'House': Lucas is back, but does Cuddy still have feelings for House?

Our favorite misanthropic doctor is growing by leaps and bounds these days on "House," as he confesses a long-standing interest in Cuddy, saves his friend's career, and even manages to take rejection with some amount of grace and understanding. Um...that's great and all, but is anyone else starting to itch for the old Dr. House? I did love learning more about House and Cuddy's history, though. Interesting stuff.

The Case: Our Patient of the Week is a teenage party gal with severely swollen hands and feet after a wild night of stalking a comic book creator. Her friends say she "looks like the marshmallow man," and I can't think of a more accurate or funnier description, so we'll go with that. She starts off with low potassium and rhabdo, and quickly develops bleeding around her heart, followed by compulsive lying caused by a brain bleed.

They manage to determine through security tapes that she found the comic book writer's journal, and used it as an excuse to go to his hotel room. The writer isn't talking, and the patient has clearly been exposed to something toxic that's now damaging her kidneys, too. They give her a drug that will help her to tell the truth, with the inconsequential potential side effect of stopping her heart. Um, if House isn't there doesn't that mean you can avoid putting your patients' lives at risk with wacky procedures that might not even work?

She describes going into the writer's room, being drugged, and being taken advantage of. Thankfully, she's still lying. Unfortunately, that means they still don't know what's wrong with her. But we've got fifteen whole minutes left, so it clearly couldn't have been that easy, right? No eleventh-hour realization by House = no cure. 

Turns out (courtesy of the traditional eleventh-hour realization) she has vibrio vulnificus thanks to an oyster dinner at the hotel and underlying hemochromatosis, made worse by the iron supplements and blood transfusions they gave her. Mystery solved! Is it just me, or was this one a bit less than satisfying? Oh, and it turns out she never even got up the courage to knock on the writer's door. I do like the image of an outwardly confident, gets-her-way girl who's secretly a nervous fangirl.

Huddy House and Cuddy: Wilson has a medical conference over the weekend, and House refuses to go until he finds out Cuddy is going. And then he plans to subtly win her over at an 80's dance during the conference. So subtly, in fact, she won't know what's happening - like a frog in gradually boiling water (ew), "she'll be red and delicious before she knows it." House chooses to dress like someone from the 1780's and it's pretty adorable. And of course, just as he and Cuddy start to dance, the music slows to "Time After Time." Awwww.

They discuss how they met at the bookstore right after she started med school (he rudely psychoanalyzed her based on her course schedule, of course), and how she tracked him down at a party, and one thing led to another...and then it didn't.

House: "I was gonna call you."
Cuddy: "No...don't do that. There was no expectations. I was just as into it-"
House: "I was gonna come see you. Figure out where things would go from there. That was the morning I got the call from the dean, and I was expelled from my first med school, and there didn't seem any point." 

Cuddy stares at him, flustered, and quickly makes an excuse to leave. House stands there in his adorable powdered wig, with a Lloyd Dobler wannabe waving a boombox in the air behind him. I love 80's parties. Wilson asks about it the next morning, and House describes their new phase: "I tell Cuddy that I've always been interested in her, and she walks out of the room." Yeah, that's pretty much how it went down. Cuddy later explains to Wilson that she can't rely on House - and she needs someone dependable now that she's a mother.

And how can he convince Cuddy he's reliable? He can fill in for her cancelled babysitter. But Oh. My. God. When House goes down to Cuddy's room and offers to watch Rachel, he discovers that the job is already taken...by Lucas, the P.I. Awk-ward. And sad. And WEAK. Cuddy hired him to investigate an accountant, and, well...yeah. Lucas makes it way more awkward by discussing in depth the psychological implications of House's hallucination in which he and Cuddy had sex. Saaaad. House acknowledges to Wilson that Lucas looks like a guy who'd be there every day. Uncharacteristically defeatist for House, but maybe that's part of his whole new leaf thing.

Gregory House - Best Friend Extraordinaire: Wilson's giving a paper at the medical conference, but doesn't ask House for his notes. Because it's about euthanasia. ("Let's tell the truth - we all do it.") Wow. He's determined to say what life is really like for someone who's dying, and what it's like for the doctors. House is understandably concerned for Wilson's career - especially after Wilson claims that his newfound foolhardiness was learned from House's "do what's right and damn the consequences" attitude.

Unfortunately for Wilson, said attitude leads House to drug his grape soda. His last words before passing out? "She's better off without you." Eh, maybe. Or maybe not - House passes off Wilson's career-killing paper as his own (well, as "Dr. Perlmutter," whose nametag he stole), getting the message across that Wilson thinks is so important, while saving his best friend from public censure. Only House could turn plagiarism into something so sweet.

Wilson walks in mid-presentation, as House is reading his words about how he failed a patient by leaving him when he was overdosing on morphine - and House interrupts himself to say how wrong he was to write that, and that he's actually incapable of turning away from responsibility. And that his friends take advantage of that. Hmm. Still sweet, but may sound a bit immodest to everyone in the crowd aside from Wilson.

The crowd is appreciative of his courage, but Wilson is furious. House points out that if the idea was to get the paper out there, mission accomplished. If, however, this was about Wilson feeling impotent and making a "grand, stupid gesture," House acknowledges unrepetantly that he screwed it up. And Wilson later thanks House for letting him off the hook morally: "You're a good friend. Cuddy should know that."  

Chase's Affair with Murder: Chase struggles over whether to tell Cameron about his minor murdering issue. She apologizes to him for suspecting the worst, and agrees that if he says he's not having an affair, he's not. But she offers to help him, with whatever it is that's eating away at him: "I love you no matter what." Easy words to say when you don't know what's wrong. Once Chase confesses to killing Dibala, Cameron sits there, stunned, and we go to black. 

Quotes:

• Wilson: "Yes, you can sit here running up my hotel bill, or you can go get the woman of your dreams." House: "I didn't know Angela Merkel was attending the conference."
• House has named Cuddy's boobs "Patty" and "Selma," because they're always smoking. Ha! Cuddy: "I feel bad. I haven't named your testicles."

Do you feel like House is still House, or that rehab changed him too much? Are you on board the House/Cuddy train?

Related:

'House': Robert Sean Leonard on Wilson & his new roommate
'House': Jennifer Morrison reportedly leaving the show
More 'House' recaps

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