(S02E23) What's curious about shows that are super-formulaic in nature, is that when they're good, you don't care about how things are constructed, it's all about what is constructed and how the characters interact with each other. And yes, I know, this has been harped on to know end by me and some commenters on this site for a long time now, but that's a good thing. This week's episode, "Who's Your Daddy?" was pretty much spot on when it comes to that concept, with a young girl named Leona coming to the hospital after experiencing a horrible vision of flooding and her dead mother on the plane she is flying on. Leona, we have been told, is a survivor of the devastation that Hurricane Katrina put on the New Orleans area, and is now, for some reason, re-experiencing things that terrorized her.

At the same time, House is experiencing horrible leg pain, which has got to be pretty bad considering what his pain threshold on a regular basis is. He's storming around his apartment, even climbing up a step stool to get a box, hidden on top of a bookshelf, that contains needles and other pain medication that looks like his "last stop" when it comes to fixing what ails him. Once again, Cuddy rings him up on the telephone, and we get to hear his funny answering machine message, but also see that she knows how to push his buttons by saying exactly what curiousness would bring him in to treat a patient.

D. B. Sweeney guest-stars this week as Crandall, who knows House from back in the day, and plays the man that has been told that he is Leona's father. Yet again, we meet someone who has had some sort of issues with House at another point in his life, but that's not surprising, is it? What was surprising to me was House picking out Crandall as an easy mark for Leona and her mother, as he wrote a book about the girl's grandfather, a well-known musician. The doc says he never took a paternity test for Crandall throughout the show, and Wilson calls him out on it, and gets the big denial. As it turns out, not only did he give the test, but ends up lying to Crandall about being the girl's father - which he actually isn't, says the big "NEGATIVE" on the test results.

What was the big story this week, one that only took up five minutes or so of actual show time, was Cuddy having House review the medical records of sperm donors. Sperm donors, you ask? Yep, looks like the chief doc is looking to have a baby, and going the artificial route. Even more amusing was the fact that the redhead kid from the Verizon Wireless commercials (you know, the ones where he is the first of his friends to have a job, and they go about harassing and embarrassing him all day long through various ways on his phone?) is one of the donors, who House brings in to meet with Cuddy under the guise of him being a new intern on the staff. Now if that wasn't funny for her to see the donor she had chosen in person, then nothing is.

But that wasn't the best part. After House gets her to hike up her skirt (twice) to give her an injection so that she will take the donor sperm better, they end up in an ongoing discussion about, they get to talking about who she should have the baby with. Whether or not he's offering his services or not is unclear, but when she rolled into his office later in the day, thanking him for the injections, something was up. She said that she had more to say, with the big grin on her face, but she didn't say any more. So either she's figured out who it is that she "likes" that she'd like to have a baby with, or she's buttering him up for it.

Next week's finale looks like a big time barn burner, and we've even been shown exactly what it's all about. House getting shot by a former patient? Wow, surprising it took this long. But if it has "everything we could want" as a finale, it should end up giving us a little bit of love-interest stuff (Cameron?), some death (the patient?), and some more conflict between the team. Hopefully, we won't get a preview of anyone on the team walking off the show, but you never know, as the writers might pull out all the stops just because they can. Additionally, check out the features section on the fox.com site, where there are already a few photos up from next week's finale, "No Reason."