Episode Report Card LuluBates: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Pants Afire
By LuluBates | Season 6 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.09.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.As usual. the first five minutes of the show are a death watch. Will it be the pop star? The big ol' bouncer? Or the fast-talking, Twittering teen? It's the teen. Her various appendages swell up until she drops. House calls it "severe edema," but I call it Stay-Puft-looking. House solves it in 59 minutes flat. Well 59 minutes of television time plus 59 minutes of real time.
Wilson wants to go to a medical conference, and he wants House to go with him so he can continue to monitor his mental health. House has a case, but since he totally solved it already and he found out Cuddy was going to the conference, too, somebody get that guy a name tag!
House has a theory that the girl has rhabdo (it took about ten minutes of very creative Googling to find out how to spell that), but the tests come back indicating low potassium. House takes the opportunity to prove once again that all teenagers are liars and gets to yell at Chase for being a sucker. Again. The girl breaks down under questioning and admits that she is a top-secret comic book fiend. Oh, the shame! She stalked an author and ate everything he ate, because she's kinky like that. The second her parents show up she starts bleeding around her heart. Oh sure, blame the parents. The team conference-calls with House, but they have no ideas. House recommends hooking her up to a lie detector. Foreman asks a few more probing questions but ends up making her brain bleed. Oops! She actually has a physical reason for lying.
I refuse to discuss the '80s party at the conference where House and Cuddy slow dance to Cindy Lauper and take a heart-warming trip down memory lane. Also, House thought it would be hilarious to party like it was the 1780s. Understandably, Cuddy bolts, abandoning House on the dance floor. Then House finds out that Wilson is a covert Angel of Mercy who is planning on outing himself to a host of his peers at the conference. House does his best to convince his friend not to commit career suicide, but when that fails, House drugs him and hides his pants.
The doctors realize that the patient stalked the creepy comic author. Cameron and Chase go to confront him, but he won't admit anything despite Cameron's scariest stare. Cameron thinks the girl is suffering from an overdose of roofies. And that Chase is a big old liar. It's not roofies. Cameron boldly suggests doing something that will potentially kill the patient. And why shouldn't she? House would do it. So they give the patient a truth serum, ands she admits that the author gave her a little yellow pill and a dirty old man rubdown. While her dad prepares the pitchfork and torches, Foreman points out that according to his scanner, her pants are on fire.
Speaking of pants on fire and the lying liars who wear them, Cuddy has been keeping a secret from House. A little bearded secret named Lucas. Yes, the private eye that House hired a season back. Awkward! Wilson wakes up from his drug-induced stupor and tries to make it to the conference in time to give his career-killing paper. House steals his pants AND his paper AND his public apology. House and Wilson battle it out just long enough for House to have his magical medical moment. Hemachromotosis made the girl susceptible to something in the oysters on the half shell. You know, God specifically said not to eat shellfish, so she totally deserved it.
And Chase finally confesses to Cameron that he killed the evil old dictator. Eh, he deserved it, too.
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see what vlogger Sean Crespo thinks about House when he has No Prior Knowledge!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!A group of precocious girls with an exuberant amount of eyeliner stand between the velvet ropes waiting, nay hoping, to make it into Pharmacide's tour kick-off party, which appears to be in Conference Room B of the Hyatt Regency in Princeton, New Jersey, so Pharmacide is obviously all sorts of awesome and really into irony. The leader of the brat pack gets a gleam in her eye, grabs one her minions Venti whatever and her second, and charge to the front of the line pretending to gab to someone. She tells the bouncer that they are the DJ's assistants, because every DJ positively yearns to employ attitude-riddled 15-year-olds as their assistant. If they can't buy you porn, lottery tickets or beer, what is the point of having an assistant? Can't imagine DJs require a lot of filing. The bouncer does not seem to subscribe to my train of thought and he opens the velvet rope for the girls to walk through. There is a momentary distraction though, when, somebody I assume is in Pharmacide based on the fact that he is walking around with no shirt and enough guyliner for a Cure cover band. The bouncer forgets that he already let the girls in, and when they protest, the band member swoops in and saves them claiming they are his "plus two." The girls giggle and follow him into the Hyatt's carpeted elevator waving bye-bye to their friends. Yeah. I totally buy that. Guys in bands love hanging out with giggly 15-year-olds, because statutory rape looks awesome on a rock n' roll resume. Also, we are still waiting for someone to need the services of Dr. House, lest this turn in to a pale imitation of a Gossip Girl episode, so can someone please hurry up and keel over? The next day the kiss-and-tell teens recount their glorious adventures with Pharmacide. There was the Presidential Suite, the pool, some weed was smoked, and there was a midnight skinny dip and, of course, a song was written to serenade her. To his credit, the drummer kept it in his pants. The Blair Waldorf wannabe finishes her story when one of her frenemies notices that her foot has swelled up like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. They all cupcake about what could be causing it, when her hands swell up and then she collapses. Finally.
Meanwhile, Wilson is packing because he's taking House on a luxury, two-night, all-expenses-paid cruise to the Pharmacology and Public Policy Conference. Woot! Wilson reminds him that it has been on his calendar for weeks, and since he promised to look after House in his fragile mental and emotional state, House has to go with him. House thinks the state Pillow Fighting Championship would be more beneficial to ameliorating his mental health, which is undoubtedly true, but Wilson doesn't care. House is fine with that. He'll just alert Foreman that he won't be able to see the 16-year-old patient with severe edema. No biggie! Wilson groans, but really now, did he not expect House to have a patient with symptoms of mysterious origins and a pithy comeback or two? House joins Foreman, Chase and Cameron with his differential diagnosis all set. She has rhabdo. Do not ask how long it took me to figure out that that's what he was saying, because it's embarrassing. There are a lot of different possible ways to spell that, okay? And, yeah, I'll admit it, I got chucked out of the third-grade spelling bee on "martyr." Anyway, I'm not sure if he's talking about this rhabdo or that rhabdo, but he doesn't seem that interested in the diagnosis. He just wants someone to go to the pillow fight with him! Foreman rolls his eyes without actually rolling his eyes and asks if maybe they can discuss the 16-year-old who suddenly has the joints of an 80-year-old, but House is done. Case solved! Everyone go home, nothing to see here. The girl fell, crushed her muscles, caused swelling, that means RHABDO (probably the latter of the two links). Cameron pipes in from where she is sitting across the room (or as House notes, as far as possible from Chase yet still in the same room), Chase interrupts to suggest deep vein thrombosis, and Cameron adds allergies as a possibility. House doesn't care. If anyone isn't paying attention, House thinks it's rhabdo, The doctors decide to test for everything. During the MRI that is like their diagnostic divining rod, Chase grouses to Foreman that House is an ass. Which may be the most obvious thing anyone has ever said ever. I mean, duh. Foreman thinks House may be using his cutting wit to encourage Chase to talk to Cameron. Also, they find no obstructions or anything too obvious on the MRI.