House – Recap & Review – Unwritten

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House
Unwritten

Original Air Date: Oct 4, 2010

Shannon – Associate Editor
shannon@thetwocentscorp.com

This week’s patient is author Alice Tanner. She writes Boy Detective books on an old school typewriter at breakneck speed. She finishes her manuscript and argues with her son when she says that was her last book. Then she pulls a pistol out of her desk drawer and tries to kill herself. Before she can do that she has a seizure and grazes herself with the bullet.  The housekeeper comes running in to find Alice unconscious.  The interesting thing is that the son collapses at the same time as his mom.  Hmm…interesting.

House helps himself to a coma patient’s candy and flowers. House is still convinced that he and Cuddy have nothing in common but work and that all they have going for them is sex and when she gets tired of that she’ll dump him if he can’t find something they both enjoy.

House does a check on Alice in the ER. He’s a big fan of her books even though they’re apparently the Twilight of the TV world in that their demographic is teenage girls. House asks how the new book is coming and Alice says she doesn’t talk about her books but if House wouldn’t mind speeding things along and discharging her, she’ll answer one question. House says it’s a deal and his question is why did Alice try to kill herself? Alice gets up to leave but House tells security she’s on pscyhiatric observation and if she tries to leave to shoot her. With a sedative, not bullets. House has the team do a workup.

House and Cuddy break into Alice’s house and gets busted by the housekeeper. Christina, the housekeeper, thinks Alice is horribly depressed. Christina also says Alice eats a lot of canned tuna. House steals the typewriter ribbon so he can read the latest book.

Alice’s son shows up to visit and, oh, he’s an hallucination.   That would explain why he collapsed at the beginning.  If she doesn’t exist, neither does he.  She’s also an expert personality reader and she can tell Chase is recently divorced and had a hookup the night before. She’s assessing Taub and how he reminds her of her cheating ex husband when something happens to her head and it’s about to explode. House instructs the team to give Alice an MRI and after they wheel her into the room her leg catches on fire. See, she has these metal screws in her leg and the MRI is magnetic causing the metal in her leg to heat up and burn right through her skin. Taub complains that she didn’t tell them she had metal in her leg and she signed the consent form. House thinks they need to get her to cooperate using something she wants as leverage. Foreman argues that the only thing she wants is to die and House thinks he can work with that.

House gives Alice a syringe filled with a mystery toxin that will kill Alice painlessly in exchange with her cooperation for the next few hours. If they can make her better and she still wants to kill herself, fine, she’ll have the syringe of death. Alice makes the deal but immediately injects herself with the poison. But you and I both know it’s saline or something because a) the show’s only half over and b) House would have known that’s exactly what she’d do. She just committed one of the classic blunders. The first is never get into a land war in Asia, and only slightly less well known is this: never go in against House when death is on the line. And third: it’s not lupus.

Alice wakes up the next morning and is peeved about that, of course. She tells House to go ahead and do what he wants because she’s out of there tomorrow. Not so fast, sister, your psych eval is extended because you tried to kill yourself. Ha ha. Alice tells House that Jack dies in the book she just wrote. House thinks that if they can find out what the book is about that they can figure out what’s wrong with Alice. House enlists Wilson’s girlfriend, Sam, to help him read the ribbons in the MRI. House reads the book and Jack doesn’t die, in fact, book ends on a cliffhanger. Jack’s mentor, Aunt Helen, develops some mysterious symptoms and kills herself halfway through the book. The team takes those symptoms plus the ones Alice already has and they get…wait for it…lupus! House says it can’t be lupus because that isn’t curable and Alice has to live so she can write Jack a proper ending.

House and Cuddy go on a double date with Wilson and Sam. House takes them to a go kart track. Sam is a cutthroat driver and House tells Cuddy it’s because Sam hates Jews. It’s all fun and games until Cuddy gets hurt. Cuddy says she’s going home. Wilson says it’s just the pain talking. House epiphanies. It’s not lupus (told you!) it’s hypothyroidism. House tells Alice she’s going to live to give Jack a proper ending and she gets mad and goes paralytic.

House and the team figure out that there’s some residue from a 15 year old car accident that’s pressing up against her spinal column (that’s also where the leg screws came from). If they could do surgery they could remove it and she would be fine but she’s refusing the surgery. House wants to know why she’s punishing herself. Brainstorming with Cuddy concludes that Alice Tanner isn’t her real name. It’s Helen and that Jack is based on her son that she lost in the car accident. House did some digging on the son’s autopsy from the crash and he tells Alice that her son had a brain aneurysm and would have died that day no matter what. That relieves Alice of the guilt and she consents to the surgery. In reality, House is just a great liar. There was no aneurysm.

Christina is back, by the way. Alice recovers from her surgery but she no longer wants to write about Jack. House is peeved. He almost tells Alice the truth about her son, but he sees Cuddy out in the hall and changes his mind. Cuddy’s right. They do make each other better.

I actually really liked this episode. I like that they brought back the part of House that likes sappy romances (remember his fascination with daytime soaps?) and that he was conflicted between wanting to help his patient because he’s a doctor and wanting to help the writer survive so she could finish his favorite book series. Let me know what you think. Leave me a comment!