For those of you who don’t mind spoilers, it will be easiest for me to discuss the episode if you know what happened: House and Cuddy go to the scene of a building collapse in Trenton, where Cuddy tells House she and Lucas are engaged and where House discovers and befriends(!) a victim trapped under some of the rubble. House’s personal biases can’t help coming to the surface when there’s a dispute over whether or not to amputate the victim’s leg or to wait and potentially allow Crush Syndrome to set in. He does the right thing by amputating the leg, and in doing so, indirectly murders the patient via fat embolism. At the end of the episode, Cuddy breaks off her engagement and tells House she can’t stop loving him despite his best efforts – thereby stopping him just in the nick from taking two Vicodin pills, leaving 13′s note of temporary resignation, which we are to assume is due to her Huntington’s Disease the only potentially negative cliffhanger to continue in Season 7.
Oh man, guys. I knew there had been way too much lag time since 13′s diagnosis; something had to happen with her HD soon. It’s going to break my heart as the disease progresses and debilitates. I’m kind of hoping there will be a Chase/13 plot line tying those two together through their difficulties, but at the same time, I’m aware of the difficulties inherent in that sort of thing: Chase was hurt by Cameron’s sudden divorce (which I don’t understand almost as much as I don’t understand Kutner’s suicide) and doesn’t deserve to be left, either voluntarily or involuntarily, by someone else; 13 would hate to do to someone else what her mom unfortunately did to her dad; Chase would be hypocritical for criticizing Cameron’s marriage to her mortally cancerous first husband if he got together with 13; much less, what would Foreman think about it?! Still. They’re two gorgeous young people, and I at least want there to be a short-term thing in Season 7!
Additionally, I really hope House, MD doesn’t pull a How I Met Your Mother, by which I mean the storyline that went down in Fall 2009: we were all rooting for Robin and Barney to get together for about a season and a half, and the show’s writers decided to forget how much importance they’d put into this relationship and turn it into a point of comic relief. In other words, House screenwriters, I’m talking to you when I say: if House and Cuddy are going to be together, DON’T SCREW IT UP WITH HIS VICODIN ADDICTION OR SOME SIMPLE MISUNDERSTANDING. After a while, the on-again, off-again shtick gets old.
I honestly thought I’d have more to say about the episode, but it was so flawlessly done – in my opinion – that I don’t want to comment on it anymore. Kudos, by the way, for not making the amputation scene too squeamish. (My brother in Florida reports, however, that in the commercial break before it was going to happen, my dad went upstairs saying the show was getting much too gory for him. Ha!) I am certainly looking forward to next season.
