House: It’s Not My Fault. I Was Trying To Judge Taub

That was House’s excuse for temporarily misdiagnosing Abby, a high school girl who started drooling and foaming some vile detritus during her class field trip to the planetarium. Moments prior, she and her boyfriend Nick were sharing some vodka to liven up the proceedings. Nick was whining about relationship drivel and professing that he wanted to stay together even after they left to attend colleges on opposite coasts. I can’t really blame Abby. In fact, I think foaming at the mouth is a downright appropriate response to having to listen to lovey-dovey woes. Maybe she was hoping that Nick would be so repulsed at the site of her spewing slime from her mouth that he would break up with her right then and there. Not a bad tactic, but, unfortunately, it failed.

The team assembles at Princeton Plainsboro to work their diagnostic magic…everyone except Taub, who is still at home having yet another inane argument wish his inane wife. She’s whining that they never do anything together anymore and bristles when Taub doesn’t jump for joy at her suggestion that they do yoga together. His explanation for being late to the whole saving lives gig is that his tire blew and he was waiting for a tow truck. Honestly Taub, do you really think House would believe such a hackneyed excuse? If you’re going to try to lie to House, you ought to think of something creative. He’ll still see through you before the words finish leaving your mouth, but he might appreciate the effort.

It’s painfully obvious to everyone except Taub that the fight really isn’t about yoga; it’s about Taub’s wife having trust issues and wondering where Taub is all the time. While this behavior is stupid, it is at least understandable, being that Taub regularly boinked anything that moved during his days as a plastic surgeon. House became my hero (even more so than he already is) when, after catching Taub texting his wife like a teenaged nitwit in an attempt to show her some pacifying attension, he seized Taub’s phone and began texting sexually obscene messages. Man, I watched that scene about three times. Mark my words; when the apocalypse hits, historians will single out texting as one of the biggest nails in the coffin of intelligent life on this planet.

Back to the case. The team runs the usual gamut of tests and begins to rule out the usual suspects like lungs and intestines. They think the heart might be the culprit, but they can’t find any evidence of parasites or fungus. They do something called a trans-esophageal echo that makes Abby seize like a banshee doing shooters. In a particularly gnarly bit of business, Thirteen has to cut Abby’s chest open and restart her heart with her bare hands.

House & Co. are now all but convinced that Abby’s problem is some kind of internal allergy. When her kidneys begin to fail, House has no choice but to begrudgingly approve a full body scan, a tactic he hates passionately. Here is where the mystery takes an especially cerebral turn: during the scan, Abby starts hallucinating, sensing a non-existent earthquake and then producing her own vivid, tripping lightshow in the sky. She imagines she is being sucked into a black hole. She also has an out-of-body type of deal where she talks with her younger self.  House believes that Abby’s subconscious is trying to tell her what is wrong with her. House wants to try using an experimental Cognitive Recognition Program that attempts to visually interpret the cognitive patterns in the brain. Foreman protests that medical science is fifty years away from being able to do anything meaningful with brain patterns, but House ignores him, as he often does. The visual portraits that result from the program are more beautiful and illuminating than the planetarium display in the opening. There was a neat recurring emphasis on celestial imagery in this episode.

When Abby is finally cured and saved, the culprit is revealed to be of human cause. How Abby got infected and who was ultimately responsible was surprisingly dark and creepy. So of course, House responded to the situation with his typically brazen disregard for decorum and appropriateness. I’d expect nothing less of him. Kudos to Fox for allowing the situation to be dealt with in the way that it was.

The other subplot of the episode involves House trying to force Wilson to buy furniture for the condo. Wilson has been avoiding doing it at all costs, and House thinks it is because Wilson is afraid. He thinks Wilson is scared of making furniture choices because women have always done it for him and he doesn’t want to face the fact that he is alone and doesn’t know himself well enough to know what kind of furniture he would want. It’s a moderately interesting and amusing subplot, but it’s not critically important. Overall, yet another solid episode.

For another take on this week’s episode, check out Bromance Overload by Stephanie Jaar.

Season 6, Episode 15: Black Hole (originally aired March 15, 2010)

For more on House, click here.

Mondays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro.