House - Instant Karma, or The Ghost of Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital

This week's opening was so prosaically shot that I honestly thought it was an opening Hulu commercial for an anti-depressant. It featured a middle-aged guy with a sad looking dog sitting at the end of a tree-lined road. But, it turned out Mr. Sad is really some sort of energy tycoon with a seriously ill son. So, he demands the prowess of Dr. House to find out what's killing his boy. Cuddy tries to persuade him that Foreman is a suitable replacement, but unless Dr. House is "dead, comatose, or crazy", Mr. Sad will have him!

So, now House is making the calls while Foreman is the front man. To complicate matters, they have to give a presentation at the Morbidity and Mortality Conference (doesn't that sound like fun?) on the recently deceased president from last week's episode. In case you missed it, Chase injected the genocidal tyrant with the blood of a cadaver to fake test results into showing a different disease. The treatment for that false disease ended up killing the tyrant, of which Chase was well aware. And now they have to do a presentation about it without revealing that they intentionally killed him. Whoops!

House and the gang run through the gamut of diagnoses for the little boy: brain cancer, stomach dancer, abdominal epilepsy, and finally realize that it's an incurable, obscure disease. The boy has little more than a day left to live. After House makes this reveal, Mr. Sad signs some papers that somehow bankrupt his vast fortune. I didn't even know you could do that. He's convinced that his good fortune in business has created bad karma for his family life, killing his son.

Meanwhile, Thirteen has decided to leave the country and head to Thailand for an unspecified amount of time. But on her way to the airport, it turns out her airline ticket has been mysteriously canceled! Who could it be? She confronts House, Foreman, House again, and no one has any idea who it could have been. Ooooh, spooky.

Finally, she finds out that the cancellation came from Wilson's computer's IP address, and confronts him. He fesses up to it, but then turns around and tells House that it actually wasn't him! OooOOOOoohhhh.

While making a Grinch reference during this discussion with Wilson (something about a heart three sizes too small), House realizes that his previous diagnosis was wrong, and the little boy has a treatable heart condition. He changes the course of treatment, and the boy makes a miraculous recovery. The father is convinced that the son's health is a byproduct of selling off his vast assets, to which House rolls his eyes dramatically.

And then, another mystery! Foreman has discovered that they can't cover up the president's true cause of death after a wild fluctuation of cholesterol (caused by the introduction of a cadaver's blood into his body) is obvious in his charts. With no other alternative, Foreman decides he'll come clean and tell the truth about what happened. Chase is very nervous.

But then! Someone has mysteriously placed an old prescription for high doses of cholesterol drugs in the president's file, as his old doctor had been trying to raise the president's HDL. Now, his murder will successfully be covered up! But who found the old prescription and put it in the file? OoooooOOOOOOoooooohhhhhhh.

Well, turns out it was House on both counts. He hacked into Wilson's computer and deleted Thirteen's reservation, as well as found out about Chase killing the president and how to conveniently cover it up. Oh, House, you old ghoul!