TV Verdict

Whoa.

After several episodes that didn’t quite work, the show gets back into form with a vengeance. Some of the many high points:

The lead up to the bachelor party.  From Forman and Hadley evaluating strippers to House setting a corpse on fire to Wilson’s terror at the prospect of a House-arranged party to…just everything.  The lead up to the party was so good, there was no way the party itself could possibly live up to the hype, right?

Wrong.  From the pyramid of blue flame, to Wilson discovering the party–complete with stripper poles, no less–in his apartment...hell even the little stuff, like the shots of the short Taub just turning around and leering at the various chests being thrust, shimmied, and jiggled in his face.  Wilson’s fears coming true, and, oh yeah, Chase almost dying.  Good times.  The one false note in the episode was the fairly casual manner in which Cuddy allowed a group of plastered doctors to treat a patient.  Breath mints?!?

The PotW was almost an afterthought amid all of that insanity, but Seth’s case was, for a change, affecting.  His struggles to deal with his cochlear implant, to deal with the sudden wave of new sensations, roughly parallels House’s attempts to deal with his unwanted visitor, the Ghost of Amber.  They’ve set up a interesting dynamic here–Amber seems to be the part of House that helps him connect the dots, and they’re setting House up to reject that.

Between Amber and the possibility that he was unconsciously trying to kill Chase, the next ep promises to be entertaining.  He spent the entire episode that Amber was a symptom of sleep-deprivation, only to discover at the end that she isn’t.  This show has been epic when House is forced to question himself.