- Taub treats a patient whose dying husband gets better as she becomes sicker, while the rest of the team deals with a devastating loss.
- Incurable bed-ridden kidney patient Eddie's wife and care-taker Charlotte suddenly collapses with respiratory failure. She insists on returning to his bedside without treatment. Kutner is found at home with a bullet through his head. House seeks motives for suicide, or murder, and Wilson worries why. Taub seems to thrive with his sole friend and brighter rival out of the way.—KGF Vissers
- A family gathers around a dying man at his home, saying their good-byes. He asks to be alone with his wife. He apologizes to her for his general SOB-ness. He says he's ready. His wife says it's OK, but then starts gasping for breath. Inside-view shows us her throat has totally closed. The weak, dying man cries for help.
A 54-year-old woman with acute respiratory failure, Taub (Peter Jacobson) says. House (Hugh Laurie) thinks it's because she's overweight. Her husband is dying of lung cancer. She went to Hawaii recently. Kutner (Kal Penn) isn't there and Taub covers for him.
Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) arrives and says the woman is demanding to be released so she can be with her husband. House says go for it, but Taub says he has an idea - all by himself.
They wheel Eddie (Meat Loaf) in to join his wife.
Charlotte (Colleen Camp) is cleared to be released after her treatment works. House is fixated on the idea Kutner isn't there.
Charlotte gasps for breath, but her husband seems better.
Foreman (Omar Epps) and 13 check out Kutner's pad looking for him. No one has heard from him. They look around, it's a fanboy's dream. They don't see anything until --- 13 sees Kutner splayed on the bedroom floor. They call for an ambulance. A pool of blood spreads next to a gun. We don't see his body. Foreman and 13 try CPR but he's cold. Dead.
Kutner killed himself.
The team sits around the table, stunned. Not even House speaks. Then, he asks if Kutner said anything to anyone. House says it could have been prevented if "the idiots who worked alongside him 80 hours a week" had noticed something was wrong. Taub thinks guilt is a waste of time, since Kutner is an idiot for killing himself. He mentions the patient and the fact Eddie is getting better. Foreman suggests they pass the file off. House tries to focus.
Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) shows up. She hired a grief counselor, which she's sure none of them will see and is offering time off, which she's sure none of them will take.
They come up with another diagnosis for Charlotte.
Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) hasn't come to see House. Cuddy checks House didn't even have an inkling. Foreman and 13 want to go see Kutner's parents. House joins them.
Taub starts Charlotte on an anti-inflammatory. In the hospital bed next to her, Eddie talks her through a fantasy vacation in Rio, the one they were always supposed to take. He sits up in bed and Taub says he'd like to run a test on him.
At Kutner's adoptive parents' home. He called them Mr. and Mrs. Kutner for years, until they gave him a chemistry set. Then they were mom and dad.
His mom asks if they have any idea why he did it. House then blames his parents for letting him take their name and give him the illusion he was white. He gets really going, saying Kutner was tormented, until Foreman interrupts and tells him to leave. The parents watch, agape.
House stands to leave and manages to offer condolences.
At the hospital, Taub reports the anti-inflammatory had no effect. But her husband is getting better. He thinks he's going into remission because of love. He says nothing fits for Charlotte. House says that leaves one diagnosis.
He visits them both. He thinks her heart is too big and his is too small, but Eddie cuts him off, asking if he's kidding. Yes, he is. He thinks she's faking, thinking the sicker she was, the longer he'd hang on. She admits it, but then starts crying out with leg pain.
House looks at her legs - one is half the size of the other.
What can shred an epiglottis and make muscle disappear? House tries to figure out. He's also been calling Kutner's friends to find out if they knew anything.
Now they're thinking MS for Charlotte. House also tells Taub to go ahead with the test he was going to run behind his back to see if Eddie's heart is getting stronger.
House confronts Cuddy, asking if she let him hire a pervert. "Well," she says, "it'd be hypocritical of me not to." House has Kutner's police record. He was charged with indecent exposure. For streaking, Cuddy says. She says House should be upset, Kutner thought like him, pushed boundaries like him.
13 runs a test on Charlotte, who talks about the fact her husband never loved her as much as she loved him. It seems to resonate with 13. Then Charlotte crashes.
Taub runs his test on Eddie, who talks about wanting more time with his wife, to treat her better. The test shows Eddie's heart isn't getting any better.
Cuddy visits Wilson, saying House needs a friend. Wilson can't deal with it. She tells him House blamed his parents, which gets Wilson's attention.
Chase (Jesse Spencer) operates on Charlotte. Her spleen ruptured. Taub waits so he can biopsy it when Chase is done. Chase says he'll do it. Chase implies Taub's sticking around to avoid thinking about Kutner. "Kutner wanted to die, Charlotte doesn't, so in the contest for my concern and interest, she wins," Taub says coldly. Chase finds her liver scarred.
House stands in Kutner's apartment. Wilson visits, saying for the record he's uncomfortable violating a dead colleague's dignity. House is glad to see him. He wants to know what Kutner was hiding and why.
There's a picture on the wall of Kutner with his adoptive parents and another of him with his dead parents. That means he wasn't hiding from the pain.
Wilson suggests they hit the bar. They find his blood all over the bedroom floor. House tries to figure out what he's missing. Wilson accuses House of being there because he's trying to solve the puzzle. House says he didn't miss anything because there's nothing to miss. He thinks Kutner was murdered.
Back at the wipe board, House fields suggestions from 13 and Taub. Foreman took Cuddy's offer of time off. News to Thirteen. House reveals his wipe board, motives for Kutner's murder. As Taub accuses House of being irrational, House suggests another diagnosis.
Taub visits Charlotte. She wants to give her heart to her husband if she dies.
13 shows up on Foreman's doorstep. He wants to work through things alone. She chokes back tears as he says she should go.
Cuddy visits House, trying to dissuade him from his murder theory. The man who killed Kutner's parents is coming up for parole and Kutner testified at all his hearings. House thinks he might have had someone kill Kutner, even though he was killed with his own gun, to the temple and police found gun shot residue.
Taub and 13 try to help Charlotte, who's seizing on the floor. She broke free from her bed and injected herself with anything she could grab. Taub knows she was trying to kill herself to save her husband.
They stabilize her, but her liver is now shot. Taub thinks it was selfless. She needs a whole new liver. House plans to lie to the transplant committee because the test to confirm their theory takes 48 hours and she'll be gone in 24.
House gets a brainstorm and visits Cameron (Jennifer Morrison). He needs an incurable romantic to talk to an incurable romantic. They want to tell her that her husband is giving a partial kidney donation and then "let" him die on the table so they can take the whole thing. He's going to die anyway. Cameron convinces him to sign, but after she watches him do it, she tells House he can't do the transplant.
She saw nodules on his fingers and thinks he was misdiagnosed. House isn't interested in helping. The guy who killed Kutner's parents died of an aneurysm two months ago. He's running out of theories. Cameron tells him Kutner hid from everyone. House didn't get a chance to save him. But he can run a test to see if he can save Eddie.
House visits Eddie. He has a fungal infection, not cancer. It's curable. He doesn't want the treatment. He tells House to do the transplant. If not now, then he can do it when Eddie gets out and is hit by a car and shows up in his morgue.
House pitches it to Thirteen and Taub. 13 thinks it's tantamount to murder now that he has a chance to live. She refuses. But Taub will do it, they've already had one pointless death, he says.
He wheels Eddie into Charlotte's room, and then tells her what her husband is planning. But Charlotte is spiking a fever, and infection is spreading. One more clue.
House confronts her for lying. She didn't go to Hawaii; she went to Rio, where they have sand fleas that could infect her. She confesses. She went last year, not with anyone he knew. House thinks they were both ready to die for guilt, not love. But Taub thinks you can't have that much guilt without love.
Taub drops by Cuddy's. There's a liver on the way for Charlotte. But Taub says it's too late, they didn't catch her disease in time. Cuddy says the fact she helped buy them some time to diagnose Eddie will give her death some meaning. No, Taub says as Cuddy prepares to go to Kutner's funeral, it won't.
Wilson tells House he was wrong about him. House is terrified he's losing his gift of seeing everything, Wilson guesses.
They go to Kutner's funeral. Foreman stands alone.
Eddie and Charlotte lie in their beds, silent.
House goes back to Kutner's, looking for something, anything.
Foreman and 13 serve as pallbearers, a coffin and silence in grief separating them.
Taub stands over Charlotte as her husband takes her hand, kissing it as she fades away.
House goes through Kutner's happy, smiling childhood photos.
Foreman takes 13's hand.
Alone at the hospital, Taub finally cries.
House tries to make sense of it all. He looks at a moody picture of Kutner, inscrutable.
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