Directed by: Matt Shakman
Written by: Pam Davis
A little girl, Jane (Liana Liberato) is having a tough time climbing a rock wall. She slips off, but at least she's on a rope held by her mother, Maggie (Janel Moloney). Unfortunately, her mother is suddenly stricken with paralysis in her hands and the girl falls anyway, possibly breaking her arm.
The mother is this week's patient. House is so unwilling to believe that the patient really is very honest by saying he knows nothing about "alien physiology." The team, except for Dr. Hadley, are also skeptical
House tries to guess the password on the patient's laptop. Dr. Hadley figures out that because the patient is trusting, there's no password on the account. The screen then promptly shows the Mac OS X menu bar and Maggie's "wallpaper" image: a photo of her and her daughter.
The patient's condition gets much worse as she starts bleeding in her eyes. Dr. Chase tries to drill into the patient's bone, but the patient's bones are harder than the drill.
Dr. Taub tells Maggie that she must get a transplant from her daughter, who is the best possible match. But Maggie refuses: someone else must take the risk. Jane demands to be tested.
House believes that Jane is in fact adopted, and that is the one secret Maggie has kept from her daughter. House realizes that Maggie has displaced breast tissue on the back of her knee, complete with breast milk. House extracts a little bit of breast milk and feeds it to Jane, saying "relax, you've had it before." Thus, House keeps Maggie's secret.
At clinic, Dr. House treats a woman with strep throat who he immediately determines to be a prostitute. The clinic patient returns with strange lesions on her neck. Innuendo suggests that she's a performer in a sex show involving a donkey or a mule. But at the end of the episode, we see her as a performer in a Nativity scene, riding a donkey.
Jennifer Morrison appears in this episode briefly, but she doesn't get a Mandatory Line.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Brutal Honesty: Jane refuses to be reassured by her mother. Doctors could be wrong, the mother says. "No, Mommy, you're dying," the daughter replies plainly.
- "Eureka!" Moment: As often happens, Dr. House has one of these while talking to Dr. Wilson.
- Honor Before Reason: Maggie would rather die than let Jane find out she was adopted and her biological mother was an addict. House calls this out as not only a stupid excuse to orphan her daughter, but hypocritical to die keeping the one secret she kept from Jane.
- Infodump: The first differential establishes the reason why Maggie is completely honest with her daughter: her mother died of breast cancer without telling her, so she decided to not keep secrets with her daughter. Maggie is also a breast cancer survivor: she had a mastectomy but no reconstruction. Also, Dr. Taub explains that no surgeon can remove all breast tissue, so a breast cancer relapse must not be ruled out as a possible diagnosis. Interspersed throughout all this exposition, House complains about the hypocrisy of Christmas, thus making all the exposition more palatable and digestible.
- Product Placement: Apple. The patient's laptop runs Mac OS X, we get to see the login screen as Dr. House makes several incorrect guesses at her password. Also, House pretends to receive an iPhone as a gift, trying to make the Secret Santa participants think that one of them exceeded the $25 limit.
- Secret Santa: At Dr. Kuttner's request. Of course, Dr. House rigs the drawing so that he receives gifts from everyone, and of course the team figure out that he put his name in the drawing five times.
