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...