House: Brave Heart (No, Not With Mel In A Kilt)

You’d almost swear you were watching a big budget action extravaganza instead of the latest episode of House, as it opens with a pretty kickass chase sequence. Cops are pursuing a bad guy on foot through back alleys and over fences and up a building. We don’t know what he did, but the guy is really fast and he’s almost as good as the parkour bombmaker in the beginning of Casino Royale (and speaking of Bond, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I think Pierce Brosnan was an infinitely better and more nuanced Bond, and if the producers had given him the scripts they’re giving Daniel Craig now, the movies would have been much better). The chase ends when one of the cops decides he’s Martin Riggs and tries to leap from one building to another, fails, plummets thirty feet and hits the ground hard. This opening is so well-made it plays like a short film complete unto itself.

The cop’s name is Donny, and miraculously he survived and is recuperating in Princeton-Plainsboro. But there’s another problem: he’s convinced that he’s going to drop dead in the near future because he’s about to turn forty and that’s the same age his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were when they died from a heart attack. He has seen myriad cardiologists over the years who have all told him that his heart is fine, but Donny doesn’t believe them. He has sworn off having kids or getting married because he didn’t want to cause anyone the grief his father caused him. Hence his willingness to try an impossible rooftop jump, because if you’re going to die soon anyway, what’s the point in being cautious?

House and the team want to discharge Donny, but Cameron takes an interest in his case. She wants to determine for sure that he really doesn’t have a mysterious heart problem and isn’t a timebomb waiting to happen. It’s funny that I’ve finally started to warm up (slightly) to Cameron just now when Jennifer Morrison is leaving the show. Oh well. I’ll try not to lose too much sleep over it (I’m already losing enough sleep as it is).

Foreman orders the usual battery of tests and they start trying to diagnose Donny. The case gets complicated when a former lover of Donny’s shows up at the hospital and reveals that Donny has a son. She never told him because they were already breaking up when she found out she was pregnant and knew Donny didn’t want children. Yikes.

But as for House personally, he has a couple of things going on this week. First, Cuddy tells him he needs to stop pretending and just hanging out at the hospital, and that he has to complete 120 hours of rounds in order to get his license back. House of course doesn’t want to do his rounds, so he does what he does best: he acts like a mischievous child until he gets the doctor supervising him to sign off on his hours. Man I wish I had tried to do that in AP Government years ago to get out of my civic hours.

House also thinks he’s hearing voices at Wilson’s. After six weeks, he’s still sleeping on Wilson’s couch and not in his guest room. He thinks that’s because Wilson turned that room into a shrine to his dead girlfriend Amber (better known as Cutthroat Bitch) and isn’t ready to have anyone be in that room. All this is fine, but I really hope House doesn’t start seeing Amber again. She’s dead and I’d like to keep it that way.

There’s a pretty big twist involving the patient, and we get more into the fallout of Chase murdering Dibala. Some of it feels a little forced, but then again, at least Chase has something to do now on the show besides look pretty and sound Australian. It’s a very strong episode that benefited greatly from having no Thirteen and a diminished dose of Foreman. Let’s keep all that up.

For another take on this episode, read Acronyms Aplenty by Stephanie Jaar.

Season 6, Episode 5: Brave Heart (originally aired October 19, 2009)

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Tuesdays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Michael Yarish