Episode Report Card Sara M: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Hurricrap Katrina
By Sara M | Season 2 | Episode 23 | Aired on 05.15.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.We get to see many sides of House this week, and very few of them were good. Drug Addict House is about to shoot up with morphine when Cuddy calls him into work. His new patient is Leona, teenage Hurricane Katrina Survivor and newly-discovered daughter (?) of House college friend and bandmate Dylan Crandall. Leona's having hallucinations and heart arrhythmias. House figures out what's wrong with her heart, then decides that she has an underlying autoimmune disease that's causing her to have hallucinations when she's in pain. He tests his theory by showing us his evil side, where he stabs the unsuspecting girl with a needles and then almost breaks her finger to put her in enough pain to hallucinate. She does, and we see another side of House -- the Leona Hallucination Vision side, which is frightening, indeed. Just when they're about to treat Leona's autoimmune disease by killing off her entire immune system, she starts pooping out of her mouth. Apparently, your digestive system can reverse itself if your liver stops functioning. It turns out that Leona doesn't have an autoimmune disease at all -- she has hemochromatosis. Unfortunately, the treatment for this condition unexpectedly rips holes in her lungs, thanks to fungus living in there. The team doesn't have time to test which one of many fungi it could be, so House demands that Leona tell him the truth about where she's been during the eight months between Katrina killing her mother and when she found Crandall. The answer is a recording studio, which somehow shows us that Leona is a bad person and a liar, and also that she has a fungus found only in places with tons of mold, i.e. a soundproof room that has just absorbed a flood's worth of water. With that, Leona's lungs and the rest of her body are magically healed, and House informs her that he did a secret paternity test -- she really is Crandall's daughter. The truth is the test was negative, but this way, Crandall gets the daughter he wants, and Leona won't be screwing him over now that she thinks she's related to him. Speaking of dads, Cuddy is still looking for one for her child. She unwisely asks House to assist in her search, and we get to see the slightly softer and more caring side of House as he administers fertility drugs into Cuddy's bare ass (we only get to see one side of Cuddy this week, and it's the back one). House and urges Cuddy to go with a donor she knows (and likes), and not some anonymous guy who likes square dancing. She chickens out of asking House to do it, and he goes home to finish the morphine he started. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
We open on a plane. A girl, Leona (not Helmsley, although that would have been a lot more fun than this episode ended up being), listens to some music on her headphones and remarks to her neighbor, played by a haggard-looking D.B. Sweeney, that she was at the studio when her grandfather recorded the piece. This makes her sad, and she reveals to us that D.B. is actually her newly-discovered father and that her mother and grandfather made some "mistakes." Obviously, waiting until D.B.'s The Cutting Edge days were long behind him to tell her who her dad is was one of them. D.B.'s attempts to make Leona feel better are interrupted when the airplane cabin starts flooding. A tidal wave comes gushing out of the cockpit, taking out the flight attendant and several other passengers in a scene that I have to imagine was either really fun or totally hellish to film. As the water heads for Leona, the Magic School Bus Cam shoots inside her chest to her heart, which is beating oddly and has little CGI electricity currents flying around it. New Dad goes running up to his new daughter, who has somehow managed to collapse to the ground even though Economy class barely gives you the room to stretch your legs. Of course, there is no water in the plane at all. This ain't Lost!
As this show is doing more and more, we start in House's apartment. Leg pain is keeping our titular character awake, and he paces around on his gothy black floorboards to alleviate it. When Vicodin doesn't ease the pain, House pulls out his secret stash of morphine and loads up a needle as his answering machine answers his house phone. His outgoing message is the predictable "You've reached a number that has been disconnected and is no longer in service. If you feel that you've reached this recording in error, go with it. Hang up." Cuddy doesn't hang up, but leaves a message telling House to abandon his exciting day-off plans and come in to work. A sixteen-year-old girl came to the ER in cardiogenic shock but without a heart attack to accompany it. That last piece of information is enough for House to put down the needle. For now, anyway.
When he arrives at work, Cuddy brings him up-to-date on the case, and also on the fact that the patient's father claims to know House. "I thought I'd met all your friend," Cuddy says, expertly emphasizing the singular form of that last word. She also has a few medical histories she'd like House to check out, but he seems to ignore this when he sees the patient's father, who runs toward him happily exclaiming "G-man!" House isn't quite so effervescently happy to see D.B. (who introduces himself to us as Dylan Crandall) as he is to see House. House pretends not to know Crandall for a few cruel seconds before deigning to flash a smile at his friend and make fun of his gullible ways.