House No Reason

23-06-2006 16:07

In tonight’s gripping series finale of the awardwinning medical drama, House struggles to diagnose a patient while facing a serious crisis of his own. New patient Vince has been brought into the hospital with a temperature and severely swollen tongue. While House is discussing the case, a man enters the office, pulls out a gun and shoots him. House wakes up in a hospital bed, and Cameron explains that the bullet pierced his stomach, nicked the bowel and lodged in his rib. However, House is more interested in Vince’s case than his own wounds, and orders the junior doctors to carry out preliminary tests.

Suddenly the attacker, Jack, is wheeled into the room, handcuffed to a bed – he was shot by security when he tried to leave the hospital. He explains that his wife was one of House’s former patients and reminds him that in the process of treating her, House got Jack to confess to having an affair. Although his infidelity had nothing to do with the brain disease House eventually diagnosed, House told Jack’s wife everything, and she later killed herself. Jack is determined that House should suffer for this, but although House does eventually admit some of the responsibility for her suicide, he won’t let Jack blame him. “You either get to ask for an apology, or you get to shoot people,” he tells him. “Not both.”

That evening, House spots an attractive woman looking into Vince’s room and asks her a series of personal questions about her husband. Yet when he mentions this conversation to his team, they tell him that Vince is a widower. Is House hallucinating? To make matters worse, Vince’s diagnosis is going slowly, and the other doctors keep spotting things that House has missed. He complains that he might be losing his logical mind, and worries that since he can’t feel any pain in his leg, the surgery could have screwed up his central nervous system.

Demanding to know why he was put into a coma instead of having an anaesthetic, he goes to Cuddy’s office to confront her. But she notes happily that he is now walking without a limp, and tells him about new research that treats chronic pain by inducing a coma that essentially allows the patient’s brain to reboot itself. Thanks to the procedure, there is a 50 per cent chance that his leg pain will never return. But House is furious and tells her that she had no right to mess with his brain. While running further tests on Vince, Foreman and Chase discover that he is bleeding behind his

eye. Before Foreman can relieve the tremendous pressure in his skull, Vince’s eye pops out. House suspects that Vince’s eyes and tongue must be affected by a common factor – possibly the brain. He tells his team to biopsy the blood/brain barrier, which is an incredibly dangerous procedure. Although Vince doesn’t have a tumour, the team find blood on the wrong side of the barrier. House suspects that Vince’s lymph nodes are not functioning properly, and his suspicions are confirmed when Chase helps their ailing patient to the toilet. Vince starts crying out in pain, and Chase leans around to look at what’s causing the problem. Blood splatters on his face – Vince’s scrotum has burst.

Foreman suggests that Vince may have testicular cancer, and Wilson confirms this could indeed rupture a blood vessel. House knows all this and is deeply concerned that he did not think of it first. He becomes angry that Cuddy’s surgery seems to have impacted on his brain, but Wilson tells him that he relies on the pain as an excuse for being miserable.

House punches his friend in the face, and immediately wakes up in bed again – it was another hallucination. He is also suffering from blackouts and can no longer distinguish between the hallucinations and real life. As his confrontations with Jack also get worse, he starts to worry that he is losing his mind. Can he get past all this to successfully diagnose Vince, and also work out what is happening in his own brain?