So is this the Making-Decisions-Based-On-Faulty-Assumptions season? Because if so, awesome.

"Good times." :lol: :lol:

I loved it. ^^ I knew from the preview last time that House was going to try the electrocution thing, and I love that they didn't have him try it out of reckless/daredevil/thrill-seeking curiosity (which is what I think they would have done last season). He was looking to confirm an answer to a specific question, and he (and the writers) treated the question and the decision to answer it with the seriousness they deserved. (I was starting to miss the musical montages. :D And HL pulls those scenes off so well.)

Plus, it was great that this storyline wasn't seperated from the rest of the plot. It tied in nicely with the POTW story, and for me the POTW (whose situation is similar to House's) giving that extra push by believing the exact opposite of what House does made House's need to prove himself right by any means necessary more convincing. (House's incredulous, angry expression when the POTW started talking about "getting out" alerted me that this was going to get good. Anything that can actually offend House is worth watching.)

Speaking of the POTW, I wanted to take both him and his dog home and keep them forever. Why can't all the POTWs be as cool as him?

Cuddy looked wiped out in this episode. Maybe she needs to take some of Wilson's Prozac. He's been cheerful enough lately, so I guess they're working.

"I love you." Heh. That made some heads snap up. Touche, writers. ;)

House in hospital gown=happiness. I don't...really even know why. On a related note, Wilson doesn't look to bad unshaven either. :)

I bought House's realization at the end that yeah, maybe he needs to go ahead and settle on a team, but 13? Really? She's had like...five lines. And she looks/acts like Cameron 2.0, which I'm not too excited about, especially since the first one is still wandering around. I'm still crossing my fingers for Plastic Surgeon.

Nice resolution for Foreman. It was funny to watch him consciously try to be not!House around his employees. After his first differential diagnosis scene, where he sends them out with "Good job," my mom commented, "Well, that would be a boring show." <_< Yeah.

And now FOX begins the torture. *settles down resignedly to wait*

Man they're really hitting them all out of the park this season aren't they (reference to the sport that's going to be depriving us of our addiction, cool :) )!

I keep wondering why it's so important to House that there is no afterlife. Maybe it's just me but it seems that if it was just something he'd believed it doesn't seem he'd be so vehement about, for the lack of a better word, evangelizing. I realize that he thinks that believing in life after death is stupid and delusional, but House for the most part seems to think people in general are stupid and generally doesn't seem to be as passioinate about talking them out of it--then again YMMV. It's either that or House had a real doozy of an experience that convinced him of his views that this whole thing is such a charged issue for him.

I guess maybe he was telling the truth about not seeing anything this time as he wouldn't have any reason to lie to a dead person, though perhaps he's lying to himself now that the experience has faded. And it is true that a small percentage of people who technically die have no memory of any experience, but I've got to think that out of the other two times House has seen something and just isn't telling. The reason why I want to doubt his statement that he told POTW that he saw nothing is that it seemed like that was not the case when he was initially talking to Wilson. Again, just my read on that, and I must admit I was out of the room during the conversation so I heard everything but didn't see expressions.

On a technical note, I'm glad that TPTB did at least acknowledge that someone who has had to have CPR will not be well enough to stand up and go about business as usual in the next scene. Granted, electrocution is an easier thing to get someone back from, or so they say, than an arrest from a more organic cause, but, as I've gone into too much detail about before, CPR is a pretty violent process all things considered. I'm sure no one cares besides me, but that part, miniscule as it is, of my brain that might have made it as a doctor, along with the part that wishes it could have, feels that I must make these kind of statements.

Yes, definitely cheers for House in a hospital gown again. I'm still jealous of PPTH's hospital gowns: not only do they close relatively will, and infront where you can at least hold them closed if they're stubborn, but they apparently have a pocket. The various ones I've encountered out here are still "old style". I say this as someone who was traumatized about having to travel the halls of the building my doctor's office was in one time in a hospital gown--due to my whining they did actually give me two so that I could put one on backwards, but still-- add that I was a teenager (a rather awkward and vain time for all of us) at the time and you get the picture. Back on topic, Hugh just has no right to be that gorgeous. I did like seeing House actually letting someone help him for once and was amused at how quickly he got his "sea legs" once the competitive duckling started getting into territory he didn't want to discuss.

Okay, I'm still not sure how I feel about the competitive one. I actually liked her better during this ep. even though she was just as bad this time as last. I can't decide if her manipulativeness makes her "mini-House" or the new Foreman (despite being a different gender and race). She sure has Cameron's number though. On that note, I thought Cameron was actually going to be awesome for once with her speedy responses to manipulative's questions, then we got to "House is endangering patients", and I knew we were back on familiar ground. I know Cameron is the "tender-hearted one", or at least they want her to be, as I've mentioned in the past half the time she comes across as the "creepy one" instead, but by now she really should know that as much as House appears to be messing around, he never does it if he sees a chance of the patient actually being in any danger. I guess you could argue as Cuddy did, that his messing around killed the patient, but I don't think that's really valid. The cause of the problem was more a simple human error issue than a real neglect issue. Granted it's probably common sense, and maybe something a doctor at the point these guys--girls-- are should know it, that you should always make sure that the meds make it into the patient's mouth and down his throat, but it wasn't really an issue that I could see the old ducklings avoiding either. Really, this patient didn't have any obvious reasons to be resistant to taking medicine. If the pills did go on the floor, it seems that the patient should have mentioned something about it as a matter of fact--not saying that it's his fault he died of course.

Also on the note of not getting House, Foreman doesn't either. I swear there's a happy medium between his constantly not being confrontational with his team and House's method of sometimes being insulting. Foreman's duckling really did deserve the comment that he didn't need someone to tell him the obvious, or whatever he said. And anyway, shouldn't said duckling know that whether they fail to find the treatment in time or if they just stop treating the patient will still die? I'm still trying to decide if they were trying to hard with the parallel-Cuddy. I was glad the Foreman went with his gut after all though, I was afraid that he wouldn't, thus demonstrating one more way in which he's just not ready yet. So, after that I can't decide if Foreman getting fired was to show us something about Foreman's lack of readiness or about how special the situation House has is.

You know, I actually didn't see 13 as another Cameron, except in the sense that she's filling Cameron's role, as the lone girl and the "caring one" but in a better way. I'm sorting of liking the theory that she is related to someone at PPTH, though I don't want it to be House, on the other hand if she were someone else's niece or sister, maybe Cuddy's or Stacy's, that might be kind of cool. And I can see a parallel between why House kept 13 on and what House did with the aspiring astronaut last week: they're both going to be careful to an obsessive degree; the one thing 13 will always remember to do is make sure that her patients really did swallow their pills.

I've got to say this time I am definitely looking forward to the next episode, especially to find out who Frank is and if he is in fact Grandpa House. This is even though I know they'll give the patient some kind of funky tumor that's responsible for all this rather than leaving it ambiguous. But did they say two weeks? ARRGGH!!!

My first response to this episode was, "Wow. That kind of sucked. The only thing good about the episode was the dog. And then they killed the dog."

On second viewing, I liked it a bit better and came to realize that the episode had some very good qualities, it was just tainted by a really bad subplot. Since the subplot had been alluded to in the previews last week I knew it was coming, and thus it cast a pall over the rest of the story.

The bad subplot I'm talking about is House's self-electrocution. I LOVE House's tendency to be curious about metaphysical questions, and I love the wacky things he'll do to satisfy his curiosity. But this action represented neither. House has already had two near-death experiences. Are we supposed to believe that he thinks the third time is the charm with respect to seeing evidence of an afterlife? And even if he were inclined to perform such an "experiment" there was no reason for him to do it while his patient is critically ill. It is essential to House's character that he does bizzare things for good reasons; here he did a bizzare thing without a good reason.

Another, though less troublesome, negative was the portrayal of "Number 13." I think she's OK; I think I could even grow to like her. But not if the writers keep having House dwell on how interesting she's supposed to be.

On to the positives:

* Still loving "Scooter" -- or, as House now calls him, "Ridiculously Old Fraud."

* Wilson yelling at House for attacking the patient's comforting beliefs, and then later calling House an idiot, were great.

* The patient of the week was engaging and had a sweet dog.

* Chase and Cameron were integrated into the episode in a natural way, instead of having a House/Cam scene tacked on at the end like last week.

* Foreman got fired, which raises my hopes that Cuddy will set up a secondary diagnostics team, letting the ducks (I guess they're not ducklings any more :-) put what they've learned into practice.

* The scenes for the next episode look good!

I completely agree with you, except for right this second. One of the reasons I got frustrated in seasons 2 and 3 is exactly that: it seemed like House started doing weird things not to save patients (or any other good reason), but so the writers could make sure we still knew House was "out there" and "unpredictable" or whatever.

But in this episode, in this story, I see the self-electrocution as in-character. And the reason is that House panicks every time someone brings up God or the afterlife until he finds evidence to the contrary. He is not the kind of atheist who has enough faith to be indifferent to the faith of "believers." He can't just acknowledge their beliefs and still remain secure in his own; he has to prove to them immediately that they're wrong. It's true that House always seems to need everyone else to acknowledge that he's right, but in the case of the afterlife/God, I really think it's panic. He gets angry, and he says it's because these people believe something so irrational, but I think what he's actually angry at is this concept of a God that can convince people to believe in irrational things--the concept of a logic that transcends the kind that House is capable of. It's impossible to make a system that transcends human logic satisfy human logic, so it takes faith to believe in that transcendant system, and House doesn't do faith--or rather, he operates under the opposite faith: that human logic can't be transcended. If the believers are right, though, then that means they have managed to figure out a truth that cannot be accessed through human logic--in other words, they have reached a correct answer that House as he is now is incapable of reaching. For a character to whom "rightness" and the intellectual process of logic are everything, that thought is understandably maddening, and I think that's where House gets the special viciousness he seems to reserve for the religious. Logic is for all intents and purposes his god, and they're just ignoring it. As incredible as it sounds, I think he's offended at their arrogance.

And if "God" operates under a different system from human logic, that also means that human logic--House--does not, logically,have the ability to disprove his existence. So I also think House this sort of lingering fear that he could be wrong about the afterlife and not even know it, because logic is all he can work with.*

*(Although the idea that House has a "gift"--an almost supernatural ability to know, against medical reason, what people need, has been explored as well, and I think it would be interesting to confront House with that aspect of himself in a "religion" episode.)

So when someone comes forward with a logical piece of evidence supporting God/the afterlife (Grace's shrunken tumors, Eve's attempts at apologetics, our clinic patient's near-death experience), House gets uneasy, but he knows what to do, because he is an expert at human logic. He proves them wrong in the logical way. He diagnosed Grace, he out-reasoned Eve, and this time he did the only thing he could logically do in order to argue against an experience: he recreated the experience.

As for this being technically the third near-death experience he's had, yeah, it seems like he could've argued with the clinic patient and the POTW based on his other two--except the other two support the theory of an afterlife. And he doesn't want that answer. I don't know why he thought this experience would be any different. It's irrational that he did. But like I said before, I think that doing this irrational thing, for this reason, is in-character, because he's responding to panic. He didn't have any experiences that he could use to support his belief, so...he kept doing it till he got one. Third time was the charm. And he didn't look happy about what he found, necessarily, but he did look calmed at the end. And he will be calmed until the next patient who believes in the afterlife shows up and challenges the supremacy of human logic in front of him (I'm guessing next week <_< ), then he'll get nervous and irritable again. Because he's got to be right about this, or else he's nothing. His logic is nothing. He's a fool.

(The irony this time is that he got his evidence against illogic by doing something illogical: doing the same thing and expecting different results. And he did get different results. So... :blink: )

Is anyone else seeing a troublesome trend here, by the way? The first time he almost died, it was in no way his fault--it was his infarction (God or Fate or random coincidence) coupled with the incompetence of his doctors. The second time was indirectly his fault (we presume that the shooter shot him because of something he did). Then in Merry Little Christmas he puts himself in danger of dying by drinking and taking the pills, but he'd been in a lot of judgement-clouding pain and he was in a pretty desperate situation. This time he was in his right mind (excluding the aforementioned panic) and he thought about it first. :huh: :unsure:

Yeah, I think I can see you idea on why House seems to have to be so confrontational with believers. It certainly beats anything I've come up with thus far.

Tpel, I totally forgot about the dog, it was very cute. It's odd, usually any animal in peril sends me right over the edge, especially if it's someone's beloved pet--as I have an aging but still very healthy cat, it hits a little too close to home-- but for some reason I didn't really think too much of it this time other than wasn't it sweet that the dog seemed to be comforting the owner as the owner comforted it-- the aforementioned cat despite her sometimes bad attitude has been known to play "nurse kitty" every so often.

And I do agree with you if it keeps getting rammed down our throats that House thinks 13 is oh so interesting and she really does turn into Cameron part two, I could get fed up with her very quickly. For now the focus seems okay because House is still trying to get to know the candidates so in order for him to decide to keep anyone on they do have to peak his interest at least a bit.

There was one other thing I was wondering last night that I forgot to post in my first comment--then I waited with baited breath for someone else to post so I wouldn't be responding to myself, not that I ever do that in real life, oh no, :rolleyes: -- yet again it ties into the infarction and how House feels about Stacy's decision. This is the last of several times we've had House posit that "life has quality" or that allowing yourself to die just to avoid pain/humiliation is not a valid action--then there's his comment to the first ever POTW, but that could be argued as an attempt to just get the chance to finish solving the puzzle. It seems that at least now, alive and in pain is a better alternative than dead with dignity preserved, so is it just that Stacy went against what he said that gets him or did he, and does he still, really not get the real possibility that he could have died for good? In our own minds we're all the protagonists of the story and of course we always know that the protagonist very rarely dies, so I'm not saying he's unusual but still wondering. But then on the other hand he has promised patients that he will directly or indirectly help them die when they felt there was no hope, has demonstrated his willingness to do so--with Ezra-- and if his claims are to be believe he and Wilson have both done it before, more than once. I guess I know what slant I want to give it, but what're everyone else's thoughts?

Oh, yes, and this probably proves more than anything else that I really need more hobbies and/or a job, but I just had another intriguing idea on the possible identity of Frank, what if he's the first patient that House ever killed? That would certainly hold with the PTOW also seeing the guy from last week who 13 technically killed--though given how much medical education she must have been through already, wouldn't she have "killed" someone before this. I get this partially from a real cool story I read in a Twilight Zone Anthology called, The July Ward. It's kind of hard to explain, but the title refers to the fact that everyone moves up a level in their medical education at the beginning of July-- incidentally, why it's considered perilous to get sick over the July 4th holiday-- so pretty much around that time a person who is now officially a real doctor will lose a patient that they might have been able to have saved had they been more experienced. So supposedly a ghostly hospital ward exists that holds all these patients, who are a doctor's first loss. Some other stuff comes into it too, but it's a really interesting story. I should track down the name of the author I guess and post it later.

I really liked this episode..it was interesting to see how Cutthroat Bitch (I love that name!) went to Chase and Cameron..how low can she go?? geez..appealing to House's former Ducklings isn't the way to go..

I liked Wilson's casual jeans and jacket look..sweet! Hugh looked yummy in that hospital gown too. :)

I wonder if the writer's will do anything about House's 'almost dying by sticking a knife into an electrical outlet' thing..although it seems that Wilson really wanted to talk about it and House didn't..nothing new there. But there's got to be more there there, right? Or is that just me over analyzing it? That could be it too.

I wonder if the writer's will pursue the idea that House is technically responsible for wheelchair guy's death..remember what Cuddy said..that it was House's responsibility that he died not his fellows responsibility..should be interesting to see if/how that plays out.

Good episode :)

God and peace
vanessa :)

I couldn't say the best ep overall, this season so far or one of the best... but pretty damn good. As you guys keep talking about House childish behaviour about the after life - near dead like experiences. Yeah, he has had three that all of us are aware of. But this one is especial because House didn't share it with us. He kept it to himself, not to Cuddy, no to Wilson no to us. His experience. Yeah, maybe he's forcing himself to not-believe or unbeliebe, or stop believing.
In Three Stories when Wilson asks House about the experiences the patient had, House told him that those experiences were real (well, if you can define real) but the "white light that people see is caused by chemical reactions when the brain is shutting down". The very same explanation he did gave to the crash accident patient.

I was saying I liked this episode because House might had experienced THREE TIMES the same thing that patient was eager to repeat. In other terms: he had had something other people values as much as their life, several times, and he didn't realized it. He needed to see it for himself the same way the other guy did it. We can't certainly know what he felt, but, as much as his "came back", he tried to be the one he wants so bad to be, the one he tries to, not the one he probably is. hope you get it.

Man, I hate Foreman. There's nothing much to add.

And, I really don't see Cameron as the useless bitch (to call it someway) or the "thing" some of you probably think she is. Totally Overcute, yeah, but nothing wrong with it.

Man, I loved Chase.


The POTW was really nice, and he looked a lot like House, like he was his nice younger good twin brother. This also reminded me how much morals costs in this show: all the patients who die leave a very deep and clear meaning... then, what's the doctors job?
Pretty much all of them keep dying.

Ps: The doctor who was "allegedly" in doctors without boundaries is left handed.