By Buzz Byrne
One thing about Gregory House (Hugh Laurie)- he plays to win. If only his prospective fellows could have figured this out one of them wouldn’t have gotten fired tonight.
Tonight Dr. Cole (Edi Gathegi) and Dr. Kutner (Kal Penn) take in a magic show and wind up with a patient. The magician himself. He nearly drowns doing Houdini’s last trick.
House doesn’t see a mystery and wants to play his games. Namely, he wants to reward the fellow who can return with Dr. Lisa Cuddy’s (Lisa Edelstein) thong. Whoever retrieves the item can nominate two others and House will fire one. Since the group isn’t sure that House is serious, Foreman tells them, “That’s how I got hired.” At least House and Foreman are having fun together.
While Kutner pursues the case of the magician, Dr. Taub (Peter Jacobson) and Dr. Amber/Cutthroat Bitch (Anne Dudek) team up to get the thong. Both hope to soak Cuddy but both fail. Kutner gives the magician an MRI and the key he had swallowed to escape his last stunt rips through his intestine and spleen. House still insists there is no case.
House and the magician spar about the essence of magic. House calls it trite nonsense and the magician calls House a closet magic fan. “You seem the type,” he says, “Lonely, obsessive.” But House is about lying to get to the truth, not deceiving to get a few “WOWS” from the crowd. And yet the magician baffles him with a card trick.
Meanwhile, the unlikeliest of players, Dr. Cole tosses out the red thong- staking his claim to victory. Wanting proof, House checks Cuddy for pantylines and I check my past posts on this show to see if I called the writing “intelligent”. When Cuddy bends severely and House is convinced, he barks it to the world that she is going commando. She denies it but he counters with, “A skirt that tight, I could tell if you had an IUD.” After that, I’m less worried about my statements on intelligent writing. That’s a good line.
In the midst of all of this, Dr.Thirteen has started to display symptoms of something. She is clumsy. She gets tremors in her hands. She tells House it’s nothing. House knows that means it’s something. He discovers her mother died young. “Huntington’s disease.” She tells him. It is fifty/fifty she has it too, but she doesn’t want to know. House admits to switching her decaf for regular coffee to force the tremors and the issue.
The magician predicts his own death within twenty four hours and it looks like he is going to be wrong by six hours or so. He is fading fast. As a last ditch attempt to figure it out, House takes a transfusion of his possibly lethal blood. Thirteen doses him out with narcotics so the team can get some painful biopsies they couldn’t get from the magician. “You drugged me,” she says, “I drugged you.” And then she takes a piece of kidney with a giant needle.
In the end, for very little reason, House figures out it is the one thing they always guess but didn’t this one time…Lupus. Finally a case of Lupus.
Cole nominates Amber and Kutner and House figures this out too. Cole got the thong by cutting a deal with Cuddy and she passed down her recommendations for dismissal. For this breach, Cole is fired. The goal was to subvert Cuddy, not empower her, House says.
He also tests Thirteen for Huntington’s but she won’t look at the results. We all could die tomorrow is her philosophy. House won’t look at the results without her consent it seems. More likely the reason he threw the results in the trash is because he “solved” her and now she is less interesting than before. I’d say that is bad news for her future employment with this team. The House always wins.