The critics have been less than impressed so far with this fourth series of House, starring Hugh Laurie as miserable maverick medic Dr Gregory House. It's felt that the series is lacklustre and failing to fire on all cylinders, especially since he is still gathering his new team around him, and the witticisms are few and far between. This particular episode is felt to be especially grim.
The following preview is courtesy of Five
Hugh Laurie stars as acerbic but brilliant New Jersey medic Dr Gregory House in the fourth season of the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning medical drama. In this episode, House splits his applicants into two teams and orders them to diagnose a disabled man suffering from fainting spells. Meanwhile, a suicidal patient in the clinic challenges House's beliefs about the afterlife.
House calls his ten remaining applicants together and presents them with the case of Stark, a 37- year-old man with a muscle-wasting disease that has confined him to a wheelchair for the last 20 years. House splits his prospective employees into two teams of five men and five women and challenges them to explain Stark's bouts of fainting. The first group to solve the problem will remain in the running to join House's staff.
The women believe Stark may be infected with threadworm and treat him accordingly; the men have no theory and decide to perform a battery of tests. They are joined by Amber (Anne Dudek, The Book Club, Mad Men), the most mercenary applicant - dubbed "Cutthroat Bitch" by House - who wants to be on the men's team because she regards them as less of a threat than the women. "If I can get the women out of the way, I'm in," she says.
Cuddy, meanwhile, is appalled by how House is handling Stark's treatment. "You can't make a competition out of patient care," she says. Like House's underlings, she suspects that the maverick medic already knows the answer to the puzzle. "If you know, you are obligated to treat," she reminds him.
The case is then complicated by a new symptom when Stark begins coughing and choking. The women persist with their diagnosis of threadworm, while the men theorise that Stark's symptoms could by explained by a tumour in his throat. However, they are forced to sit in detention in House's office as a punishment for conducting time-wasting tests. Amber manages to sneak out and run a scan on Stark's throat, which appears to disprove the tumour theory. The men's team is duly fired by House, but Amber refuses to give up and, in the process of carrying out another test on Stark, she notices that his blood has turned green.
Amber's discovery indicates that Stark's kidneys are failing, which explodes the threadworm theory backed by House and the women. Realising that he was wrong, House suspends the contest and throws himself into the case with all urgency. When further tests suggest that Stark may have ocular cancer, House proposes radical surgery to remove the patient's eye.
Stunned at the news, Stark decides that his quality of life has deteriorated to the point where he would prefer to die, and refuses to have the operation. "I'd rather just get this over with. I've been trapped in this useless body long enough," he says. Stark dreams of an afterlife in which he will be free of paralysis, but House dismisses his ideas - prompting an angry rebuke from Wilson. "You couldn't let a dying man take solace in his beliefs?" he snaps.
While Stark seems to have given up, House finds himself battling another patient over his beliefs in the afterlife. The doctor is stunned when a man in the clinic tries to electrocute himself by jamming a knife into a plug socket. Once the patient is shocked back into life, he tells House that his suicide attempt was inspired by a recent near-death experience in a car accident. "Paramedics said I was technically dead for 97 seconds," he recalls. "It was the best 97 seconds of my life."
House pours scorn on the man's notions, but Wilson demands to know how he can be so sure there is no afterlife. The cantankerous medic resolves to find out once and for all if there is life after death - by repeating the patient's trick with the knife and the plug socket...
(5 Star)
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