Recap: Epic Fail

How could an episode of House called “Epic Fail” not be worth watching?! Unless of course it turned out to describe the plot...but FlyBy thinks not.

Recap and ratings after the jump. Yes, there are spoilers.

For the first couple of minutes, FlyBy was a little anxious: we weren’t really sure why there was a video game demo in place of a medical drama involving a misanthropic doctor who just got out of rehab. But don’t worry! All’s well!

Well, not really, because one of the designers of the video game has a few problems. He feels that his hands are burning; his lungs fill up with fluids; and oh, he also has a painful (we were not surprised) erection for three hours (?!). Gregory House has seen worse. But he’s too busy finding new hobbies, cooking meatballs, and making juvenile jokes about male genitalia with Wilson.

Wilson: Oh! Ow. No, no. They're browning way too fast.

House: Blue is the color you've got to watch out for.

*snicker snicker*

We thought that was funny. A little. Come on. You know you did, too.

House also quits his job. And the moment House leaves the room, Foreman (shocker) asks Cuddy to let him run the department. Cuddy asks him to take this case to see if he can handle the pressure. At that point, FlyBy was seething. But we also knew where the title of the episode came from.

WHAT AN EPIC FAIL.

Foreman makes several poor decisions when the patient posts his symptoms online and offers a $25,000 reward to anyone who can correctly diagnose him. Finally, the team diagnoses him with amyloidosis. Foreman has a dejected conversation with Thirteen about whether he’s ready for the responsibilities of the promotion when Thirteen tries to cheer him up by detailing her bisexual exploits. Wait, WTF?!

And just when you think everything is fine and dandy, the patient goes crazy and hallucinates again. Clearly, they were wrong. Foreman asks her to start him on chemotherapy. Later, he has a brainwave and runs up to Thirteen to tell her to stop. But she already has figured it out (correctly this time), after reading the online diagnoses.

Even though he told her not to. Uh-oh.

Later, he tells her that he finds it too hard to manage both the relationship and his promotion. Is he going to break up with her? No. He’s going to fire her. UH-OH.

In the meanwhile, Taub resigns because House isn’t around. UH-OH.

While shit goes down in Princeton-Plainsboro, House is sitting back and having a conversation with his therapist with--voila!--a check for $25,000 made by correctly diagnosing his old team’s patient. Medical diagnosis seems to be the only reliever of House’s pain.

In conclusion:

House is BACK. But he’s not the same. He’s not the same narcissist he used to be. No scathing comments. In fact, FlyBy doesn’t know whether we like him as much as we used to.

On a scale of 1-10:

The diagnosis: 6 (FlyBy doesn’t really like Foreman right now)

Sub-plots: 9 (Thirteen?! Taub?!)

House: 9 (“Et tu, bootay?”)

Overall: 8

Epic Fail? Nope.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Eduloqui