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 treats a
fighter pilot whose confused vision and hearing
cause her to hallucinate. Meanwhile, he begins
the process of whittling down 40 applicants to
become his new team.
House’s curiosity is piqued when Greta, a captain
in the air force, appears in his office demanding
his help. “I need you to find out what’s wrong with
me,” she says. “I crashed a flight simulator
because I started to hear with my eyes.” Greta
reports a severe case of synaesthesia, whereby
her hearing and vision have become confused,
leading to extreme hallucinations. She is willing to
pay $50,000 in cash if House treats her in secret
and keeps no record of her stay. She is desperate
to join the NASA astronaut training programme
and fears that her condition will disqualify her.
House presents Greta’s case to his group of 40
applicants, all of whom are competing for a place
on his team. To keep track of them, House has
assigned each one a number, and proceeds to
eliminate members seemingly at random – much
to Cuddy’s annoyance. “This is stupid,” she says.
“You can’t manage that many people! You’re just
going to keep weeding them out arbitrarily?”
House sees Greta’s case as the ideal
opportunity to appraise his prospective
employees, and orders some of them to run a
battery of tests, whilst sending three others to
break in to her house and search for clues. At
Greta’s home, they discover a faulty chimney flue
that may have poisoned her with carbon
monoxide – a possible explanation for her
symptoms. Greta is moved to a high-pressure
chamber to flush the poison out of her body, but in
the process suffers a heart attack and needs to be
shocked back into life. Unfortunately, the highpressure
environment causes a minor fire that
leaves burns on her chest.
Tests appear to rule out carbon-monoxide
poisoning as a cause, so the doctors explore
other theories. Greta, meanwhile, suffers another
attack of hallucinations and flees her room.
House’s team manages to sedate her, but not
before Cuddy realises that something underhand
is going on. She finds out Greta’s identity and
orders House to keep a record of all her treatment
and tests. However, Greta refuses to put her
name on any tests – which means that House and
his entourage have to become creative. “How can
we test when we can’t test?” he wonders.
The team now suspects that Greta has a
problem with her liver, but only a biopsy can
confirm the diagnosis. Greta refuses to consent
to any surgery that will leave a tell-tale scar, but
one of House’s applicants, a plastic surgeon
known as ‘39’, offers an ingenious solution. He
suggests a breast enlargement operation would
give them the opportunity to biopsy her liver,
whilst leaving a scar that can be easily explained.
Greta reluctantly consents to the procedure,
which reveals cysts on her lung. With this
additional symptom, the team moves a step
closer to diagnosing her condition – but it takes a
familiar face to solve the puzzle.
Also this week, House worries that he may be
suffering hallucinations of his own when he sees
his three former protégés – Chase, Cameron and
Foreman – in the halls of the hospital. Wilson tells
him that Chase and Cameron have moved to
Arizona, while Foreman is in New York – and
delights in speculating that House’s ‘visions’
betray his true feelings. “It’s always interesting
when repressed guilt starts un-repressing itself,”
he remarks. House scoffs at the notion, but his
concern suggests that he is curious to know what
has become of his old team.