Pilot

We open on some pleasant, soothing music. We follow Robin "The Craft" Tunney around as she rides a bus, runs through a rather over-gated ramp, and then enters a school, where she is a kindergarten teacher. Her co-worker, "Miss Melanie," sidles up, all curious as to why Robin is late for work when she pretty well knows the answer is that Robin spent the night with Brad, and there aren't any bus stops near Brad's house. Either Miss Melanie has the bus route memorized, or she's got some history with Brad. Hmmm. Anyway, Miss Melanie begs Robin to tell her whether or not she actually slept with Brad as a hallway full of small children watch and listen. Miss Melanie says that if Robin didn't sleep with Brad, then there's either something wrong with him or there's something wrong with her. Something like...a mysterious degenerative brain illness?!?!?!

To escape the probing questions of the Melanie Report, Robin ducks into a classroom. The kids greet her with a "good morning Miss Radfafa" in that group-of-children-speaking-in-semi-unison-unintelligble way. It turns out that they're saying "Miss Rebecca," like, what kind of school lets its students address teacher by first name? As her ridiculously well-behaved students take their seats, Miss Radfafa asks them what they did over the weekend. A cute little girl asks why Miss Radfafa asks what they did over their weekends, but never tells them what she did over her weekend. I think that cute little girl was paid off by one Miss Melanie, who is no doubt behind the door listening in right now. She MUST find out about Brad! She MUST! Miss Radfafa says she'll tell them all about her weekend, providing they don't tell Miss Melanie about it. Oh, Miss Radfafa's class has really opened a can of worms (spoiler!) there. You never want to know what your teacher did over the weekend. My fourth-grade math teacher used to spend a part of every Monday's class I'd like to call "doing your teacher's budget" telling us what she did during her entire weekend and we'd have to listen to her and add up all the money she spent. She would always go into painstaking detail about which meals she ordered and how delicious they all were and the class was always right before lunch so we were all starving and it was torture. Not to mention really boring, as most adults' lives are to children and, usually, to adults. Anyway, Miss Radfafa starts talking about a "new friend" she made and how much fun it is to make new friends, but before she can go into the TMI details about what kind of fun she and her new friend had, she loses the ability to form words. She can make some funny gibberish sounds, though, which the kids find freaking hilarious. Miss Radfafa does not seem to enjoy the humor, though, as she starts twirling around as some suspenseful heartbeat sounds come on the soundtrack. "Call the nurse" she manages to write on the whiteboard before falling to the floor and seizing. Nurse, schmurse -- she needs DR. HOUSE!

Speak of the cranky devil, he's caning his way down the hall with Robert Sean Leonard, a.k.a. Dr. James Wilson, who's telling him about a patient. It's Miss Radfafa, of course, whose pre-opening credits deal apparently happened a month ago. Wilson reports that she lost the ability to speak and has been deteriorating rapidly since. But never mind her! First we have to pay very close attention to the fact that House needs a cane to walk, because it's the only thing we see on screen for the first few moments and therefore it is VERY IMPORTANT. House doesn't like the fact that his limp makes everyone think he's a patient, but doesn't want to wear a white coat because it will identify him as a doctor. This guy will never be satisfied. House stops griping long enough to get in a remark about how happy he is that Wilson's patient can't speak, and Wilson lets him know that Miss Radfafa is his cousin before House can stick his bum foot in his mouth any further. Instead of the usual "ooooh...sorry," you'd expect someone to say here, House just goes, "Brain tumor. She's gonna die. Boring." Wow, not only does he remind Wilson of his cousin's mortality, but he also has to throw in that personal comment about her teaching style. Damn, he's cold.

Wilson and House talk for a while about what their respective jobs are (Dr. Wilson is an oncologist, House is an "infectious disease guy") because that's the kind of information the viewer needs to know during a pilot episode. Then Wilson gets back to his cousin, saying that he doesn't think she has a brain tumor, based on the negative lab results and her non-response to radiation therapy. House takes a second to dry-swallow a couple of sweet, sweet painkillers, and then makes fun of Wilson's poor dying cousin for using an HMO. Wilson has worked with House long enough to expect this, it seems, and does not punch him in the face. Instead, he tells House to put that team of over-qualified young doctors he hired to work on figuring out what's wrong with Miss Radfafa.

Sick Miss Radfafa lies in her sickbed sickly. The camera tracks in on Miss Radfafa's face. And in...and in...and it's getting kinda close there...and we're up her nose. Robin Tunney nose hair enthusiasts, this is your lucky day! The Magic School Bus Cam continues its travels and we pass either a booger or Miss Radfafa's brain, and then go inside that and through blood vessels and into the neuron-y section and then we're looking at the latest CAT scan of Miss Radfafa's head, which only shows that she has a lesion. House's team of young, hot, infectious disease doctors are gathered around, and, led by Dr. Eric Foreman, played by Omar "Dr. Trainface" Epps, are kind of put off by House's policy of avoiding talking to the patient at all costs, because patients, like all humans, LIE.

House says he doesn't think Miss Radfafa has a brain tumor. Any other suggestions? Hunky Aussie Dr. Robert Chase, dressed in an unfortunate plaid-on-plaid shirt and jacket ensemble, says it could be aneurysm or a stroke. That's cute, but I'd think that after a MONTH, both of those would have been ruled out. Dr. Allison Cameron, the impossibly beautiful female member of the team, suggests Mad Cow Disease. Foreman suggests Wernicke's encephalopathy, but House says that the blood tests have shown that her thiamine level was normal (the cause of WE is acute thiamine deficiency). Foreman points out that labs screw tests up as much as people lie. As someone who worked in a medical lab, I have to say I'm a little offended by all this talk of incompetent labs and faulty test results. Then again, as someone who worked in a medical lab, I have to say I'm completely in support of all this talk of incompetent labs and faulty test results. House takes a minute to be impressed by the distrust of fellow man that he has created in one of his underlings, and then orders the blood tests to be redrawn and a contrast MRI to be scheduled. And so it was.

House tries to leave for the night, but he's caught at the elevator by some angry woman wearing the kind of power business suit that screams...well, "POWER BUSINESS SUIT." She's Dr. Lisa Cuddy, and House totally skipped out on a meeting he was supposed to have with her. House says he had no intention of being in any meeting, and walks into the elevator, considering the matter closed. He's greatly annoyed to see her follow him in, and becomes even more so when she starts in on how, as his supervisor and the signer of his paychecks, she's getting a little sick of the fact that House hasn't really been doing any work lately. And by "lately," she means "in the last six years." Six YEARS?! You have to respect a guy who gets away with that much slacking off for that long. House defends himself by saying that he comes to work five days a week, eight hours a day, and his eight hours are up for today so he's going home. "To what?" Cuddy retorts. Ouch. The elevator opens, and House tries his best to escape the annoying woman with a quick limp by the large Benefactors board. But she follows him, saying that his stellar reputation has gotten him by this long: "But your reputation won't last if you don't do your job. The clinic is part of your job. I want you to do your job." And I want a job where my employer has to beg me to do work. "But, as the philosopher Jagger once said, 'you can't always get what you want,'" House retorts, and off he goes. "I can't get no (DA NA NAAA!) satisfaction," Cuddy says.

The day, Miss Radfafa is wheeled down the hall with Cameron and Chase. Miss Radfafa -- who has recovered the power of speech, so I guess that camera up the nose trick was good for something -- notes that House is absent. Radfafa is laid out on that MRI sliding bed thing, and Foreman prepares to inject some gadolinium (atomic number 64) into her veins, which will, he explains, act as a contrast material for MRI. Or, as Cameron prefers to say, "Whatever's in your head lights up like a Christmas tree!" Good one, Cameron! First of all, as we learn later, they're all operating under the assumption that Miss Radfafa is Jewish, so perhaps "menorah" might have a more culturally sensitive comparison point there, and second, I can't imagine that Miss Radfafa -- or anyone else, for that matter -- would be all that happy about having weird chemicals injected in her body that make your already-mysterious-disease-ridden brain go crazy neon. It doesn't matter in the end, as one of the technicians stops them from going forward with the test, saying that there is a problem.

Cut to House using his good leg to kick open the boss lady's office door and yell at her for pulling his authorization. Cuddy says she sure did. House says that Cuddy should at least have "the guts to face" him if she's going to fire him, as if he's the master of face-to-face contact with other human beings. Cuddy tells him to stop shouting. "I'm angry!" House shouts. "You're risking a patient's life!" "I assume those are two separate points," Cuddy retorts. Damn, she's good. House keeps yelling until Cuddy interrupts to ask if he's trying to scare her with the yelling, because she can't really see a scenario where she has anything to be scared of. If House gets mad enough to try to hit her, she's "pretty sure [she] could outrun [him]." Aw, snap! Cuddy follows it up by saying that she did a little philosophy studying of her own, and therefore knows that "if you try sometimes you get what you need." I think she's missing a "you just might find" in that quote, but I'll take it. House will take some painkillers.

Sometime later, House limps out of the office and tells his waiting team to go ahead with the MRI: "She folded." They scatter, and House tells Wilson, who's hanging out for no discernible reason, that he had to promise to work four hours a week at the clinic until he's made up the last six year's worth of time, which will be sometime in the year 2054. "You better love this cousin a lot," House grumps. "Not as much as I love you," Wilson thinks to himself.

We finally proceed with the MRI. Miss Radfafa looks nervous as she gets strapped in, probably because she's wondering what the hell hospital this is where doctors' authorizations get pulled and replaced willy-nilly. Cameron presses a button, and Radfafa slides into the PHILIPS BRAND MRI tube. The cameras put the fish-eye lens on for close-ups of poor Miss Radfafa in the tube, because that adds an extra special sense of claustrophobia and confinement. If you've ever had an MRI, you know that it's impossible NOT to feel claustrophobic. You have to remain perfectly still for, like, twenty minutes, and you're in this narrow tube, and there are all these weird thumping and clicking noises around you that are so loud that you have to wear earplugs. Three seconds in, Miss Radfafa is complaining that she doesn't feel "so good." A teacher who uses "good" where she is supposed to use "well" must be pretty sick. But the doctors ignore her and the MRI continues. Miss Radfafa starts gasping for air. The camera travels into her open mouth and down her throat, which abruptly slams shut in our face. How rude!

In the booth, Cameron starts to panic that Radfafa isn't responding to her calls. Chase tells Cameron to relax because Radfafa probably just fell asleep. Unless narcolepsy is one of the symptoms of Radfafa's mystery brain ailment, I'm going to go with a "NO WAY, IDIOT" on that one. Cameron runs out and shuts down the MRI, immediately determining that Radfafa is having an allergic reaction to the gadolinium. They pull her out of the tube as the soundtrack holds a note ominously. Radfafa is no longer conscious and she isn't breathing. So she gets a tracheotomy. Aw, those things leave unsightly scars. Miss Radfafa is going to be pissed when she wakes up from that nap.

House hangs out outside Miss Radfafa's room and takes a few pills while, inside, his more social team members tend to their patient. "Heh heh, sorry about the tube," they say. "Try to get some rest if you aren't too terrified of this hospital of DOOOOOM to close your eyes." The team comes outside to House, who says it's just like a human to somehow be responsible for almost dying from an allergy she probably never knew she had. House says that since they can't get their contrast MRI, they'll actually have to talk to Miss Radfafa. Or at least, one of the underlings will. House will just spit some platitude about truth and lies that, as Foreman points out, doesn't really mean anything.

House begins his dreaded four-hour clinic shift. He asks the desk clerk if there's a TV around so that he can get his daily fill of General Hospital, which he says starts in eight minutes even though that would make it only one o'clock, which is when All My Children is on. Anyway, House, I'll give you a quick GH recap right now: mob people plotted against Sonny, and he found out and plotted against them and was REALLY INTENSE about it, and also something happened to some other characters maybe. And now you don't have to actually watch it, which is good because Cuddy appears to be set on watching your ass all shift to make sure you actually do some work. She gives him his first patient, who is complaining of back spasms and is orange in color. House looks intrigued by this despite himself.

The patient is, indeed, orange. Although, thanks to the weird orange tint Bryan Singer chose to put on everything in this episode, so is everyone and everything else, so it's really not that special. Anyway, the patient nervously twists his wedding ring as he says that he was playing golf and then, the day, he could barely stand. House stands in the corner and laughs at him, and then takes some painkillers. He gives one of his pills to the patient, saying it will make his back feel better. And because House wants some addiction company. House gives his expert diagnosis: the patient's wife's inattention to her husband's bizarre skin color means she's having an affair, and the patient needs to cut down on his carrot and megadose vitamin intake. House prescribes a good lawyer and takes off. Why isn't anyone concerned with the fact that the patient is obviously a vampire? After all, not being able to see his own reflection is the ONLY EXPLANATION for the fact that he himself didn't notice that he was turning freaking ORANGE.

House's patient is a small child who has asthma, but doesn't regularly use his inhaler since his mother doesn't like the idea of her young child taking such "strong medicine." House loves medicine (a little too much), so he's furious at the mother and lectures her about how important it is for growing children to have oxygen as the kid stares at House's bad leg, like, you're a little too old to be that rude, kid. As House starts to explains the wonders of steroids on asthma patients, the kid keeps staring, and then House stops talking and runs out of the room. What happened? Is he self-conscious about his leg? Does he need another Vicodin fix?

...nope! House just has a brilliant idea about Miss Radfafa's treatment. He sends his team an urgent page, which they get while visiting Miss Radfafa, trying to get a medical history that isn't FILLED with EVIL HUMAN LIES like about how her mother died from a "heart attack," i.e. her mother was a syphilitic cross-dresser. The team leaves the room to answer House's page, and are annoyed to see he's right outside the room, but paged them because he didn't feel like actually walking into a room with a patient in it. Why didn't House consider pathology as an exciting career field? The only patients you need to see then are dead, and dead men tell no tales. Anyway, House thinks Radfafa has cerebral vasculitis, which can be cured by steroids. As he speaks, Miss Radfafa isn't too sick to lift her head off the pillow and look through the blinds of her room to see Dr. House. She stares long and hard at his cane, because people with mobility issues are just that much of a novelty for those in the greater Trenton area. Anyway, Foreman and Cameron quickly determine that House doesn't have much more to go on than an assumption, but he wants to pump Radfafa full of steroids anyway. He figures that if he's right, Miss Radfafa will get better and his theory will be proven correct. "And if we're wrong?" asks Cameron. "Then her voice will deepen and she'll get ass acne," says House. Actually, he just says that if the steroids don't work then they'll have ruled something out.

The day, Miss Radfafa is still alive, thanks to a defibrillator. Foreman explains that her chest will be "sore" for a while. A sore chest is the least of this poor woman's worries right now, I'd say. Girl looks rough. Who did Robin Tunney piss off to get this role? When we aren't getting closely acquainted with her left nostril, she's having her throat sliced open and flopping around her hospital bed like a dying fish, and most of the time in that unflattering fish-eye lens. Foreman asks her to put four pictures into order to tell a story about what appears to be a mother buying a kite for her ugly daughter and then her daughter flying the kite. Looks like capitalist propaganda to me! It doesn't look like anything to Radfafa though, because she can't do it. How many times has she probably given her students a similar exercise to do? Oh, cruel irony!

House and his team have a meeting. Foreman says that Miss Radfafa was able to put the story together when he gave her the test again five minutes later, so her "altered mental status" is intermittent. Whatever is wrong with her, it's going deeper into the brain. They've got anywhere from a weeks to two months, depending on whether it's a vascular problem, an infection, or a tumor. House orders an end to all medications, as neither the radiation nor the steroids have cured her. His great new plan is to watch her die. They'll know more about what they're dealing with based on how fast Miss Radfafa declines. House's team finds this objectionable. House asks if they have any other ideas. They don't.

Exiting the office, Foreman asks Cameron for help. "What's up?" she asks. Foreman says it's always a good idea, when breaking into a home, to have a "white chick" with you. I don't know why that is, particularly, nor do I understand why they can't just ask Radfafa for permission to check out her house, meth lab or no.

Doing his clinic time, House deals with a patient who thinks he has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome because he read too much about it on the internet and convinced himself that it fit his symptom of being tired a lot. CFS guy got off easy; every time I've tried to research a possible medical condition on the internet, I always end up with terminal cancer. House asks the guy if he has any other symptoms. The guy says he gets headaches and had a slight fever once. He wonders if he has fibromyalgia. The self-diagnosed fibromyalgia/CFS sufferer: for when you really want the audience to know that they're dealing with a whiny hypochondriac. CFS asks if there's anything he can take for his imaginary illness. House plays along with great gusto and says there just might be.

House canes over to the pharmacy and asks for thirty-six Vicodins and change for a dollar. He uses the quarters to buy a bunch of sugar pills from the Placebo dispenser to the M&M machine. He then returns to the pharmacy window, where a bottle of Vicodins has been left completely unattended, and does a quick switcheroo of the precious, precious painkillers with the sugar pills. He slams the bottle back on the counter and tells the pharmacist to give them to the guy in Exam Room 2. Except that the sugar pills look totally different than the Vicodins and there are only, like, seven of them in that bottle, so you'd think someone on the pharmacy staff would see right through House's little ploy. You'd think wrong.

And so, House is forced to actually talk to Miss Radfafa, who is sitting up in bed with her suitcase packed. He kicks the nurse out of the room and introduces himself to the now less-than-grateful Radfafa. He starts things off right with a "you're being an idiot." No response. He says that Radfafa has a tapeworm in her brain. Radfafa asks if anyone has actually seen it. Er...no. But House is sure that's the problem, so why doesn't Radfafa stop this going-home-to-die silliness and submit herself to his treatment? Radfafa says that her mental faculties haven't declined so much that she has forgotten when House was sure she had vasculitis, the result of that theory being that she can't walk and has to wear a diaper. "What made you a cripple?" Radfafa asks, because when you're going to die before the weekend ends, you don't have to be tactful. House reveals that he had an "infarction." Hee hee hee! It sounds like "fart." Anyway, the blood flow to Houses's thigh muscles (I don't want to know any more about them than that, thank you!) was obstructed, and no one caught it in time to cure it before the muscles died in what was a very painful process. Radfafa -- who apparently moonlights as a psychologist when she isn't teaching kindergarten -- says that House is now trying to get back at and hide from the world, and who is he to tell her not to give up on herself when he obviously gave up on himself? She says she just wants to "die with a little dignity." House says that's not possible, especially if you're wearing an adult diaper: "It's always ugly! Always!" Radfafa's eyes tear up and she looks away. "We can live with dignity," says House. "We can't die with it."

House ambles down the hall to his team and reports that, despite his powerful speech, Radfafa is still refusing treatment. The doctors wonder if they can say she isn't competent to get a court order overriding her wishes, but House has suddenly remembered his medical ethics and says that they can't because Radfafa is competent. Wilson, who also apparently moonlights as a psychologist, says that Radfafa isn't a file to House anymore; she's a real, live, person. That is subject to change during the coming weekend, however. The doctors asks House what he's going to do. House says that he figured out what was wrong with Radfafa, so his work is done. It's not his problem that he didn't have enough proof for her.

As House is limping away in defeat, Chase pipes up to say that he may know a safe, non-invasive way to prove that Radfafa has a tapeworm: an x-ray. It wouldn't have shown up on the CAT scan because the cyst a tapeworm makes when it burrows into you looks the same as other brainly things. But they can do an x-ray on Radfafa's thigh, figuring that if there's a worm in her head, there's bound to be a few in tapeworm favorite hang-out spot, the thighs. One good thing about having dead legs muscles like House: no tapeworms.

Radfafa has agreed to the x-ray, apparently deciding there's no way it can kill her. She probably thought that about the MRI, too, and about the steroids. The doctors take the x-rays, we see a couple of computer graphics, and lo and behold, we have a nasty little tapeworm. Chase shows it to Radfafa and says that she's had worms for about six to ten years. "Do I have more?" she asks. "Probably!" says Chase, chuckling away at poor old worm-ridden Radfafa. If her students find out about this, she will never hear the end of it. Thirty years down the road, she'll still be known first and foremost as the teacher with a worm in her brain. Chase hands Radfafa two pills and tells her to take them every day for a month, and then she'll be cured. Hopefully those pills will work on her dying brain worm first, because she doesn't really have a month to wait around. Chase lists off the pill side effects, all of which Radfafa has had in a more serious form already. She gladly swallows them.

House limps into his office, hoping for a nice, long General Hospital viewing session free of human contact. But it is not to be -- Cameron is waiting for him, and she wants to know why House hired her. House says that what he thinks doesn't matter, because he's a jerk. Cameron says she doesn't want to work for someone who doesn't respect her. She doesn't really mean it, though, since she doesn't quit immediately when House says he hired her because she is "extremely pretty." "It's like having a nice piece of art in the lobby," he says. Except it's a piece of ass. "I worked very hard to get where I am," Cameron says. House says that's true; she worked very hard. But she didn't have to. And that is why he hired her: because she was so beautiful that she didn't have to be a doctor, but she become one anyway: "You worked your stunning little ass off" instead of taking the easier road of marrying rich or being a model. "Gorgeous women do not go to medical school," House says, "unless they are as damaged as they are beautiful." Yeah, or, THEY WANT TO BE DOCTORS. What the hell?! Awww, I like this guy for the entire episode, and then he makes an inexcusable asshole comment like that and I have to kinda hate him. House asks Cameron what her damage is -- physical abuse? Sexual assault? Cameron stares at him, and then leaves to answer a page.

Orange Guy, now restored to the same normal orange hue as everyone else in this episode, talks to Cuddy. It is revealed that she is his personal physician, and that he has been "good" to her and to the hospital. He says he took House's advice -- all of it. He stopped eating carrots and he followed his wife. Cuddy says she doesn't want to know what No Longer Orange Guy found out, because either his marriage is over or he wants her to fire House, which she can't do. "The sonofabitch is the best doctor we have," she says. Yeah, when he isn't giving his patient steroids that make them almost die, he's great. No Longer Orange Guy sits there and tears up as he rubs his now wedding band-less finger.

Chase and Cameron enter Radfafa's room and ask how she's feeling. She says she's better. In that case, here is her entire kindergarten class to visit their wormy teacher! She's thrilled to see them, and even happier to get the huge Get Well Soon card they made for her. I wonder if House had anything to do with the less-than-polite inscription of "we're happy you're not dead." Although if House was involved, the "not" part probably woudn't be there. Miss Radfafa demands a hug and a kiss from all her students and they jump on the bed. I was never that close with my kindergarten teacher, but then again, I did go to public school. Meanwhile, Miss Melanie watches from the foot of Radfafa's bed. She tries to look happy that Miss Radfafa is well again, but you know she's wondering how soon is too soon to invite Miss Radfafa over for a nice, pork dinner again. "Brad will be mine," she thinks. "Oh yes. He. Will. Be. Mine."

House and Robert hang out and watch some dramatic hospital show on television. It could be General Hospital, but since Sonny is not present, I doubt it. House asks Robert why he lied about Miss Radfafa being his cousin. Robert says it got House to take the case. House: "You lied to a friend to save a stranger. Don't you think that's kinda screwed up?" Enh, not really. I mean, either you hurt someone's feelings or a nice lady dies. Seems like a fairly easy decision. Robert says he's sure House has lied to him. "I never lie," House says. There's a pause in the conversation, at which point someone on the dramatic hospital show says, "We're doctors. We make mistake, people die!" House makes a "when did Cuddy start writing for television?" face, and then a nurse comes in and tells House he has a patient. She pulls back the blinds and the camera zooms in on the CFS guy, bouncing around and waiting for his fix. "Got change for a dollar?" House the Human Lying Liar asks Wilson.

And we leave the hospital to the angelic voices of the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" chorus. Damn, they must have laid down a good couple hundred grand for the rights to that song. This is a high-faultin' TV show right here.