(S06E16) "I'm going to be dead in a few hours. Your secrets couldn't be safer, unless you're keeping them from yourself." - Nash to House

'House' entered into one of television's most overused cliches last night: the "randomly stuck together somewhere plot line." It's happened so many times that attempting to count all of them would require a NASA scientist, a team of fact checkers and one of those slick-looking slide rules that only a handful of people left in the universe know how to use.

This time, the team gets separated into different parts of the hospital during a lock down. Each has their own interesting stories to tell as they whittle away the hours, and each have varying degrees of success.

(S07E02) I really thought this was going to be a superb Monk. It had all the elements of a top notch cat and mouse affair, starting with guest star David Strathairn -- so brilliant in Good Night and Good Luck as Edward R. Murrow -- as a chess grand master, Patrick Kloster. The set up was elegant; Kloster's wife hires Monk to investigate her murder because she is certain her husband will follow through on his perfect plan to kill her. Within a day, she's dead and the chess master has an airtight alibi. How did he do it? It was a Columbo gambit, and only a genius like Columbo -- or Monk -- could figure it out.

Unfortunately, this episode wasn't written by Levinson and Link. The clues to the mystery fell into place without any great surprise or twist. The wife was poisoned when she drank from a secret stash of oleander laced wine, which was never found. That was just Monk's supposition after swiping the flowers from the garden. That would be inadmissible evidence because he had no warrant to get them from Kloster's home. Then he actually tried to plant the evidence -- again, not very smart or Monk-like.