'House': The Need To Know

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The point is that I could write pages about all of the implausible bits of drama but much of this show requires that you swallow inane plotlines like House swallows Vicodins — just knock it back and keep moving. So let's start with the fact that House gave his captor back his gun after the hostage taker was in the CT scanner! What? He WHAT? WHAT? Did that make sense? At all? Was our antihero suddenly overcome by Stock"house" Syndrome? This crazy and illegal maneuver (aiding and abetting a criminal, according to my Law & Order addiction) was explained away by Thirteen, the human pincushion into which House needed to shoot all of the drugs he was planning to use on his jailbound patient in order to assure the dude that the good doc wasn't spiking a vein with bad medicine.

Thirteen yelled at House, "You're a coward. You need to know everything because you're afraid to be wrong. You're so afraid of being ordinary, of being just another doctor, just another human being, that you'll risk other people's lives." Wait, isn't a coward someone who avoids danger and runs away from pain? Technically his maneuver was brave and risky. Also, really, really stupid, but the moment moved the plot away from an immediate solution and added tension to the final minutes of a show that despite it's outlandish premise made me want to see how it ended.

Despite how much he poked and prodded, House never really completed his psychological profile of his abductor. There was a lot of verbal jousting but no conclusive evidence as to why this guy went nuts in a random hospital clinic rather than just Google his wide array of symptoms like every other person with inconclusive anythings.

It was fascinating to note that the SWAT team leader asked Cuddy if she had a husband or loved one who was being held at gunpoint in her office and she replied "no," but later the cop said, "I hope your boyfriend knows what he's doing." Later still we came to the scene where House entered Cuddy's office (which should have been a crime scene by then but, um, not in Princeton, apparently) and where I anticipated another hug or a kiss or even an emotionally heavy "Thank God you're okay." Instead they continued their high-school level crush, bickering about House enabling the patient and Cuddy enabling House. House explained that if the "moron with a gun" hadn't taken the metaphorical medical establishment by storm, the poor sap would be dead. Now at least he gets to be alive in jail and that's something, isn't it?

Cuddy bantered with House for a bit and then just asked him directly, "Do you want a relationship?" He replied, "God, no. Just trying to follow your logic." Here is House the cowardly liar. He is not afraid to risk his physical life, though he dulls his physical pain with pills, but he is afraid to risk his emotional life by walking away from the slightest possibility of rejection.

And then something cute happened. In the first scene we saw House in Cuddy's office fussing with her desk. In the last scene she tugged at the furniture's handle and everything fell out because House has literally gotten into her drawers. It was a fumbling start, at least.

So what did you guys think? Were you all in on the hostage suspense? Don't you think that House would be brought up charges for returning the gun, or at least under some sort of medical review for going rogue and trying to drug the hostage-taker and getting that one guy shot?