As it turns out, despite his deflections, House’s pregnancy had boringly, naturally resulted from a dizzying rendezvous with a minor character. Yawn. We’ll revisit that later.

Wilson sort of unhelpfully offers his two cents on what’s bothering his highly astute friend about the circumstance - or at least partially - but House isn’t in the mood. And what the big man says is true: it had barely been half a year, tops, since his stay at Mayfield. (My Amazon Prime is showing me a weird version of season 6.)

I like to think that House’s “diagnosis” was not in fact preceded by the usual litany of telltale symptoms (this is the “rare ailment” show and not everyone has early signs of pregnancy, and House has always been special), and when it was discovered inadvertently, of course it wasn’t smiles and good cheer all around. In fact, it was more along the lines of devastating lab accident: when a member of the team processed House’s mandatory drug test in their own lab at their boss’s behest (even though he was clean, surely it was part of a particular mind game to prove their weight in salt via conflict-of-interest), House’s sample was accidentally swapped with their patient’s - and she was denied, at least for the moment, a procedure due to its potential ill effects on a developing fetus. Since the distinctly-not-pregnant patient’s condition then continued to deteriorate, you could bet the collective reaction was a far cry from “Mazel tov, Dr. House!” when the crew retraced their steps and uncovered the truth. What a mess.

I imagine that it’ll also be revealed sort of offhandedly later on that House in fact did experience one of those more obscure early pregnancy symptoms he would be wise to (ex. Beccaria’s sign, a specifically-located head pain, from “Joy to the World”). It’s up to us laypeople to guess if there was a lot of, a little of, or no denial on the part of this medical mega-brain.

At work they call me 007:

0 hours of sleep

0 hours without caffeine

I think my favorite thing about him is that juxtaposition of, like, impenetrability and vulnerability. He's abrasive, impulsive, arrogant, vulgar; he's also wildly self-destructive, wracked with self-loathing, isolated, traumatized, and miserable. He's edgy and obnoxious and physically and mentally ill. He's a brooding agent of chaos with a silly animated face.

Plus he's just incredibly well-rounded and talented: an avid listener of music and musician alike, a polyglot, a monster truck enthusiast, a soap opera connoisseur. There are many things about him that shouldn't go together, but do - the most brilliant doctor in an undefined varying episode-to-episode radius is an incorrigible manchild. He's a maverick. He's without a doubt a singular person.

Differential diagnosis for parentage? Our protagonist offers contradicting yet compelling explanations to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital for his newfound condition. Evading getting up-close-and-personal or not, sometimes you need to keep ’em on their toes.

Posting here totally ruined the quality despite my best efforts, so I'll also add the scenes separately.

Me when House appears onscreen:

Pics of Francis and Lois in the reboot. (Their relationship picking up where it left off just warmed the cockles of my heart. Plus, I love what Lois is doing with her hair nowadays.)

Him and those damn tacos (accompanied by Dr. Allison Cameron looking smashing in Aviators). He even has them later on at the same spot with shooter "Moriarty". Between that and the pancakes he was digging into in his hospital bed, was he very hungry before getting shot? (He did tell Moriarty to leave the hypothetical thank-you chocolates downstairs.)

Funny and touching.

*The scene pans to House interacting with a "patient" ("Carmen Electra" with leg pain, fresh off the golf course)* House: Here's how a well-adjusted doctor handles a case. 🙂