Paternity

We join a lacrosse game, already in progress. I don't know anything about the sport, so I have nothing to say here except that I'm pretty sure players aren't supposed to see double like one young man is doing. Indeed, we zoom in on his eye and then through it to his brain and what appears to be a CGI neuron, which shorts out just in time for the kid to get knocked on his ass by an opposing player. He falls to the ground and his helmet flies off. His parents, all concerned, look on as their son bleeds and continues to have trouble seeing. "Get a doctor!" shouts the coach.

But first, we must watch the new, post-pilot extended opening credits, which are awesome and the Massive Attack song is great, but I don't really like the Law & Order-style cast walk they've got going on at the end.

House sucks. Literally -- he's sucking on a lollipop and catching up on the latest fake gossip rag when Wilson enters. House tells him to shut the door and be quiet because he's hiding in an exam room to avoid seeing any patients in the five minutes between now and the end of his mandatory clinic time. He pops a few pills as Wilson tells him that if he wants to get out of clinic duty so bad, he should just tell Cuddy that he has an urgent case. House says that would be LYING, and as we all know, House is perfect and never, ever lies. Wilson says House can just bend the meaning of "urgent" to fit his needs. House says he can, but that he can't bend the meaning of "cases" -- either you have them or you don't. And House doesn't have any right now. Wilson is absolutely appalled that House would let his highly trained, hot, young staff sit around and do nothing. House says that's not entirely accurate -- Cameron is answering House's mail, and Foreman and Chase are doing "research."

We cut to our little Cottages, bored out of their minds. Chase's medical research consists of doing a crossword puzzle. Foreman's consists of helping him with the particularly difficult clues.

House tries to leave the clinic, but is stopped by our lacrosse player and his parents. They claim to have an appointment with him, which House finds hard to believe since this is a walk-in clinic. Dad says House made the appointment by mail, and shows him a letter from a "Gregg House, MD" to prove it.

Back in the office, House asks Cameron when his signature got "so girly." The "G," especially, looks like it was written by a "junior high school girl." Oh, please. I paused the tape, and it's a perfectly normal-looking, unisex G. It's not like it has hearts flying around it or anything like that, although I wouldn't blame Cameron for putting a few there out of spite while she was stuck answering mail instead of being a doctor. Cameron apologizes, explaining that the family has been trying to get in touch with House for a long time now, so she decided to answer them. House says that if people want his attention, they should try wearing low-rider jeans. I'm assuming he means females. Or Wilson. Whatever.

In the meeting room, Cameron writes down Dan's symptoms on a whiteboard. House notes that the "G" in "night terrors" looks a lot like the one in his signature. Cameron rolls her eyes. "What does the jerk tell us?" House asks. "Nothing good," Foreman says. Ha ha! Foreman's a jerk. Anyway, he adds that Dan's brain is losing control of his body, causing the jerks and the double vision. It's either a movement disorder or a degenerative brain disease. Chase the Optimistic says it could just be an infection. "You wish," says House. He then takes a second to criticize Cameron's family history-taking ability, as evidenced by the fact that she didn't even catch that Dan's dad isn't his real dad. What proof does House have of this? Well, apparently, men are raising children they mistakenly believe to be their own 30% of the time. Foreman says it's more like 10%. Either way, that's still a really high percentage, unless you're appearing on Maury, in which case it's really low. Cameron says that this doesn't even matter, but no one is listening to her because House and Foreman are taking bets about whose false paternity percentage is correct. How are they going to actually prove that? I have no idea, but House gets in a crack about Foreman's dad not being his real dad and Foreman does not stand up and hit House in the face.

Cameron gets back to work and suggests that Dan has leukoencephalopathy. Chase says it might be something completely unrelated to the brain and that might not even be serious, like, drop it already, Chase. He adds that if you discount the night terrors symptom, there could be a systemic cause to Dan's remaining symptoms. Cameron says that the way the parents described it, Dan was definitely having night terrors. Chase points out that Cameron is taking their word for it, which is wrong because people are evil and they LIE. House says that Chase has a good point, and Chase grins like a smug bastard. House orders a polysomnograph. I've had two polysomnographs, and they are not fun. It's probably the least painful thing that will happen to poor Dan in this episode, though.

Night falls on New Jersey. Dan is asleep in bed, closely monitored via video camera by the extra-hours-working Cottages. House enters Dan's room, which is pretty much all you need to see to know that this is the kid's nightmare, since House would never enter a patient's room in real life. Anyway, NightmareHouse -- who isn't much different than RealityHouse -- restrains Dan and starts putting some rubber gloves on, which is never a good sign. He says that Dan's brain problems are the result of nerve damage in his toes, and starts to mark off an incision point around Dan's big toe. Dan begs to see his parents. As X-Files-style creepy music plays, House picks up some heavy-duty clippers and tells Dan that this is going to hurt. No shit. Dan screams as House cuts off his big toe. Ugh, this is worse than that scene in Misery when Kathy Bates took a sledgehammer to James Caan's feet. And it's still not the most wince-tastic thing that will happen to Dan in this episode.

Meanwhile, in real life, Chase and Foreman stand to Dan's bed and look at the computer monitor that displays his brain waves. "That's a night terror," Chase says. I guess it wasn't so systemic after all, was it, Chase? I love the guy, but he kinda sucks as a doctor so far.

Dan gets an MRI. Apparently, he comes through it without almost dying, unlike everyone else we've seen get an MRI on this show (which, admittedly, is only one person), and the results, along with his blood work, don't indicate that there's anything wrong. House tells his Cottages to assume that something is wrong, and take a very close look at the MRI. Foreman and Cameron maintain that it looks fine. Chase spots an "meningeal enhancement" and guesses that it's viral meningitis. House says that Chase is very clever to take a guess like that on the assumption that House saw something, but says he is also "pathetic." And wrong. House tells the team to take a close look at the corpus callosum. Chase says it looks "okay." House is outraged, and tells us all what the corpus callosum does: it's the "George Washington Bridge" of the brain, connecting the two hemispheres. He softens his tone and says that the problem is "subtle." Chase says that he sees some "bowing" (pronounced like the bow you tie, not the bow you take). House asks if he's guessing again. Chase says he totally is. House says that, this time, he's right. Chase smirks with pleasure. Hey, even an extremely attractive broken clock is right twice a day. Foreman says that the bowing could be easily explained by the kid's moving during the MRI, which everyone tends to do. Unless, you know, they're dying from an allergic reaction that Chase likes to call "falling asleep." House doubts that Dan was able to shift just one hemisphere of his brain. "There's no tumor," House says, but something is pushing on that corpus callosum. House thinks it's a blockage. "Today night terrors, tomorrow he's bleeding out of his eyes," House says. At this, Cameron winces and looks away. I guess she's squeamish about eyes. House orders a "radionucleotide" (I've seen it spelled "radionuclide," so I don't know if House pronounced it wrong or I just didn't do enough research here) cisternogram, which will show the blockage.

Foreman inserts a needle into poor, poor Dan's spine. Dan does not like it. His dad holds him while Dan thrashes around, although he doesn't thrash too much because when there's something pointy in your spine, you try to stay very, very still, I'd imagine. As Dan grunts in pain, Foreman injects the radioisotopes. You'd think that someone would be very, very careful and devote his full attention to the task at hand when injecting something into someone's spine, but Foreman is an exception. He stares at Dan's and Dan's father's eyes as he works, and sees that they both have the same fleck in them.

I'm happy to report that we're done with spine injections for now, as Foreman tells Chase about Dan's and his father's identical flecks, which make it very likely that they're related and that Foreman will win his bet. Chase says that's not enough evidence to get a payoff from House. Foreman wonders how they can get the conclusive proof that will win him a hundred bucks. Chase suggests getting the whole fam tested for Huntington's Disease, which is not funny, even though both Chase and Foreman laugh at the prospect of informing an entire family that they could all be dying of a horrible degenerative brain disorder. House limps in and Foreman informs him that the cisternogram indeed found "a lot" of blockage in poor Dan's brain. Chase says he's scheduled a surgery to put a shunt into a ventricle, and then everything will be fine. "He's lucky to have you as his doctors," says House. I guess he's making fun of them, although I'm not sure exactly how.

House's devious plan to avoid clinic duty seems to have failed him this time around, as he is now seeing a woman and her baby. The woman proudly says she gives her daughter breast milk only -- no formula. "Yummy," says House. Mom -- whose thin braids and thick choker clearly establish her as "earthy" -- says that her daughter woke up with a swollen face. House determines that the kid's temperature and glands are normal, and then asks why the vaccinations are missing from her daughter's records. "We're not vaccinating," says Mom. Uh oh. House counts to ten in his head, and then asks Mother Earth why she refuses to protect her child against potentially deadly diseases. Mother Earth says she thinks vaccinations are drug company plot to make more money, and aren't really necessary. ["I don't know why they didn't have her object on the grounds of the suggested link between vaccinations and autism, except to make her look like an uninformed crackpot instead of a regular old negligent boob." -- Wing Chun] "Hmm," says House. Oh, man. If you thought what he said to that asthma mom in the last episode was bad, this is going to kick its ass. House lures Mother Earth into a false sense of security by taking the baby's little stuffed animal frog and saying "ribbit" while dangling it in the kid's face. The baby laughs. Any time someone makes a baby laugh, it's really adorable and cute, even if it is Crankypants House and he's just doing it to set Mother Earth up. He observes that the frog is an "all-natural" toy, made without using dyes. He wonders aloud if toy companies mark their prices up and lie about their research costs when it comes to their all-natural toy lines. It's a really good business, House says. Oh, pish posh. There's no need to spend all that money on all-natural toys. Just do what my mother did: my one-year-old brother was inconsolable after losing his stuffed elephant, "Lovey," so, being as artistic as she was desperate, she fashioned a replacement Lovey out of old pantyhose that slightly resembled the original Lovey's shape. My brother didn't know the difference for years. Kids don't need expensive toys until they enter school and have to compete with their friends. Until then, they're perfectly happy with large cardboard boxes and lumpy bundles of pantyhose.