TVSquad

(S04E15) Do you remember what you were doing on May 16, 2004? Think hard, it's important. Seriously, that information could determine exactly how you feel about tonight's episode.

On May 16, 2004, The Sopranos aired an episode called "The Test Dream." Tony, reeling from an impending separation and problems in Mafia-town, went a little funny in the head and spent most of the episode engaged in the longest, most weirdly symbolic dream sequence in the history of television (until, that is, the show broke its own record two years later). If you remember, fans of the show were pretty angry; my father, for instance, shot out his screen, Elvis-style.

Anyway, I'm going to guess that you either loved that episode or hated it. How you felt about it probably informs how you felt about tonight's House. My own feelings about it are simple...

I loved it.

Maybe it's the four years I majored in English, pretending to care about BS symbolism, but I found both "The Test Dream" and tonight's House riveting television.

Tonight's sparkling gem of an episode opens with House sitting in front of the hottest stripper the FOX censors could allow. He's drunk and he can't remember how he got there, but that doesn't bother the stripper much because he's still got sense enough to pay her. It isn't until he starts bleeding on her and claiming someone is going to die that she starts to get a little freaked out. I can't attest as to whether House gets the medicine right each week, but I can tell you this, it's dead-on about strippers. They hate when you bleed on them. Ahem. Moving on....

House stumbles out of strip club to find an accident scene. He was, apparently, on a bus that crashed. Someone on the bus is going to die, but he can't remember the who or the what of it: the answer is locked in his concussed and broken brain. The rest of the episode, then, has House trying various ways to get into a dream state (so he can unlock his memory) alternating with the various ways the staff tries to get House to go home and rest.

Of all the dream state attempts, the only one I didn't buy was the first one. House has Chase hypnotize him. Pretty much all the knowledge about hypnotism I have comes from the episode of Diff'rent Strokes when Arnold is hypnotized to help find the kidnapped Kimberly, so I might be off about this, but doesn't someone have to be okay with subverting their own will to another's in order to be hypnotized? I realize that House really wanted to find out what was locked in his brain, but allowing Chase to control him? Seemed out of his character to me.

That said, it did set up some of the best banter in the episode, with House taking both Chase and Wilson into his subconscious with him. I especially liked it when a fantasy Amber shows up, much to Wilson's consternation. It also foreshadowed what was really going on in House's mind, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Some of the other ways that House tried to trigger a memory: smelling the accident victims' clothes, taking enough Vicodin to kill a mule, sensory deprivation, falling asleep, and, finally, taking an Alzheimer's drug that speeds up neural activity. Was I the only one wondering just how House is able to maintain his beautiful mind in the face of all the gunk he puts into his system? I take two Tylenol PMs and I'm toast for three days; he fills his system with a pharmacy and comes out of it a-okay.

Each fantasy sequence gives him another piece of the puzzle. Eventually he focuses in on the bus driver, running through a series of possible symptoms with a series of dream-players representing House's own subconscious.

If you were grading the dream-players on a scale from 1 to 10, the stripper/schoolgirl Cuddy would rank at approximately a 47. When Cuddy shows up, House decides that it wouldn't be a proper fantasy unless she was properly objectified. The dream cuts immediately from the bus to the strip club, with Cuddy dressed in one of the hottest schoolgirl uniforms seen outside of my browser's history file. She slowly strips while the two go back and forth on the possible diseases the bus driver might have. Just as Cuddy is about to take her top off, we cut back to the bus as it's obvious to both House and dream Cuddy that House is more interested in the answer than her breasts. By the way, that noise you heard at about 9:30 tonight was the sound of a million men pressing the rewind button on their TiVos at the exact same instant.

I loved the Cuddy sequence because it perfectly captured the elements of House's personality we've come to love: his sexual energy, his quest for the truth, his not-so-subtle lust for Cuddy, and, finally, the self-awareness that only the very bright have about themselves. It was also nice to see the schoolgirl uniform. Have I mentioned the schoolgirl uniform?

The other dream-player I enjoyed was "The Answer." She wasn't on the bus, but was, instead, a beautiful, mysterious woman who existed as House's metaphor for the answer he was seeking. House lusts after the answers the same way other men lust after women.

The Answer shows up even after House saves the bus driver's life. Though House got the information he needed about the bus driver from his memory (particularly a limp that indicated an air-bubble moving through his blood-stream), he wasn't who House's subconscious is so desperate to save.

This leads to the last segment of the episode, with House filling up a bus with staff from the hospital to represent each of the victims of the crash. He hopes the sensory immersion will help jog his memory. Oh, that, and the dangerous amounts of neural activity drugs he took. As House walks to the back of the bus, he slips into another fantasy sequence, with The Answer asking him to look again and again at her necklace.

Did you get it before House did? It completely blindsided me (which actually makes me a little nervous as I'm usually pretty good about getting these things; maybe I got into a bus accident earlier today). The necklace is made of resin... of amber. Amber. Amber was on the bus with House and she was severely injured.

House, ODing on the medicine, is brought out of cardiac arrest just in time to tell Wilson that his girlfriend was a) on a bus with House and b) probably dying. Neither nugget of information is good, but both together is downright rotten. We end with a very distressed Wilson and a very juicy cliff-hanger for next week's season finale.

I honestly don't know how you guys will react to this episode. I know that I spent the whole hour with the same goofy look on my face that Christopher Walken had when he saw heaven in the movie Brainstorm. This is the kind of TV I signed up for when I started blogging here. It was not only risk-taking and filled with subtle character moments (rare for House; they usually swing a very heavy hammer when it comes to character), it was brilliantly directed, with a cinematic feel you don't normally get on a network TV show.

I realize that this review along with last week's Office review might begin to paint me as TV Squad's Pollyanna (and not just because I tend to dress like Hayley Mills and always try to get mean old Mr. Pendergrast to come out of his shell). I don't think I've changed, though. I think the writing has gotten better. I think the writers have spent their strike vacations wisely and they're using the month of May to show us just how good scripted television can be. It's like they're saying: screw American Gladiators! Good writing, great acting, and wonderful direction beats steroid freaks in spandex any day of the week and twice on Monday.

Maybe I am a Pollyanna. But you know what? I don't care. We're getting some great TV and I'm getting to write about it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go think of Cuddy and play the glad game.

Other Stuff:

-- I think I have a weird theory here; someone tell me if it's completely insane. House is only attracted to dark-haired women. It occurred to me tonight that the stripper, The Answer, and Cuddy are all raven-haired beauties. Cameron was, too, but only during the first season. She went blond right around the time that any chance of a romance was put to rest. House's ex-wife? Also dark-haired. I'm wondering if this is one of those things that show up in a show-runner's bible that never gets explicitly mentioned on the show. It's not that big a deal, but I wanted to throw it out there and see if anyone could remember a time that House had a near-romance with a blond or red-head.

-- "Lesbian." "He just forgot [my name]." "No, Thirteen, I just wanted to call you a lesbian." "I'm not a lesbian." "I was rounding up from 50%." How is it that House is funnier than the majority of sitcoms out there? Someone show the writers of Two and a Half Men an episode of House so they can see how comedy writing is done.

-- There can't be a House/Amber tryst can there? I mean, first off, it violates my raven-haired beauty theory. And, second off, uh... he couldn't do that to Wilson! Could he? He'll take the man's sandwich, yes, but he wouldn't take the man's woman, would he? Is this a bait-and-switch for next week? Please put your theories in the comments!

-- This was the best episode yet in terms of integrating the cast. We got a little bit of everybody and nothing felt forced. This is because the writers avoided an unnecessary B or C story and just let the A story unspool organically, using the characters where it felt natural. I'd like to see more of this in the future.

-- Did anyone else see the title of this episode and think immediately of Herman's Head? Ahh, early nineties FOX. You've come a long way, baby!

-- I'm not a fan of terrible music, so I wasn't sure if that was Fred Durst making a cameo as the bartender. I checked FOX's House website to make sure -- it was, which broadens the appeal of House to the hundreds of millions of Limp Bizkit fans that exist in Fred Durst's memory -- but I bring this up as a warning to anyone who might want to go to that website. Make sure you have a T1 line linked directly to FOX if you want to view it properly. Sheesh.