House: Dr. Cameron: Exit Stage Left, And Don’t Hurry Back

After six seasons on House (though she’s been sitting on the bench for the last couple of years), it’s the end of the line for the obnoxiously sanctimonious twit Dr. Allison Cameron. No, she doesn’t die (unfortunately). Instead, she just whines for forty-five minutes and then hits the bricks. Hey, that’s good enough for me. I’ll take what I can get.

We open with a porn star on set, but don’t get too excited. He crumples to the ground almost immediately, complaining about the exploding feeling in his eyeballs. I felt something similar today during a production meeting but didn’t have any way of televising it. Oh well.

Foreman initially wants to treat a baby with fever and muscle weakness instead of porn star Hank, (played by Jane Fonda’s son Troy Garity, who was great in the underrated 2001 comedy Bandits) but Cuddy arrives and presents House with his new medical license. It’s official: House is back in charge again. Porn star it is! But before House can even get back to work, Chase and Cameron walk in and announce that they are resigning and leaving the team. Okay! Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Except this creates problems for House. And why are they leaving? Because in the wake of Chase confessing to Cameron that he killed Dibala, she has convinced him that he needs to leave Princeton Plainsboro with her in order to save his soul. Suddenly I’m reminded of a great Jack Nicholson line from As Good As It Gets (you know, the movie that should have won the Best Picture Oscar in 1997 instead of that bloated, impossibly trite slogfest Titanic): “Sell crazy someplace else lady. We’re all stocked up here.”

This means that Foreman, as the sole member of House’s team, has to do all the work for Hank. Needless to say this does not please him. So before Cameron and Chase can depart, he corrals them and says that Chase owes him. Chase agrees to help him on this one last case, and Cameron tags along. But House senses that this arrangement is only temporary, so he sets out on a mission to get Taub and Thirteen back into the fold. This becomes the B storyline, the underlying thrust of the episode: House harassing Taub and Thirteen at their jobs, their homes, and even the gym (Thirteen, not Taub, duh) until they agree to come back and work for him again.

As for Hank, we go through the usual battery of tests. They try obscure treatment #1. It works except then it doesn’t. They try obscure treatment #2. It works until Hank starts foaming at the mouth or screaming or going into cardiac arrest. Then they try obscure treatment #3. Then the patient sits on death’s door, until House or someone on the team can have a revelation at the last moment. But due to Hank’s occupation, we also get the added treat of watching Cameron frown at him nonstop and make sour, holier-than-thou judgments.

And of course, House suspects that Cameron is letting Chase off the hook so to speak because she blames House for Dibala instead of Chase. Why? Because it’s convenient. House tries to mention this to Chase and also to Cameron, and separately they both accuse him of trying to manipulate their relationship to his advantage. Poor House. Where has he inherited this reputation? Okay, I take that back. But just because he does have personal motivations at stake, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He is in fact, as usual, dead right.

We also get to see more of Lucas in this episode, and the fallout from House learning last week that he and Cuddy are shacked up. Wilson tries to play mediator for House, both with Cuddy and the rest of the team. But he’s no more successful than he usually is.

All in all it’s a solid episode that shifts the power structure among the supporting characters and sets up significant changes to come. Cameron is gone, and that’s almost enough to make me dance a jig like Joe Hallenbeck in The Last Boy Scout.

For another take on this episode, read Resistance is Futile by Stephanie Jaar.

Season 6, Episode 7:  Teamwork  (originally aired November 16, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro