House Considers the Perils of Male Bonding

House always leaves us with a moral. In last night's episode, "The Down Low," it was "you can't always get what you scheme for."

Drug dealers Mickey and Eddie seemed like good friends and stand-up guys—you know, except for the whole selling-cocaine thing. But as we eventually learned, Mickey was a cop who was trying to arrest his pal Eddie. He wouldn't tell House's team where he lived because—why, exactly?—oh, right, because it might have endangered the investigation to which he'd devoted the last 16 months of his life. The big bust was coming up, and he had to be there.

But all his secrecy was for nothing, because after many false diagnoses, Mickey turned out to have an advanced and fatal case of Hughes-Stovin Syndrome. The drug bust went fine even without Mickey's presence, and Eddie was marched at gunpoint to a police car as Mickey died in his wife's arms.

How to reckon the moral calculus of the situation? On one hand, Mickey screwed Eddie over. On the other hand, Eddie was a snitch-murdering drug dealer. And on the other other hand, Eddie was the one who was willing to take a risk—taking Thirteen to the Dry Cleaner of Doom—to save Mickey's life. Also, he cared enough about his child to read the free parenting magazine in the waiting room. So maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all. In fact, maybe we were meant to think that life is fair in the end, since relatively straightforward Eddie lived and sneaky Mickey died.

Once again, we saw in this episode that Princeton-Plainsboro has the world's most judgmental doctors, with Chase and Taub browbeating Mickey for his drug-dealing ways during his spinal tap. Worse still, Thirteen tried to comfort Mickey with the empty words "You did the right thing"—right after he'd learned that he had only days left to live. What ever happened to doctors who just want to heal the sick?

Enough with the patients. Let's move on to our favorite couple, House and Wilson, who are totally NOT GAY. Seriously. Even though Wilson knows what culottes are. When cute new neighbor Nora wouldn't believe he was straight, Wilson—with Charlie Brown-like optimism—appealed to House for help. Wasting no time in pulling away the football, House concocted an evil scheme to keep Wilson miserable and get Nora for himself. He told Nora that he and Wilson were both straight, then made sure she saw their giant A Chorus Line poster and invited her to an Evita-listening party. His plan, as he explained to Wilson, was to become Nora's best gay friend, then allow her to convert him to heterosexuality.

It almost worked. So it was a great pleasure to see Wilson get the better of House for once by walking into the fancy restaurant where House was dining with Nora and asking House to marry him. (Could there be anything cuter than an elderly lady urging one middle-aged man to "Say yes!" to another? I don't think so.) Even House's evil schemes don't always work.

Or do they? I suspect House just wanted Wilson all to himself—even if that meant listening to Wilson sing show tunes.

On to the last and most lightweight of the schemes. Fed up with Foreman's attitude, Thirteen, Chase, and Taub conspired to humiliate Foreman by making him believe they were all earning more money than he was. That Foreman would figure out their scheme and turn it around on them was fully predictable. But it was almost worth it for the sight of the three MDs standing in front of their boss like naughty schoolchildren, confessing their crime and begging her to reduce their own salaries and increase Foreman's.

Almost, but not quite. It's not clear to me why they cared so much about keeping Foreman around. "He's a good team leader"? Please. He's overbearing and obnoxious, he's wrong even more often than House is, and he almost never gets the last-minute flash of insight that leads to the life-saving diagnosis. How exactly would the team be worse off without Foreman? I guess there'd be one less person to share House's abuse.

"The Down Low" had more than its share of great lines, among them:

House to Chase, who was sporting a clean-cut new look: "Did Cameron get your hair in the divorce?"

Taub to Foreman on his job strategy: "That's what I'd do. But I'm a coward."

Best of all, the words we've been waiting to hear Wilson say to House for five years: "Greg House, will you marry me?"

What did you think of the episode?