Episode Report Card Sara M: A | 1 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Piece of Cake
By Sara M | Season 5 | Episode 10 | Aired on 12.02.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.This show is at its best when it's juggling more than one storyline/case/character arc, and tonight's episode proves it. First up, we've got the Patient of the Week, a devoted fitness trainer whose videos are designed to help fat people get in shape. She keels over during a shoot, and that brings her to PPTH, where the doctors quickly discover that she didn't lose her own excess weight through diet and exercise, but with gastric bypass. Several diagnoses are proven wrong until the patient gets all sad and returns to her fatty ways and eats a slice of chocolate cake, only to suddenly get better. House diagnoses her with hereditary coproporphyria, a disease that requires a high carbohydrate diet to cure. She'll have to reverse her bypass and get fat again. She decides instead to take drugs that will treat her symptoms, even though House was offering her a delicious chocolate cake. Kumar and Taub, meanwhile, have their hands full when Taub finds out that Kumar has started a profitable website selling second opinions from one Dr. Gregory House. Taub agrees to keep it a secret from House for a percentage of his earnings. But then Kumar and Taub run into a not-so-satisfied customer who wants to see her online doctor in person. That can't happen, so they try to treat her in the ER with the help of Cameron and Chase (for a percentage of Kumar's earnings). Then the patient dies. Just kidding! House tricked them into thinking that to get back at Kumar for starting up the site. He allows Kumar to continue it -- for a percentage of his earnings. A big percentage.
Over in the emotions department, Cuddy takes over House's office while hers is being fixed. This causes them to bicker and play revenge games against each other like children until they have A Moment. That abruptly ends when House cops a feel and Cuddy gives up. But when her office is finished, she finds her new desk looks very familiar -- it's her desk from med school, courtesy of House. Aw! But then when she goes to thank him, he's getting friendly with the woman he hired to play Kumar's dead patient, and Cuddy's heart is broken again. No!! And because no episode would be complete without lots of Hadley, we get her Huntington's drug trial experience. She's having trouble hanging out with other Huntington's patients in the waiting room, and it turns out that they remind her of her mother when she was in her final stages. We flashback to Li'l Hadley, who, hilariously, is just as blank and expressionless as the adult Hadley. She never said good-bye to her mother when she went off to a home, and she admits to Foreman it's because she hated her mother and wanted her to die because her mother's illness meant she always got yelled at. And since we didn't get hit over the head with it and Olivia Wilde did a good job with good lines, it worked for me.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The world is looking bright as a woman charges up to the camera and starts promising to make us thinner without gimmicks, crash diets, or drugs. Behind her there's a parade of overweight people jogging their way up the stadium stairs. One guy collapses, and the take is ruined. The world is looking much less bright when House's cameras are filming it, so now all the colors are dull. Sigh. Why does this show hate color so much? The camera crew is pissed at the guy for falling, but the woman is compassionate, making sure he's feeling okay and telling the rest of the workout group to keep running up and down the stairs because they're not doing it for the cameras, they're doing it for themselves. I hope she's paying them an appearance fee too, though. The fallen man takes a quick breather and gets fired up again, and he and the woman make their way up the stairs together, reaching the top and looking like Rocky. A fat Rocky, but still. He's thrilled with himself until the woman suddenly keels over. Of course, she does it with style, rolling down like half the stadium until she's stopped by the camera crew. Did you really think the fat guy was going to be the Patient of the Week? Mais non! We've already done that episode.
House bravely attempts to ride the elevator by himself, but it's no good. Cuddy squeezes her way in just like she squeezed her way into today's cleavage-riffic office wear. She complains that House is getting half the amount of requests as usual for his diagnostic services, so it's slim pickings for his next case. She reads off the file on our fitness trainer, who managed to break her ankle in her stadium roll fall. House grabs the file immediately, causing Cuddy to ask why he isn't arguing with her that this case is beneath him. He says there's no point, since they're in an elevator so he can't use his go-to move of running away. Cuddy meanly points out that he can't run away regardless.
They de-elevator on House's floor and continue walking side by side. "Why are we still together?" House asks, very observant. Cuddy has been waiting all morning for him to arrive at work for this moment: she announces that she will be using his office while her office is repaired after its destruction last week. She thinks this is fitting since House was "directly responsible" for her office's current state. House points out that the man who took him, and several others, hostage was slightly more responsible than he was, to which Cuddy says her desk won't fit in his cell. With that, she points House in the direction of "our" outer office (the meeting room), which will be his to use. She gets the room with the stereo, the napping chair, and the giant ball.