The fifth season of House premiered on September 16, 2008 and ended on May 11, 2009. The main storylines for this season include the aftermath of Amber's death and how it affects Wilson's relationship with House, Cuddy's search to be a mother, Thirteen discovering that her symptoms related to Huntington are getting worse and her new relationship with Foreman, Kutner's shocking and sudden suicide, Cameron's and Chase's relationship going to the next step, Taub's relationship with his wife and House hallucinating with Amber (and later Kutner) due to Vicodin abuse which leads him to make a very important decision.
>It began to air in a new time slot from September to December: Tuesday 8/7c. Starting January 19, 2009, House moved to Mondays at 8/7c. Sky1 has taken over the rights to screen the show in the UK airing Sundays at 9 PM.
Production[]
The Hollywood Reporter was the first to go on record that House, M.D. would be renewed for a fifth season. Later, FOX Broadcasting Company stated in this Network Prime Time Schedule [1], that House would premiere its fifth Season at 8 PM EST on September 2, 2008. However, the first episode didn't premiere until two weeks later, September 16.
Although House was originally scheduled to be shown on Tuesdays during Season 5, at mid-Season, the time slots for House and American Idol were switched on the prime time schedule, putting House's new episodes in the 8 PM EST slot on Mondays.
However, the biggest change in Season 5 was the departure of Kal Penn from the series so he could take a position at the White House. As a result of his sudden departure, his character, Lawrence Kutner was killed off. Although many critics denounced the move as unnecessary and totally unshadowed by the previous episodes, the event led to a series climax when, due to Kutner's death, House descends into psychosis and finally admits himself into a psychiatric hospital to deal with his twin demons of Vicodin and grief.
Overview[]
Wilson slowly starts to recover from Amber's untimely death, but begins to reevaluate his life and to contemplate resigning from his post at the hospital. House's original regret over his role in Amber's death seems to have worn off as instead of being supportive, he merely tries to convince Wilson that he is overreacting to the situation. However, Wilson winds up leaving his post.
House's father dies, and House tries to dodge the funeral, only to have Wilson return as a favor to Cuddy and Blythe House to ensure that House makes it. During the trip, the details of the beginnings of their friendship are revealed. House also reveals that he suspected John House wasn't his biological father and House points out a family friend at the service who House believes really is his father. After they return to Princeton, Wilson realizes he hadn't had this kind of fun since the day Amber died and decides to return to Princeton-Plainsboro.
However, Wilson has to come to terms with another loss - his homeless brother Danny reappears in his life when he is found in New York City. Wilson finds that Danny is now a stranger to him and that the initial incident that led to his disappearance has shaped his behavior in ways only House seems to fully comprehend.
Thirteen has to confront the reality, forced upon her by Amber's death at an early age, that she too is facing a lifetime with a devastating illness. Her behavior quickly starts to deteriorate and she is fired and then re-hired. However, she soon returns to her undisciplined ways. As a result, Foreman begins first to get concerned about her behavior, then starts to feel protective. It soon blooms into a romance, but House feels it is affecting their medical judgement and tries to make them break up.
Cuddy tries to adopt, but after House tries to convince her not to, the adoption falls through anyway. When House tries to show his condolences and Cuddy snaps at him for changing his tune, they embrace and kiss. Wilson realizes that the two are very attracted to each other and attempts to make them confront their feelings. We soon begin to realize that although they are both reluctant to begin a romantic relationship, both want the other to be more involved in their lives.
Cuddy finds another girl to adopt, Rachel. Feeling overwhelmed by both her hospital responsibilities and the demands of a new child, she accepts Wilson's suggestion that she hand over some of her hospital duties to a deputy. To handle the almost full-time job of supervising House, she turns to Cameron, who is incredibly adept at handling her old boss, but soon realizes she isn't up to the challenge on a constant basis and that anyone else would just say "no" to House all the time. Cuddy returns to cover all her duties and starts to make House's life as miserable as possible for keeping her away from her child, including posting signs on the elevator that it is scheduled for maintenance (which it's not) and setting up a trip wire in the doorway or part of his office. She later stops tormenting House when she decides that making his life miserable won't do any good.
House comes to work in a good mood, setting everybody off. Wilson and Foreman conclude that House is taking heroin. Wilson takes House out to dinner and buys him a drink, and after House drinks it, he walks off indignant that Wilson would suspect that he is taking heroin. However, Wilson follows him and finds him puking it up out back by a dumpster, House finally admits he is taking Methadone because it has put an end to the pain in his leg. After threatening to leave if Cuddy won't agree to methadone treatment, he instead goes back to Vicodin because his changed behavior with methadone almost cost a patient his life.
The entire team is shocked and confused when Kutner commits suicide and the whole team is saddened by his loss. House, not wanting to think he couldn't see it coming, reaches the conclusion that it was murder, until he looks through a bunch of photos and finds one showing a lone Kutner with a blank expression - in contrast to the smile he wore in the other photos when he was with other people.
Not long after Kutner's suicide, House develops severe insomnia and begins to hallucinate, seeing visions of Amber. These visions are extremely vivid and allow House a direct line to his own sub-conscious. However, House is soon carrying out actual conversations with Amber to the point where he uses a Bluetooth Headset while at the Hospital so it does not appear he's talking to himself. After subjecting himself to a number of dangerous treatments, the hallucinations are eventually shown to be an obvious and common result of Vicodin abuse.
Chase and Cameron start getting more serious about their relationship. Eventually, Chase plans to propose to Cameron, but when she learns about his plans, she starts making excuses not to go away with him. She finally confesses that she doesn't know what do. Chase proposes anyway, and Cameron finally accepts. Shortly thereafter, House takes over the planning of Chase's bachelor party, hiring a stripper and hosting it at Wilson's apartment. While at the bachelor party, Chase does a body shot off of Karamel, a stripper suggested by the Amber hallucination who was also at Wilson's bachelor party for his third wife. The stripper had used strawberry body butter, and as a result of his strawberry allergy, Chase goes into an anaphylactic shock, and is saved by a medical student with an EpiPen. House realizes that he knew about Karamel's body butter and that the his subconscious was out to get Chase - the Amber hallucination has become dangerous.
After Chase recovers, he and Cameron continue with their wedding plans. Cameron reveals that she was keeping a frozen sample of her deceased first husband's sperm in case she never found a new person but still wanted to have children. They finally compromise with Chase agreeing she can keep the sample.
House eventually believes he has confessed the hallucinations to Cuddy and that she helped him through the painful withdrawal process. After House dries out, he starts to kiss in her and it was implied that they made love afterwards. The encounter, however, was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hallucination and delusion. As House realizes this, he hallucinates about both Amber and Kutner.
The season ends with alternating shots of Cuddy, Foreman, Taub and Thirteen enjoying Cameron and Chase's wedding and Wilson driving House to a sanatorium, which House willingly enters.
Cast[]
Main Cast[]
- Hugh Laurie as Gregory House
- Lisa Edelstein as Lisa Cuddy
- Omar Epps as Eric Foreman
- Robert Sean Leonard as James Wilson
- Jennifer Morrison as Allison Cameron
- Jesse Spencer as Robert Chase
- Peter Jacobson as Chris Taub
- Olivia Wilde as Remy "Thirteen" Hadley
- Kal Penn as Lawrence Kutner
Recurring Characters[]
- Michael Weston as Lucas Douglas (3 Episodes)
- Lori Petty as Janice Burke (3 Episodes)
- Anne Dudek as Amber hallucination (4 Episodes)
Episodes[]
Number | Title | Original Air Date | Plot |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Dying Changes Everything | September 16, 2008 | In the aftermath of personal tragedy, Wilson resigns from the hospital… and from his friendship with House. Meanwhile, Thirteen struggles with her personal medical problems while helping treat an executive assistant with a similar situation to her own. |
2 | Not Cancer | September 23, 2008 | The team deals with an organ donor whose organs prove fatal, and the two surviving patients. Meanwhile, House hires a private detective to spy on Wilson, but hears a few things about himself that he'd rather not. |
3 | Adverse Events | September 30, 2008 | A painter's undiagnosed illness affects his work, and House and his team must look at the man's paintings to determine what's wrong with him. |
4 | Birthmarks | October 14, 2008 | While en route to his father's funeral, House must help the team with a differential diagnosis on a young Chinese girl who has collapsed under mysterious circumstances. |
5 | Lucky Thirteen | October 21, 2008 | Thirteen brings her one-night stand to the hospital after the woman has a seizure. However, the woman admits she slept with Thirteen just so she could get to House and have him diagnose her condition. Meanwhile, House continues to pay Lucas to spy on Wilson. |
6 | Joy | October 28, 2008 | An ailing man suffers from blackouts and sleepwalks, leading the team to wonder if his sleepwalking is a symptom, or how the man is becoming exposed to something else. When the man's daughter grows ill as well, the team must provide a diagnosis before both die. Meanwhile, Cuddy adopts a newborn but when the birth mother displays a rash, she has to make a decision between putting the mother or daughter at risk. |
7 | The Itch | November 11, 2008 | The team must treat an agoraphobic who refuses to leave his house, and have to work around Cuddy, who is less than thrilled at having hospital equipment relocated. Meanwhile, House is plagued by an itch, and Cameron and Chase have relationship issues. |
8 | Emancipation | November 18, 2008 | While Foreman takes on a pediatric case on his own, the rest of the team deals with a 16-year-old factory manager and emancipated minor who collapses at work. When Foreman's patient takes a turn for the worse, he's forced to question whether he can deal with the situation on his own, or if he needs House's help. |
9 | Last Resort | November 25, 2008 | A man seeking the right diagnosis for his illness is willing to take on the hospital and the SWAT team to get it. He takes thirteen and several patients from the waiting room and puts them in Cuddy's office. To put an end to the crisis they must come up with the right diagnosis, treat the wounded, and hold off a SWAT team. |
10 | Let Them Eat Cake | December 2, 2008 | The team takes on the case of a fitness guru on an all-natural diet who collapsed while filming a video. Meanwhile, Foreman conducts Huntington's Disease drug trials and Thirteen signs on as a subject, Cuddy is forced to move into House's office, and Kutner uses House's name to run an online medical-advice website. |
11 | Joy to the World | December 9, 2008 | House and his team deal with a bullied girl who collapses during her school's Christmas program. Meanwhile, Foreman and Thirteen grow closer during the Huntington's disease drug trials, House gives a patient a gift, the staff wonder who gave House a special gift, and Cuddy gets an unexpected gift. |
12 | Painless | January 19, 2009 | House and the team try to diagnose a man living with severe, chronic pain; Thirteen and Foreman explore their complicated relationship; Cuddy discovers that caring for her baby leaves her with little time to run the hospital. |
13 | Big Baby | January 26, 2009 | Cuddy decides to spend more time at home to take care of her newly adopted baby and passes some of her day-to-day responsibilities off to Cameron, including supervising House. Cameron is forced to play House's games and becomes involved in a power struggle as he and the team take on the case of a Special Education teacher who collapsed after spitting up blood in the middle of class. As House tests Cameron's tolerance for his extreme measures, the patient continues to fall ill and House insists the teacher's seemingly inherent goodness is actually a pathology. |
14 | The Greater Good | February 2, 2009 | House and the team take on the case of a woman who collapsed in the middle of a cooking class, and they soon learn she is a highly-renowned cancer researcher who recently gave up her entire career in order to pursue her own personal happiness. Though the team struggles to understand how the woman could give up saving lives for the sake of her own contentment, each grapple with the pursuit of happiness (or lack thereof) in their own lives. As the patient's condition continues to worsen, so does Thirteen's as she begins to suffer serious and life-threatening reactions to the experimental Huntington's Disease clinical trial. Meanwhile, Cuddy attempts to make House's life miserable for him in retaliation for his part in her own unhappiness. |
15 | Unfaithful | February 16, 2009 | When a priest who runs a homeless shelter sees a bleeding Jesus hovering at his doorstep, he is admitted to the ER. House takes on the case as a distraction for the team while he confronts Foreman and Thirteen about their relationship. The team soon learns the priest had been involved in a molestation scandal that caused him to lose his faith. However, just as they are about to dismiss his case, the patient's condition takes a drastic turn for the worse, and House grapples with his past and his belief. |
16 | The Softer Side | February 23, 2009 | A patient with both male and female DNA has the team stumped. Meanwhile, House starts acting nicely, raising Cuddy and Wilson's suspicions that something is terribly wrong. |
17 | The Social Contract | March 9, 2009 | House and the team take on the case of Nick, a book editor who loses his inhibitions. The team realizes Nick has frontal lobe disinhibition, which causes him to speak his mind having no control over what he says and making him just like House. Meanwhile, House suspects Wilson and Taub are keeping something from him. |
18 | Here Kitty | March 16, 2009 | Morgan works in a nursing home with a pet cat who only sleeps next to people if they are about to die - and does so with alarmingly accuracy. When it seems the cat has predicted her own death, Morgan, convinced she is about to die, fakes a seizure in order to get to House to have him diagnose her before it's too late. |
19 | Locked In | March 30, 2009 | A man awakens in New York after a bicycle accident unable to move or communicate in any way. House, himself injured in a motorcycle mishap, occupies the hospital bed next to Lee and quickly annoys the doctors treating them both by insisting that Lee has "locked-in" syndrome. |
20 | Simple Explanation | April 6, 2009 | Charlotte, an older woman who has spent the last six months taking care of her dying husband Eddie, is rushed to Princeton Plainsboro after collapsing from respiratory failure. The couple becomes a double mystery for the team when Eddie begins to improve as Charlotte's condition worsens. The previously unthinkable becomes real when it seems that Charlotte will die before Eddie, and the team will be forced to make a difficult decision. |
21 | Saviors | April 13, 2009 | Cameron postpones her vacation with Chase in order to ask House to accept the case of an environmental radical who collapsed at a protest with unexplainable symptoms. Although suspicious of her motives, House agrees. Since she pushed him to take the case so emphatically, House forces Cameron to take the lead and run many of the tests on the patient. Meanwhile, House is unsure of Wilson's new healthy diet. |
22 | House Divided | April 27, 2009 | The team takes on the case of a deaf 14-year-old named Seth who collapsed after he started "hearing" explosions while competing in a wrestling match. When the team tries to test him for seizures, Seth loses vision in one eye, complicating House's bunk theory of "Exploding Head Syndrome." As his condition worsens, the team has an ethical disagreement about the patient and his mother's adamant decision to forego cochlear implants to supplement his hearing. When the prospect of giving Seth the ability to hear for the first time in his life arises, House and the team are faced with a resounding decision. Meanwhile, House's lack of sleep starts to play tricks on his mind, but he finds his insomnia may be a gift instead of a burden |
23 | Under My Skin | May 4, 2009 | House and the team take on the case of a ballerina whose lungs collapse in the middle of a performance. When the treatment causes her skin to fall off, the dancer faces not only the prospect of never dancing again but also of dying an agonizing death. The team must use their imaginations to carefully choreograph ways to test and treat her delicate body without killing her. Meanwhile, House continues to suffer from what he thinks is insomnia, and he is willing to go to desperate measures to cure it. |
24 | Both Sides Now | May 11, 2009 | House and the team are intrigued by Scott, a man whose left brain and right brain operate independently, leaving him with two distinct personalities and no control over some of his actions. As the two sides of Scott's brain struggle for dominance, his warring personalities make it increasingly difficult for the team to figure out what is causing the unique problem. The team is forced to use some unusual methods to get him to cooperate with their necessary testing. Meanwhile, when House refuses to make an appearance in the clinic, Cuddy takes an unconventional approach to force House to make up the time with a particular patient. |
Video[]
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