We get to see many sides of House this week, and very few of them were good. Drug Addict House is about to shoot up with morphine when Cuddy calls him into work. His new patient is Leona, teenage Hurricane Katrina Survivor and newly-discovered daughter (?) of House college friend and bandmate Dylan Crandall. Leona's having hallucinations and heart arrhythmias. House figures out what's wrong with her heart, then decides that she has an underlying autoimmune disease that's causing her to have hallucinations when she's in pain. He tests his theory by showing us his evil side, where he stabs the unsuspecting girl with a needles and then almost breaks her finger to put her in enough pain to hallucinate. She does, and we see another side of House -- the Leona Hallucination Vision side, which is frightening, indeed. Just when they're about to treat Leona's autoimmune disease by killing off her entire immune system, she starts pooping out of her mouth. Apparently, your digestive system can reverse itself if your liver stops functioning. It turns out that Leona doesn't have an autoimmune disease at all -- she has hemochromatosis. Unfortunately, the treatment for this condition unexpectedly rips holes in her lungs, thanks to fungus living in there. The team doesn't have time to test which one of many fungi it could be, so House demands that Leona tell him the truth about where she's been during the eight months between Katrina killing her mother and when she found Crandall. The answer is a recording studio, which somehow shows us that Leona is a bad person and a liar, and also that she has a fungus found only in places with tons of mold, i.e. a soundproof room that has just absorbed a flood's worth of water. With that, Leona's lungs and the rest of her body are magically healed, and House informs her that he did a secret paternity test -- she really is Crandall's daughter. The truth is the test was negative, but this way, Crandall gets the daughter he wants, and Leona won't be screwing him over now that she thinks she's related to him. Speaking of dads, Cuddy is still looking for one for her child. She unwisely asks House to assist in her search, and we get to see the slightly softer and more caring side of House as he administers fertility drugs into Cuddy's bare ass (we only get to see one side of Cuddy this week, and it's the back one). House and urges Cuddy to go with a donor she knows (and likes), and not some anonymous guy who likes square dancing. She chickens out of asking House to do it, and he goes home to finish the morphine he started.
We open on a plane. A girl, Leona (not Helmsley, although that would have been a lot more fun than this episode ended up being), listens to some music on her headphones and remarks to her neighbor, played by a haggard-looking D.B. Sweeney, that she was at the studio when her grandfather recorded the piece. This makes her sad, and she reveals to us that D.B. is actually her newly-discovered father and that her mother and grandfather made some "mistakes." Obviously, waiting until D.B.'s The Cutting Edge days were long behind him to tell her who her dad is was one of them. D.B.'s attempts to make Leona feel better are interrupted when the airplane cabin starts flooding. A tidal wave comes gushing out of the cockpit, taking out the flight attendant and several other passengers in a scene that I have to imagine was either really fun or totally hellish to film. As the water heads for Leona, the Magic School Bus Cam shoots inside her chest to her heart, which is beating oddly and has little CGI electricity currents flying around it. New Dad goes running up to his new daughter, who has somehow managed to collapse to the ground even though Economy class barely gives you the room to stretch your legs. Of course, there is no water in the plane at all. This ain't Lost!
As this show is doing more and more, we start in House's apartment. Leg pain is keeping our titular character awake, and he paces around on his gothy black floorboards to alleviate it. When Vicodin doesn't ease the pain, House pulls out his secret stash of morphine and loads up a needle as his answering machine answers his house phone. His outgoing message is the predictable "You've reached a number that has been disconnected and is no longer in service. If you feel that you've reached this recording in error, go with it. Hang up." Cuddy doesn't hang up, but leaves a message telling House to abandon his exciting day-off plans and come in to work. A sixteen-year-old girl came to the ER in cardiogenic shock but without a heart attack to accompany it. That last piece of information is enough for House to put down the needle. For now, anyway.
When he arrives at work, Cuddy brings him up-to-date on the case, and also on the fact that the patient's father claims to know House. "I thought I'd met all your friend," Cuddy says, expertly emphasizing the singular form of that last word. She also has a few medical histories she'd like House to check out, but he seems to ignore this when he sees the patient's father, who runs toward him happily exclaiming "G-man!" House isn't quite so effervescently happy to see D.B. (who introduces himself to us as Dylan Crandall) as he is to see House. House pretends not to know Crandall for a few cruel seconds before deigning to flash a smile at his friend and make fun of his gullible ways.
With that, House and Crandall stop in front of the Leona's room. House wants to know what his friend is doing with the girl, and Crandall explains that Leona is apparently jazz legend Jesse Baker's granddaughter. She lost her mother and home in Hurricane Katrina. Thumbs down to House for using recent human tragedy as a storyline. I hate it when shows do that. Anyway, Crandall tells House that he recently discovered he is Leona's father. At this, House raises an eyebrow or two and observes the obvious -- Leona and Crandall don't look much alike, she being black and him being white and all. Crandall says that, while he was writing a book about Jesse Baker, he got to know Jesse's daughter. The book ended up trashing Jesse and his daughter, so she wasn't all that willing to step up and tell Crandall that she had his child. House pronounces this story "unbelievable," by which he means that he doesn't believe Leona is really Crandall's daughter. He calls Crandall a "sucker," but agrees to treat the girl anyway. What a pal House is!
Over in the Differential Diagnosis Lair, Cameron offers up an explanation for Leona's condition that House snaps at her for, since it had already been ruled out in the ER and Cameron obviously didn't read the file before making her suggestion. Chase and Cameron suggest that Leona's time in post-Katrina New Orleans could have had a detrimental effect on her health -- since the city was filled with toxins, mold, sewage, etc. -- but House ignores them to posit his own theory: the cardiogenic shock was caused by an arrhythmia. To fix it, they'll have to wait for her to have another one. Since they can't predict when this will happen, House wants to induce it. Cameron says he "can't" do this, but has to change this to "shouldn't," since there's nothing incredibly wrong and unethical that House can't do. Cameron volunteers to give the consent form to Crandall to sign, but House nixes this, figuring Cameron wouldn't be able to stop herself from telling Crandall what a bad idea the procedure is. To prove this, he gives Cameron a little dress rehearsal, in which he plays Crandall and Cameron plays herself. Foreman -- who seems to be completely healed from all that brain damage he's been suffering from over the past two episodes -- tries to interrupt to do some real work, and is shut down. House's portrayal of Crandall suffers from House's inability to truly get into character as he makes fun of Cameron in a very Housian way. When he asks Cameron if she would induce an arrhythmia in her own child and Cameron pauses, House takes off to get the consent signed himself, his point proven. Cameron just looks back at her co-workers with the perfect "what the hell?" expression on her face.
House tells Crandall about the process of inducing the arrhythmia, which involves snaking some wires in all of the pathways of Leona's heart and then zapping them each with electricity to find the one that's broken. He says that the test is "perfectly safe" and performed "every day," leaving out the fact that other perfectly safe and routine tests such as MRIs often render House's patients half-dead. Just before Crandall signs the consent form, House tells him not to be so gullible -- the test is actually "crazy dangerous." Yeah, what a sucker Crandall is, believing that something a doctor tells him about a medical procedure is true. House tells him that the arrhythmia test needs to be done despite the risks, and then asks him for a DNA sample so that he can run a paternity test to prove that Leona is just a con artist trying to scam her new daddy out of everything he has before moving onto the guy her mother slept with. It's like the evil version of My Two Dads. Crandall prefers to trust Leona, and won't give House a DNA sample. He will, however, sign the consent form.
Chase sticks a catheter into Leona's heart. The second charge puts Leona into tachycardia, but the brain wave monitors show no hallucinations, meaning that this is not the faulty section of the heart. They zap Leona back to life. House wants to test another part of Leona's heart, but Chase protests that this is very dangerous to Leona's fragile heart. House tells him to blame Foreman if there's a negligence trial, and Foreman just frowns. With that, they send the electrical pulse, and Leona goes into hallucinations. The damaged heart muscle isolated, a tiny probe comes out of the catheter and freezes the tissue in a process called cryoablation. The damaged heart muscle can no longer interfere with the heart's electrical signals, and Leona is cured. Her hallucinations stop on the EEG, and House is sure Leona will be fine by breakfast the day. And since we're fifteen minutes into the show, I'm sure this will prove to be true.
House visits Cuddy, those medical histories she gave him in hand. She tells him that they're her top two sperm-donor choices, and she wants House's expert medical opinion on which one is genetically superior. I know that Cuddy doesn't have many choices of people to help her out with this since she hasn't told anyone, but even so, is House really the right person to ask? I'd run the risk of getting a kid with a genetic disease before I'd go to him for any kind of assistance. Of course, House doesn't like either of Cuddy's choices: Donor 1284 claims to like square dancing while Donor 613 likes Mozart. This makes their potential offspring loser kids who are destined to get beaten up on the playground. Man, those sperm-donor questionnaires sure do get detailed. Cuddy, of course, cares more about her child's long and healthy life than her donors' choice of hobbies. She angrily throws a pile of files in House's lap and tells him to find her a donor who will produce a popular kid. She sarcastically thanks him for his help. Well, what did you expect, Cuddy? Class and decorum? Come on now.
Leona tries to recover despite having a really annoying roommate. The woman keeps coughing and asking for water. When Leona pulls the curtain back to help the woman out, it's not a real person at all, but a nasty, bloated body. Leona identifies the woman as her mother. With that, she wakes up and screams. I knew this was a hallucination as soon as we saw that Leona had a roommate. No one in PPTH ever has a roommate.
While House and his bad leg pace around the hallway outside the Differential Diagnosis Lair, the Cottages inside it wonder if Leona had another hallucination or if it was just a nightmare. Cameron and Foreman are sure it was the former; Chase, the latter. House enters the room and chooses option C: none of the above. Cameron starts to talk, but he shushes her by saying that he wasn't finished speaking yet. If only they could have treated Season 1 Cameron like this, I would have loved it. Now, it's just mean and kind of off-putting. House adds that Leona may have had an "atypical seizure." Then he goes back outside to pace some more. Cameron explains to the group that House does this to take his mind off of his leg hurting, because she is the House Mood Expert. House returns to the room to suggest that Leona had a flashback due to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Cameron wants to know why House is so determined that this not be a hallucination. House says that would means that the heart defect they found and fixed was just a coincidence, and those never happen on this show except for almost every episode. House leaves the room again, and the Cottages go back to discussing his leg pain, since they're as bored with this patient as I am. House pops in to suggest that Leona has an autoimmune disease that makes pain -- such as the pain of an arrhythmia -- manifest itself in hallucinations. Autoimmune Disease Specialist Cameron is about to spring into autoimmune disease-testing action, but House dismisses the need for these, saying he has a way to test his theory that only takes five minutes. All they need is a PET scan and something that will cause their patient physical pain. Things are looking grim for Leona right now, I must say.
As House sends a very nervous and scared Leona into the PET scan tube, he assures her that it won't hurt at all. Once he's done tying her down to the bed, he jams a needle into her finger. In the booth, Crandall angrily asks what that was for. Foreman is stuck having to explain to the guy that it's just a simple test, and then tells House that the pain did not cause a hallucination, which he knows by looking at the PET scan of her brain. House goes for the mental pain route, sternly asking Leona why she's lying about Crandall being her father. Leona sticks to her story -- that her mother told her that Crandall is her father -- and House jabs the needle into her leg. This is getting kinky. But in a bad way. Leona cries out in pain. Crandall yells at House from the booth to leave her alone. But House keeps going, his face twisted into a cruel sneer, getting nice and close to Leona's face while he tells her that he knows that she's hustling Crandall. Meanwhile, poor Leona cries and tries to free herself from the straps keeping her tied down to the Bed of Torture. Foreman tells House to stop the test, but, of course, House doesn't. Instead, he grabs Leona's finger and yanks it backwards while he accuses her of trying to con Crandall, who used to be the "perfect mark" but has since been bled dry from, presumably, other con artists. And with that, House's face suddenly melts and has stuff oozing out of it. "She's hallucinating!" Foreman says. Well, duh. Unless this show really wants to push the boundaries of what people will find sexy for a leading man, I think it's safe to say that House did not suddenly get Ebola. After what he just did to that poor sixteen-year-old girl, though, I'd be okay with him getting it. As Leona screams in terror and pain, House smirks.
House defends his actions to the Cottages -- specifically Cameron -- who speaks for most of the audience, I'd say, when she says his actions were reprehensible. And yet, she didn't do anything to stop him, nor did any of the other Cottages, or Crandall. House: "Diagnostically, she needed to be hurt. I wanted to hurt her. Win-win!" So he wanted to hurt a sixteen-year-old girl because he thinks, based on absolutely nothing but his own cynical nature, that she's trying to con his friend, whom House doesn't even seem to like? I think there is a loser here, and it's the audience. I definitely lost some of my respect for this character and enjoyment of the show built around him, that's for sure. It's one thing for a guy to be an asshole and make fun of people. That's fine with me. It's quite another when he assaults children for "diagnostic" reasons and enjoys the hell out of himself while he does so. House says the only cruel thing was that he had to stab Leona twice before coming up with that finger-breaking winner of a hallucination trigger. So now they know that Leona has an autoimmune disease, but they don't know which one it is, and it's so far advanced that there's not much they can do for it. House recommends treating all the autoimmune diseases at the same time with a bone marrow transplant. But that will require a bone marrow donor.
In the comfort of his office, House puts on a CD that apparently came with the copy of Crandall's book on Jesse Baker, Genius Destroyed. He listens while he reads the book. If House really wants to know about Genius Destroyed, it might be cheaper and easier for him just to look in a mirror. Although I guess that would be more fitting for something like Enjoyable Television Character Destroyed. He BROKE the girl's FINGER, people! I don't think I will ever forgive him, and I don't care how necessary it was to her diagnosis, especially since I don't think it was at all. Cameron had plenty of tests to run that would have told them to same thing. House is swept away by the sounds of Jesse's piano playing until it's interrupted by a drugged-sounding Jesse (I assume) yelling at someone for not tuning his piano properly. Then Crandall comes running in, demanding to know why the Cottages are looking for a match for Leona in a bone marrow registry when her father is right there. Which means that House may have delayed Leona's treatment and not tested a potential donor simply because he doesn't believe the girl for reasons that are beyond me. Crandall orders House to test his bone marrow, which is just what House wanted. It makes me wonder if this bone marrow transplant is really necessary, or if House is doing it because it will allow him to test Crandall's DNA. Crandall catches on to this possibility, and orders House to test his bone marrow only. Well, I'm sure that the guy Crandall just watched breaking his daughter's finger would respect Crandall's wishes and stay well within ethical boundaries. House reminds Crandall of "Easy Lay Faye," who asked Crandall for a hundred bucks for a bus ticket home to visit her sick grandmother. The truth, House says, was that she used Crandall's money to buy weed. House knows this because he was the one who told her that her lie would work. "If our friendship means anything to you..." Crandall starts. Dude, he just told you that he and some girl named Easy Lay Faye conned you out one hundred dollars for weed with absolutely no remorse. I think it's safe to say that your friendship doesn't mean a fucking thing to him now, nor has it ever. Crandall tries to appeal to House's sense of logic, saying that if House does the test, either Leona won't be his daughter, in which case he'll be miserable, or Leona will be his daughter, in which case he'll still be miserable for not trusting her.
House goes to the Clinic, where his latest patient is a little boy with a bright red rash on his chest and face. Concerned Mother has no idea what it could be, but thinks it might have something to do with a recent camping trip the boy took with his father. The boy brags that he caught two spiders on this trip, which shows you right there that something is wrong with him: no one touches a spider on purpose. House finds out what's really wrong with the boy with his tried-and-true diagnostic method of disemboweling the child. Not really -- but if he did that, it wouldn't be out of character anymore. What House really does is ask the mother what color the new couch he's guessing she bought is. The kid says it's red, and that he often falls asleep on it while watching cartoons after a bath. Then the kid sneezes, and House says a quick "bless you" without skipping a beat in what must have been improvised, since the kid's sneeze was real and you can sort of see the actress playing his mother get pissed off that she'll have to retake this scene due to the sneezy brat kid she's stuck with. Cuddy enters the room and tells House, "I need you. Now." Whoa. "Yes, mistress," House says with a fake deep voice. The kid starts laughing. Yeah, it's all fun and games until he breaks your fingers, kid. House tells the mother to try giving her kid a bath before she goes running off to the Free Clinic and wasting everyone's time. Mother looks ashamed of her stupidity.
House reports to Cuddy's office. She asks him whether he told anyone else about her sperm donor thing, and he says that he didn't. Not even Wilson. She starts closing her shades, and this looks like it's going to get fun. She hands House a needle and tells him that she needs him to inject her with gonadotropins, because she can't do it herself, and apparently didn't think any of this through when she was given instructions to inject herself with them twice a day. I would have many more problems with the logic of all this, but it gives us some quality House-Cuddy time, so I'm all for it. Of course, the drug has to be injected into Cuddy's ass, and she bends over and lifts her skirt up to show House and us a significant part of her ass cheek. She compliments his professionalism in not making any smart remarks. Since she's facing away from him, she can't see the variety of facial expressions he's making in response to his view. He studies her ass for a good while, and then shakes it off with a comment to the effect that Cuddy has a huge ass, which, as far as I can see, isn't true. Cuddy doesn't have a huge anything, except for cleavage and no-nonsense attitude. "Shut up," Cuddy snaps at him. House applies alcohol to the area for several minutes, with more care and precision than we've ever seen him display, until Cuddy turns and says, "I'm pretty sure you got that." But she's smiling and her voice is kind of seductive. HOT. "Microbes can be sneaky," House tells her. Enh...not quite so hot. Unless I'm missing out on the sexiness of dangerous single-celled organisms. With that, House finally shoots Cuddy's ass full of gonadotropins, and Lisa Edelstein can finally cover herself back up and spare our blushes. "Twice a day...this is gonna be fun!" House says. Yes, yes it will. In fact, it's a pretty safe bet that it'll be the only fun thing in this entire episode!
House listens to more of Jesse's piano playing. Wilson enters with a carton of chicken mole (hope you didn't get that from the taco stand/car wash, Wilson! Or else we won't be seeing much of you in this or even episode, unless they take place in a bathroom stall) and pesters House about Crandall, of whom Wilson thinks House is jealous for maturing while House is stuck as a seventeen-year-old. (Wilson generously gave House twice the mental age he should have, in my opinion.) House scoffs that Crandall hasn't changed at all. He tells Wilson about Leona's crap mouth, which Wilson says will not gross him out of eating his lunch since, as an oncologist, half of Wilson's patients "have their skin sloughing off." Meanwhile, he's sleeping with the other half whose skin remains intact. ...Oh, let's be honest, he's probably sleeping with some of the skin-sloughing patients as well. The friction really intensifies the sexual experience. Wilson asks House why he's so worried about Crandall, though I have seen no evidence that House cared enough about to worry about yet. Wincing in pain as he rubs his leg, House tells Wilson a story about the time Crandall fell in a love with a girl House didn't approve of. When Crandall said he wanted to marry the girl, House went to talk to her at Crandall's request. "And you blew it?" Wilson asks. No, House says, it's more like Leona's digestive system. As in, the situation reversed itself. As in, the girlfriend blew House. "I was doing him a favor," House defends himself. Wilson, who couldn't be put off of his food with talk of poop oozing out of someone's mouth, is so disgusted by this that he throws his food down on House's desk and leaves the office, conveniently forgetting that when it comes to morals and fidelity and sex, Wilson is hardly a paragon of virtue himself. Dick. His grandstanding almost made me forget what an asshole House is, both in this scene and through the entire episode. For his part, House just turns the Jesse Baker back on and starts eating Wilson's lunch. He takes a few bites before putting the fork down, turning the music off, and getting his thinking face going.
Chase is in the middle of Leona's liver biopsy when House pages Foreman, ordering him to stop it.
The Cottages report to House's office, where they find their boss listening to Jesse Baker on his record player. He urges them to listen, and Foreman begs him to tell them that he didn't stop a biopsy to make them listen to music. House says that the liver biopsy is actually unnecessary, and would have been fatal. Kind of like that bone marrow replacement, except even more dangerous. Nice going with that, guys. When the song gets to the part where Jesse starts yelling at people, Foreman loses his patience. But House says that Jesse was playing way too well for him to have been on any drugs: "Something [else] was screwing with his personality." Additionally, Jesse was yelling about his piano being out of tune when it actually was not, so House thinks that whatever was making him an asshole was also screwing with his aural perception. And if you add those things to the liver disease that killed Jesse, you get hemochromatosis. Which is genetic. House is apparently much quicker to believe that Leona is biologically related to Jesse than he is to believe she's related to Crandall. Cameron is about to test Leona's blood for iron, but House again says he has a quicker way. Maybe this time he'll break her entire arm.
House and the Cottages arrive at Leona's bedside and note that her skin color is darker now than it is in a picture of her from three years ago in Crandall's book. It doesn't make any sense that the picture would be in there, since Crandall said that Leona's mother didn't tell him about Leona because of how his book trashed her and her father, which would indicate that the book was published around the time Leona was born and not thirteen years later. This storyline doesn't make any sense anymore and I don't care about it. More House-Cuddy time, please! Anyway, hemochromatosis causes the skin to darken, and Leona's skin is definitely darker than it was just a few years ago. Which is fine, except for the fact that hereditary hemochromatosis almost never shows up until well into adulthood. Like when you're Jesse's age. So this still doesn't make sense. But Cameron smiles because she likes it when her boss is right. House orders the Cottages to find the iron deposit in Leona's liver and treat it with deferoxamine. Leona will be fine by lunchtime. Which is good, because House is hoping to score a free lunch off Wilson by telling him about the time he tied a teenage girl to a bed and then broke her finger for no reason.
Meanwhile, House has taken up residence in Cuddy's office. He's interviewing a bright young man to be his new intern. Cuddy enters the office and is surprised to see House there, and to hear that he's looking for an intern. She greets the guy, who laughs ridiculously as he shakes her hand. He apologizes, saying that he laughs when he's nervous. He tells Cuddy that he's interested in CANCER! and INFECTIOUS DISEASE! for his medical career. "The big devils!" he adds. He laughs and snorts again, and House asks him what kind of music he likes. Donor 613 says he likes Mozart. A lot. Cuddy's jaw drops and she leaves the office, being sure to open the desk drawer positioned at House's crotch quickly and strongly before she does. Don't hit him there too hard, Cuddy, or he won't be able to donate to your cause, which is where this storyline seems to be headed.
Chase hooks Leona up to the deferoxamine, promising that the treatment will be "quick and painless." Yeah, well, that's House said, and that didn't quite work out. Indeed, the Magic School Bus Cam goes into Leona's veins, where chunks of iron and/or deferoxamine are ripping holes through Leona's lungs. Obviously, this is bad news. The monitors respond accordingly. Chase rushes over to intubate Leona, who is no longer able to breathe.
"Her lungs are swiss cheese," Chase informs the crew of Leona's current condition. Great job, guys. The deferoxamine treatment has killed Leona, whose time, Chase says, is "basically up." House blames this on a flaw in the scientific method, because this means he didn't do anything wrong, just like how Crandall's girlfriend was solely at fault for cheating on him with House. While House paces and then sits to rub his leg, the Cottages go over what could have drawn all that iron into Leona's lungs and caused this whole mess. Her two-way digestive system can be blamed for the iron's going into her lungs instead of through her intestines to be disposed of as normal waste, but what made the iron rip through the lungs that way? Foreman comes up with an iron-loving fungus that bound to the iron. But there's a problem: if it is a fungus, they don't have time to figure out which one. House tells them to treat Leona for the most common fungus -- aspergillus -- and hope they're right. You know, like how they treated that autoimmune disease she didn't have and almost gave her a liver biopsy that would have killed her. Hooray for the guess-and-check method!
House doesn't have time to deal with Leona anymore, since he has an appointment with Cuddy. If only Leona's ass were as nice as Cuddy's, maybe she would get more of House's attention. Cuddy is outraged at House's stunt, tracking down one of her sperm donors and parading him around in front of her, but House defends his actions by saying that, now that Cuddy has met the guy, she knows she wouldn't want to have his baby. Cuddy starts to say she's tired of looking for the right father of her children, but is interrupted by House's sticking her ass with the needle. Fun times for Lisa Edelstein this week, I'll tell you. House says that Cuddy should know who is the father of her child: "Genes matter." Or is that "jeans matter"? Because House loves wearing jeans. "Who you are matters. Find someone you trust," House adds, seeming just a little bit hurt that Cuddy never picked him. She picks up on this: "Someone like you?" "Someone you like," he says. I guess that's why she didn't go to House in the first place. I hear incredible crankiness is a hereditary trait.
Wilson rushes into House's office without knocking to find him with his pants down and a woman bobbing around his crotch area. "Oh, sorry!" Wilson says, before letting out an awkward "I don't know what to say now but I feel like I should keep talking" "Okay..." Awesome. House is not getting a blowjob, though -- just a leg massage from Ingrid the Hot Season 1 Masseuse. Now that they've established that House is not getting any action, Wilson says that he's sure House did that paternity test on Crandall, it came back positive, and that's why House's leg is hurting so much lately. Except that his leg hurt well before Crandall even came into this episode, and House still denies running the test in the first place. Cameron enters and manages not to burst into tears of rejection and embarrassment before House can tell her that this isn't what it looks like. Doesn't anyone knock anymore? Cameron has urgent news: Leona's lungs collapsed. It isn't aspergillus. And with that, Cameron takes in the scene for the first time, steps back, and averts her eyes as she walks out of the room. Oh, please let her walk in on House giving Cuddy an injection time! That reaction was great. Since his patient is still dying, House has to stop his massage session.
Back in the Differential Diagnosis Lair, House and the Cottages try to figure out what fungus Leona was most likely exposed to. Since she told Crandall she was living at the Children's Shelter in Ridgeland after Katrina, House says that's one place they can definitely rule out, because he's still convinced that Leona is a liar. "We can't ask Leona where she was -- she's intubated," Cameron says. House gets a look on his face that says, "Oh, can't we?"
House injects Leona with something that wakes her up. He tells her to blink to respond to his questions. First up, he wants to know if she lied to Crandall. She doesn't blink. He asks her if she was really living at the shelter, as she told Crandall, reminding her that her answer could determine whether she lives or dies. Again, she doesn't blink that she lied to Crandall. "You're a lousy con artist!" House says. She should know her mark well enough to know that no matter where she said she really was after Katrina, Crandall would still have taken her in, so she doesn't have to lie. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Leona trusts the guy who's been needlessly torturing her all episode and has almost killed her like three times. She blinks. House's theory is flawed here, though -- I mean, what if she was just blinking because her eyes were dry? Anyway, House puts a piece of paper and a pen in her hand and tells her to write down where she was instead of the Children's Home.
The answer is that Leona was at her grandfather's recording studio, which Leona didn't want Crandall to know because she knew from his book how much he hated what went on there. Not like all that much Jesse-style debauchery and sin would have been happening in a flooded, abandoned, hurricane-ravaged room like that, but whatever. For obvious reasons, recording studios have soundproofing, which absorbs moisture. And nothing's moister than a flood that takes out an entire city. The zygomycosis fungus is found at the highest levels of mold. They'll treat her for that and she'll be fine by dinner. Apparently, swiss cheese lungs aren't as big a problem as you would have thought, and instantly heal themselves once the thing that caused them is taken care of.
Foreman sets up the zygomycosis treatment while Crandall stands around sulking that Leona lied to him. Foreman tells him to get used to this -- that's what teenage daughters do. Unlike SOME PEOPLE, Foreman has taken Crandall and Leona's situation at face value and seen no need to dig deeper than that. And it didn't affect Leona's treatment one way or the other. Imagine that! He leaves the room, and Crandall sits down and holds his (maybe) daughter's hand.
Cuddy comes to see House. She opens her mouth to speak. House looks at her expectantly. Finally: "Thank you for the injections." "You're welcome," House says. Cuddy turns to go, so House has to ask her if this was the only reason for her visit. Of course not! She just can't bring herself to say what it was. Your guess as to that is as good as mine, but it looks to me like she was trying to ask him to be her sperm donor, but chickened out.
Leona's getting better. Crandall thanks House for saving his daughter by almost killing her, and House asks him why he thinks he'll be a good father to Leona. Crandall says it just feels right. And it feels good. House has never done anything in his life that felt both right AND good, so he is dismissive of this. But Crandall says that his reasons are good enough no matter what House says, and then Leona starts gagging. House rushes Crandall out of the room, and then closes the curtain behind him and removes Leona's tube for some one-on-one time. She isn't choking and dying like House cruelly told Crandall she was -- just breathing on her own now that her lungs are healing. House tells her that he lied to Crandall and ran that paternity test after all. Leona looks scared. House adds that Leona's lie was much worse than House's, which makes me think that she was a con artist after all. But then House says that Leona really is Crandall's daughter, so I don't know what he meant by that. Leona doesn't look all that thrilled about the test results, though. On his way out of the room, House tells Crandall that they're even.
House goes home. Wilson leaves a message on his answering machine as House looks at the real paternity test results -- Leona isn't Crandall's daughter after all. He told her she was so that she wouldn't screw him over like she apparently set out to do, and so that Crandall would keep the daughter he seemed so happy to find. It's the only non-asshole thing House has probably ever done for Crandall. He puts the test results down on his coffee table, right to the syringe that used to be full of morphine.
week is the season finale! Let's hope it's a better episode than this one was.