Fridge / House

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• House has the main characters' names be House and Wilson, a send-up of Holmes and Watson. However, the comparisons go deeper.
  • House is hooked on Vicodin; Holmes on cocaine. They both can't resist a good mystery, and always assumed that someone—or everyone—was lying. They are both talented musicians. But the best hint is in plain sight in some many episodes: House lives in apartment 221B. Holmes' abode? 221B Baker Street.
  • In the series finale, House fakes his own death, just like Holmes does in The Final Problem.
  • The person who shoots House in the Season 2 finale is referred to in the script as "Moriarty".
  • There's also been a couple of references to someone named "Adler" or "Irene Adler", including the patient of the pilot episode (Rebecca Adler).
  • The character of Holmes was based on a medical teacher Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had. In the season 5 christmas episode, House receives an antique medical textbook... written by Joseph Bell, the very teacher that Doyle based Holmes on.
• The episode "House Divided", Amber is House's anima.
• Every single season finale has been building to season 5's finale. Season One had House's mental jumping-around, not in itself unusual, but it's hard for a stable mind to tell three stories is jigsaw order like that and be totally consistent. Season 2 is House's gunshot-induced hallucination. Season 3 gives us the magical reviving woman. Season 4 really gave House some gas, with the brain problems and the hallucinations and the electroshock. It's all been foreshadowing.
• There is a reason why Amber's hallucination tried to kill Chase that time. Up to that point, House didn't treat the fact that he was seeing Wilson's dead girlfriend as something he should take seriously, and instead took advantage of having an "all access key to [his] brain". Amber causing House to attempt to kill Chase without him realizing it was House's brain trying to tell him that it is serious, and that he needs to get rid of Amber.
• Consider the show's central conceit, Willing Suspension of Disbelief-challenging enough as it is: genius doctor has to solve an apparently unsolvable medical mystery every week, virtually all of which are inexplicably concentrated in one corner of New Jersey. What's the plot of the season 2 finale? House is faced with a medical mystery, but the fact that the mystery in this case is literally unsolvable is what tips House off that he's dreaming. It's at least a Lampshade Hanging, and arguably even a Deconstructed Trope, of the basic concept of the show—driving the consequences of a medical mystery which cannot be solved to their logical extreme. Additionally, in the episode, all the other characters are just manifestations of House's personality—try imagining some of the team's medical-related lines as if House was saying them.
• Each episode spends time building up drama to do with the patient, and then as soon as they get diagnosed, it gets left unresolved. But then, that's what it's like for the doctors, isn't it? They see small snippets of each patient's life, never seeing the full story, and so the audience gets the same experience.
• In the very first episode, House tells Cameron he hired her because she was pretty (his reasoning being that she could have likely had a comfortable life taking it easy without becoming a doctor, which means she worked hard to get where she is now). In real life, "Cameron" is just as attractive as her actress, who is a successful actress in Hollywood.
  • Not really the same. Attractiveness doesn't really add to one's success in the medical field but it's almost a necessity for an actress.
    • There have actually be studies that attractive people have better careers, are given better results in juries, etc. People really are that shallow.
• In the episode "Three Stories", House is giving a lecture. In the lecture, he tells the stories of three past cases of different people with leg pain. At first he hides their identities by saying that they're two middle-aged men and Carmen Electra, which we see in the scenes of those people being treated. Eventually some of the interns attending the lecture ask questions that require House to reveal the actual ages and genders of the patients. One of the middle-aged men turns out to be a 16-year-old girl, and Carmen Electra turns out to be a man screaming in pain who is then revealed to have just been a drug seeker. When this is revealed, they change to who they actually are in the scenes. Eventually it is revealed that the pain seeker was actually House, though the man wasn't seen as House until later, and it was never revealed to the interns that it was House. However, even though we don't see that the pain seeker is House, when we first see him as a man, and not Carmen Electra, he's dressed the same way House dresses.
• In the season one episode, "Paternity", House goes through the Surgical Sieve in trying to rule out causes for the patients symptoms. He uses the Mnemonic Midnit (pronounced Midnight) to go through metabolic, inflammation, degenerative, neoplastic, infection, trauma; ruling each out. He ponders that Midnight also has a g and an h. The Fridge Brilliance sets in later when we discover that the patient is adopted, so his disease could be genetic, the G in "midnight". This turns out to be red herring as the disease was a rare complication arising from a case of measles in the first months of the patient's life. You can also argue that H should go for Medical History, since the biological mother's vaccination schedule comes into play.
• Taub's ringtone for his ex-wife is the "Piña Colada Song". At first it just seems like a catchy tune but it actually makes a lot of sense that he'd choose it. It's about a couple who each try to cheat on the other but in doing so end up accidentally scheduling a date with one another (because her personal ad caught his eye and he responded to it, not realising it was her). Once they're reminded how suitable they are for one another, it's implied the couple ends up staying together. Taub had cheated on his wife repeatedly and she had an emotional affair. He still wants them to end up back together. So the song actually fits nicely.
• In Season Four, Episode 8, the patient is a stage magician. And the diagnosis is lupus. After three and a half years of misdirection ("It's never lupus!"), that's one heck of a magic trick to pull on the audience, isn't it?
• One of the major tenets of diagnostics is, "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras"... but House and his team seem to encounter a hell of a lot of zebras. Why? House finds horses—the more common ailments—boring and pursues the zebras avidly.
  • There's also implications that House usually isn't the first doctor his patients are seeing; they're being referred to him after other doctors were unable to figure out what's wrong with them. When all the horses have been ruled out, it's time to bring in the guy who's an expert at finding zebras. Or horses disguised as zebras, in some cases.
• The fact that all the medical tests are run by the main characters is somewhat annoying, but it kinda makes sense: they usually only deal with the cases that the others were unable to diagnose, and therefore everything that could have prevented the disease to have been diagnosed earlier should be eliminated. And that includes human factor—that is, incompetence and negligence of the laboratorians, which means it is preferable to have all the tests run by the team themselves. Of course, the question remains of how they could be qualified enough to personally run every possible test...
• In the Season 4 episode "97 Seconds", Thirteen screws up by giving the patient the meds for what winds up being the correct diagnosis, but failing to make sure the patient swallowed them, leading to the dog eating them instead, which eventually winds up killing both the patient and the dog. When she's agonizing over it in the morgue, she tells House that she keeps replaying the scene in her mind, wondering if she knocked the pills over when she went to leave. Given that she knew she has a genetic predisposition to Huntington's, a disease that causes movement difficulty and involuntary movements, she could've not only been worried that her mistake killed the patient, but also that the mistake was caused by early manifestations of a disease she'd been worried about her whole life.

Fridge Horror

• In the series finale, House fakes his death so that he can share Wilson's last five months of life. House has, many times, stated that Wilson is his only friend, the only person he considers something close to family in the entire world, and that if he dies, he will be completely alone. What do you think is going to happen when Wilson finally dies from his terminal cancer?
• Also in the finale, House uses the body of the drug addicted patient to make it look like he died in the fire. A question arises, however... What happened to the drug addict in the first place? On somewhat popular interpretation is that House purposely caused him to overdose on heroin, thereby murdering him and getting access to his useful body.
• Thirteen's dad has already lost his wife and son to Huntington's and will probably end up losing his daughter to it as well. There is no evidence that he has any other family members.
• If House is supposedly dead as far as most of the world knows, who's going to Mercy Kill Thirteen when the time comes?
  • House. He is supposedly dead, not actually dead. He would just track her down and bid her au revoir just as planned. Thirteen will even see it as a sign as he went to receive her from heaven! (A bit too romantic, I know, but you get the point.)
  • She also has a girlfriend now.
    • It'd probably still be House that did the actual killing, even if he let said girlfriend in on what happened. House wouldn't like killing her, but he could emotionally handle it. Not everyone could; even Thirteen, who mercy killed her brother at his request, obviously had some issues related to it, even if she feels she did the right thing.
• In Season Five, Episode 20, Lawrence Kutner commits suicide. While Reality Writes The Plot, there never was a suitable explanation in-story. However, in Episode 18 "Here Kitty", they meet a cat called Debbie which supposedly predicts the death of people it snuggles up to. When House discovers that Kutner is superstitious, he torments him with the cat. Not only do House's pranks keep the cat close to him, but on one occasion it stares him down suspiciously. This could be a coincidence, but considering that he dies two episodes later, there could be a connection.
  • In another sense, a real horror sets in when you realize how realistic that was. Contrary to what one sees in a movie, suicides often leave no letter or note or any sort of explanation, nor there are any obvious signs beforehand. Just thinking how many people you know actually could consider suicide is aviation-grade Paranoia Fuel.
  • Kutner actually acts very strange while asking Taub about suicide in the episode "Painless", maybe it was an attempt to talk to someone who felt like he did but Taub telling him that the story about a suicide attempt wasn't about himself put Kutner off.