Episode Report Card Sara M: C | 1 USERS: C YOU GRADE IT Carnival
By Sara M | Season 5 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.06.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Meat Loaf plays a guy with cancer-related congestive heart failure who's on his deathbed when his dutiful wife has breathing problems. Meat Loaf makes enough of a recovery to call for help, and she goes to PPTH. When she refuses to stay so she can go home to her dying husband, they bring him in, too. Then Kumar is late for work and Foreman and Hadley go looking for him at his apartment and find him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We immediately stop caring about the Patient of the Week and the rest of the episode is shot in blue. Since you probably weren't paying any attention to the POTW storyline, here's what you missed: Meat Loaf and his wife battle it out over who gets to die in order to save the other one until it turns out that both of them have curable illnesses -- Meat Loaf's lung cancer heart failure is actually just a fungal infection, while the wife has visceral leishmaniasis thanks to a secret trip to Rio with another man she took because she was sick of waiting for her husband to take her there. While she's able to get a transplant liver in time, the diagnosis came too late and she isn't responding to the medication. Meat Loaf the crappy yet faithful husband lives, while his cheating yet loving wife dies.
House spends most of the episode trying to figure out what happened to Kumar, searching his apartment for signs of depression and finding nothing. After accusing Kumar's foster parents of causing his death by not letting him mourn his other parents properly, he decides that Kumar was murdered by the same man who murdered his biological parents. But when that guy ends up having died in jail two months ago, he's left with a suicide. While the rest of the PPTH staff (sans Taub, who spends the entire episode avoiding feeling sad about Kumar, only to finally break down at the end) attend Kumar's funeral, House goes back to Kumar's apartment and finds one candid photograph of Kumar looking less than happy. And that's the only sign he or any of us will probably get.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!I'd like to open this recap by giving the people at Fox publicity a special shout-out. Not only were they (and not, I'm going to assume, the writers of House) responsible for all the tacky Kumar in memoriam sites and Facebook pages, but their desperate need to cash in on a character's death also affected me personally when I sat down to check my email before watching this episode and found an email sent at 7:29 pm with the subject line: "House Memorial Widget - Lawrence Kutner *spoiler alert*." Gee, thanks for the spoiler alert AFTER THE SPOILER IN THE IMPOSSIBLE-NOT-TO-SEE SUBJECT LINE, you fucking morons! My viewing experience of this episode is now changed, and for what? A memorial widget? I don't even know what that is, but I'm sure it sucks.
Anyway. We open in a living room that appears to be full of dust and free of seemingly necessary items like lamps. A small group has gathered around a hospital bed with a dying man in it, and that man is played by Meat Loaf. Apparently all the electricity in the house is required for his hospital equipment and none can be spared for lighting. But you'd really think the loved ones would want to see Meat Loaf's face before he kicks it. They leave, and Meat Loaf tells the nurse that he wants to be alone with his wife, who is played by the same woman who played Yvette in Clue, not like she's at all recognizable these days. Meat Loaf weakly cries that he was a selfish husband and never got the chance to take her to Rio. At this point, Yvette doesn't seem to mind that so much, and says she loves Meat and always has. Meat's eyeballs roll back in his head, and he says he's "ready." Yvette's sobs over her Poor Dead Husband turn into gasps for air. She clutches her throat, and the Magic Schoolbus Cam makes a welcome return to show us that her airway has closed up. I think we've seen that graphic before. Meat resurrects himself enough to sit up in bed and call for help. I bet he wishes he hadn't sent the nurse out of the room now. Also, way to steal Meat's deathbed thunder, Yvette.
It would appear that the greater Princeton-Plainsboro area is having some kind of electricity problem, as the lights are off in House's meeting room when he arrives at work and gets the file on Yvette from Taub. House immediately diagnoses Yvette with being fat and developing sleep apnea that caused her airway closure and asks where Kumar and Hadley are. Taub quickly says Hadley is with the patient (get the morgue ready) while Kumar is home with his sick dog (get the morgue ready, again). Foreman supplies that Meat Loaf has been dying of heart failure for the last six months, and Meat Loaf has been credited in this episode as "and Meat Loaf Aday." Well! I always thought Loaf was his last name. Now I see it was just his middle name. And good for him for using it here, because nothing says "serious actor" like using one's full name. House lets Taub know that he knows he stole credit for Kumar's diagnosis last week, and Taub continues to insist that he somehow contributed to the idea before expositing that Meat's heart failure was caused by lung cancer, so it probably has nothing to do with Yvette's symptoms. House ignores the stuff about the patient and says he thinks Taub is making that stuff about Kumar's dog up to cover for him being late because he feels guilty about taking Kumar's credit. Taub ignores him and suggests that Yvette's illness was caused by a recent trip to Hawaii. House turns that down, saying that the Foreman-suggested disease she could have picked up there would have spread to the husband with his weakened immune system. Taub suggests a virus, and just as House is suggesting they start treating Yvette for that, Hadley enters and says Yvette refuses to be treated because she wants to get home to her dying husband as soon as possible. She adds that Yvette thinks her husband got better when her own health failed. House thinks nothing of this and is ready to send Yvette home to die when Taub says he has an idea, and didn't even need to steal it from Kumar.