House Season 8 Episode 5 Recap: The Confession
In the opening scene of the episode, a small town is honoring Bob, a 30-something local businessman and prominent member of the community, for his service to the town. But we quickly find out that he may not be as virtuous and honorable as he’d like everyone to know when we see him cheating on his wife with the local beauty queen in a seedy hotel room. But while having sex he suddenly becomes disoriented, feels shortness of breath, and then collapses.
House’s team is back together, now that he was able to get the money together to fund his department. Chase and Taub return, and we find out that in the meantime Chase quit medicine and that Taub went back into plastic surgery. On his first day back on the job, Taub has to find a babysitter for his two daughters, born from two women he got pregnant at the same time a little over a year ago. Now he’s with neither woman, but has both kids for a few days and asks Foreman, then Wilson, to help him babysit.
Meanwhile Bob is consumed with guilt about his affair and feels that he needs to tell his wife before he goes into surgery. But this is only the start of his repentant attitude. When the team decides he needs a liver transplant, dozens of people from Bob’s town show up to be donors. But he decides to go into a long series of confessions about many dishonorable things he’s done to the town, from fraud to embezzlement and more. Eventually, he even confesses to Chase that he killed his former business partner and “3 or 4 other people.” This confession raises some red flags, and the team discovers that the confessions are another symptom. In fact, he’s done none of these things he’s confessed to all along. The team traces the confessions to a brain aneurysm caused by a rare disease normally only found in young Asian children. Bob is treated and cured. And then he lies to his wife that he never cheated on her and chalks the confession up to his condition.
As far as the team is concerned, House spends much of the episode trying to get a DNA sample from Taub and his two children, so he can prove that Taub may not be the father of both kids. He even starts a hospital-wide betting pool on whether or not Taub is the father. In the end, when faced with knowing or not knowing, Taub decides to shred the results without looking at them.
It also seems that there may be some (surprise, surprise) attraction between Chase and Adams, which House points out not-so-subtlety on two occasions. And House hires a renovation team to redo his newly reclaimed outer office, only to find out at the end of the episode that he’s simply installed a removable wall between his office and Wilson’s. Wilson is not amused.
As far as House episodes go, this one was pretty standard, which is a bit of a disappointment. The first 4 episodes of the season have been refreshingly different from House’s normal plot structure and some interesting dynamics had been forming between House, Adams, Park, and Foreman. But now that Taub and Chase are back, it seems the writers have settled back into their usual tropes and plot devices. Not that that’s a bad thing, the show is still well-written and acted, I just hope that the writers can continue to develop Adams and Park (as well as Forman in his new role) instead of simply plugging them into the House plot structure and moving forward with business as usual.
Image courtesy of Fox.
James Ged is a writer who watches too much TV. But he’s found a good outlet as a blogger for CableTV.com. You can follow him on Tumblr: TV Buzzer.
