House: Burning Down the House

Last night on House, our hero torched the place. Metaphorically speaking, of course (although I wouldn't put literal torching past him). But first, our Case of the Week. A man and wife are fished out of the ocean by the Coast Guard after risking a trip from Cuba on a tiny boat, all to see the good Doctor House. The wife, you see, has some sort of mystery illness--the kind that's pretty difficult to diagnose when her medical records are still floating in the Straits of Florida. The kind that's extra-difficult to diagnose when the doctor won't even bother to see the patient. The kind that's even more difficult to diagnose once her heart stops beating. Death is no match for House (or God, depending on who you ask), however, and the heart starts beating again. Turns out, she has some sort of crazy rare heart defect that's easily corrected by surgery. If you take the miraculous God/praying stuff out of it, the case isn't really that interesting, so I'll move on to the more meaty plots.

Failing to cope with change (his arch-nemesis) in the face of Foreman's imminent departure, House lashes out and fires Chase, claiming Chase is finished learning from him. Chase deals with it pretty well, and even better once he's back sucking face with Cameron. House crashes and burns at a last-ditch effort to try and keep Foreman, who seems more determined than ever to become something other than a change-hating misanthrope. Cameron, for her part, hands in her resignation letter when it becomes clear that House won't be inviting Chase back. (And her last great passive-aggressive salvo comes in the form of her goodbye gift to Foreman: a framed copy of the journal article he essentially stole from her.)

So yes, House's entire team: gone. Now it's just a lonely guy and his new guitar. (The new guitar, you see, indicates that House may be capable of change after all.) For someone who really hates talking to patients, he'll have to do a fair bit of that before he can find three new suck-ups to boss around. Or, more likely, before he can somehow convince the original suck-ups to return, one by one, in the first four or five episodes of the new season. You know, if I had to guess.

Last House-ku of the season:
House is all alone
How bananas is this show?
See you in the fall.