House: Little Miss Evil

If there’s something every young generation likes to do, it’s to toss words around without even using them in the proper context. For example: psychopath. “I can’t believe you just slashed your ex-boyfriend’s tires! You’re such a psychopath!” Actually, no. Just because a female slashes her ex’s tires does not make her a psychopath. In fact, she’s far from a psychopath because it proves she’s feeling very angry about something.

As we learned in this week’s episode of House, a psychopath is someone who can’t feel emotions and basically doesn’t have a conscience. That would be our patient of the week, Valerie. House doesn’t find Valerie’s case interesting at first, but a red flag goes up when he realizes she’s hot and her husband is not. It’s always simple logic like that which works for House, isn’t it?

Valerie is initially admitted to the hospital after suffering from massive ear pain.  It doesn’t take long for Thirteen to get the heebie-jeebies about this woman and she performs an MRI test behind the other doctors’ backs. The MRI confirms Valerie’s abnormal brain functions and Foreman is miffed Thirteen continues proving him wrong and disobeying his orders. Yes, after a bit of a reprieve, Thirteen and Foreman still can’t seem to settle their differences and the angst returns.

Valerie, played by Beau Garrett, is perfectly creepy in the part. Early on in the episode she admits to the doctors that she cheated on her husband with a co-worker and subsequently poisoned said co-worker. However she continues to play the role of the innocent wife when her husband is around because she can’t risk losing his millions. Thirteen feels bad for the poor guy and tries to drop him hints about what’s really going on, but Valerie won’t stand for it. She’s out to get Thirteen by reporting her to Cuddy and the medical board. Eerily enough, I thought Beau Garrett and Olivia Wilde shared a certain resemblance so I was just waiting for a twist at the end where it was revealed they were long-lost sisters or relatives. Sadly, that never happened.

Elsewhere in House-land, House is reunited with an old medical school classmate who has recently hit hard times. Even though it may not always be easy to believe, House is not a psychopath and he actually does have feelings. This time, it’s guilt. House feels guilty for potentially ruining Wibberly’s future back in medical school when he swapped their papers. He gives Wibberly a mortgage check, and that’s when Wibberly comes clean: he did graduate from medical school. He was an orthopedic surgeon for a few years until he lost his license for overbilling patients to satisfy his gambling addiction. House still wants to do a good deed, however, and he leaves the check with Wibberly.

As it turns out, Valerie’s psychopathy is only one of her many symptoms. The other ones include brittle bones and a failing liver.  Even though she’s been run off the case, Thirteen has an Ah-ha! moment after speaking to Valerie’s sister. Valerie was not always a psychopath. Her personality changed sometime during her adolescence and seemed to be getting worse recently after she changed her diet to include nuts. The change in diet helped awaken the dormant symptoms from Wilson’s disease that was residing in her body. And now with the proper treatment, Valerie regains her feelings and as a result comes clean to her husband.

For another take on this week’s episode, check out Psychos R’ Us by Cameron Cubbison.

Season 6, Episode 11: Remorse (originally aired January 25, 2010)

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Tuesdays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro