Brave Heart
Updated 2009-10-20 08:12:13
Guys, it's official: I liked House's hair better when it was longer. Okay, onto the show. Police officers attempt to chase down a criminal who is wise to the ways of parkour. Oh, House , no. The Office just made fun of how passé parkour is like four weeks ago. This is embarrassing! Also, show me one criminal in America (or even Europe) who actually uses parkour to escape the police. Anyway, the guy runs through various warehouses and actually seems to make his getaway more difficult than it needs to be by jumping across stacks of pallets rather than just running on the ground. Finally, he appears to be at a dead end and the cops draw their guns. And then they just watch him slide through a partially-open window. Shoot him, idiots. Anyway, the guy keeps running and the cops keep chasing him and this is just embarrassing for the cops. It's one guy being chased by like thirty cops through two warehouses. Once again he appears to be surrounded and once again, he climbs away to escape as the cops watch him with their guns drawn. In the end, the criminal is on one roof and the rebel bad-ass cop is on the other (we know he's the rebel bad-ass because he's wearing a leather jacket and street clothes while the others are wearing suits or uniforms). Unfortunately, his name is Donny, which is not very bad-ass at all. While the perp watches in disbelief and his partner yells for him to stop, Donny gets a running start and tries to jump to the other building. He doesn't make it. Not even close. He lands on his back about two stories below where he started.
And yet, he lives! But with two broken bones, a collapsed lung, and a severe concussion. And he's under Cameron's care in the ER even though I thought she worked for Foreman now. Also, way to not cut off Donny's clothes there, EMTs and ER staff. He has a broken leg and his pants are almost entirely intact. Maybe PPTH ran out of hospital gowns? Donny's partner, who is nursing some kind of ankle injury due to his inability to climb stairs, tells Cameron that Donny thinks he's going to die soon, hence the life-threatening stunts. Donny explains that his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all dropped dead from heart problems just after turning forty, and he's turning forty in a week. But all the doctors he's seen about it say his heart is fine. He just thinks that means they can't find whatever is waiting to kill him. Cameron says she knows a doctor who can.
Wilson walks into his living room in the morning to find his roommate fiddling around under the covers. Horrified, Wilson promises to come back in ten minutes when House has finished jacking off on Wilson's couch. House claims he's just picking lint out of his belly-button. Wilson doesn't care -- just the idea of walking in on House pleasing himself is enough to make him realize that House needs his own bedroom. Fortunately, the apartment has a spare room that Wilson was using as a study. Unfortunately, said room used to be Wilson and CTB's bedroom, which House says is a "shrine" to his dead girlfriend. And rightly so, I'd say, since I'm pretty sure that Wilson is living in CTB's old apartment because of squatter's rights. While Wilson is clearly thinking about CTB, House proudly admits that he really was jacking off under the covers, just to put that image in Wilson's head alongside the dead ex-girlfriend. Wilson says the room is House's and runs away.
At work, Cameron says she has a "genetic timebomb" for the team to take on. House thinks the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather's deaths are just a coincidence and doesn't see any reason to treat Donny. But Cameron is determined to help Donny so that he'll stop living his life as if he's about to die and settle down and start a family, which he was always afraid to do before because he didn't want to die on his kid like his father died on him. This apparently works on Foreman, who says they'll take the case. House doesn't respect Foreman's authority, bringing up how Chase called him the "de-facto boss" last week. Foreman says that as long as House's "de-facto medical license" doesn't actually count for anything, he is still in charge. He orders Chase and Cameron to start testing Donny's heart for everything. On their way into Donny's ICU room, Chase has a flashback to Dibala's death, which also occurred in the ICU (and probably in that same bed, since PPTH's ICU only has one room) and can't go any further. He slips his watch into his pocket and tells Cameron and Foreman that he left it in the locker room and has to run back to get it.
Cuddy enters House's office (even though it's really Foreman's office, House has made himself quite at home behind the desk) to find out what his plans are. House makes a Nazi joke, and Cuddy clarifies that she meant his employment plans. He likes the status quo, but Cuddy doesn't feel like paying a doctor's salary to a guy who doesn't have a medical license. He has to re-qualify for the license, and that means doing 120 hours of medical rounds. House wants her to just sign off that he did them, but she refuses which is perfectly valid since she'd get in a lot of trouble if the state board found out that she was lying to them. But I'm sure House won't understand that and will make this a lot harder than it has to be.
Just like all those cardiologists before them, the Cottages find nothing wrong with Donny's heart. Chase is ready to give up, but Foreman is in the Halloween spirit, so he has other ideas: namely, digging up Donny's paternal line and testing their remains. Great-grandpa and grandpa came up as skeletons, but Dad is represented by a bowl of gross. That's because he had a sealed casket and thus was decomposed by only anaerobic bacteria, who apparently leave liquefied purification behind because they are jerks. I did way too much research on that just now, by the way. Yuck. Foreman uses this time with Chase to talk about how he obviously had problems entering the ICU earlier. Chase admits that he almost had a panic attack in there. "I've crossed some line and I'm having trouble getting back to the other side," he says with all the drama. Foreman offers to have Donny moved to the only other room at PPTH if that'll help Chase, but he says no because then Cameron will get all nosy and he doesn't want to tell her what happened even though everyone else knows by now. Even Cuddy knows more than Cameron does, and that's just embarrassing. Cameron walks in to find that Foreman and Chase are taking the great-grandfather and grandfather's bodies respectively, leaving her to test the bowl of Dad. Can you imagine being the prop department on this show? "We'll need two skeletons and a bowl of green sludge. Make it look like human remains after a round with anaerobic bacteria. Here are some pictures to use as a guide."
House is just about to go home for the night when a woman walks into his office. She wants to talk to him about Donny's case, since she "read in the paper" that House was treating him. Um... which paper did she read that in, exactly? The Very Specific Times ? The We Know Way Too Much Herald ? And how/why would they find out that Donny was being treated by House without wondering: a. why a diagnostician was treating a guy who simply fell off a roof; and b. why House was allowed to treat patients at all since he doesn't have a medical license. Oh well. Basically, the woman has no interest in seeing Donny, but she does have an interest in his case since the newspaper also said he was being looked at for genetic conditions (again, how could they possibly know this??) and she and Donny have a son together that Donny doesn't know about. House hands her a phone and instructions on how to call Foreman to tell him this "cool information." But will it be reported by Every Single Thing Daily ? It can go under the headline story "Woman Eats Oatmeal For Breakfast; Tops With Raisins."
House was not lying when he said that bedroom was a shrine to CTB. There are pictures of her all over the place. Some with Wilson, posing awkwardly as he does. Were they even together that long to have this many pictures? Is that her PPTH security badge on the shelf? Makes sense they wouldn't have taken it away from her after she was fired, since the PPTH security team is just that terrible. Suddenly, House hears whispering. At least, I think it's whispering. It's kind of hard to tell since the ominous music on the soundtrack is so loud and drones a lot of it out. He turns his light on and it stops. Even so, he walks into Wilson's room unannounced, apparently hoping to catch him whispering or listening to the radio of something that would explain the sound. Wilson is lying in bed silently until he asks House what's up. House claims he's fine and goes back to bed. As soon as he turns the light off, the whispering starts again. Just sleep with the light on until Halloween is over, House. Or until you can find a way to convince your friend to take down all the CTB photos that are clearly having an effect on you.
The next morning, the Cottages enter the meeting room and exposit that they didn't find any consistent genetic mutations in Donny's dead paternal line, but now they have a living relative to test in his son. House, meanwhile, has written them a double-post-it note saying he's on medical rounds because this patient is even more of a waste of his time than they are. Foreman tells Cameron to skip taking a blood sample from Donny's son and go for the "most pure" DNA source, which also happens to be the most painful -- the bone marrow.
Guess what? Son of Donny has no interest in some painful bone marrow biopsy to diagnose a condition he doesn't have to worry about for another thirty years. Cameron pulls Mom outside to talk to her about stuff that has nothing to do with medical treatment, encouraging her to tell Donny's son about his father. "I've been lying to him his whole life. What's he gonna think of me?" Mom says. I guess you should have thought of that before you lied to your son for his whole life, Mom. Cameron urges Mom to do it anyway, pointing out that if Donny is right and does die soon, this could be his son's only chance to meet the father who didn't want him in the first place.
House is on rounds with Dr. Singh and a trio of med students. They gather around a patient's bed and one student and/or resident says she is ready to be released. At that, her vitals crash and alarm bells go off. The students rush to tend to her, sticking their fingers down her throat in their zeal to help. Dr. Singh hangs back and tells House to stop pushing the button on the poor patient's monitor that is making her vitals appear to crash. He does, and she's totally fine. The students are not pleased, since they were about to perform all kinds of emergency life-saving procedures on her. Not to mention the scare of a lifetime that poor patient just got. I like House much better when his childish behavior doesn't come at the expense of helpless sick people. Dr. Singh asks House to stop acting like this and just do the rounds as ordered. House responds by ripping the patient's catheter tube out with his cane, causing her to groan in pain (guess what isn't a pleasant sensation? Having a tube ripped out of your bladder) and spilling urine on the floor. House shoves a paper in Singh's face and urges him to sign off on House's 120 hours before he does worse. Like what, he smacks the patient across the face? I thought House learned how to care about people or something.
The ex-girlfriend tells Donny that he has a son. She was pregnant when they broke up but decided not to tell him because she knew he didn't want kids. And she's not sorry about it at all. Her son wants to meet his father. His father doesn't want to meet him. "Just say hi to him," Mom says. Yeah, that'll be enough. The kid won't ask anything more from his father. This is all very fucked up. The son, whose name we finally learn is Michael, walks in. They exchange awkward hellos, and then Michael asks his father if they can do something together when he gets better. With tears in his eyes, Donny says no. His father died when he was Michael's age and it was "the most painful thing [he] ever went through." Since he thinks he's going to die, too, he wants to spare his son that pain. It's kind of too late, though, since Michael knows his father exists. In fact, this is probably more painful for Michael than having a relationship with Donny and then Donny dying would have been. Anyway, nice going on that one, Cameron.
In the meeting room, House calls Cameron out for ruining Michael's life. Cameron is quite proud of herself, though, saying that it was the only way to convince Michael to consent to a bone marrow biopsy. Did he give up that bone marrow before or after his father rejected him? House says Cameron just gave that kid years of therapy, like he can really judge after what he did to that sick woman on rounds. House asks Chase for his input, but Chase doesn't have to pay attention now that he's a murderer. House says Donny is fine and he's going to send him home with Chase's help.
In the elevator, House accuses Chase of being distracted by his conscience eating at him for that whole murdering thing. "I'm fine," Chase lies. "You shouldn't be. Talk to someone. Docs fixed me up in seven weeks. You're ten minutes tops," House says, actually being somewhat kind and empathetic. Although does he really think that his forty-something years of being a dick requires that much more therapy than intentionally murdering a patient? Or that he's "fixed up" now? Chase waits for the other shoe to drop and House to make fun of him, but it doesn't happen. "Thanks," he says. Yes. Thanks, House, for showing us that you are capable of acting like a human being. Maybe the insanity story arc will be good for the show after all.
House and Chase enter Donny's room. Donny is almost smug in assuming that they couldn't find anything wrong with him, but House says they actually did -- Ortoli syndrome, a name House no doubt came up with from his week-long obsession with Italian cooking. Because it's fairly obvious from the look on Chase's face that House is totally making this up. House throws it over to Chase to explain the condition, but Chase sucks at improv and does little more than stammer. House pours Donny a glass of water and hands him some pills he calls "nebisicin." Like "medicine," but said by a three-year-old. He might as well have called them Altoidocin, because they're basically mints. But Donny seems to buy it, and House even tries to make him feel a little better about it by saying that they didn't have the medicine needed to fix this fictional condition when his father was alive, so there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent his death. And with that, Donny is discharged.
So I guess we'll spend the next forty minutes of this show figuring out what's wrong with House. He returns to the bedroom of whispers. As soon as the light is off, the whispers start again. He immediately turns it on, and they stop, only to be replaced by a loud thumping sound. CTB is coming for him! Hooray! Oh, no, wait -- it's just someone knocking at the door. Wilson yells for House to answer it, saying it has to be for him. By the way, is that CTB's medical degree on the wall? Wouldn't her parents have sort of wanted that back? Do they even know their daughter is dead? I question how Wilson was able to get her apartment and keep all her things. He wasn't married to her, and I very much doubt she put him in her will.
Foreman is at the door. House asks him if he was talking before, although that wouldn't explain why he heard the whispering the other night, or how House could have possibly heard Foreman talking when the banging on the door was pretty faint. But I guess he's desperate for an explanation. Foreman says he wasn't talking to anyone or on the phone, which is obvious since he's here alone and also apparently has a problem with using the phone, since instead of calling House to tell him the latest news he rushed over to do it in person: Donny is dead. He collapsed just four hours after they discharged him from PPTH. Ortoli strikes again!
After the break, Foreman and House hang out in Wilson's living room, trying to figure out what they missed in Donny's case. Foreman says he collapsed in his laundry room and by the time someone found him and called 911, he was already dead. "I sent the guy home with mints," House says. Well, at least they can rule out any heart conditions that are cured by mints. House takes this all very personally because he's self-absorbed, thinking there must be something wrong with him for him to miss that something really was wrong with Donny. Also, he's hearing things, but he doesn't tell Foreman about that. Foreman says anyone could have made the same mistake, since every single test they ran said Donny was fine. And since he knows that House has to find out the answer, he had Donny's body sent to PPTH's morgue so they could do the autopsy personally.
A few hours later, Chase wakes Cameron up to say he's going to head over to Donny's ex-girlfriend's place to tell her the bad news. Apparently she lives two hours away. So she lives that far away but still gets the Princeton Minutia Picayune ? Cameron tells Chase to just call her, but Chase thinks she should hear it "face-to-face." At 6 a.m.? No news is worth getting up at that hour. Cameron thinks there's more to the story and asks Chase if everything is okay. Of course, he says it is and doesn't understand why she'd even ask. He promises he'd tell her if something was wrong. Well, there goes that marriage, and after less than a year. The people who write this show hate love.
Lucky Donny! He gets an autopsy performed by a neurologist and a guy with no medical license! Foreman takes samples of Donny's hair and nails until House gets bored and revs up the saw so they can take a look at Donny's heart. Actually, hold on a minute -- why didn't Donny's father have an autopsy to find out his cause of death? I really doubt that they just let seemingly healthy 40 year-old men drop dead and chalked it up to unknown heart trouble back in 1979 without cutting them open to see what happened. Autopsies have been around for a long time. Anyway, Foreman refuses to let medical-license-less House cut Donny open even though House says it's not like he can screw this case up more than he has already. Want to make a bet? Foreman takes the saw from House and starts cutting away, stopping pretty quickly as blood spatters and leaks out from the opening. Corpses aren't supposed to bleed, you see. So, what's the explanation? Donny isn't a corpse! He's still alive, which he proves by suddenly opening his eyes and screaming. It scares the crap out of House and Foreman, who both jump back in terror and surprise, although only Foreman screams like a girl. I was not surprised by this because the previews gave it away. Stupid Fox promo department. That could have been a really cool moment.
After the break, Donny's new chest wound is stitched up and he's in a hospital room, although he's unconscious because his blood pressure dropped again. Apparently, his heart was beating all along, except it was doing it so slowly that the EMTs thought he was dead. Uh huh. Obviously they train at the same place as the PPTH security guards do. FIRE THEM. Declaring someone dead who isn't actually dead is an epic failure. This isn't 1809. Also, I'm pretty sure your heart beating so slowly that it can't be detected by the EMTs for like four hours causes some serious oxygen deprivation problems. But no one mentions that because we have a new symptom for Donny: extreme bradycardia. This makes me wonder if his dad, grandfather, and great-grandfather's hearts all did that same slow-but-not-quite-stopping act and since they weren't autopsied for some reason, all three were buried alive. They might want to check their coffins for scratch marks while they have them above ground. Shudder. House suggests that Donny's problem might not be in his heart after all, since they've tested it as much as possible and found nothing wrong. Maybe the problem is somewhere else that causes the heart to stop. Foreman suggests an inherited autoimmune disorder called Isolated Anti-Ro Antibody. Um, why wasn't this considered earlier? They knew at the beginning of this case that Donny's heart was found to be healthy by many, many doctors, so why didn't they just assume the heart was fine and something else caused the deaths? And instead of testing Donny for the theory, House tells them to just start treating him for it with steroids.
Donny's blood pressure climbs back up to normal somehow and he wakes up. He complains of a headache and jaw pain, and I'm sure Cameron makes him feel much better when she fills him in on his journey to the autopsy table. He says he can't feel all that great about coming back to life when he's going to die in a matter of weeks anyway.
House gets his hearing checked. The doctor says his hearing is fine, which doesn't answer House's questions. He reluctantly asks her why he might be hearing whispering. She says it's probably someone whispering. Oh, come on, doctor, really? Do you think he'd have his hearing checked if the explanation was that simple and obvious? He asks if there could be any other explanation for why he's hearing things. Perhaps the fillings he got thirty years ago in the Philippines are picking up AM radio signals? The doctor says psychosis is more likely and that there are other doctors to consult for that. Hopefully Dr. Singh isn't one of them, because he is probably not House's biggest fan right now.
House reports to Cuddy, who isn't falling for that 120 hours thing Dr. Singh signed off on because House stupidly submitted it on the first day of rounds and it's impossible to do 120 hours of rounds in one day. It's like he's not even trying to trick her anymore. House says it doesn't matter because he isn't getting his medical license back anytime soon. "I'm not ready to be a doctor again," he says.
He returns to Wilson's apartment and decides to sleep on the couch because the living room isn't haunted. He tries to tell Wilson that he just fell asleep in front of the TV, but the fact is that the TV isn't on and there's bedding on the couch, so this was obviously intentional. Wilson figures out that something's going on and offers to talk to House if he needs it. House tells him to get lost. Is he paying Wilson rent yet? He should.
Meanwhile, Donny's jaw hurts more than it did before. He complains that the pain seems to be in one tooth. A nurse (could this be the mysterious Bobbin Bergstrom whose name always appears in the end credits as "nurse" even in episodes where no nurse is actually featured? Because I have been wondering about her FOR YEARS. Like why does she get to be a nurse on this show and not Evil Nurse Brenda, who I miss so much? What kind of a name is Bobbin? And who the hell is she and how does she keep getting credited for episodes where she can't be doing more than extra work? They didn't give credit like that to those two guys who guarded the courtroom door in every episode of Night Court and they were much more prominent) tells him that he's shit out of luck there, because he's maxed out on painkillers. "Try to sleep," she says. Because that's easy to do when you're in pain so intense that even the maximum amount of pain meds don't dull it. And then she just leaves. Donny takes matters into his own hands, searching the room until he finds a surgical clamp hanging out in a drawer (when will PPTH learn not to leave medical equipment just lying around?) and using it to extract the offending tooth.
After the break, Chase says Donny's tooth was fine, meaning it was not the cause of Donny's pain. Well, it probably is now. That open socket in his jaw can't be comfortable. Chase, Cameron, and Foreman try to diagnose for about two seconds before Chase asks where House is. Foreman says he quit. Again. "It's a power play. He'll be back tomorrow," Chase says. Oh, go kill someone for the greater good, know-it-all. Foreman likes Cameron's new bone cancer diagnosis, saying it could have triggered paraneoplastic syndrome, which shut down Donny's heart. Chase says bone cancer isn't hereditary. Cameron says Li Fraumeni syndrome is, and it increases the risk of developing bone cancer. So everyone in Donny's paternal line had Li Fraumeni syndrome and thus developed bone cancer at the same time in their lives which then caused paraneoplastic syndrome that shut down their hearts? Kind of a stretch, but all Chase can counter it with is "not bone cancer," so Foreman orders a scan to confirm bone cancer. Chase and Cameron go off in different directions for maximum relationship symbolism.
House hasn't heard any voices during his time on the couch, so he heads back to the Haunted Bedroom. He hears the voice again, but this time he actually investigates it and discovers the sound is coming from a vent. A vent that leads to the next bedroom. He heads for Wilson's room and opens the door slowly and silently this time, walking in on Wilson talking to no one about nothing. "I had pea soup today. You'd love my breath right now. I didn't get a chance to run tonight. House is having issues. I missed you a lot today. All I want to do is ... (sigh) you know." Okay, so he's talking to dead CTB about his boring-ass day. Wherever she is, she cannot be thrilled about this. I mean, there's nothing to suggest that CTB would have listened to this crap when she was alive so I can't imagine she's enjoying it when she's dead. House retreats back to his room, happy he wasn't crazy after all but sad for his friend. Don't feel too sorry for Wilson, House. He's kind of an asshole to stick you in a room surrounded by pictures of the woman you had to check into a mental hospital to get away from. Of course, that wouldn't have been a problem if you hadn't had a part in her death in the first place. So I guess they're even.
Foreman and Cameron do the bone scan. Cameron confronts Foreman, asking him what Chase is lying to her about. Foreman says he told Chase to talk to her, and he's telling her to talk to Chase. Foreman is really good at communicating with his loved ones, so you know this advice is sound.
The next morning, House decides to skip breakfast and fill up on mindgames instead. He tells Wilson he's having auditory hallucinations at night. Wilson says there's probably rational explanation for it, but House says he checked everything out and the only answer is he's losing it again. And worse than last time, since he can't blame the Vicodin. Which I guess is the final word on what caused House's hallucinations before. Even though that doesn't make sense. And Nolan said it couldn't have been the sole cause. But whatever. He says he's going back to Mayfield. "Okay," Wilson shrugs. That wasn't the answer House was expecting. In fact, he was expecting Wilson to confess that he was whispering. But Wilson realized that and wasn't about to play along. He calls House an "ass" for using Wilson's conversation with his dead girlfriend as a way to fuck around with him. Yeah, I really don't get why House did that. We're supposed to think he's not being such a dick anymore, right? It's not like Wilson knew that his whispering was tormenting House and was doing it on purpose. Or maybe he was, but sub-consciously. Anyway, House apparently feels left out because Wilson is talking to the air when he could be talking to his friend House. Although it's not like House talked to Wilson when Wilson asked him to, so whatever. Wilson says that's not the point -- he misses CTB and talking to her makes him feel better. "You don't," he says.
House shows up at rounds, this time lead by Cuddy. Even though she only said she was going to lead rounds because House was causing trouble so there's no reason for her to be there since he said he quit. But anyway, he says he's feeling much better now and takes back the quitting thing. He's here to get his medical license back. Cuddy says it won't be that simple -- either House quit because he was having a problem or he quit to jerk her around. Regardless of which one it was, it needs to be addressed, most likely in the most immature and unproductive manner possible. Cuddy and House step out into the hall as the med students watch and listen in. They hear House say, "I can see your nipples" to the Dean of Medicine and the female med students confer. The tall redhead says Cuddy hates House, but the shorter brunette thinks it's more the opposite. The male student says nothing, most likely because he's too busy mentally reconsidering his decision to attend Princeton Medical School.
House returns to the meeting room, where Foreman and Cameron tell him that the scan was negative for bone cancer, they don't know where Chase is, and they have no idea what could be wrong with Donny. They are useless on all fronts. House can help with that last one: he thinks Donny has a hereditary nerve disorder. Foreman explains it as Donny's brain mistaking nerve pain for tooth pain. It also explains the heart problem. And it's easily cured! Except that House won't let anyone administer the medicine but Chase.
He finds him snoozing on a couch in the doctor's lounge and warns him to do his sleeping at home. Chase doesn't think it's a big deal that he missed out on the bone scan that is part of his job, and House says he obviously isn't getting help with his murderer guilty conscience and he's starting to think it's because Chase wants to feel bad because that means he isn't a psychopath. He orders Chase to get into Donny's scary ICU room and do his job. At this point, they would have been better off re-hiring Kumar than Chase.
Chase hooks up a bag to Donny's IV and keeps having flashbacks to Dibala's blood-soaked death. He's interrupted by Donny, who doesn't have much hope that his doctors got the diagnosis right this time. I wouldn't either. Chase decides to make conversation, asking Donny if he ever shot and killed anyone. Donny says he shot two people, but they didn't die. The police department needs better bullets or something. Donny says some of his co-workers have killed. "Did they ever get over it?" Chase asks hopefully. "I got an ex-partner who nearly drank himself into oblivion," Donny says. And that was after he got help. Chase is bummed out to hear this, but it gets worse: Donny just shat the bed.
Loss of bowel control means that House's diagnosis was wrong and Donny is getting worse. House makes a duty=doody joke that no one finds particularly entertaining (including me -- that was even below House's usual third grade brand of humor) while the Cottages get to diagnosing. Cameron suggests Wilson's disease, but House says it would have affected Donny's liver by now. Foreman says maybe it did, and the liver is so far gone that "the labs look normal." Um ... how does that work, exactly? Anyway, they don't have anything else to go on, so they decide to treat Donny for it without even trying to confirm the diagnosis.
Chase has ducked out of work yet again, this time to go to confession. It takes him a minute, but he's able to tell the priest that he killed someone. "But it was the right thing to do," he adds. Oooh, sorry, Chase -- the priest doesn't see it that way. He says who lives and who dies is not Chase's decision to make. "Sometimes in the operating room it feels like it. I'm a doctor," Chase adds at the end, just in case the priest thought Chase was a plumber who likes to hang out in operating rooms. "You should know more than anybody that human life is sacred," the priest says. I want to feel for Chase here, but his frowny face looks a lot like Beaker from The Muppet Show . Chase asks if a genocidal dictator's life is sacred. The priest must have totally figured out who Chase is and who he killed by now, and is no doubt thinking about how he's going to phone the reporter from Everything About Everything Ever Press as soon as possible. Chase begs the priest to forgive him, but the priest says this is too big for that. "What do I have to do?" Chase asks, his voice starting to break; "what does god need me to do?" "You have to turn yourself in to the police," the priest says. Chase doesn't like that plan at all. "I did the right thing. There has to be another way," he says. The priest says if he wants absolution, turning himself in and facing the consequences is the only way. The priest is not helpful and kind of a dick. I think Chase should just keep confessing to different priests at different churches until one tells him what he wants to hear.
House spends the night in his office, thinking. Cuddy stops by to tell him that she's signing off on his 120 hours after all. House thinks she's letting him skip the rounds because she's uncomfortable around him. Cuddy denies this, even after House says being around her makes him "feel funny." He appears to be kidding, but not really. "I was kinda getting into the whole hot-for-teacher thing," he says. Really? Didn't they have, like, three seconds of rounds together? Cuddy asks House if he's "sure" he's okay. House says it was a "false alarm" but doesn't go into the details. "What about us?" he asks. Where is this coming from? They've had minimal interaction all season and no sexual tension in the few scenes they have had together, and now all of the sudden, this? Huh. Cuddy says the way things are between them now is the same as ever; "you press my buttons, I press yours." And that gives House his epiphany moment. He sets off for Donny's room, taking an extra second to invade Cuddy's personal space and say "you do make me feel funny."
House enters Donny's room and informs him that he has a "self destruct button" in his brain. Actually, it's a berry aneurysm, which can apparently be inherited. It grew throughout Donny's (and his father's and his father's and his father's) life and pressed against the nerves that control things like tooth pain and heart rate until around the age of 40, when it got so big that the signal to the heart stopped entirely. Although that doesn't explain why Donny's heart is beating just fine right now. Did the aneurysm somehow shrink a little bit when he fake died? And how did it grow so large in just one day that Donny had that intense tooth pain but it took 40 years to stop his heart? And surely doctors would have been able to see an aneurysm was the cause of death for his father -- they're pretty easy to see in an autopsy. Not to mention the CT scan Donny must have had done on his head when he was admitted with that concussion should have seen something, right? Anyway, Donny has some trust issues with House since the last time they spoke House sent him home with a fake diagnosis and then Donny sort of died. House says he's willing to prove he's telling the truth by signing both Donny and his son up for brain surgery. Donny seems relieved to hear that his son will be okay, but when House rather kindly offers to let Michael come in for a visit ("visiting hours don't apply to my patients"), Donny hedges. House takes this to mean that Donny won't be calling Michael at all -- now that he doesn't have the excuse of sparing Michael from the pain of losing a father, the fact is that Donny likes his selfish life and doesn't want to be burdened with the responsibility of a son.
Michael and Donny come through their surgeries with matching head bandages. Donny is wheeled in to visit his son in the recovery room. It looks like he wants a relationship with him after all.
It's two in the morning at the Cameron-Chase residence. Cameron is up late filing a missing persons report since her husband has been gone for eight hours now. He arrives home looking like a hot mess and slurs out an apology. "You're drunk," Cameron says. "I needed to get wasted, I did. But now I'm better," he says. Going the route of Donny's ex-partner, I see. Also Chase's mom. And no, he will not tell Cameron what's obviously bothering him. Which is kind of ridiculous because at this point he's going to lose her if he doesn't say anything so why not risk it?
House sleeps with ear plugs to drown out Wilson's insanity. He should have just worn those ear plugs in the first place! Then he would have known that the whispering wasn't coming from inside his head. He closes his eyes, smiles a little, and then opens them... and starts talking to his father. Which really surprised me. I hope he doesn't tell him about how his mother totally cheated on his dad and House isn't his biological son! That would be such a bummer. Although probably better to hear than Wilson's nattering on about pea soup. He admits that they did have "some good times" before calling out to Wilson in the other room and telling him this whole talking-to-dead-people thing is stupid. "You see? He really is getting better," Wilson whispers with a smile. I hope he's not talking to CTB just now, because I can't imagine she'd be thrilled to hear that the guy who was indirectly responsible for her death and also fired her is doing well.
You can read more from Sara Morrison at L.A.me , follow her on Twitter , or you can email her at saramorrison@gmail.com .