No Reason (House)

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House episode
"No Reason"
Episode no. HOU-224
Airdate May 23, 2006
Writer(s) David Shore (story and teleplay)
Lawrence Kaplow (story)
Director(s) David Shore
Guest star(s) Elias Koteas as Jack Moriarty
Chris Tallman as Vincent
Michelle Clunie as Judy

House Season 2
September 2005 - May 2006

  1. Acceptance
  2. Autopsy
  3. Humpty Dumpty
  4. TB or Not TB
  5. Daddy's Boy
  6. Spin
  7. Hunting
  8. The Mistake
  9. Deception
  10. Failure to Communicate
  11. Need to Know
  12. Distractions
  13. Skin Deep
  14. Sex Kills
  15. Clueless
  16. Safe
  17. All In
  18. Sleeping Dogs Lie
  19. House vs. God
  20. Euphoria, Part 1
  21. Euphoria, Part 2
  22. Forever
  23. Who's Your Daddy?
  24. No Reason
All House episodes

No Reason is the twenty-fourth episode of the second season of House, which premiered on the FOX network on May 23, 2006.

Contents

[edit] Plot

As House and his team work on the diagnosis of Vincent, a man with a giant swollen tongue and a temperature of 103 degrees (39.4 °C), another man (named in TV Guide as Jack Moriarty, played by guest star Elias Koteas), a disgruntled patient of House's, walks into the office and shoots him with a handgun. Vince develops two more rather graphic symptoms (pressure behind his eyes causes one of them to pop out, and a burst scrotum during urination) which seem to have no possible connections to each other.

Waking up from a coma two days later, House continues to treat Vincent from his hospital bed in the ICU with Moriarty, shot by hospital security and handcuffed to his bed, as his roommate. House wakes up Moriarty and asks why he wanted him to die. Moriarty replies that it was not his intention to kill House, and that he wanted to see House suffer. The reason Moriarty wanted to see House suffer was because his wife was a patient that House previously treated. While diagnosing her, House badgered Moriarty until he admitted that he had cheated on her.

Despite this fact having no medical relevance to his wife's illness, House told her about the affair anyway. Moriarty's wife then committed suicide after being released from the hospital. He tells House that he realizes that his affair led to his wife's suicide, however he feels that House should take part of the blame because there was "no reason" to tell her about it. House is seen hallucinating sitting in the passenger seat of Moriarty's wife's car next to her as she begins to kill herself (by starting her car with the garage door closed). House comes back to his hospital room and with a tear in his eye tells Moriarty "I'm sorry."

Since the shooting, House feels decreased pain in his leg. He finds out from his records that during the surgery to treat the gunshot wounds, a treatment of ketamine to induce a coma had been given to relieve his leg pain, but he experiences neurological side effects. It becomes clear that House cannot separate fact from fiction, as hallucinations begin to get a stronger grasp on his sense of reality, from hitting Wilson to eating tacos. He begins to question his own ability to diagnose, while hostility increases between him and Moriarty, thus he has "no (ability to) reason". As Vince’s body begins to deteriorate, House struggles through his own self-doubts and must try to make sense of his life and world.

After several hallucinations, House determines that nothing he has experienced since the shooting is real, and decides to kill Vincent with a new surgical robot, hoping that the death of his patient, or a hallucination gone too far, will snap him back into reality. His theory proves to be true, and in the final minutes of the episode we see House being rushed into the ER moments after he was shot. Before the episode ends, House asks for ketamine, which he supposedly received during the imagined events of the episode. It is important to note that although the episode is almost entirely a hallucination, the patient ("Harpo") and the shooter both exist outside of the hallucination; no information is given as to what became of the patient but in Season 3 Episode 1 it is revealed.

[edit] Behind the scenes

  • House/Holmes Connection: Professor James Moriarty is a fictional character who is the best known antagonist of the detective Sherlock Holmes, after whom House is modelled. The man who shoots House is named Jack Moriarty, although his name is never spoken in the episode. House's relation to Holmes is furthered by the fact that they share the same address, 221 B Baker Street. See the analogue between House and Holmes.
  • The taco stall Cactus Taqueria that House visits during a hallucination is real; it is a popular destination for Mexican food in the Los Angeles area. This is one of only a few outdoor scenes that actually looks like Los Angeles, which is where the show is filmed.[1]
  • The episode is notable for featuring levels of graphic gore unusual for an episode of House. During House's hallucination, his patient's eye pops out of its socket and his testicle explodes, showering Chase in blood. Also when House 'kills' the patient at the end of the episode he does so by effectively gutting him with a surgical robot.
  • Directorial Debut: The episode features creator David Shore's directorial debut.
  • During one of the DDx scenes, Cameron states that "...the kidney drains into the bladder which drains into the ureter..." This statement is anatomically incorrect. In reality, the kidney drains into the ureter which drains into the bladder which drains to the urethra and exits the body.
  • House's says that the guy with a swollen tongue "looks like Harpo". This is a direct reference to Harpo Marx, who frequently made weird faces by sticking his tongue out to make it look like his mouth.

[edit] References

  1. ^ House: No Reason Episode Trivia Tv.com retrieved November 13, 2006.

[edit] External links

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