'House' Season 7, Episode 13 Recap

['House' - "Two Stories"]

In the spirit of fairness, I wasn't going into this 'House' episode in the best of moods, considering I had to work on a holiday. Not only have the last few episodes been a milligram of melatonin away from being a total snore, but I was all ready to start trashing something to turn it into my own stress ball. A non-metaphorical stress ball would have been more effective.

As usual, the episode felt uneven, fighting between the medical drama and the melodrama, but at least it managed to shake free of the stiffling pattern of diagnosis, symptoms and resolution that made every episode feel rote and predictable.

The most noted improvement was the fact that it didn't start in the usual bloody opening of the patient of the hour suffering from yet another unexplained symptom that sets everything in motion. It didn't have the usual power grip that a bleeding face or twitchy body can produce, but any change with this show is a good thing.

Then, as we learn that House is trapped in a classroom full of quizzical kiddies, that old feeling of "jump the shark" creeps up but the disjointed storyline that leaps back and forth between House's struggles to keep Cuddy and the two kissy-faced kids felt like a fresh idea for a show that ran out of fresh ideas long ago. Even an episode of "Kindergarten Oncologist" can be a welcome change for a show as overdone as this one.



It's also a different way to spring the possibility that Cuddy is considering dumping House without just springing it in the course of a regular plot. It gives it a different twist other than just a new mystery symptom and a reason to care to keep watching something other than the blinking clock on my VCR (yes, I still have one, deal with it).

The kids' story was cute but didn't really give me a reason to care about their resolution since anyone one who had seen more than five minutes of 'House' could tell it would just serve as a catalyst for House's problems.

And even though it seemed that House had learned his lesson and seemed willing to sacrifice a piece of his typical personality for another tiny shot at happiness, something tells me that he's going to forget that lesson for the sake of another plot.

After all, haven't you learned by now that "everybody lies"? Maybe not always, but eventually.

'House' airs Mondays at 8PM ET on Fox