House: Lies!

Arsenic! Children’s vitamins! Gross hospital cafeteria pizza! It’s all on the House menu this week. Who’s getting poisoned to death this time?

Well, no one, since House’s patients don’t die very often, because a show about a genius doctor who doesn’t solve the vast majority of his cases would get crappy ratings. And this time, our heroes don’t even get that close to killing anyone, because they’re too busy focusing on the fact that their patient is an Evil Lying Liar Who Lies.

Said patient, who calls herself Sophia (we never learn her real name), is a 16-year-old supposedly emancipated minor who holds down a factory job, lives in an expensive-looking apartment that I’m totally jealous of, and projects an air of fierce (and fake) independence – all because of a deep, dark secret that isn’t revealed until the show’s final moments. When we finally hear it, her real story is indeed quite sad, enough that even House finds it affecting.

But first, we get to hear her fake stories – first, that her parents died and she became emancipated to avoid having to go into foster care, and second, that she just pretended her parents died because in fact she was raped by her father. Over the course of the episode, House’s minions take turns bonding with the girl – Kutner when he thinks the girl’s an orphan, Thirteen when she thinks the girl’s a sexual assault survivor, and Taub when he’s pretending to be Thirteen (in a scene that rocked, by the way. It’s always weird when I find myself liking Taub.)

The patient’s requisite set of incorrect diagnoses includes heart disease, “severe emotional stress,” and arsenic poisoning, but the team finally settles on leukemia and sets about getting her a bone marrow transplant. Naturally, the best source is a relative, so Thirteen goes off alone to visit the girl’s father – a presumed rapist – which is more than I would do, so go Thirteen. But then she figures out that the patient is lying yet again, and that Sophia has, in fact, assumed another girl’s identity and isn’t emancipated after all. House finally forces the truth out of Sophia: She believes she’s responsible for the death of her little brother, who drowned in the bathtub while she was supposed to be watching him. But now, having reached catharsis, she’s willing to call up her parents, get herself that transplant, and have as happy an ending as one can have whilst blaming oneself for the death of one’s sibling.

Speaking of brothers, we get a nicely parallel storyline this week, which centers on Foreman trying to prove his manhood. You see, he wants to get time off to work on a clinical trial. He’s a dick to House about it, and then he gets upset when House is a dick right back. After some angry back-and-forth, Foreman manages to get assigned his very own diagnostic case without House’s knowledge.

Therefore, we spend a good chunk of the episode hanging out with Foreman’s patients, two cute little boys with a very young mother. One of the boys has a haircut that looks an awful lot like Chase’s did in the first three seasons. The other is suffering from an unknown and more dangerous ailment. Foreman is at a loss, and he makes Chase and Cameron help him, because there are no patients needing surgery and it turns out running that ER doesn’t take much work (seeing as how Cameron could take off for a week to treat that agoraphobe from High Fidelity.

After the boy crashes and Chase treats him while Foreman stands around looking terrified (not a look I can recall ever seeing on him before), Foreman goes to beg for House’s help. Of course, Foreman can’t even do that without antagonizing him, and House refuses. Finally, after Chase quite reasonably theorizes that the patient’s 8-year-old brother might be trying to murder him (I love Chase), Foreman has a House-like A-HA! moment and diagnoses the boy with an iron overdose from his vitamins, which were in fact administered (without malicious intent) by the brother. And this is all later revealed to be part of House’s master plan to teach Foreman he can cope. Group hug!

Meanwhile, House and Cuddy don’t interact once during the episode, and Cuddy gets a total of maybe four lines. House does give her a lingering look from afar, though. Wow, I sure am glad they made us suffer through that wrenching adoption episode so that we could get this thrilling romantic story arc. At this rate they’ll be holding hands by the season finale.

And in the D plot, Wilson tries to play a stupid and ineffectual mind game on House, which catches House off guard because he thought Wilson was too dense to think up stupid mind games. (Or wait, maybe that was me…)

Season 5, Episode 8: Emancipation (originally aired November 18, 2008)

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