Sorry this is so wordy, so much to say about 97 Seconds! House has had two near death experiences at the time of this episode. The first (that we know of) is when he has a heart attack during his treatment for the infarction (Three Stories). During the time he was hovering between life and death, he seemed to have an out of body experience, or so he told his class, dropping in on the futures of three patients, whom he may or may not have ever treated. These patients all had leg issues and their treatments had differing outcomes than his (both for the better). When asked about these experiences…these visions…House says that the “white light” that some people seem to see when having a near death experience (and the visits to the afterlife) are merely the chemical effects of the brain shutting down. It’s what, he says, is what he chooses to believe. He explains that his choice to believe this makes him more comfortable. His disbelief in the afterlife, or glimpse of it, make him hopeful that life (his life, as brutal as it’s been at time, we now know) is not simply “a test” for some other life. The second near-death experience came when House was shot by an assailant who has not yet been caught. The loss of blood and shock had him hovering between life and death as hallucinated entire conversations with his shooter. During his hallucination, House assessed his own life and self-worth in conversations with the shooter (who, because it was a hallucination, was really his own subconscious). Ultimately confronted with the easy exit of death (symbolized by the scene where he shared the suicide attempt of the shooter’s wife), House chose life and fought his way out of unconsciousness, however briefly, to tell Cameron he wanted to try a radical pain-management treatment. If he was going to live, he was going to try to better his conditions. Arguably, House has had (at least) one attempted suicide (arguably, because there is some debate as to whether taking a bottle-full of oxycodone and forcing himself to drink a large tumbler full of whiskey is attempted suicide. And arguably because we don’t know if he’s been in a state where, perhaps just after the infarction or when Stacy left him he was suicidal. Wilson says that House fell apart, so it’s possible). So, what do we make of what happened in “97 Seconds?” We haven’t seen House in physical pain much this season; he seems, physically to be coping fairly well. We’ve seen him take vicodin, but not hiding his pain; not wincing, not hurting. The only noteworthy time we see him in physical distress in 97 seconds is after he distributes the patient charts to his candidates, coming down the lecture hall stairs without his cane. As he hobbles to the desk and perches on it, he is in quite a bit of pain. But I don’t think it’s significant to the story. What we do see, however, is House being very, very frustrated. I think he’s tired of the game; tired of the competition; tired of the candidates. He is annoyed when he tells them to take off the numbers, and has little patience for the candidates right from the start. The teams are divided (more or less by gender) and the game is afoot. Meanwhile, House retreats to the clinic to do his hours. The clinic patient draws a knife, taking House by surprise, but not by more surprise than he gets in another moment, as the patient, who is quite banged up, proceeds to the nearest outlet and jams the knife into it. House is in shock momentarily witnessing this bizarre act, probably in the moment before, wondering if once again he was going to be attacked by a patient. He calls for a crash cart and revives the electrocution victim, but, as is clear from the subsequent scenes with both Cuddy (who he visits first) and Wilson, he is preoccupied with the actions of the clinic patient. He remains preoccupied with them throughout the remainder of the episode until, he, himself, duplicates the act. When House finds out the reason behind the electrocution, it disturbs him. Until he speaks with the now-conscious clinic patient, he wonders—puzzles—as to why anyone would stick a metal object in a live outlet. Is it attempted suicide? Or a suicidal gesture; an attempt to get attention for his problems? Suicide would be easier with a gun. Electrocution is not an easy way out. It is clear that House cannot quite fathom why anyone would do this irrational, to him, thing. Upon speaking to the patient, House learns that the guy is trying to duplicate the sensations he experienced when, a week earlier, he was badly injured in a car crash. “The paramedics told me I was technically dead for 97 seconds. They were the best 97 seconds of my life,” he tells House. He describes, though not in detail, that there is “something” out there. Something beyond living. On the “other side.” House is completely drawn in, listening, caught up in the guys’s words. Coming back to himself, however, House retorts that (as he described in Three Stories) that all the guy experienced was the release of serotonin and endorphins—chemical reactions as the brain begins to shut down. Revived, the patient recalls the sensations as experiencing the afterlife. One has to believe that House has spent a great deal of time over the past 10 years (maybe more of that time early in this 10 year period) researching and thinking about his own experiences. How does he explain his experiences described in Three Stories? His “hallucinations” in No Reason? House is a self-described atheist. He does no t believe in God. He sees faith and religion as the opposite of science, which, to him, can explain everything ultimately. Even the things we don’t know the answers to, we only do not YET know. They are not unknowable. It’s only that we do not yet know. But I believe that there is another side to House, one who can be awed by nature and its vastness; one that can be moved or touched or awed by the touch of a fetus’ tiny barely-developed fingers. I find it ironic that House, for his vacation in Fetal Position sought out places of Awe (with a capital “A”). I think that these two sides of House fight occasionally for position, and the House that cannot see the possibility of a God in “crack babies” and (in his own experience) abusive parents; and who in his professional life (esp. as an infectious disease specialist) has seen the horrors of epidemics and terrible, devastating disease often wins out against the other side of him. Hugh Laurie has recently said that he believes that House is “an old soul”—and someone who has seen a great deal of human suffering in his life. House’s world-view is colored by those experiences. Sorry for this brief tangent, but I do think this plays into what we saw in this episode. When House goes to visit the POTW, and the POTW tells him not to do the surgery because it is time to shed his sick body and move on, House wonders angrily. “Go to where?” For the second time in a short period, patients, in House’s mind, are making life and death decisions based on something that cannot be proved and that likely does not even exist. “Leave him with his fairy tales,” Wilson admonishes House. But House cannot do that. I think that if House had not already been thinking about this, with the issue preoccupying his thought, he might not have done the outlet thing. But as it was, House sits in his office, considers whether the risk is worth knowing. We then see another two battling forces in House fight each other for control. House is drawn to disprove the clinic patient’s assertion that there is an afterlife. House is drawn to the outlet like a moth to a candle flame. We’ve seen him in this sort of internal battle before. In the episode Skin Deep, after Cuddy has told him that she had dosed him with a placebo, House begins to doubt himself and the “reality” of his pain. The closing scene of the episode has House, filled with self-doubt at the piano, playing Bach, trying to stay distracted enough to not take a Vicodin. The pill bottle sits atop the piano, daring him. But House continues to play until the pain is enough to make him hit a duff note. He stops playing and reluctantly spills out the pills on the piano. You can still see him trying to battle the urge and even when he ultimately takes the pill, it appears to be almost against his will. This was the battle I saw raging across House’s face as he sat in his office. In this case, it wasn’t something to stop his pain (I do not think he was trying to either commit suicide or express a suicidal gesture in order to get attention, to use House’s own speculation about the clinic patient). As impulsive as the move was, he planned it so that he would be found almost immediately. When he awakes, Wilson is at his bedside. “You’re an idiot,” he says almost before House opens his eyes. I rarely agree with Wilson and think he is often manipulative and dismissive of House’s real anguish. But, in this case, I do have to agree with him. It was a stupid move and a terrible risk, unless, as Wilson says, House, while not actively suicidal, doesn’t really care whether he lives or dies at this point in his life. House immediately wants to talk to the clinic patient. Not to Stark, the POTW. House will leave Stark alone, knowing that he is dying. Letting him live out the remaining days of his life with his image of an afterlife intact. But House wants to talk to outlet-guy. “What have you seen?” Wilson asks of House. House averts his eyes, only insisting that he needs to talk to the patient. Has House seen something? “Nothing,” he responds to Wilson through a great deal of anguish (I wonder if the anguish we see so brilliantly conveyed on Hugh Laurie’s face is pain or disappointment that House has seen nothing – as we will learn or a combination). “You need to talk about this,” insists Wilson, believing that House really does not care if he lives or dies. This new fact (or maybe it’s an old fact that Wilson had thought was faded from House’s psyche) greatly disturbs Wilson. But House covers by telling Wilson that he insisted that House find out for himself. I think that House wanted to see the clinic patient (who was dead) to warn him against trying it again. That now that House had been there voluntarily, and saw no evidence of any sort of afterlife (that he’s admitting to, anyway) he wanted to make sure that his patient didn’t try to find Nirvana in that way again. At least that’s what I think. Otherwise, why not want to talk to Stark immediately? Like Wilson, I worry that House (yeah, I know he’s fictional) will do himself harm at some point. He’s not at a point (I don’t think) where he was last year anywhere along the first half of season three, where I thought that at some point he might want to end it (and nearly did in MLC). House expressed to Stark that given a choice between a miserable life and nothing, he should chose misery over nothing. If there was something on the other side—a “better” life, would House be more inclined to end his own life? House has always had doubts, despite being a self-proclaimed atheist. In any event, it was a poor test and fairly shoddy, impulsive research. But, for the time being, has erased House’s doubts. Gosh. I’ve spent nearly 2,000 words talking about House and his motivations. I’ve barely spoken about the patient, the fellow-wannabes, CCF or any of the regular crew. As far as the POTW, I do believe that he simply, in the chaos of the moment, forgot to take the pills. 13 left the pills on the bed-table and went to get water. The male team went in and started talking about a conflict of meds, which the POTW dismissed. He had been informed of what House was doing. 13 put the water on the table next to the pills, but didn’t stick around as the male team began their work. Her lack of assertiveness contributed to the patient’s death, although she came up with the right diagnosis. As House says at the end, her mistake cost the patient his life, because everything that they did from that point on was based on the assumption that the medication didn’t work and that, therefore, he did not have thread worms. In the end, House keeps her on, despite the mistake. Why? Maybe like the astronaut who will now be the safest flyer in the sky, 13 will be the meticulous doctor on House’s staff. She has now killed a patient. If she doesn’t get the “yips” she will be a better doctor for it. She assumes House, the cold bastard, will fire her for it. But as he said earlier, to CTB, should he fire himself as well? He feels his own responsibility in the death of the patient, although he won’t admit it to Cuddy, you can see it in his eyes and body language. I haven’t much to say about Foreman. I don’t like him. I really don’t think he’s like House in too many ways, and I wonder why he doesn’t go back to Dr. Marty entirely. Chase and Cameron, I liked in this episode. So where does this lead? Do we know, really, what motivated House to stick a knife in an outlet? If he really believed that there is no afterlife, why experiment? So he certainly has doubts. Is he borderline suicidal? We know that House keeps his emotions very, very much under wraps. Especially now with all of those new doctors around him, he needs to conceal his vulnerability pretty heavily. Can’t let his guard down at all. Has the loss of Cameron, Chase and Foreman…his hallucination of Foreman and C and C’s return, going on with their lives and seemingly happier to be out from under his influence affected him more than he’s willing to admit? Are Wilson’s fears founded? I guess we’ll know more about this as the arc progresses. Stay tuned.