['House' - "Bombshells"]

'House' hasn't been the show that everyone has been looking forward to seeing at the end of a hard day. It's not something that most people stare at the office wall clock praying that the minutes go by so they can learn what interesting or scary disease someone has contracted and how, when, or where it will kill them.

Someone out there is still watching it though, other than contractually obligated TV critics. It's not burning up the charts, but it handily scores the top spots vs. its competition in that all-important age 18-49 demographic. Could it be that TV fans have just been hanging on through all this viscerally painful viewing to see how their favorite medical detective (well, only if you don't count 'Quincy' and Dick Van Dyke's character on 'Diagnosis: Murder' in a very distant third) is doing in his difficult time of unending happiness?

Last night, they got their answer. The moment we all saw coming when Cuddy and House finally hooked up way back at the end of last season came when we didn't see it coming.



A breakup between the two love-struck physicians was inevitable since Cuddy is a level-headed single mother who can be her own rock without House, and House is basically a giant kid with a gland problem. He was bound to say the wrong thing, do the wrong whatever, or pull a prank so unworthy of Cuddy's future affection that it would take a nuclear holocaust to bring the two back together. Maybe.

The execution was really the biggest surprise to the moment we all thought we could see coming. Cuddy comes down with some mysterious growth and of course, House immediately thinks it's fatal even before they do the ultrasound. That's because he spends the first chunk of the show denying it up and down so he won't have to deal with the hand-holding comforting and sappy reassuring that he hates even having to watch his patients go through.

During this classic case of denial, we get to watch Cuddy's subconscious play "Pictionary" with her situation by drawing up all sorts of TV- and movie-inspired dreams from a hokey "Leave it to Beaver" rip-off with House playing a weird mix of Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont to an obvious "Two and a Half Men" live action comedy with House as a slightly less cocky Charlie Sheen. The timing on the airing of that last one could not have been more perfect.

Character dreams are a huge television convention, an easy way for the writer to convey whatever the character is feeling without using actual dialogue or scenes in the context of a story that make logical sense. Here, they felt more organic even when they were being very tongue-in-cheek. They didn't come right out and tell you what Cuddy was thinking or even worried about. They actually made you think about it until the answer came flying out of her in the climatic final scene. Plus, anything that references 'The Evil Dead' gets a big thumbs up from me, even if undead and decaying zombies that can run and fight as well as a Romanian gymnast still send me into a fanboy rant.

And here's the biggest shocker of them all: Taub was the good cop. He was actually placed in a situation where you not only felt sorry for him, but you actually rooted for him to do the right thing. He was paired off with the patient of the week -- a disturbed high school kid in a deep depression that went pretty deep for a kid who may or may not have been cutting himself to feel alive. The kid's story actually got pretty dark, even for a show that treats bloody urine and cystic tumors as an everyday plot point. Taub even seemed to have some genuine affection and concern for someone other than himself or his latest conquest. It was so good, and so worthy of my time that I actually hope the plot carries through to the next episode.

Of course, the big bombshell of the night was Cuddy's eventual break-up with House over something that, frankly, I had forgotten about for almost a year. House's inability to be comfortable, or even show the affection that Cuddy needed in her darkest hour, drove him back to his old partner, Dr. Vicodin, and just when we thought that House had grown up and faced pain that we all will eventually have to deal with in some form or another, it turns out he was really just resting himself on another cane.

The moment felt genuine, surprising and actually human, for once this season. I can't believe I'm about to write this but I'm actually looking forward to the season finale, and not because it will be the last 'House' episode that I'll have to watch for at least the next nine months.

'House' airs Mondays, 8PM ET on FOX.