House

When an office building collapses, House has to work fast to diagnose a young woman, Megan, who survived the disaster. Due to her injuries, Megan's only form of communication is blinking. House, without a team since Foreman and Cameron quit and he fired Chase, talks through his ideas with a janitor at the hospital. As Megan's condition worsens, Cuddy puts pressure on House to hire a new team, but House defiantly ignores her, and Wilson resorts to desperate measures and hits House where he knows it will hurt. As House persists in diagnosing Megan by himself, he realizes that the case is not what it appears, and that solitude may not be the answer.

House has relented in regard to interviewing potential team members, but he's doing it his own way. He has called in all 40 applicants for the open spots on his team (including guest stars Olivia Wilde, Kal Penn, Peter Jacobson, Anne Dudek and Edi Gathegi), each numbered individually by runners' bibs, and puts them to the test in a Darwinian trial period. As he drills the fellows and arbitrarily fires some along the way, he is approached by a fighter pilot named Greta, a candidate for NASA's astronaut training program. Greta suffers from a neurological disorder in which she is converting visual images to sound, or hearing with her eyes. Knowing that NASA would reject any possibility of her becoming an astronaut if they knew of her problem, Greta begs House to treat her in secret. Keeping her identity private, House takes the case to his fellowship candidates and pits them against one another to come up with an accurate diagnosis. Meanwhile, House is ruffled when he thinks he sees Cameron, Chase and Foreman in the hospital hallways.

The final 10 fellowship candidates compete ferociously when House splits them into two teams by gender. They are assigned to diagnose and treat a wheelchair-bound man with muscular atrophy who is slowly suffocating. As the two teams are trying to one-up each other, complications arise when one team treats the patient but doesn't follow through to make sure their treatment was executed. While the students are busy with their assignment, House experiments on himself to see what happens in the moments when people hover between life and death. Meanwhile, Foreman runs his own team of fellows in his new job at another hospital, and resorts to using a very "House-like" treatment to help a patient

When a 20-year-old funeral home cosmetician, Irene, has a massive seizure, she hallucinates that the cadavers in the funeral home have come to life, House and the remaining seven fellowship candidates must figure out the cause. Thinking something in the funeral home may have made Irene sick, House sends the candidates on some less-than-desirable investigative missions, including a visit to a graveyard. As Irene's symptoms become more life-threatening and her ghostly visions more vivid, House surmises that connecting with Irene's mother might be the best route to diagnosing her illness. Meanwhile, Foreman finds his "House-like" reputation has preceded him as he interviews for a new job, and House must narrow down the candidates from seven to six.

The team takes on the case of a man who collapsed while being mugged. When the man complains of new symptoms that do not fit his initial admission profile, the team suspects he is a hypochondriac. As Mr. X continues to fall ill with symptoms unrelated to his neurological disorder, Foreman and the remaining six fellows are assigned to keep watch, and are bemused as they see their own behavioral idiosyncrasies reflected through him. As they attempt to diagnose this human chameleon, they seem to learn more about themselves than their patient, whose true identity is a mystery. Meanwhile, Cameron and Chase keep a running pool on whom House might cut next from the team of candidates, and Foreman engages in a power struggle with House and Cuddy.

House is recruited by the CIA to help diagnose a deathly ill agent with an unknown illness. The agent's medical case is being spearheaded by Dr. Samira Terzi (guest star Michael Michele), who offers up very little information about the agent's history or previous assignments. With limited information to go on, House uses some unorthodox methods to try to crack the code and determine a diagnosis in time to save his mystery patient's life. Meanwhile, Foreman faces resistance from the remaining six fellowship candidates when they question his judgment and argue over the diagnosis of a female drag car racer who passed out after a race.

A documentary film crew is chronicling a teenager with a major facial deformity who opts to undergo a dramatic reconstructive procedure. When the patient suffers a heart attack just prior to the surgery, House and the team are called in to determine the cause, since the surgery cannot proceed until the patient's cardiac condition is diagnosed. With the film crew covering their every move, Cameron and Chase are especially self-conscious, and House looks for ways to escape from the cameras. Meanwhile, House finds himself distracted by several of the candidates vying for a spot on his team, and he questions his motives for having chosen them.

House encounters a magician whose heart failed while performing an underwater escape act. While the remaining fellowship candidates work to diagnose the illusionist, House is determined to prove that he's a scam artist faking his ailments to cover up the fact that he nearly drowned during his act. During the testing, House suspects one of his own candidates may have an undisclosed illness. In the meantime, House pits his team against one another in a challenge involving Cuddy, granting the winner immunity from elimination and a chance to nominate two other candidates to be put on the chopping block.

When Cuddy puts the pressure on House to choose the final members of his team, House deliberately assigns the candidates to a particularly challenging case - an uncooperative, over-the-hill former punk rock star with a history of drug abuse and civil disobedience. House informs the candidates their potential future depends on correctly diagnosing the patient. As the candidates race to find out if the patient is ailing due to drug abuse, an underlying disease or an unknown condition, House keeps a running tally of their efforts, making a few arbitrary point deductions along the way. Meanwhile, Wilson informs a former patient whom he had previously diagnosed with terminal cancer that he is going to live, and the news throws a wrench in the man's carpe-diem lifestyle.

House and the team treat a woman who suffers from a sudden paralysis of the hands that causes an injury to her daughter while she's spotting her at an indoor rock-climbing wall. As House probes the woman and her injured daughter for any leads as to what might be causing her condition, House is convinced that the woman is withholding information. When the woman's daughter reveals some very descriptive details about her mother's personal life, House isn't so sure the woman hides anything about herself from the people around her, especially her daughter. As the team runs tests to find out what caused her paralysis, the woman loses her eyesight and her system begins to shut down, and House and the team are baffled as to whether it is the woman herself, or her own physiology that is lying to them. Meanwhile, House lets his team participate in a Secret Santa gift exchange, but he puts his own twist on the holiday tradition.

When Dr. Cate Milton (guest star Mira Sorvino), a psychiatrist trapped at the South Pole and the research station's only doctor, becomes ill in the middle of her assignment, she and Dr. House are thrust into a long-distance relationship of sorts. Unable to get Cate out or any additional medical supplies to the South Pole station, House and his team must resort to treating her via webcam. House and his team walk the doctor through a series of makeshift and painful diagnostic tests she must perform on herself. Cate pushes back at House's every recommendation, and is unwilling to risk valuable station medical supplies until he can provide valid proof for his diagnoses each step of the way. While House and his team helplessly watch her condition worsen, House's usually icy demeanor surprisingly softens as he searches for ways to save her life. Meanwhile, House does some detective work of his own and is surprised to learn who Wilson has been dating.

House and the team encounter a woman admitted to Princeton-Plainsboro after she collapsed at her wedding. Her test results come up negative for a variety of common diseases, which leads the team to suspect foul play. When they discover the woman had been a music producer living in the fast lane until she converted to Hasidic Judaism, House insists that people do not change so easily, and that her seemingly rash decision may have something to do with an underlying condition. The woman's husband insists that House treat his wife for her illness, rather than for her past, but she continues to fall dangerously ill. The team must run through all possible diagnoses without disturbing her newly found religious beliefs before it is too late. Meanwhile, House is preoccupied by Wilson's newly-outed relationship with a woman whose personality is remarkably similar to House's.

House suspects an emergency room patient has a bigger problem then the E.R. initially diagnosed based on the fact that the patient is too nice. A skeptical House questions the patient's sunny disposition as the team tries to get to the bottom of his illness, but disagrees with House that niceness is a symptom. Meanwhile, House and Amber are at odds about how much time they each get to spend with Wilson, and Cuddy demands House give his team performance reviews.

House is convinced one of the actors (guest star Jason Lewis) on his favorite soap opera, "Prescription Passion," has a serious medical condition after observing his symptoms on television. House decides to intervene and take matters into his own hands, but both the actor and House's own team dismiss House's assessment and do not believe there is anything wrong with him. Meanwhile, much to House's delight, Amber and Wilson have their first argument, and Cuddy tries to keep up appearances when an inspector makes an unexpected visit to Princeton-Plainsboro.

In the first part of a two-part season finale, House finds himself dazed, confused and covered in blood after surviving a bus accident that left dozens seriously injured. Unable to clearly recall the events leading up to the crash due to his head injuries, House becomes convinced through his flashbacks that a fellow bus passenger was exhibiting signs of a deadly illness prior to the crash. Much to the team's dismay, House pushes through the pain of his own injuries, desperate to piece together the fragments of his shattered memory in order to save someone who might not even know he or she could be dying.

In Part Two of the two-part season finale, House remains inhibited by injuries sustained from a bus accident that has also left a victim rapidly deteriorating from a mysterious condition. Clues inside House's head hold the key to a patient's condition, and House's friendship with Wilson is tested beyond limits as murky memories from the bus accident the night before threaten to change their lives forever.