A guy walks into House's office and shoots him. Two days later, House wakes up in the ICU with Cameron on one side of his bed and his shooter on the other, thanks to PPTH not having anywhere else to put the guy. PPTH being totally incompetent and not-so-good at patient care is nothing new, but House having no leg pain and full use of his right leg is. Turns out that Cuddy took advantage of his injuries to put him in a ketamine coma that somehow reset his brain and his nervous system, making his leg pain magically disappear. Unfortunately, it also seems to have had some side effects, such as hallucinations of House's shooter calling him names and psychoanalyzing him in various boring monologues. The hallucinations make it difficult for House to do his job, which is diagnosing a guy with a hugely swollen tongue whose mystery disease progresses into other swollen things that also explode. Like his eyeball. And one of his balls. House decides to use a robot to perform a necessary surgery on the patient, and demonstrates his new toy's powers by making it sort of get it on with Cameron, who doesn't mind one bit. While the Cottages go off to do the robo-surgery, House gets more psychoanalysis from his shooter and hallucinates himself into the car the shooter's wife committed suicide in. And then he has the diagnosis. He runs into the robo-surgery lair and informs the Cottages that he has been hallucinating this whole time and the only way to snap out of it is to do something totally unrealistic. And that something is using the robo-surgeon to rip the patient's stomach open and spill his intestines all over the table. Because the eyeball and ball-ball explosions weren't horrifying enough. It works, and House wakes up just as he's being wheeled into the ER suffering from gunshot wounds to the abdomen and neck. Yes, everything that happened after he was shot was all a dream (I think. This episode was such a mindfuck that for all I know, he hallucinated everything and wasn't even shot in the first place). House asks for ketamine now that he's learned that the possibility of losing his mind is worth trying to fix his leg, passes out, and the season ends. I'm not sure how I felt about this episode yet, but I definitely can't wait for season to start.
The standard warning graphic reads, "Due to some graphic content, viewer discretion is advised." This time, it ain't dicking around.
Case in point (although there will be much worse cases with much worse points later on): we open on a close-up of a man's incredibly swollen tongue. House tells the Cottages that their new patient has a high fever, but he only cares about the case because he finds speaking to "Harpo" (so named because he resembles Harpo Marx, the curly-haired Marx brother who never spoke. Like Teller from Penn and Teller, except original) to be a hilarious and fun experience, because the man has difficulty speaking. House demonstrates this for everyone, and then we cut to him asking the patient what his favorite dessert topping is, saying that even the most seemingly insignificant detail can be the thing that saves his life. True; I can think of a few times when Oreo crumbles have saved mine. I am surprised to see that the man playing Harpo is Chris Tallman -- incredibly talented improv performer, very generous cocktail waitress tipper, and all-around nice guy. He's also good at talking, although you'll have to take my word for that one. Anyway, Foreman doesn't want to bother with a case that is purely for House's amusement and starts packing up to leave. Although...where is he going? Does he have his own office? Is he only called into work when there's a case and gets to hang out at home when there isn't one? In this case, Foreman says that he's going to the movies. A word of advice, Foreman: don't see RV.
It turns out that there's no need to go anywhere for action-packed drama, as a man walks into the room and asks for Dr. House. House immediately points to Cameron, the "skinny brunette," but the guy already knows her, as he was a patient of House's. This also explains why he doesn't know House. Now that he does, though, he whips out a gun and shoots House in the gut. House goes flying backwards into the Whiteboard, which, for the first time, has nothing to offer him in return, and then to the floor. The only sound is Cameron gasping and clutching at where her pearls should be. Foreman and Chase make moves towards House, but the shooter yells at them to stay back. Which they do, because, despite Foreman's recent brain damage and House's frequent allegations that Chase is an idiot, they aren't stupid. The shooter turns back to House: "Shocking, isn't it? Who'd want to hurt you?" And with that, he raises the gun and shoots in the direction of House's face. Credits!
When we return, House's face is looking remarkably intact, meaning that the shooter spent more time on his little pre-shooting quips than on actual target practice. His admission bracelet gives him the same date of birth as Hugh Laurie and violates continuity. It also says that his doctor is Cuddy, which makes me happy, even though I know she's not a very good doctor. House wakes up to find a two-day beard growth on his face that looks the same as his regular two-day beard growth and Cameron reading by his bedside. "You're pathetic," he informs her. The "oily buildup" in Cameron's hair, House says, indicates that she's been sitting by him since his admission. "Pardon me for caring," Cameron says. "Did I lose any organs?" House asks. I don't think I can take any more of their flirty talk. No, Cameron says; the bullet hit a couple things, but didn't destroy anything. He was also hit in the neck, but that one just went through it, severing the jugular. Fortunately, House was in a hospital when this happened, which is probably the only way he could survive all the blood loss. Cameron starts talking about the shooter, but House immediately says that he doesn't care about him or why he shot him: "I assume his reasoning was faulty." And while no one deserves to get shot, House might be one of the more convincing cases for such treatment, so I'm not too sure about that. Anyway, House wants to get back to work and asks Cameron what happened to the tongue guy.
Cameron says that they had to biopsy the patient's tongue, and House figures they only did this after running a battery of less-painful and less-invasive blood tests that told them nothing. Oh, Cameron and her reliance on those scientific tests that don't cause the patient undue harm. What a silly goose she is! The biopsy told them nothing, and House figures that they couldn't do an LP because of intercranial pressure. He smiles smugly in his ability to know everything even after being out of it for two days.
And then a man is wheeled into the space to him. He's hard to recognize without the gun, but it's House's shooter. While Cameron explains that he was also shot when security got him trying to escape the hospital, House removes all the wires connecting him to the bed and walks off to talk to Cuddy about this incredible oversight. In the hallway, Cameron urges House to get back to bed before he rips his stitches, to which House dares her to try to stop him. When Cameron does, House tells her to get her hands off of him, as he's twice her size and apparently not above using his superior physical prowess on her. This might be entertaining to watch, the cripple/very recent two gunshot victim and the wee movement-inhibiting vest/corset-wearing doctor wrestling, but it doesn't happen. Cameron just stuns House with her ability to understand what he means when he orders her to check Harpo's "trash," that being his lymph system, where the waste of whatever is attacking his body's is being dumped. She's so proud of herself for figuring this out that she totally forgets about stopping House from walking around.
House wheels his morphine drip into Cuddy's office, and shame on her for not being by his bedside for those two days instead of Cameron! After all, shouldn't the hospital she runs be able to keep the crazy gun-wielding former patients at bay? And where is the gratitude for those two ass injections he gave her that were the only bright spots in last week's episode? Cuddy immediately knows that House is there to yell at her about his new roommate, and says that they have no other place to put the shooter, as PPTH is full of patients today (which is easy to do since the place only has, like, five patient rooms). Cuddy says that they have House's assailant handcuffed to the bed and sedated so he won't be able to harm House again. Because I'm sure the sight of the man who tried to kill you resting peacefully to you isn't mentally harmful at all. I think Cuddy's hormone injections came with an extra dose of stupid.
House stops caring about his shooter when he realizes something else: his surgery was messed up somehow. He says this while tinkering with the only thing he kept himself connected to: his morphine drip. Cuddy tells him to stop upping his dosage, but House says that he isn't -- he's lowering it. And the effects can apparently be felt instantly, as while his belly and neck hurt a lot, his leg doesn't hurt at all. Cuddy is amazed and pleased, but House isn't. Surgery for gunshots shouldn't alleviate leg pain like this. Something must have gone wrong. "Enjoy the mistake," Cuddy says. House won't, because while the leg pain eraser is a good thing, there are sure to be other side effects that might not be so pleasant for anyone except we, the viewers.
House is forced back to the ICU, where he stands over his shooter with a key that he inserts into what looks like the guy's morphine pump so he can lower the dosage and wake the guy with pain. He can do this because there's no one watching or guarding the attempted murderer. "Why did you try to kill me?" House asks the guy when he wakes up. Shooter says that he didn't -- he strategically shot House in non-lethal places so that House would live and suffer. The only person suffering right now is the shooter, as House removes his morphine connection entirely, and the guy starts moaning in pain and sounding like a total wimp about it, too.
While Chase is trying to biopsy Harpo's lymph node, his tongue swells up so much that he can't breathe anymore. They have to give him a fun tracheotomy.
The Cottages gather around House's bedside with this news as well as House's own medical records, which he apparently requested. Cameron whispers that she shouldn't be giving these to the patient, and then has to say that she's whispering because Shooter McGavin over there is sleeping and she wants to respect his peaceful slumber. Chase's eye roll is amazing at her remarks. House raps Shooter's bedside with his cane to wake him up so he can watch House save a life and be totally amazing. House tells them to give Harpo an LP, as Chase points out that the risks of doing it with the intercranial pressure are no longer outweighed by the benefits now that Harpo has a hole in his throat. House is surprised to find himself agreeing with this.
House and Shooter McGavin spend some quality time in the ICU. It's nighttime, so Shooter asks House whether he wants a bedtime story. House doesn't like it when people talk to him at the best of times, so it's no surprise here that he doesn't want to hear anything from Shooter now. Shooter doesn't care about this and continues: his wife went to House with a mysterious illness. In the process of diagnosing and curing her, House found out that Shooter was having an affair, because all married people on this show cheat on their spouses. This ended up having nothing to do with his wife's illness, but House told her about the affair anyway. And then she killed herself. Shooter McGavin throws House all these sad faces when he tells him, as if it's House's fault that his wife is...er, sorry, was the World's Worst Receiver of Bad News. Meanwhile, anyone who managed to pay attention to the pre-credits sequence in the middle of all the action and excitement will remember that Shooter didn't even know who House was and also said that he, not his wife, was House's patient.
After the commercial, House's ability to eat his amazing ICU breakfast of pancakes is impeded by the fact that his arm is handcuffed to the bed, as Cuddy promised she would do to him if he wasn't caring. That was back during when they were having the hot sex, though, so I could see how House got a fun suggestion confused with a real threat. Anyway, he's stuck in ICU with Shooter, who takes advantage of the time to tell House how, exactly, his wife killed herself: she sat in the closed garage and ran the car. "You shoot the guy who sold her the garage door opener?" House asks. Hee hee. "You're an ass," he adds. Shooter says that he was ignoring the rules to do what he thought was right, just like House always does. Oooh, learn a lesson, House! Come on, now. Shut up, Shooter. Shooter tells House that he knows it's his fault that his wife is dead: "But why can't you admit that it's maybe just a little bit yours, too?" I'm guessing that's because IT ISN'T. I'll blame the wife's emotional instability that made her kill herself over that before I'd blame House. I'd even blame whoever Shooter cheated on her with before I'd blame House. "Here's how life works," House responds (oooh, this should be good), "you either get to ask for an apology, or you get to shoot people. Not both." Awesome.
In yet another layer of surreality for me in this episode, the Taco stand that House and Cottages are now outside of is a place I pass by pretty much every day on my way to work. Cactus Mexican Food is on Vine St. north of Melrose. I've never eaten there, though, because I don't like cacti. House is eating there, much to the annoyance of his employees, who want him to get back to PPTH before his stitches pop out again. I'd like to know how they managed to uncuff him from the bed. And how did he get served at that place wearing just a hospital robe? Surely they've got some sort of "no shirt, no shoes, no hospital robe, no service" rule there. Anyway, House wants to diagnose Harpo while he munches on his fish taco (ewww), but no one else is in the mood for this. So House just imitates them instead. His theory is that Harpo had a weakness in his ocular vein that caused the pressure. HouseChase, who sounds like my dad trying to impersonate the Crocodile Hunter, says "no way, mate! There's too much blood to just be a vein." HouseForeman, using special BlackSpeak for added authenticity and who also sounds like my dad trying to imitate someone, although this time it's Any Famous Rapper: "no way, Hizzy! If it was an artery, he'd still be bleeding!" And then, HouseCameron, who sounds like my dad trying to imitate my mother on the phone when I call them and she can't answer it because she's watching American Idol and refuses to buy a Tivo: "actually, he'd be dead." House makes this great Cameron-style sad face when he says it, too, because that whole thing was awesome. Meanwhile, House is sitting on the hood of a blue lowrider. House apologizes for getting some taco debris on Cameron's ride, which she says she likes to go rolling around in on the weekends, flashing her chrome spinners while she hits the switch on her hydros for the three wheel motion.
House continues his trash analogy and tells the Cottages to check the brain's "trash," by which Foreman figures out he means the blood-brain barrier. Again, House is kind of surprised that Foreman knows what he's alluding to so quickly. He orders them to biopsy the barrier. Foreman also thinks that they should treat Harpo for worms, infections, and STDs, just in case that's what he's got. House scoffs at the last suggestion, saying he doubts that Harpo is cheating on his gorgeous wife and that he doesn't think she cheated on him either. The Cottages look surprised -- not because their boss has, for what must be the first time, taken a patient's family member at her word, but because Harpo is a widower. HIS WIFE IS DEAD! And then House looks down at the car and sees a bloody hook dangling from the door handle! And the call is COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! And then Cameron removes the green ribbon around her neck and her head FALLS OFF!
Wilson finally shows up to work out in the physical therapy room in House's place, as House has decided to forgo the physical healing so he can figure out what's mentally wrong with him. Meanwhile, it kind of sucks that you have to start using a treadmill only two days after being shot twice. Wilson isn't so sure that House imagined the Wife Ghost, saying that he might have just seen a nurse or some other woman visiting Harpo and gotten confused. No, House says, there were no hot babes near Harpo and no one saw him talking to anyone when he collapsed. He's now sure the Wife Ghost was a hallucination, a by-product of whatever surgical mishap left his leg feeling no pain. House is worried that his mind will never be the same, and he'll never be able to trust it to practice medicine. He also wants to know why his medical charts say he was given ketamine during his surgery.
So House leaves the useless Wilson to ask Cuddy, who's trying to do her job down in the Clinic. House ignores her patient to ask why he was given ketamine and put in a coma. When she doesn't answer, he threatens to beat the truth out of his surgeon, and walks off to do that. Cuddy watches him stalk off to do this, walking normally without needing his cane, and blurts out "it worked!" What worked? Well, she decided to go ahead and do an experimental procedure wherein a patient with chronic pain is put into a coma to let his brain "re-boot" itself. Cuddy says that there is a 50% chance that House's pain will come back -- and a 50% chance that it won't. House is less thrilled about this than Cuddy. In fact, he's absolutely furious that she went ahead and messed with his brain without his consent or knowledge. "Why are you so upset?" Cuddy asks, because apparently her brain was also re-booted but the operating system crashed, leaving her totally stupid. House denies experiencing any neurological side effects, saying his anger is just a "point of principle."
The Cottages do the blood-brain barrier biopsy and tell House that they didn't find anything except blood on the wrong side of the barrier. Meanwhile, Cameron is concerned that Shooter McGavin has been sleeping a lot, which House dismisses by saying that he upped the guy's sedative dose, presumably to keep him unconscious and quiet. That's better than lowering the guy's morphine and making him suffer, although I have to say that while I'm usually angry when House or any of the Cottages cause their patients undue harm, I very much understand it in this instance.
House says that the blood on the brain side of the barrier indicates cancer, even though all the tests for it have been negative. He goes back to his trash can analogy, saying that when your trash cans are full, you throw your stuff in your neighbors' trash cans. Except that you can't just do that out in the open and get caught -- you have to sneak outside and through the alley and then dump your trash by their garage. House sure does know a lot about secret trash disposal. Is it that hard to just leave your trash bag right to your full can? Anyway, Chase immediately catches on to what House is saying and says that he'll go check the lymphatic system in Harpo's chest. House is annoyed: "You got that from trash cans in the alley?" You see, he makes these little analogy things deliberately confusing and hard to follow because he doesn't want anyone but him to know what he's talking about. This time, Chase did. House is saying that they should check the lymph system over from the one they already biopsied -- the one in the lungs. The Cottages go off to do this, and the not-so-asleep-after-all Shooter McGavin asks House whether Chase knew what he was talking about because Chase is getting smarter or because House is getting dumber. I very much doubt it's the former.
Oh, and here's a fun close-up of a lung lymph biopsy!
And back to Shooter McGavin, telling House off some more that House thinks he's a rebel who doesn't follow society's rules, but has really just substituted his own rules. And they are to always tell the "blunt, honest truth in the starkest, darkest way." And whatever happens after that is what should happen. If people don't follow House's rule, they're cowards. Meanwhile, this moment-of-truth speech has put House to sleep. Me too, if it doesn't stop soon. Shooter continues that people aren't polite because it's nice and tactful and "cowardly;" they do it because they "have an ounce of humility" and know that they'll make the same mistakes and those mistakes will have consequences. So, then, they are cowardly if the reason why they don't make fun of people is that they don't want to be made fun of themselves, right? What the hell is Shooter even saying? "Why do you want so bad not to be human, House?" he whispers to his roommate, who's still trying to sleep. For all Shooter's talk about politeness and humility, he sure is rude when it comes to roommate etiquette.
The Cottages come in with some news, and Shooter tells them that he knows House is only pretending to be asleep, because House's nostrils always flare when he's sleeping. Creepy. Cameron and Foreman tell House that the biopsy was negative and they're still clueless as to what's causing Harpo's problems.
Chase gets to take Harpo on a post-op walk around his room. Harpo heads into the bathroom to relieve himself. His one existing eye almost bulges out of his skull like its former neighbor when looks down at his deal and screams that "it's getting bigger!" "You're...getting aroused?" Chase asks, not sure whether his patient is coming on to him or having another medical emergency. "No! Not that way!" Harpo screams back. At least, I think that's what he said. Guy does have a mouth full of tongue so it's difficult to understand. Chase decides that taking a look at this won't make him seem gay and rushes in to check it out. He kneels down just in time to get a face full of scrotum as Harpo's BALL FUCKING EXPLODES. OH MY GOD.
I'll have to recap the rest of this episode especially carefully now, since I'm assuming that we lost the entire male audience after that scene. House is back in the physical therapy room, this time with all the Cottages. Chase gets to use the exercise bike instead of House, because House explains that he bet his therapist that he could do a certain amount of clicks on it by Friday and doesn't want to lose. So he's cheating. He wonders whether blood from the kidneys could have caused Harpo's exploding ball. Cameron doubts it, since the kidneys and the scrotum aren't connected to each other. House says that they're dealing with a case that doesn't seem to follow any rules, so it might be worth it to start thinking of things that don't make any sense. "Maybe he's not human!" Chase suggests. Man, this stuff never happened to Mork from Ork, I'll tell you that. Foreman doesn't Believe, so he suggests testicular cancer, and House gets a disturbed look on his face while the Cottages argue with each other.
House goes to Wilson. Actually they both go -- to the bathroom. They discuss the possibility of Harpo having testicular cancer as they pee silently, since while this show can having exploding testicles and eyeballs popping out of sockets, God forbid we should hear the sounds of tinkling. We must protect that innocence of our children, who have never heard someone peeing before and therefore would be scarred to hear it on their televisions. House is upset that he missed the testicular cancer diagnosis in the first place. He thinks that it's because Cuddy's little experiment has impaired his mental abilities. Wilson doesn't agree with House's anger towards Cuddy, and says that House just doesn't want a healthy leg, because that wouldn't give him any excuses to hate life. He cites an example of patients who get a false positive on HIV tests and live with that for months or years. When they find out that they're actually negative, they're not as happy as you might think, because being HIV positive has become part of their identity and now it's gone. Hopefully, they didn't also go around doing drugs and sleeping with Australians in the meantime. "I don't define myself by my leg," House grumps. No, Wilson says, House went even further than that -- he could only deal with his disability by making it mean nothing, which meant that everything physical also had to mean nothing. Therefore, mental stuff, everything that's "coldly, calculatingly intellectual" has to mean everything. I'm much happier with Wilson psychoanalyzing House than Shooter McGavin doing it, by the way. House interprets everything Wilson says as being against House and for Cuddy. Wilson agrees with what Cuddy did because he knew that she was going to do it. So that makes three of House's closest friends/lovers/whatever who have screwed with his body while he was in a coma. No wonder he hates people so much.
House runs screaming into Cuddy's office, his new leg abilities getting him there faster than ever before. "WHAT DO I HAVE?!" he screams at her. His answer is his brain and its brilliant medical problem-solving skills. That's all he has in his life since he's alienated most people from it, including a live-in girlfriend, and his body doesn't work like it's supposed to. All he has is his mind, and now Cuddy and Wilson have taken that away. "You were out of control! You were shooting morphine!" Cuddy says. Hey, how'd she know about that? I mean, the viewers actually got to see the empty, used morphine syringe on House's coffee table, and some of them still refuse to believe that he injected himself with it. Wilson says that if House is having side effects, they can help him. House gives him a response he's sure Wilson and his love of the physical will appreciate: a nice big punch in Wilson's face. That was fun to watch, actually. A couple more of them, and I might actually start to like Wilson. Cuddy looks on in horror, but doesn't step in to help. Wilson has it all under control: "Are you hallucinating? I mean, right now -- are you hallucinating?"
And House is back in his hospital bed, staring at Shooter McGavin, who says that House was yelling at him and calling him Wilson. Also, House's bathroom hallucination made it into real life, since he has wet his bed. Man, there is nothing more embarrassing than wetting your bed right in front of the guy who tried to kill you. House mutters a "damn it" as the Cottages stroll in, ever the masters of bad timing. House pulls his blanket up to hopefully cover the wet spot that's forming underneath him as they report that Harpo was negative for testicular cancer. House tells them to do a cystoscopy that will prove that Harpo is human (i.e. show them if he has some kind of weird anatomical defect that is causing the kidneys and scrotum to be connected) while Foreman and Chase totally sneak quick glances at House's bed and presumably the wet spot they can see on it. Cameron is either clueless or doesn't want to ruin her crush fantasies with evidence of incontinence.
House and the Cottages walk down the stairs. Chase tells House that the test was negative; Harpo is free of anatomical defects in his urinary tract. That should be quite a comfort for the guy missing an eyeball and a ball-ball. Oh, and let's not forget his giant tongue. At this point, House realizes that he can actually walk up and down stairs without difficulty. He takes a moment to enjoy this, merrily skipping up and down the steps bathed in the glow from the sunlight coming in through the blinds, and he tells them to biopsy Harpo's prostate lymph nodes. Cameron protests that this would involve cutting through Harpo's stomach, which they can't do because of Harpo's bleeding problem. Foreman argues that they don't know whether Harpo even has a bleeding problem. Then House stops running up and down the stairs to ask them all how he got there. The last thing he remembers is the end of the last scene. Oh, I love that! We viewers all assumed that editing transported us from House's bed to the staircase, cutting out the unimportant and unnecessary stuff in the middle, as TV shows and movies always do, and then suddenly it all gets turned on its head when we realize that we were actually experiencing it in real time. And now we, like House, can no longer trust what we see and hear. I love it when TV shows and movies fuck with the audience like that.
House goes to Cuddy's office. She stands, bracing herself for impact, but he isn't there to yell and scream at her; he has to pull himself off of Harpo's case. "I'm losing my mind," he says. Cuddy isn't sympathetic, accusing House of doing this to scare her and make her feel bad about what she did to him. House asks Cuddy why she jumped up when he entered the room. "I thought you were gonna attack me again," she says. "Again?" he asks. He only hallucinated that scene with her and Wilson in the office. Which means that he's hallucinating right now, too.
House opens his eyes. He's still in his hospital bed. He turns to see Shooter McGavin smiling at him like a creep.
After the commercial, Shooter and House take a lunch break at House's favorite taco stand. House has already figured out that this a hallucination, too, which means that he can eat all the tacos he wants and never get fat! It also means that Shooter is just a figment of House's imagination and therefore when he talks to Shooter, he's just talking to himself and not the guy who tried to kill him. "How can I tell what's real?" House says. Shooter says that as long as House doesn't act on any of his ideas, he can't hurt anyone. He can keep throwing out the ideas to his team, but if they're based on a hallucination and not reality, the Cottages will point that out to him and refuse to act on it. We hope. And doubt.
Back in the physical therapy room, House decides that they'll have to do more than biopsies, which aren't always accurate. House bases this on the analogy that if you go "down the shore" (what up, Jersey in the house!) and fill a cup of ocean water, you won't find any fish in it. Obviously, that doesn't mean that there aren't any fish in the ocean. They need a bigger sample. Chase agrees with what HallucinationCameron said before: they can't operate on Harpo to really see what he's got going on inside his body because of his bleeding problem. Foreman agrees with HallucinationForeman that they don't even know for sure whether Harpo has a bleeding problem. Chase has had two facefuls of bleeding-caused exploding body parts, though, so he knows better than anyone that Harpo has a bleeding problem and they can't operate on him. Unless, that is, they can find a way to do the surgery without having to cut him open.
Fortunately, PPTH possesses the very latest in robo-surgeon technology, even though the place can't figure out how to keep an attempted murderer and his victim in separate rooms. Harpo balks at the prospect of a robo-doctor. He wants a person. House points out that people haven't done much for Harpo so far, judging by his rapidly decreasing number of balls. House tells Harpo to at least watch the robot in action before he decides.
Our sample patient will be Cameron, who is laid out on the operating table as sexily as possible. House will be operating the robot controls. I don't care how big of a crush I have on a guy -- I draw the line when it comes to him operating a robot with a scapel while suffering from blackouts and hallucinations. What if he hallucinated that I was skinnier than I actually am and accidentally cut into me? Although I guess that's not possible for Cameron. House tells her to stop him if he does anything that doesn't make sense, assuming that she'll still have her limbs at that point, and begins. His years of videogaming have made him quite skilled at the process, and he trails a little robot finger down Cameron's cheek. He then moves down to her stomach and peels her shirt up just a bit, revealing her belly button. He puts a little vacuum-thing in there, as part of his agreement with Cameron that she'd only let him do this if he did some lint-removal service. Anyway, Cameron reacts to this by closing her eyes and looking pretty darn happy with how things are going. House decides to really press his luck and uses the tiny robo-scapel to cut Cameron's top button off of her shirt and the little pincher-arm to part it, revealing a little piece of her bra. "House..." Cameron moans. "Does that hurt?" he asks. She shakes her head that it does not. This kind of reminds me of my days in my school's U.S. First club, except that our robot only had to pick up a large ball and deposit it in a barrel. We couldn't get it to undress women and get them all hot, no matter how much I'm sure some of those geekier guys tried. Anyway, thus concludes the robo-sex and Harpo's demonstration, much to his chagrin. Now that he's missing an eyeball and a testicle and has a screwed-up tongue, robo-sex might be all he can get.
"You wasted your life," Shooter tells House back in the ICU. If House died, no one would miss him. "I would," Stacy says, entering the room with her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised up into her hairline. Suddenly, one of the glass walls wobbles and comes crashing down upon her, cutting her into pieces. She smirks as she breathes her last breath. A janitor cleans up the mess, and it's like it never happened. I have to say, I was upset when I saw that Sela Ward was coming back for the season finale, but this was totally worth it. Anyway, no one would care whether House died, including House, who says that since he'd be dead, he wouldn't be able to care. Shooter tells him not to argue over semantics. House accuses him of being anti-semantic. Hee. He gets up and starts writing on one of the glass walls that didn't just fall over and kill Stacy.
Shooter McGavin adds that House thinks other people and caring and all those other warm fuzzy emotional things you can't measure don't count or matter or even exist, but they do. "That does not make sense," House says, studying what he just wrote on the board and trying to ignore his Wilson wannabe roommate. Shooter still thinks someone is paying attention to him, though, and says that House's life purpose is not to "sacrifice himself and get nothing in return," since House doesn't think that life or anything else even has a purpose anymore. With that, House is transported to Shooter's wife's car of suicide. She's in the driver's seat, he's sitting to her. She drifts off. Shooter voiceovers that House doesn't even care about the patients he saves, which is the only good thing he has in his life: "You're miserable for nothing. I don't know why you want to live." I guess he doesn't, since House closes his eyes. But then he opens them, and he's back in the ICU standing in front of the glass wall. He turns to Shooter and says that he's sorry. Shooter smiles slightly, possibly realizing that all he went through to get this apology wasn't really worth it in the end. "I know what's wrong," House says.
He enters the OR, where the Cottages are getting ready to robo-operate on Harpo. The scapel is in position over Harpo's belly, but House says Harpo will be fine without it. The Cottages think that House has figured out what's wrong with Harpo, but he just asks them why they haven't tried to pull him off of the case since he's having hallucinations and blackouts. Foreman says that House always acts a little off, but then he's always right in the end, so he figured things would proceed that way this time as well. "I'm almost always eventually right," House says. They should have made that the title of this show. Interesting how House isn't his usual arrogant self and has actually admitted that he isn't always right. Maybe he's getting some of that humility Shooter was talking about.
Unlike usual cases, House says, the Cottages have been with him every step of the way and never argued anything because they all seem to have identical knowledge. They've been proceeding on this case assuming that things always have to make sense. If they don't, then one of their assumptions was wrong. But what if the only faulty assumption this time was that this whole thing was real and supposed to make sense? Foreman thinks that House is losing it. "I've lost it," House says. He starts to raise an arm, and Chase grabs him. House smiles and asks Chase why he would stop him unless he knew what House was going to do. Because Chase is House. Everything here is House. This has all been in his mind, not just the stuff we thought were hallucinations. As long as House's mind can keep everything making sense, the dream will continue. So all House has to do is something so out of the realm of possibility that it will snap him out of whatever dream world he's caught in.
With that, House grabs the robot controls and starts maneuvering them in a much less delicate manner than he did when Cameron was the patient. The Cottages try to stop him, saying that if he's right, then he's just having a nightmare that he'll wake up from, regardless of what happens inside it. But if he's wrong, he'll be committing murder. Cameron points out that even if this is a hallucination, it kind of rocks since House can walk and isn't in pain and gets to go to the taco stand all the time. I have to agree with her reasoning. The only time I've ever had a lucid dream involved me going to a Burger King and the guy working at the drive-thru was a friend from college who lived three thousand miles away. Since there was therefore no way he could be working at a Burger King, I figured I must be dreaming. So my friend ditched work and jumped in my car and we drove around trying to figure out what to do now that we could do anything. We were thinking of Thelma and Louising off a cliff, but then I got all logical and decided that since I wasn't 100% sure that this was a dream and not reality, I shouldn't risk doing anything stupid just in case. So my friend and I spent the rest of my dream driving down a highway with our seatbelts on observing the speed limit. It was so boring. House has wisely decided to go the opposite route, because although this dream world is nice, it isn't real and therefore it doesn't have meaning. Maybe if his actual dream world was as fun and cool as the one I made for him with the sex and the Stacy death, he would have wanted to stay there. Oh, well.
"I want meaning!" House cries. With that, he slams the robo-scapel down into Harpo's stomach. Monitors beep wildly, and the Cottages try to wrestle House away from the controls. But they are super-weak and can't even overpower a man who's just been shot twice and isn't wearing any pants, so House continues. He slices through Harpo's abdominal cavity and then uses the pincher-arm to grab a piece of Harpo's intestines and yank them out of his body. Oh, it's horrible. Worse than the exploding testicle, but not as bad as the eyeball, in my opinion. Bear in mind that I do not have any testicles of my own. Harpo flatlines. The monitors have question marks where vital signs should be, because even they are like "what the fuck was THAT?!" Blood drips to the floor. The Cottages are horrified.
Evil Nurse Brenda walks in and says that she is not going to be the person stuck cleaning this mess up. So House takes her over to a dark corner of the room and has sex with her. They share a post-coital cigarette and then she leaves the room. House remembers what just happened and steps towards Harpo and surveys his destruction. "Oh, god," he says, starting to think that this is real after all and he just killed a guy. But then Harpo's arm swings comes out from under the sheet. His fist unclenches and a bullet drops to the floor. House picks it up and smiles. He was right after all. "Good-bye," he says.
Cut to House being wheeled into the ER, presumably immediately following his pre-credits shooting. "Hello," he mutters, opening his eyes. The Cottages tell the ER staff that he's been shot twice, in the abdomen and neck, meaning that even the real Shooter McGavin can't hit a guy in the face at pointblank range. Cameron assures House that he'll be okay. Before he passes out, House mumbles to Cameron, "Tell Cuddy...I want ketamine...." His Shooter McGavin alter-ego made House realize that it's better to risk losing his mind than to keep living as its prisoner. I think it's safe to assume that he'll survive the shooting, but I have no idea what to expect out of him season now. Can't wait to find out!