"s the Foreman. And also, he"s Kal Penn, and why would they put him on the show if he"s not staying. During the part where everyone"s convinced it"s cancer, SMA Guy says he"s had enough of being trapped in his own body; he just wants to die and get it over with, and set himself free. House thinks that"s bollocks, of course, and repeats the knife-in-the-socket experiment (on himself) to prove to SMA Guy that there"s no afterlife. He pages the pinchy-faced woman before he goes through with it, though, so she arrives moments later and resuscitates him. When Wilson questions him later about what he saw, House is mum.
Up in SMA Guy"s room, they"ve discovered that it"s not cancer, gone back to the worms idea, and given him another treatment, which is supposed to start working immediately...but it doesn"t. He asks that his dog be put up on the bed with him, and that his hand, which he can no longer move on his own, be put on the dog"s head. Then he goes into Cheyne-Stokes and dies. Minutes later, so does the dog.
Pinchy gives House the news, and he hauls himself out of his sickbed to run the diagnosis postmortem. Turns out the guy not only didn"t take the pills, but he gave them to his dog; since the dog is of a breed with a particular gene that can"t take typical heartworm medication, SMA Guy knew he and the dog would both die. The worms diagnosis was correct, and the big-foreheaded girl who was running with it is upset, sitting by the body and brooding about how she didn"t watch SMA Guy to make sure he took the pills. Aaaaaand she"s evidently the Cameron. House delivers a lecture but doesn"t fire her, she leaves the room, and House grimly tells the corpse what he saw while he was temporarily "dead" by electrocution: nothing.
Elsewhere, the real Foreman gets himself fired for taking a diagnostic long shot that, while correct, reveals he"s still haunted by past mistakes.