In the middle of a seemingly-normal day at Princeton-Plainsboro, House and his fellows' work is disrupted by a former patient's husband out for revenge, who proceeds to shoot House and severely wound him. Unfortunately for the both of them, the man's escape is brought to a violent halt, leading to his installment in the hospital's ICU... one bed away from House himself.
Tropes
- Code Silver: Subverted. The shooter just blows House away and leaves, with everybody else in the cast standing still in shock as it happens. The scene in which the man is stopped and House interrogates him is just part of House's hallucination and an attempt at trying to make sense of things that he eventually ditches when he figures out he’s dreaming. This whole mess becomes one the show's greatest unsolved riddles.
- Karma Houdini: The man who shot House managed to escape the hospital in the real world and is never arrested.
- Rewatch Bonus: Besides all of the clues throughout the episode that point to it being House's hallucination even before The Reveal, there's also the strong implication that the woman House talks to under the impression that she's the swollen-tongue patient's wife is actually the wife of Jack Moriarty (the same woman also appears in the part where House hallucinates killing himself in the same way that Moriarty's wife supposedly did), and that the conversation the two of them have (where House mocks the obvious difference in attractiveness between her and her husband, and subtly accuses her of having had an affair) was actually the one they had when she was being treated at Princeton-Plainsboro, and led to House coming to the conclusion of the husband's infidelity instead of hers.
