Episode Report Card Sara M: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Paranormal And Paraplegics
By Sara M | Season 3 | Episode 2 | Aired on 09.11.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Clancy, a seven-year-old boy, comes to the ER suffering from alien abductions and a bloody ass. House and the Cottages eventually discover that some of his cells have DNA that isn't Clancy's, causing his bloody ass and vision problems, and Cameron cleverly figures out a way to isolate them so they can be removed. But Clancy's still hallucinating about aliens, leading everyone to believe he's got some more of that alien DNA in his brain cells they can't find. Everyone except House, that is. He's having a confidence crisis after being wrong about last week's patient and doesn't think they should try anything else on Clancy since they've fixed the bleeding problem that brought him to PPTH in the first place. Fortunately, Cameron (thanks to the triumphant return of Evil Nurse Brenda!) finds out that last week's patient actually was cured by House and threatens to tell House about it if his lack of confidence interferes with his diagnostic abilities. So Cuddy is forced to tell him the truth, and he gets his brilliance back and figures out that Clancy is a chimera and also a way to find out which brain cells are his and which are his absorbed twin brother's. It involves brain surgery, electric probes, and House yelling at small children, so you know it's cool. Clancy goes home totally cured, and House confronts Wilson about lying to him after figuring out that Cuddy didn't do it alone. Wilson continues to be an asshole, and House goes home to his only real friend, his cane. He'll need it now that the ketamine treatment seems to have worn off, the leg pain is back, and the Vicodin is being ingested. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
The Pre-Credits Sequence of Doom features a boy, Clancy, who doesn't want to go to bed and his parents who don't want to deal with him, especially when he tells them that he's afraid to sleep because "they" might come and take him again. The parents unsympathetically tell him to go to bed and get over it, so Clancy turns to the comforts of his televsion and is alarmed to see the channels seemingly changing of their own accord. I'd be alarmed too -- those are some crappy shows Clancy's TV is tuning into. Jerry Springer, Blind Date, and "The Weather Station," fly by before the alien forces finally give up on finding something good to watch at this hour (guess they didn't come across that ubiquitous Magic Bullet infomercial that is absolutely captivating) and turn the television off. The house starts to rattle and shake, and then, in a scene you've seen many times before if you've ever watched The X-Files, Clancy's shutters fly open and a bright white light flashes into his room. And this is normally where the eerie X-Files theme music would start up, but since this is a medical mystery show and not a paranormal mystery/weird government conspiracies that I found tiresome and ultimately made me stop watching show, we cut to the next morning. Clancy's dad goes to wake him up for school, but Clancy isn't in his room. Instead, he's lying on the front lawn bleeding out of his ass where the alien probe was. Or maybe he's just another kid with an ass bleeding problem on this show. The real question here is why didn't anyone notice the small bleeding child lying on the front lawn for at least a few hours? Those are like the un-nosiest neighbors ever! Cue the eerie House theme music.
House begins the day in his usual post-ketamine coma way: a morning jog. He laces up his sneakers, grabs his iPod shuffle (not one of the fancy new kind, either; House is sorely out of date with iPod technology) and heads out. A few seconds go by, and House comes back inside. We can only see his crotch in this shot, but even Hugh Laurie's crotch has acting talent and you can see the disappointment and dread as his hand grabs his bad thigh. House goes to his closet and searches his coat pockets until he finds one with a bottle of pills in it. He dry swallows a few and stares at his old friend/nemesis, his cane, which is sitting in his closet, patiently waiting to be taken out and used again.