house
lines in the sand (4/24) 21.00–22.00

Hugh Laurie returns as the curmudgeonly medic in the third season of the acclaimed hospital drama. Tonight’s episode finds House and his team treating an autistic boy whose only apparent symptom is uncontrollable screaming.

House’s team take on the case of ten-year-old Adam, an autistic boy incapable of speech, who likes nothing better than drawing squiggly lines and playing video games. House’s protégés are puzzled by his interest in the case, as the only symptom seems to be the boy’s screaming, which could simply be a product of his autism. House orders an array of tests on the boy, but not before he realises that his beloved blood-stained carpet in his office has been replaced. He refuses to hold any more meetings in the room until Cuddy retrieves it.

The doctors run the tests and report back to House in the hallway, where he has decided to hold meetings in order to annoy Cuddy. The tests are inconclusive, but Adam then produces another symptom when he coughs up fluid from his lungs. The team meets again in Wilson’s office –much to Wilson’s dismay –to discuss these new symptoms.

Foreman suspects lymphatic cancer and asks Wilson for help in performing a biopsy. Wilson has trouble getting Adam sedated, so House steps in and encourages Adam to take the anaesthetic by inhaling it himself. Adam’s parents are astonished, believing this could be a breakthrough in his autism, but House couches it in harsh terms: “A monkey’s afraid of the red berries until he sees another monkey eating them. Monkey see, monkey do,” he says, assuring the parents that their son is still as “messed up” as he was before.

Privately, though, House admits to Wilson and Cameron that he has great admiration for Adam. Rather than pitying the boy, he envies his freedom to opt out of “mind-numbing social niceties”. Adam can act as he likes, in a manner to which House can only aspire.

The biopsy shows liver cells in Adam’s arm, and House speculates that the boy might have a damaged liver –possibly from poisoning. When further tests rule this out, House adopts a new line of inquiry, theorising that the boy could have put something in his mouth by accident. He approaches Adam directly and holds up a set of pictures from his home to get the boy to identify what he ate. Adam points to the sandbox, only for his right eyeball to roll back into his head.

Having expended all the other meeting places in the hospital – including Cuddy’s office – the team now fetches up in the chapel, where House introduces the eyeball problem into the mix: “We have been blessed with a new symptom!” he cries, in his best preacher voice. Foreman suggests that a micro-tumour could be to blame, and proposes surgery that might result in removing the eye. The operation is set to go ahead, when House makes a connection between the symptoms and the drawings that Adam was making. But what exactly has he seen, and can he stop the surgery in time?

Also this week, House receives further attention from the 17-year-old daughter of a patient from last week’s episode (‘Informed Consent’). Cuddy tells him that the girl has been calling the hospital up to 15 times a day, and declares her a stalker. “Right, it couldn’t be that she finds me interesting and attractive,” House replies sarcastically. “It has to be that she’s insane!” House promises to steer clear of the girl in exchange for Cuddy returning his carpet, but Cuddy stands firm.As ever in the world of House, however, a medical mystery is never far away, and it soon becomes apparent that there is a rational explanation for the girl’s behaviour.