House Goes to Extremes to See What Happens After We Die

• Oct 10, 2007 03:15 AM ET
• by ninahammerling

Episode Recap: "97 Seconds"

Wow - despite House & co. losing not one but two Patients of the Week (plus a really sweet pooch), this was one memorable episode. And as usual, it's all because of this time, he was testing the boundaries of life itself, to see what - if anything - there is beyond death.

To diagnose POTW 1, the guy with incurable Spinal Muscular Atrophy (and to further reduce the number of intern candidates), House splits up the remaining contestants by gender: "If your sex organs dangle, you're the Confederates; if your sex organs are aesthetically pleasing, you're the Yanks." In other words, girls vs. boys. Well, with the exception of Number 24, aka "Cut-Throat Bitch" ( Anne Dudek), who requests to be with the Confederates, though they want nothing to do with her. True to form, she seeks out both Chase and Cameron for diagnostic help and a bit of rule-bending. CTB lives up to her name - especially when she doesn't want to stop an experiment involving a jar of bugs biting the patient just because he was, oh, y'know, choking - but I find myself kind of liking her gumption.

POTW 2 is a House solo effort, a guy who endured a car crash and was "technically dead" for 97 seconds - the best 97 seconds of his life, he says. The intensity of his belief that there's something more gets under House's skin. When POTW 1 is told that he's dying and says that wants to be free, wants to see what else there is, House curtly declares that there's nothing - then decides to check it out for himself. Right after paging CTB, he repeats POTW 2's move of sticking a knife into a socket to sample a near-death jolt for himself. And he gets his wish: His heart stopped for nearly a minute. When he regains consciousness, Wilson calls him an idiot, asks him what he had experienced, then says, "Just looking at you hurts. I'm going to order up some extra pain meds." To which House responds, "I love you." Those two!

The other best friends - POTW 1 and his aide-dog - had the most touching moment of the episode; just before dying (unnecessarily, as it turns out), POTW 1 tells his dog, who is looking at him with big, sad puppy eyes, that it's OK, that he isn't afraid. Then the doggy dies too, because he ate the pills that would have saved the patient's life. Honestly, it was one of the more moving cases I can remember seeing on this show.

At a Bunsen Burner "tribal council," House first fires the Confederates (that would be the danglers) for breaking his silly rules, but in the end, thanks to CTB's insistence on drawing POTW 1's blood and finding it be Vulcan-ish green, the Confederates are called back in to help with the further diagnosis. In the end, he fired the Yanks (the aesthetic pleasers) - all except Number 13 ( Olivia Wilde), even though she was the one who handed POTW 1 his ill-fated pills and didn't actually watch to make sure he took them them. House claims that she'll never make the same mistake again... I guess so, but other than having nice hair and big, lashy eyes, Number 13 has yet to make an impression on me. She's just sort of blandly antagonistic at the moment.

Meanwhile, in his own parallel case, Foreman played House at New York Mercy, where he saved his patient but was fired for following his gut. Seems like it's about time for him to return to the Princeton-Plainsboro fold.

For the first time this season, Cuddy's provocative attire actually distracted me - I'm not sure what she and House discussed at all, I was so preoccupied with the fact that she was showing that much cleavage. Though when she walked down the hall in that too-tight short skirt, it provided a subtly hilarious synchronized head-tilt from House and Wilson as they watched her go.

"97 Seconds" hit all the notes that make House House: I laughed out loud at some of the zingers (House to Number 18, Edi Gathegi: "A man of your integrity I feel I can trust, Big Love, and I don't call you that because you're a Mormon," followed by a big wink); I got a tear in my eye when POTW 1 died (well, to be precise, when he had that touching moment with his dog; I'm a sucker for moving animal moments); and I couldn't take my eyes off Hugh Laurie, as he was alternately sweet, irreverent and vulnerable. Add to that a good dose of Wilson-House moments, and I was one happy House fan tonight.

The baseball playoffs will be occupying our usual time next week, so enjoy the game; the episode coming up in two weeks looks like another doozy, again dealing with what happens after you die (in a Sixth Sense kind of way). Can't wait!

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