In the main case, the team deals with a fourteen-year-old girl who collapsed at her birthday party. She seems nice at first, but her story quickly goes through beats including pregnancy and a secret trove of rape-and-animal-themed pornography. She eventually turns out to have Dissociative Identity Disorder, which you might also know as Multiple Personality Disorder, or Split Personalities, or even "that thing Sally Field had in that one movie, not Gidget, later than that." So some of her personalities have different allergies, which caused understandable problems with the diagnostic process. Anyway, she's got cancer, too. So there's that. But at least she's not actually pregnant!
House mostly ignores her, because he's more interested in diagnosing a boy who died at four years old. This is tricky for him because Foreman has explicitly barred him from doing so, so he has to go through a lot of ridiculous shenanigans to meet with the boy's father and spy on the mother and so on. The whole time we're supposed to pretend that House might go back to prison if he gets caught, but that seems like more of a sweeps-week thing. The boy died of a genetic condition, which is the only thing that the mother would care about because she's very interested in moving on with her new life, new husband, and new son.
Finally, in intra-team news, Chase is somehow more interested in personal grooming than usual (I know, right?) and it's because he got a chance to appear on a local talk show as a ridiculous Australian stereotype who gives medical advice or something. It's relatively short and pointless, but at least the clip of Chase on the show is pretty funny.
House is at his computer, researching Air Force bases. He claims that he's going to go hang gliding at a place where Park says is completely flat. So that's another personality trait they've given her: encyclopedic knowledge of military installations. Chase is not there, for reasons that will become apparent, but not in any way interesting. Foreman enters to offer a case. His is a fourteen-year old girl, but House is more interested in a four-year-old boy he learned about somewhere. Foreman turns to go, but Adams has read the file and says House's patient is dead already. Foreman drops his file on House's desk and leaves. House glares at Adams and tells her, "Death is a consequence, not a symptom. If it's not a symptom, it's not relevant." Taub suggests they try to save things, including the girl and House's freedom. House hands him Foreman's folder and leaves.
The team (minus Chase) studies the case of the fourteen-year-old girl. I know how old she is because she got sick at her fourteenth birthday party. Chase enters and Park demands to know his dentist's name on the grounds that he must have just been there. I enjoy watching her act like House because it comes off as much more hostile when she does it. Adams and Taub throw around random diagnoses while Park determines that Chase didn't really see his dentist that morning because he got a fresh manicure. Who says you can't do both at once? Park says that Chase has had three haircuts since she's known him, but for some reason he's lying about getting a manicure. So why, she wonders, is he being cagey about this particular element of personal grooming? They decide to check the patient for opioids, meaning drugs.
The kid tells Adams that she sometimes takes vitamin C but is otherwise drug-free. And she had her attack while she was opening a Magic 8-Ball. Those things are possessed by the devil! Outside the patient's room, Taub tells the mother that "certain drugs" could explain the reaction. The mother says Iris (that's the kid's name, which is good to know because I was just about to start calling her "Fourteen") has been moody lately, so she's been spiking Iris's vitamin C with Diazepam to calm her down. Taub thinks the anti-anxiety medication could explain it. So they'll just get her off them and everything will be fine! And just then, Iris vomits.
House goes to bother Wilson about his dead-patient case. For some reason, he doesn't use that window between their offices that they made such a big deal out of building. He probably prefers barging in himself. Wilson speculates that House wants to go back to jail so he can be self-destructive. We're supposed to pretend that if Foreman finds out that House is working on this, he'll get thrown back in prison, but I don't buy it. When House is working, he spends a lot of time goofing off, so why couldn't he spend that time diagnosing old cases? House brushes off this concern, and rightfully so. The case goes like this: kidneys died, transfusion, lungs died, patient died. So he starts speculating, to Wilson's increasing annoyance. Maybe the lungs came first? Lupus? Did the kid have a rash? Wilson is ignoring him loudly. Then House goes off to an anger management class.
At the meeting, House insists that platitudes don't help. And he asks a guy named Emory if his dead child had a rash or was sensitive to sunlight. Nope! After the meeting, House has a diagnosis for Emory and wants to exhume the son. Emory says that his ex-wife would have to approve it, but she wants nothing to do with him or Drew's death. House says that Emory's anger comes from Drew's death, but also from not having an answer. Emory tells House that Drew is in a crypt in St. Jude's cemetery.
Adams pokes at Iris, who says she's got some tenderness in the abdomen and the breasts. She hasn't been having regular periods, so maybe she's pregnant. Adams says they just need a drop of blood to test for that. And even though Iris has never had sex (that's two episodes in a row with virgins! The clown kid was last week, right?), pregnancy would explain all of her symptoms. But then she develops a new one: she can't feel her arms! I'm starting to think the doctors on this show have a superpower where they can cause people to generate new symptoms every time they declare a diagnosis.
House is at the cemetery. The old man leading him is too slow for his taste. He asks House what he intends to do. House goes with a NAMBLA joke and tells him that after taking bribes to let him plunder graves, he shouldn't have opinions. Then he relents and says he's looking for a hole in the cartilage of boy's nose. The old man, whose name is Milton, lets House into the tomb where Drew's sarcophagus is lying. Or laying. Anyway, it's in there. And the kid's name is Drew. House slowly starts to jimmy the lid, but his phone rings. He puts it on speakerphone and sets it aside to continue his literally ghoulish activities.
At the other end of the phone call, it's Adams with the news that Iris is pregnant. But what caused the arm thing? Taub says cerebral tumor. Adams says vasculitis. Park says MS. Chase eventually rushes into House's office to join everybody else. He asks House where he is, and House answers, "Nowhere, he said cryptically." Nice work! Chase has nothing to add to the diagnoses. Park observes that Chase's eyebrows have been waxed, and everyone assumes he's also had a Brazilian. I'm still not convinced Chase doesn't get Brazilians all the time. House pokes at Drew's nose, which is not punctured. He jumps in on Park's obsession with Chase, but authorizes Chase's HIV theory, along with an MRI to check for tumors. Then he spots something weird in Drew's fingers.
Iris is in the MRI tube. There is the sound of banging. Taub, Chase, and Adams are in the monitoring room and learn that the HIV test was negative. Adams wants to know why Chase got his eyebrows done. He claims to be vain and shallow. Iris is slid out of the tube. Her arms are now sore. And covered in bruises! Still, at least she got out of the MRI tube without going into a coma the way most of their patients do.
Chase suggests that the bruises might have been caused by actual physical trauma. Boring! Park goes with scurvy. House sends Chase and Taub to Iris's house and Park and Adams to the lab.
With that out of the way, Foreman wants to talk to House. Apparently, House vanished for 45 minutes at exactly the time that a local Air Force base (the one he was investigating at the start of the episode) was doing some tests that knocked out the GPS signal. Foreman reminds him that if a stunt like that doesn't work, he'll go back to jail. That doesn't get any more convincing by having characters repeat it over and over again. And House does actually illegal things all the time, so I don't know why I'm supposed to get all exercised about him working on two cases at once. He should work on multiple cases sometimes!
House and Wilson are in the cafeteria. House talks about Mees' lines, so maybe it was heavy metal poisoning. Wilson says that House is addicted to puzzles.
Later, House has lured Emory's anger management group to meet in a different restaurant. He sneaks Emory out the back to where his ex-wife lives. House digs wood out of the patio table while Emory doesn't want to talk about how Drew looked. He eventually goes with "peaceful."
Chase and Taub are in Iris's room. The wallpaper is pink. Taub is familiar with Brazilians and can tell Chase didn't have one because he's not complaining enough. Chase admits that he only had visible bits waxed because he was going to be on television. And it aired two hours before, which is why he's willing to admit it now that no one can watch it. Taub mocks him a bit and plays with the Magic 8-Ball. Chase finds a false drawer in the dresser. There are love letters from Iris's boyfriend. And porn featuring torture, rape, and animals. Kids, here's a helpful tip: if you've got really horrifying porn in your house, take the labels off. Especially if you're already hiding it behind secret false panels. At least make it so nosy doctors can't immediately tell what you're into. Also, probably don't get your porn on DVDs in the first place, but you're probably way ahead of me on that one, what with it being 2011 and all.
Meanwhile, in Story B, House breaks into the ex-wife's house. Emory follows, looking awkward and uncomfortable. House roots through the kitchen. Emory drinks some booze. Then he takes a breath and goes into a bedroom. He sinks to his knees and looks at the doorjamb, where someone has painted over the marks that used to record Drew's height. House finds him looking through a box he found in the closet. There's a stuffed zebra and a plastic vampire-tooth thing that House says is filled with lead paint. Then there's the sound of a car pulling up, so House and Emory get out of there.
Iris tells Chase, Taub and her mother that she hasn't had sex. The mother doesn't buy it, what with the pregnancy. You can see how she has reason to be skeptical here. Iris says the torture porn is her boyfriend's. She just stores it for him because he can't keep it at home. The mother gets mad and demands to know what else she doesn't know. Iris says that the boy came to the hospital last night and told her to leave. She wouldn't and he hit her. Hence the bruises, which I guess actually are from physical trauma. But she won't talk to the police. And also her vision is getting weird. "It's getting hard to see. What the hell's happening to me?"
Emory and House are at House's home. He has some homemade chemical tests that will tell him if there's any arsenic, mercury, or whatever in the stuff they found in the box of Drew's stuff. There isn't. He seems disappointed. Emory looks at the stuffed zebra and shares adorable stories of Drew's malapropisms while swigging on a bottle of rum. House asks about the mother, and Emory says she never even cried at the funeral. She just sat there like a statue. Oh! I bet she poisoned him. That would explain the heavy metal poisoning, right?
Wilson tells Foreman they have a problem. Wilson wants to know why Foreman cares about House working on the Drew case, and it's because Foreman doesn't want House going completely crazy and working on ghost animal cases. Foreman says he's confident House won't put himself in jail over a dead kid. Wilson says he will put himself in jail over a puzzle. Foreman is confident that House will back down. Based on all those years working together where House backed down a lot?
House's office. House and Taub are watching Chase's television appearance on the laptop. Apparently he was "Doctor Down Under" and had to use lots of hilarious Australian lingo. He doesn't find it as funny as everyone else. Park is satisfied with the explanation that Chase wanted to look pretty for the television, but House wants to dig deeper and figure out why Chase wanted that. Anyway, he's off to do clinic time, so he directs his team to test for something. Adams accurately points out that House doesn't have clinic hours on Tuesday. He ignores that.
House has, for his "clinic hours," Drew's mother, who showed up thinking she was getting a free flu shot. He pokes at her verbally in hopes of proving that she has apathetic hyperthyroidism, but she slaps him for acting like she didn't care about her son. I guess the murder theory is also off the table. She says that Emory got overwhelmed and she left him because he had Drew's eyes. House wants to know who babysat Drew. The answer is her father. "His place or yours?" muses House. She doesn't answer, saying instead that her father is just like Emory when it comes to moving on. House says, "So he has two types of people inside of him" and walks off.
House goes to bother Iris, casually dismissing whatever tests the team was doing. He claims to have found her boyfriend, who ran in front of a car. She says he's lying. He says he's in the E.R. He demands to know how she knows her boyfriend's okay. Her answer: "Because I'm right here, you dick." Multiple Personality Disorder!
Chase announces that it's dissociative identity disorder, which is what MPD is called now. Sorry! [Note: "Damn straight!" -- Buck -- RS.] The point is, Iris appears to have multiple personalities, or "alters." The team all accepts this readily even though none of them, as far as I know, is a psychiatrist. The mother insists that Iris hasn't had any severe trauma that would cause this. There was a car accident when she was two years old, but Iris says she doesn't even remember it. Taub gently explains that she could have gotten pregnant when she didn't know what she was doing. Then Iris finds out about the Diazepam her mother was feeding her. The mother says she just thought Iris was moody.
Chase tells Iris that different alters can have different symptoms, which is the sort of thing that can complicate a diagnosis. The mother accurately points out that there's something wrong with her in addition to the multiple personalities. So they're going to need to use hypnosis!
Wilson tells House that Foreman won't back down. They're both stubborn, and House is the one who will end up in prison. He says it isn't worth it. House tries to process this, and then says "okay." Wilson leaves, because he's the most gullible man in the world. House bounces his ball and clicks his pen and thinks. Think think think! Then he gets up. We see him at a house lying to someone on the phone about getting a flat on the way to a chiropractor's appointment.
He's at the county coroner's house, and he'd like to talk about his grandson, Drew Lemaine. He sees some clown statues that may or may not mean something. Inside, he demands to know what Drew did when he was there. It was mostly television and biscuits. No finger paints or sidewalk chalk. He wants to know if he's expecting someone. And just then! The ex-wife and her new husband come in! She says she told House to leave him alone. And the new husband punches House in the face, which seems like something that should be happening more often.
Chase talks to Iris, who says, in a little girl voice, that she's nobody because nobody can see her. It's not clear who hypnotized her. I'm going to assume there's a man with a top hat and a Van Dyke named The Amazing Zingor that the hospital keeps on staff for this sort of thing. Iris can't feel her arms. She says she used to hurt when she ate strawberries. She remembers everything! And we see a flashback of the car crash. The driver of the car tells her it's going to be okay, but then he dies in front of her. A siren approaches. Back in the hospital, her mother assures her that it wasn't her fault her father died. She insists it was her fault because she was crying. She's bleeding from the crotch pretty strongly. A miscarriage, I guess?
After the commercial: No! Not a miscarriage! The tests say she's still pregnant! The team has done some more interviewing and they cross out everything that doesn't apply to every alter, because alter-specific symptoms are presumably psychosomatic. Taub says that opening the Magic 8-Ball triggered a switch to an alter with a strawberry allergy. Fine. They decide to ultrasound. There's no embryo in there. But all three blood tests (performed by three different doctors) said she was pregnant. House says, "Exoplanets." That's not a thing; it's an analogy. It means that they deduced she was pregnant just from the hormones in her blood. Wait, that's how they checked to see if it was a miscarriage? They just drew some blood? Do hormone levels drop that quickly after a miscarriage? Anyway, Adams declares choriocarcinoma, and Chase modifies it to occult choriocarcinoma. House says to tell all the alters they have cancer.
House enters his office, where Wilson is hanging out. Wilson says he knows that House can't let it go. And he's just as bad as House, because he knew his objections would fall on deaf ears. House likes the part about deaf ears.
The ex-wife sees House in her front yard, talking to her new son. Emory's there too. She's furious. The new husband rushes out to punch House some more, although House is shouting that he's figured out what killed Drew: it was Alport syndrome, which is genetic. He eventually gets through to her that a genetic disease could affect her new child. She says he's lying, because Drew wasn't deaf. But House brought a tuning fork so he could demonstrate the high-frequency hearing impairment. It's why Drew made up his own words. The new husband eventually lets go of House. House tells him there are platitudes that can help him with his anger. The police roll up. The ex-wife looks teary-eyed. She tells Emory that she misses Drew, too. They both cry. I notice she didn't say anything about missing Emory. House gets into the police car, which drives away. He looks thoughtful.
Iris is getting some fluids. Adams tells the mother that she's responding well.
House is outside Foreman's office like a kid waiting for the principal to see him. Inside, Foreman tells Wilson that he thought threatening House with jail would work. He can't back down now. He has to send him back to prison to show his authority. This is the week after Foreman and House worked together to screw Wilson out of boxing tickets. Just thought I'd mention that. Wilson sighs. He tells Foreman his job is keeping the machine running. Cuddy didn't try to control House; she managed him. "She knew better than anyone what a tool he could be." So is he suggesting that Foreman have sex with House? Because that's what it sounds like. Wilson leaves and gives House a grave nod.
Foreman comes out and sits by House. He asks what Cuddy would have done. House claims it would have been ten clinic hours. Foreman says, "Cuddy's not here anymore. You've got thirty." And that's the resolution? Boring!
Follow Monty on Twitter at @montykins and read his blog, Mysterious Exhortations.