House: Good Medicine

Another change-of-pace episode, another winner for House last night. This time the hospital was on lockdown after a newborn went missing. As Cuddy searched for the baby, the doctors, paired up and scattered throughout the building, were forced to confront their fears and regrets. Chase and Cameron officially said goodbye to their failed marriage; Taub and Foreman took some of House’s painkillers and hallucinated their way through each other’s personnel files; Wilson and Thirteen played a game of Truth or Dare, with Wilson being the butt of Thirteen’s many lies; and House sat with a dying patient (guest star David Strathairn) and continued to mourn letting go of the woman he met while in the mental hospital.

When given the chance, one of the things that House does so well is allow its characters to stretch, to reveal sides of themselves we (and, perhaps, they) don’t know exist when they’re trapped in their lab coats. Last night, we saw buried insecurities come to the surface, unvarnished honesty heal old wounds, and, just to show that these people don't always have to be medical robots, even a little bit of fun. (Note to producers: Give drugs to Omar Epps’s deadly dull Foreman more often. He’s never been better than he was in this episode.) Judging by next week’s promo, it’s back to business as usual for the diagnosticians. But increasingly, House is breaking its patterns, and, in season six, doing something few series are capable of as they age: improving.