House: When in Doubt, Bring Back the Cool Dead Chick

So, at first, my thoughts going into this week’s episode were as follows:

“OH MY GOD THIS SEASON IS STILL NOT OVER. Come on, people. Kutner’s dead, Chase and Cameron are getting married, the ghost of last season’s dead best character is walking around, and WE ARE STILL NOT AT THE SEASON FINALE YET. And we won’t be there next week either. Forget all those theories people used to have about Lost, season 5 of House is the real purgatory.”

Then I saw the episode, and I got over all that. Because this week’s episode was really good.

Or maybe it just felt that way, since it was basically custom-designed for complainers like me. I’ve been whining for a while now that I’m sick of seeing House’s various character flaws explored in the same ways over and over for five seasons. And so far, most of this season’s peaks have come from the few times when we got to learn about House in new ways – notably, from the patient who lost his filter, and from the episode we saw from the patient’s point of view, and now from this week, which gave us, in my opinion, the most interesting look into House’s head in the series to date (yes, including the actual episode titled House’s Head, which was very good, and yet still not as cool as this one, on a purely character-based level). This week, for the first time in I can’t even remember how long, I seriously cared about House as a human being. (Well, okay, I take that back, I do remember the last time. It was at the end of the Christmas episode, when he found out Cuddy was going to adopt that baby (who has since become invisible). But that feels like seriously a million years ago.)

Anyway, plot:

Our patient is a 14-year-old Deaf boy who feels like his head is exploding. The doctors do their tests and come up with their inaccurate diagnoses like always, but there are two important points along the way. The first is that the boy is eligible for a cochlear implant, but has chosen not to get one because he prefers to be a part of the Deaf community (he goes to an all-Deaf school, he has a Deaf girlfriend, he’s on a Deaf wrestling team, etc.). House decides he doesn’t care about this and manipulates Chase (who really should know better by now) into giving the kid an implant without his or his mother’s knowledge or consent. The kid is traumatized and outraged, and his mother could and should sue, but she ultimately decides to have him keep the implant, because mama (and House) knows best. The other important point comes at the end of the episode, after House has diagnosed the kid with multiple sclerosis and the kid is responding to treatment, because oops – it turns out House is wrong, even though he was absolutely positive he was right (and more on that in a second). Foreman ultimately diagnoses the kid, correctly, with sarcoidosis.

Also, Chase and Cameron are getting married in two weeks, because that’s when the season finale is, and House takes it upon himself to plan the bachelor party, even though he hates (or maybe at this point is just indifferent to) Chase. Apparently House is quite good at planning bachelor parties, even though Wilson is his only male friend (luckily Wilson has had three weddings). So House, with a little help from his ghost friend (see below), spends much of the episode planning/rehearsing for this party. This includes sending Foreman and Thirteen on a scouting mission to a strip club (Olivia Wilde overplays this scene so much that Thirteen comes off as vaguely serial-killer-esque), as well as having his team test-drive some alcohol-ice-cream concoctions during work hours and setting a corpse on fire. Chase pretends he doesn’t want any part of this, even though he totally does. So he asks House to kidnap him, which House does by hiring actors to pretend to be immigration agents, which was hilarious. We also get another of those rare references to Chase being Australian later on, when he winds up carrying around a giant stuffed kangaroo at the party. That was also hilarious. As was the behavior of pretty much everyone else at the party, especially Taub (and not just because all the strippers were two feet taller than him) and Wilson. Wilson hadn’t even planned on going to the party, so House held it in Wilson’s apartment without telling him (hee!). Robert Sean Leonard as drunk Wilson is AWESOME. So was that whole sequence. I love watching the cast act like they’re having fun and like they like each other. Sadly, though, it turns out that Chase has a severe strawberry allergy, and House has subconsciously arranged to kill him via having him lick a stripper’s strawberry body butter (well, at least it’s more creative than rubbing strawberries on Chase’s mouth radio).

But really, all of this is simply entertaining filler for the real plot of the episode: House v. House’s Subconscious, with the latter role being played by Amber. Since House hasn’t slept through the night since Kutner died, he’s having visions of Amber. But this show has all sorts of rules about hallucinations versus fantasies, and Amber is very much a hallucination. She isn’t even really Amber at all – she’s simply the voice that always lives in House’s head. Except that she’s walking around and talking and wearing those little-girl outfits Amber used to wear and being coy like Amber used to be. But she doesn’t flirt with House like she used to do, and she doesn’t show the slightest interest in Wilson, either. Because she’s not Amber, she’s House. Confused? Yes, it’s weird. But it’s also fantastic. We get to hear House, as Amber, fantasizing about killing Foreman and/or Thirteen, referring to women as “skirts,” getting his insights into the case through visions of bowling pins, tuning out the comments of his team when he ceases to find them useful, and figuring out how to knock over Wilson’s pencil cup in order to steal a file from Cameron. The whole effect is fascinating, and a great new way to see what it’s really like to be House. There’s a scene at the end, for example, when House is hiding out during the bachelor party, lying in Wilson’s bathtub alone (well, with the hallucinated Amber), drinking a bottle of wine and toasting himself for diagnosing the Deaf kid. Because that really is where he prefers to be. And it doesn’t come off as sad or pathetic, like these scenes usually do when they’re showing House alone while everyone else is being social – instead, we’re just seeing House be House, because that’s how he likes it. And then it turns out he was wrong about the diagnosis anyway, which causes him to question the wisdom of his own subconscious, which is freaky for everyone involved, viewers included.

Of course, the actual relationship between Amber and the storyline is tenuous at best – we’re told her presence may or may not be due to House’s guilt over Kutner’s death, which may or may not be reviving his guilt over Amber’s death. So the decision to have Anne Dudek play this role feels an awful lot like a desperate attempt to return to the show’s good old days of a year ago. Which is fine with me. Can’t they just admit they made a mistake with the casting way back when and switch out Thirteen and Amber next season? I won’t even complain about the inherent continuity issues, I swear.

So, as of this week, I’m back on board with season 5. Which works out, since there are now only two episodes left, and one of those will feature a Chase/Cameron wedding, which as we’ve established is in itself enough to make me happy. Sorry to be so fickle, writers. Just keep throwing more giant stuffed kangaroos in every week and I promise not to give up on you again.

Season 5, Episode 22: House Divided (originally aired April 27, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out Cameron Cubbison’s review here.

For more on House, click here.

House, Tuesdays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Chris Haston