House: Under My Skin

It’s the penultimate House of the season, and it’s one of the better episodes of late. We open with fancy, classical dancers doing their fancy, classical moves. The director of the proceedings worries about his star guy’s back. Hmmm, is this guy the future patient? Well, according to the House formula, no.

The guy says he’s fine but when he lifts a ballerina over his head, his back seizes and he drops her. Then the ballerina, Sophie, starts gasping for breath. While she’s doing this, House is at home eating cereal. That sounds good right now. He’s remarkably calm given that the ghost/hallucination of Cutthroat Bitch is sitting across from him strumming the ukulele. He chastises her for trying to kill Chase. She simply responds that he isn’t completely rational. Hallucinations are so obnoxious!

Foreman comes in and whines at House to come in to work the ballerina case. House wants to stay home, but unfortunately, if grownups don’t go to work, they get fired. When they get to the hospital, the team goes through the usual diagnostic Olympics. Dead Cutthroat Bitch keeps suggesting ideas, and House continues to suggest the exact opposite of everything she says. House realizes he can’t keep these hallucinations a secret anymore, so he goes to pay his significant other Wilson a visit.

He bursts into Wilson’s office and ignores the whines of a guy who Wilson just told has kidney cancer. He tells Wilson that he’s hallucinating and that he thinks it is because he has sleep apnea that is messing up his slumber time. House asks Wilson to sit in on all of his differentials because he doesn’t fully trust himself anymore. Wilson asks House who it is that House is hallucinating and House lies and says Kutner. After all, who wants to say that you’re hallucinating the dead girlfriend of your best friend who coincidentally, you helped to make dead.

But Cutthroat Bitch tells House that she knows he’s wrong about sleep apnea, which means that House knows he’s wrong too. House then goes back to the drawing board. He gives Wilson a lovely laundry list of possible theories for why he is hallucinating, including infection, schizophrenia (kind of a late diagnosis huh?), trauma, MS, and finally, Vicodin. House of course doesn’t want to believe that his dependency on Vicodin is behind his hallucinations, because then he’ll have to either give up practicing medicine-and thus give up his life meaning-or detox from the pills and probably have to stop practicing medicine because he’ll be in too much pain. Not exactly good options eh?

Meanwhile, Sophie the patient gets put through all kinds of hell. The team injects water in her lungs which makes her feel like she’s drowning, and then her skin starts peeling off like wrapping paper and they have to keep applying fake skin before she bleeds out. This is one of the more gruesome House cases I can remember.

That’s basically what happens in the episode, we cut back from House trying to diagnose the patient and House trying to diagnose himself. Unfortunately, the writers have dreamt up and chosen to include what is in my opinion quite possibly the worst subplot ever created: while newly-engaged (ugh) Chase and Cameron are at home, Cameron mentions that she has kept the frozen sperm of her dead husband and wants to keep it so that if she and Chase get divorced, she can still have kids. So let’s recap: two uninteresting, pointless characters who have been on life support for two seasons + frozen sperm=equals good idea? Not in any sane universe.

At one point House thinks he has finally shed himself of his hallucination nightmare and goes out to celebrate with beer and onion rings…my kind of celebration. But alas, he is wrong, and when House realizes this, the sheer fear and despondency that registers on Hugh Laurie’s face is overwhelming. Seriously, Laurie is a force of nature.

Of course, the part of the episode that will have people gushing and beaming is that after Cuddy helps House start detoxing off Vicodin, we learn more about their 20+ year history and, gasp, they finally get together. I’m sure they’ll be broken up next week already for the sake of season finale conflict, but it was definitely a nice little moment. The last couple of episodes have had season-finale events: Kutner’s death, nimrods getting married, House and Cuddy getting together. Makes me wonder what’s in store for the actual season finale. Until next week…

Season 5, Episode 23: ­­­­­Under My Skin (originally aired May 4, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out Who doesn’t go for the drugged-out hallucinating bad-boy type? by Robin Reed.

For more on House, click here.

House, Tuesdays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Darren Michaels, IMDbPro