Plot
The episode opens in a strip club where Dr. Gregory House is getting a lap dance. Drunk, disoriented, and suffering from a head wound, House has a short disjointed vision and presumes that "somebody's going to die". When he leaves the club, he sees that the bus he was on crashed. Back at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, House is diagnosed with a concussion and post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, he orders his team to check the bus driver for a possible seizure that precipitated the crash. Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) performs a medical hypnosis on House to stimulate his memory, during this, House finds himself getting drunk in a bar, alone. Chase, Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and Wilson's girlfriend Amber Volakis (Anne Dudek) guide House through the hallucination, and the only other person House recognizes is the bartender (Fred Durst), who forced House to take the bus by taking away his keys.
While the team investigates several pathologies to fit the bus driver's condition, House overdoses on his Vicodin and starts to hallucinate. He finds himself back on the bus, where he sees a woman (Ivana Miličević) who was not on the bus. However, before House can speak to her, Wilson awakens House to do an MRI on him. When House returns to the bus hallucination, Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) is with him. As they discuss the bus driver's possible diseases, House realizes they are in his head and tells Cuddy to accompany the discussion with a strip tease. Cuddy complies, but just before she takes off her bra, she notes she is distracting House, and stops. The woman from House's earlier hallucination returns and introduces herself as "the answer". She tells House to "look" at the bus driver's shuffling feet, which House believes to indicate Parkinson's disease. When the bus driver needs to be intubated due to a possible clot from a pulmonary embolism, House notices the driver's recent dental work. He reasons that an air bubble, that got accidentally injected into the patient's bloodstream through the gums, would explain all the symptoms. The bubble is extracted, and the patient is saved. House believes it over, but a dream that night causes him to realize that the bus driver is not the patient he saw a symptom in, the crash merely dislodged the air bubble and caused the driver's problems.
In a renewed attempt to retrieve his memory, House has his team reenact the bus crash. House overdoses on physostigmine, a medication against Alzheimer's disease, and his mind flashes back to the bus scene before the accident. "The answer" reminds House that since he values reason above everything else, there must be one for her presence in his mind. She keeps asking House what her necklace is made from, until House realizes that it's made of amber. "The answer" transforms into Amber Volakis, and when Wilson and Cuddy manage to resuscitate House from his overdose-induced cardiac arrest, House immediately informs Wilson that Amber's life is in danger as he now remembers the crash. In the crash, Amber was injured with a bar through her leg and House saw her later being carried away to an ambulance. Wilson has not spoken to Amber since before the accident. "Thirteen" (Olivia Wilde) checks the patient roster and sees that a patient admitted to a different hospital matches Amber's description.
Read more about this topic: House's Head
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)