WMG / House

House is actually Chuck Noland from Cast Away. Chuck hallucinates and believes he is actually a surgeon due to loneliness. His name is House because he wants to go home and he is sarcastic because he can't. It also explains why his only friend is named Wilson.

House is a bitter acerbic jerk because he's severely constipated.

House abuses Vicodin like no other, and has been for years. Vicodin contains hydrocodone, which is an opioid. Practically all patients develop constipation after using opioids consistently for a long period of time (say, years). Ergo, House is an asshole because nothing's coming out of his asshole.

House is an adult version of Doogie Howser and is now bitter.

• He never had a real childhood, never grew up properly. Dealing with the nightmare that is America's health care system, he finally snapped.
• The pressures of being a genius and a particularly rough adulthood drive him mad, so he moves to a different part of the country and changes his name. This would also explain House's badly developed social skills. (He was always a jerk.)
• We already know that Doogie was a medical genius with emotional issues. House's childish behavior is just classic "Peter Pan syndrome" caused by all his time spent working. Just imagine Doogie after years of experience and education... It Gets Easier, leading to the jaded but absurdly brilliant House.

House is the Riddler from Batman in an alternate universe.

Think about it. The crummy childhood (not really unique, but a similarity), the obsession with riddles and puzzles, the cane, the contempt for authority, the utter disregard for any sort of laws, the willingness to gamble with people's lives: the list goes on.

• Theory: Gregory House was a brilliant child who turned to a life of crime after being denied entrance to medical school. He chose a fake name to conceal his identity (who names their child E. Nigma?), dons a costume, and begins attempting to prove to the so-called "World's Greatest Detective" that he is smarter. House/Riddler hates the idea that anyone is right who is not him. He is also willing to put people's lives in danger to prove himself right.

House is an Alternate Universe where the Cleveland Hellmouth is under Princeton instead.

This explains the higher levels of weird there, as well as why House is there — Hellmouths attract weird things, so where else would one looking for entertainment and a challenge go?

How he knows about it is a whole nother question.

It also means that it's not House making everyone's lives worse, necessarily — this would happen anyway because of the Hellmouth. Cuddy and Wilson are unaware of there being a Hellmouth in Princeton, though.

And it means that Kutner was murdered — though, since House does not believe in the supernatural, he will never know what did it. Kutner was necessary for some demon rite...

• This raises an interesting problem with the episode Safe.

House lied about golfing with Stacy

Does Season 1 need spoiler tags?

• They were having sex when the aneurysm occurred. He uses sexy Carmen Electra as "his" stand-in, he says she's a "pleasant alternative" and "quite the golfer". The first thing we see Carmen do is cheer as she penetrates an ascetic (with a golf ball) and when she is examined, she has her pants off for no good reason. Before he goes under, to Stacy, he says, "I'll see you when I wake up... we'll go golfing," which makes Stacy crack a wide but subtle smile (maybe it's the botox). Then House says "I love you," shocking the smile off her face and causing her to catch her breath. Stacy apologizes for what she's about to do to him, but House misunderstands, and tries to tell her that their activities did nothing to cause or worsen his condition.

In "Better Half", we see him reading manga.

Stephen Fry will guest star as House's Psychiatrist.

Because it would be awesome!

• Yeah, it would, but the powers that be already cast Andre Braugher for that role. Just as long as he isn't related to Foreman — or worse, Vogler...

House does have autism. Wilson lied about not believing it, in "Lines in the Sand".

Wilson was in the room when House complained about the pity given to less functioning autistics like the Patient of the Week. Cuddy's doubt made him understand that the best way to show his understanding, was to pretend not to think House has it, thus sort of saying "I don't care/it doesn't change our friendship, or how impressed I am with you."

• Additionally, while the eye-contact and giving someone a present was surely great for the parents, it wouldn't count as a "10". Except, if you include House and his accomplishment..

Stephen Fry will guest star as Patient of the Week.

And they'll throw some ABOFAL reference just for the heck of it. For example, let's suppose someone, say, Thirteen, tells him about some of House's opinions:

POTW: Perhaps it might help if I explain that I don't give a flying toss about Dr. House.
Thirteen (or even better, House himself): I beg your pardon?
* Will Marcus Mumford play Stephen's son whom they have to track down for a kidney?

House is in a coma and hallucinating everything.

Think about it. The entire universe revolves around him - often, it seems as if nothing in the hospital would get done if he was not there to help. He is always right (more or less); he is never called to task for any of the ethically gray (or black) things that he does; and he is incredibly fascinating to everyone he meets. This is all easily explained if the "universe" that he sees is the result of his delusions while he's in a coma. The hospital where he works is loosely based on what he experiences when his brain swims towards lucidity.

• The scary thing is, this theory could be half right.
• It's the only logical explanation for why he isn't dead yet. He's been shown mixing Vicodin with alcohol in large quantities. That WILL kill you, either from resperatory arrest or liver failure. If he's only imagining it, though, he can do whatever he wants.
  • Tolerance to opiates (and alcohol) builds up over time. House has been taking Vicodin (actually a rather weak opiate, as those things go) for years, and drinking for even longer, more than long enough for his body to grow accustomed to regular doses of both even mixed together. I personally know that an opioid-tolerant individual can survive regular alcohol binges. The real danger he's facing is that there is 100 times more acetaminophen (Tylenol) than hydrocodone (opiate) in a Vicoden pill. The Tylenol and the alcohol is more dangerous to his liver than any amount of opiates he'd ever consume. But that is a long term concern that would set in over months and years, not something that would happen because of one night of partying. It is a significant risk for him since he is regularly exceeding 3000 mg of Tylenol daily (only 4 Vicodin ES would do that). I'd have to assume he is being monitored for such damage, and if nothing else his co-workers would definitely notice the jaundice setting in around those bright blue eyes.

)

• Don't forget that he's working in a hospital that doesn't exist in real life.

Cuddy will date PI Lucas just to make House jealous.

Aussiello said so.

• The dating is confirmed. Her true motives are unknown.

House has been in a coma since "No Reason," the season 2 finale.

Everything after comes from the ketamine coma. That ketamine treatment worked much too well to be real - seriously, running?

House rejected the original illusion because it was too perfect. When he slipped back into coma, the illusion eventually became Darker and Edgier so House would accept it - Darker and Edgier than the first two seasons...

This would also explain how House could survive so many near-death experiences with so little permanent damage.

House is literally an anarchist.

When Foreman calls him an anarchist, it's meant to be a bit of hyperbole. But House sees every rule from "get permission before experimenting on babies" to "the cafeteria is closed after 6" as a personal challenge. He also defies every authority figure, without exception, and never votes in any election. Sounds like a classic anarchist to me.

• Looks like this is confirmed as of "Broken" (the season 6 premiere). But it's compulsive. He does it even when he knows it's against his best interest.
• Alternately, "the cafeteria is closed after 6" (and most other rules) are personal challenges. He's being tested as a medical technician for an anarchist colony (and nobody wants an unproven anarchist for their doctor).

House is an omniscient being with amnesia.

He's almost always eventually right. The "almost always right" is the omniscience; the "eventually," and some of the "almost," is the amnesia. Since he doesn't believe in omniscience, he's not likely to break out of the amnesia soon.

• It is possible that House got the amnesia during some unfortunate incident involving Chase when Chase was still in seminary. House sacrificed the knowledge of his perfect knowledge to make Chase a (low-key) Cosmic Plaything.
• The amnesia got worse for a while in season 5 because the hidden omniscience tried to manifest as Amber.

Whatever antidepressant Wilson is currently on (or not on) has affected his personality.

Compare Wilson in the Vogler arc to Wilson at the end of season 4 and the beginning of season 5. Clearly, something changed; and while it's likely part Character Development, it happened fast enough that something might've helped it along. And antidepressants often do more than just wipe out the depression.

• Possible timeline: Wilson was on one antidepressant during seasons 1 and 2. He tried to switch during season 3, but the drowsiness side-effect was so serious that House felt the need to spike his coffee with amphetamines. Wilson is now off anti-depressants, and is heading toward the same sort of mess his younger brother is already in. (If House had seen Danny Wilson with his own eyes, he'd prescribe them to James Wilson himself.)
• You sure it isn't just his relationship with Cutthroat Bitch?
  • That would explain a lot, yes. But we still have to bridge the gap between Wilson's season 1 behavior and his season 3 behavior. (Wilson's behavior during the Tritter arc was considered by many to be out of character until the season four finale.)

House is the Semi-Demi-Antichrist

That is, House is the designated savior of the forces of evil, though on a smaller scale than the entire world. His primary goals are to make everyone around him miserable and to annoy Cuddy - and he's been incredibly successful. His work as a doctor is partly a means to throw off suspicion and partly another method of spreading misery.

• In a corollary, Chase and Cameron are currently running La Résistance in Princeton, which is why we haven't seen much of them lately. Cameron has taken enough recent missions inside PPTH that she may be on the verge of a Face–Heel Turn, if she isn't already a double agent (which would have some poetry in it).
  • House has broken Chase's cover... but that was a Pyrrhic Victory...
    • Or was it? Soon, House will be unopposed again. Unless you count Dr. Nolan.
• Lucas has taken over La Résistance. And he is using Left Behind as a primer.
• So he's what, one-quarter as evil as the real deal?
  • No, he's one-quarter as powerful as the real deal. He cannot unite the world against good, but he may be able to unite New Jersey against it.
    • New Jersey isn't already united against good?
• We have met the Demi-Antichrist, and his name is Dr. Nolan.

Lisa Cuddy really is/was a hooker.

She laundered all the proceeds through the hospital fundraising mechanisms. This is how the hospital is able to afford the spacious campus, state-of-the-art equipment (including bi-monthly MRI replacements), and House's legal fund. It is the reason Cuddy won't fire House - he has blackmail material and will, if she fires him, take her down with him. And it is the reason she's infertile.

• Also why she wears such ridiculously impractical and unprofessional clothes. You can take the girl off the street corner and all that...
• She's the same call girl Sam Seaborne "accidentally" slept with in the very first episode of The West Wing.

The show is a Show Within a Show and takes place in the same world as Dead Poets Society.

The actor who plays Wilson is Neil Perry, and faked his own suicide to escape the "Gender-Normative Parent" Plot and pursue a career in acting. He then found a job playing a doctor (the career his father wanted him to pursue) on TV and became successful enough that his father accepted his choice in careers. As a peace offering, Neil invited his father onto the show for a guest appearance as a father whose son is a brain-damaged pianist.

• Wouldn't House be running in the universe for around 50 years then? House is set in the present day, while Dead Poets Society happens during the late '50s.
  • No - Wilson isn't that old. What happened was, in this universe, the teacher played by Robin Williams made so great a mark on society that all the social and scientific revolutions happened ahead of schedule. House is set in that universe's 1970s-1980s. (It would explain Chase's fashion sense.)
  • ^ And all this has officially become my canon.

Foreman is pretending to be in love with Thirteen because he believes people with Huntington's Disease deserve to die.

Foreman faked his relationship with Thirteen so that House wouldn't ask why he wanted to join the Huntington's trial so badly. He has since done his level best to derail the study via a horrific plan- learning how the study works in detail, breaking the double-blind, and acting.

Because he switched Thirteen from the placebo to the drug without telling anyone else who was running the study, he has drastically reduced the chance of the drug ever being shown to be safe and effective - presuming it is, in fact, safe and effective; this is effectively causing the genocide of people with Huntington's disease. If it isn't safe and effective, switching Thirteen increases the odds that it will be found to be safe and effective and also reduces Thirteen's long-term chance of survival. And it worked almost exactly as planned - the people running the study didn't even cancel the study, but just wiped Thirteen's disastrous "placebo" result from it. Even to the end, Foreman never told them who got a placebo so that Thirteen could get the real drug.

Naturally, Thirteen does not know about this. Foreman maintained the relationship to ensure she never has reason to find out - that, and she's attractive in a skinny-white-girl way.

There is a chance that Thirteen isn't the only patient Foreman switched - just the only one we know about. A lot of House has been running behind the scenes lately.

Note that Foreman distanced himself from Thirteen as soon as he got a plausible excuse.

• And now he has used his relationship with Thirteen as an excuse to fire her. Smooth move... and brilliant.

House is The Grim Reaper.

Or at least a Grim Reaper. And he is very bored. He does not enjoy watching people die, which is one reason he doesn't just hand out his Death Note. But he cares more about finding out why people are dying, and trying to stop or change it, than about the people themselves.

He might be unconsciously killing people around the globe when their times come. He might be a plague-bringer to the American Northeast. He might be on vacation with a temp filling his position.

He might not remember what he is at all - in fact, he probably doesn't, since he doesn't normally believe in souls.

Regardless, he prefers figuring out how people are going to die, or what's wrong with them, to waiting for them to kick the bucket or collecting the souls when the time comes.

He may or may not be related to Death. But this would certainly explain his distinctive, almost glowing, blue eyes and his cane. It would also explain why he kept the rat Steve McQueen, aka The Death of Rats.

• This may be backed up by the show if Amber isn't a hallucination.
• Or maybe he's a schizophrenic Grim Reaper. His doctor side has no knowledge of his Grim Reaper side; but his Grim Reaper side knows of his doctor side. This is why so many of his patients have extremely rare and hard to diagnose diseases. The Grim Reaper side is trying to do his job of actively killing people off; but, because he knows his doctor side is a great diagnostician, he must give them extremely complex diseases in the (mostly vain) hope that his doctor side cannot cure them.
• It would explain why he isn't dead- as the anthropomorphic personification of Death, he's immortal.

House and Ace Attorney take place in the same Universe

Point 1: An entire arc stems for a search that was conducted by an officer that was doing it as payback. In the Ace Attorney games, the 4th amendment doesn't exist.

Point 2: Godot mentions he awoke when he smelled a doctor's coffee. What doctor regularly has coffee with patients that are in comas? House does!

House is unaware that he has Haruhi-like power of rewriting reality.

And, like in Haruhi’s case, his coworkers know about his power and try to keep it a secret from him at all cost. This is why he keeps his job and why everyone is surprisingly tolerant of his attitude to medical ethics and his Jerkass acts: they know that if they fired him, punished him, or called him out on his actions as often as he deserves it, he would get annoyed, and his subconsciousness would destroy the world. This is also why, every time he was in the real trouble - see the Vogler arc or the Tritter arc - someone saved him in the end. This is why Wilson returned so soon in Season 5. And, last but not least, this is why medical mysteries happen every week in House’s universe; he subconsciously wishes various people to fall ill with rare/strange diseases so they can be admitted to his service. That way, he has riddles that keep him entertained.

• This would explain why the original "ducklings" all returned to PPTH - House willed them back.
• But if this is true, then soon everybody will see Amber Volakis again.
• As of the end of season five, the doomsday clock for the world of Haruhi-House is less than five minutes to midnight.

Killing that artificially-induced brain tumor in the optic chiasm will prove to be an effective long-term treatment for Thirteen's Huntington's.

Because she is not going anywhere any time soon.

• How artificially induced was that brain tumor, anyway?
  • Foreman thought it was caused by the anti-Huntington's drug. We may never know if that's true, or if Thirteen would have gotten it anyway.

Chase will have to face a Fate Worse than Death soon.

When the actor playing Chase tried to learn what The Powers That Be have in store for the character, the final result he got was tears. This translates to something horrible. Since the powers that be also promised not to kill off any doctors in season 5, that leaves a Fate Worse than Death for Chase.

• The creator just announced that Chase and Cameron will regain Character Focus at the end of season 5 in "a really cool way." "Cool" in the House-verse dictionary historically tends to involve dangerous, hard-to-diagnose illnesses or other things unpleasant to the direct recipients.
  • Averted then (unless you count that close call with anaphylaxis), but not Jossed yet.
• Why not simply death? Chase is a Cosmic Plaything, and his death would end his role in any cosmic games. If there are Fates Worse Than Death, he has to go through at least one before he dies. Chase has, in the past, expressed the belief that there are times when euthanasia is acceptable; therefore, he must believe that there are fates worse than death.

House will become The Artifact.

House is not what he was physically or mentally as of mid-season 5. (When Cuddy beats you to a diagnosis....) And FOX is both virulently anti-drug and a fan of Executive Meddling. So, in season 6, most of the burden of diagnosing will lie on the shaky shoulders of Foreman and the new team.

• We're heading that direction. The last two cases have been finalized when House was away from Diagnostics.

"You Can't Always Get What You Want" will be the song for the final minutes of the series' finale.

It will likely include the Last-Minute Hookup of House and Cuddy. Because if you have romance on this show, you must suffer horribly or live in bliss off screen.

• The Last-Minute Hookup of House and Cuddy is supported by Word of God at the moment.

Whatever causes House's boredom has happened to Cuddy.

In the first three years of House, Cuddy's primary roles were to give House cases and make sure he did his job or, if there was no case, clinic duty. After Cameron got rehired into PPTH's ER, her primary role onscreen has been to deliver cases, one way or another. Since she, as a doctor trained under House, doesn't always consult Cuddy before transferring cases, Cuddy no longer knows for sure when House and his team are working. Having lost the most enjoyable part of her job, she is trying to compensate by entering the games House and Wilson have long engaged in with both feet - which otherwise would have died down, since Wilson had been mourning Amber for half that time (counting the seasonal break).

Cameron's real reason for resigning from Acting Dean of Medicine was not that she had too many lingering feelings for House to deal with him at work.

She took the job because of those feelings, if they exist. And, from what we saw, she's not significantly worse at deanhood than Cuddy has been lately. She may even have been better - it's much more efficient if you don't use empty threats on the person whom you know you'll eventually say yes to.

Her real reason is one of these:

Cameron resigned from being Acting Dean of Medicine to avoid the fallout from the Huntington's trial.

She had advance warning that Foreman was planning sabotaging the study - if Chase was willing to report to Vogler, he'd certainly be willing to report to her! She did not want to be in charge when Foreman got caught messing with the Huntington's trial. She didn't want to have to choose between letting Foreman get away with genocide or kicking him to the curb with no means of support. And she didn't want her name linked to the scandal.

Cameron resigned from being Acting Dean of Medicine because her feelings for House at work were interfering with her relationship with Chase at home.

Chase looked like a mess when we did see him in the time she was Dean - perhaps because he knew why she took the position by then. Love has made Chase crazy, more or less, or else given him a new focus for latent craziness; Cameron is afraid of what might happen if he ever empties that drawer she gave him. His skillset (intensivist-surgeon who can deal with House's team) is too valuable for her, as administrator of PPTH, to risk losing over heartbreak. And she already knew that she could find someone else to distract House.

• This might also explain The Tag to "Saviors." Apparently, some form of "Chameron" is considered essential for smooth functioning of the hospital.
  • If that last speculation is true, then PPTH is gonna have a blue Christmas.

Chase was on personal leave for about six weeks after Cameron returned to the ER.

He was not seen in the OR proper during that time; the one time we saw him in scrubs then, he was cozying up to Cameron. He had not done operations or even tried to scare "ducklings" from the OR.

He has been known to unintentionally kill or injure patients when he tries to work under emotional stress, and he had enough of that when Cameron was Acting Dean. Ordering the leave might have been the last thing Cameron did offscreen before she informed Cuddy that Cuddy needed to take her position back.

• It was no more than six weeks' leave. Unfortunately, the underlying issues aren't completely resolved.
• Or he's mentally slipped off the rails far enough that he's only thinking he's back at work. Insane!Chase is nicer than classic!Chase, and House also believes Chase is back at work, and so everyone is humoring them.

House fired Chase at the end of season 3 because Chase's Tuesday games got out of hand.

House told Foreman while (temporarily) firing him over Thirteen that, had Chase let his relationship with Cameron get in the way of his work, he would've fired Chase. But at no point during Chase and Cameron's tenure with House did they have a genuine, official relationship; that is why they both remained employed after the sleep-lab debacle. When Chase expressed interest in a genuine relationship, Cameron ended the pseudo-relationship, at least for then...

Chase did get fired a few months after that. The real reason was that he was still trying to pursue a relationship with Cameron. The mental effort he put into this distracted him from the differentials, which likely contributed to at least one disaster (Season 3 had several). House couldn't tell him to drop his relationship with Cameron because, technically, there wasn't one yet.

Cuddy has used a Fountain of Youth.

She became Dean of Medicine at 32. She hired House, who has been working in Diagnostics for 12 or 13 years as of Season 5. She now says she's 38, and this is consistent with info from season 4. The simplest way to reconcile this chronology is to give her access to a Fountain of Youth sometime before season 1.

• Or she's just lying about her age.
• The info from season 4 supporting her being 38 comes from House. House has no reason to lie about her age then, since he's talking about how old she's getting (pushing forty). He knows her from college, and he was presumably there when she hired him. No, she's not lying about being 38 — or not entirely lying.
• I don't recall the specific episode; did they say he'd been running the diagnostics department at PPTH for that long, or just working in diagnostics? If it's the latter, the obvious explanation is that he was working somewhere else/for someone else before she hired him.

Cuddy headed Diagnostics twelve years ago.

House started as her duckling; he only became head of Diagnostics after she became Dean of Medicine. Admittedly, barring a Fountain of Youth, she would've been only 26 then, but she could have been a prodigy. PPTH seems to attract prodigies.

• It is noted that Cuddy graduated medical school at 25. This makes this (even more) unlikely, but not quite impossible.
• Discredited. Until recently, Cuddy seemed to think that Diagnostics = House, literally.

Chase has used a Fountain of Youth.

Not that he needed one. He probably overshot his goal when he used it.

The season 1 episode "Cursed" includes three apparently incompossible facts about Chase:

1. He is 26.
2. His father divorced his mother when he was 15.
3. His family has been broken for the last fifteen years/half his life. (Which, combined with point 2 alone, would suggest that he's 30.)

We also have to deal with his being at PPTH in diagnostics a full year before the series started. And he certainly looked (to many viewers) like he ought to be 26 then.

There are many ways to resolve this problem. A Fountain of Youth is one.

• There is probably a better explanation, or else the Fountain of Youth he used is starting to wear off violently.
  • Example of a possible better explanation: Chase's father left when he was 11. His parents made the divorce official when he was 15.

Chase got through med school with a Time-Turner.

Because flunking seminary school and completing med-school makes for a tight schedule even if he was 30 in season 1.

Perhaps he would have been twenty-six if he hadn't time-traveled but needed four years' worth of short-range Time Travel to graduate in a reasonable time. This is not mutually exclusive with the Fountain of Youth, but mixing them will make things even more insanely complex.

If he tried to use a Time-Turner in seminary, it would help explain why he got the boot from there. He probably lost it before season 1 of House, though.

House and Cuddy had a relationship.

It ended badly, and they both wanted to call it off. They did, but House found blackmail material at her house - stuff he didn't originally intended to use. But he was feeling raw about the breakup, and he didn't have a job, and so he blackmailed her to get his job. He had other ideas as to how to use the blackmail material; hiring him was the only one acceptable to both of them.

Now he threatens her with the blackmail material whenever she wants to fire him. It's part of the reason she seems so strained and worried at times - House doesn't seem the type to randomly reveal her secret, and he doesn't seem easily pissed off, but she's still worried that he'll decide to drop the bomb. It's part of the reason she lets him get away with so much. It's also how the hospital has so much money - instead of paying House directly, she's paying the blackmail into the hospital funds so House can have cable, MRI machines, whatever he wants. She may be doing blackmail of her own or working at an "escort agency" to help cover House's blackmail. She put some of the money into House's legal fund. House is trying to find out how much he can safely blackmail her into doing without her losing her job or otherwise being displaced (he overstretched himself when he set in motion whatever brought Vogler to the hospital.

• It is Canon that House and Cuddy knew each other, casually and perhaps biblically, when they were both at medical school, when she was about eighteen and he was about twenty-eight. (His approach to ethics meant it took longer than normal for him to complete med school.) But we don't know whether that was a true relationship or just a friendship with benefit.
• He may have used the blackmail material without even realizing what he was doing. Thus, Cuddy almost put teeth into her threats to fire him.
• Considering her reaction to House's shouting from the balcony that he slept with her (he failed to say when), it's all but canon that they did do it at some point (which she presumed he was referring to).
• The relationship is confirmed in "Top Secret" and "Known Unknowns."

If Taub leaves PPTH, he could join the organizations of Cold Case or Without a Trace and be an asset.

First, he finds a teenager who accused a priest of molesting him - with no more info than that and who the priest in question was. Two episodes later, he has found Wilson's insane brother, whom Wilson had been looking for (off and on) for 13 years - and Taub couldn't have been working on that for more than 18 months! Anyone that good at finding people would be useful at a Missing Persons department or hunting down witnesses to a cold case.

• Or he could join Lucas Douglas in that rumored spin-off of ''House''. Together, the two would fight crime!
  • We might get to see that before Taub leaves PPTH. Lucas has been spun back in.
• Someday, when he's ready, Taub will find out who killed Kutner. And then take revenge.
  • Or, Taub killed him out of Jealousy.

Taub was not a wanted child

He is Jewish. His looks, last name, and relative lack of observance indicate that he was born into it. And his first name is Christopher. This is like someone in the Bible Belt naming their kid Muhammad.

• His middle name is equally non-Jewish. His parents must've had a mixed marriage. Perhaps it was a shotgun wedding? Taub was born before the era of free love...

Stacy Warner will return.

She is the only sympathetic recurring character - she was there for almost a year, not counting the pre-series stint - who has escaped PPTH for more than a few episodes. (Seriously, the place is the Hospital New Jersey.) She has to be sucked back in soon.

• The odds of this happening have gone up slightly. She left PPTH because of her feelings for House and his abuse of them; House left PPTH at the end of Season 5. It's possible that she fooled herself into thinking he wouldn't return.

Wilson will start dating Cuddy.

It is established by the creators that Wilson will start dating somebody. Cuddy is the only female regular who is currently unattached.

• Oops — she was attached when the theory was written. We just didn't know it.

Wilson will start dating Thirteen when she comes back from Thailand.

He is attracted to the needy. She has a genetic disease which is shriveling her brain. Not a bad match.

Wilson will start dating Cameron.

This will require forcibly removing Chase from her apartment, but it can be managed - and, if Word of God is true, it will be. Then again, Cameron seems to enjoy pushing the boundaries of her relationships - she cheated on her terminally-ill first husband! (More or less.) And she dropped the other man after the fella died, so that wasn't true love. She would probably enjoy having forbidden dates with Wilson while Chase is waiting anxiously at home (or in an INS cell or in the ICU) with his eyes sparking green...

A new female character will join the regular cast to replace whoever is leaving at the end of Season 5.

And Wilson will attempt to make her ex-Mrs. Wilson #4.

• Leaving at the end of Season 5, darn it!
• This theory has suddenly gotten a lot more complicated.
• Finally happened, more or less, but the details need finessing.

Tritter will return.

Because not just any cop can be trusted to scare the life out of everyone at PPTH.

• He now has reason.

Edward Vogler will return.

Because he is the head of a drug company, and drug companies are implacable. If he gets wind of how well House and Wilson have(n't) been getting along lately, he'll know this is a good time for him to return...

House is still in the coma we learned about when he taught the class.

One episode showed the incident where House lost the muscle tissue in his leg; one of the things mentioned by his then-girlfriend was that he wanted to be put into a chemically induced coma for the worst of it. He's still in that coma.

The various members of the cast are either people that he knew at some point or are amalgamations of certain traits. The various medical cases are a way for House's brain to avoid atrophying as well as a way to try to pull himself awake.

This also would explain the obsession with pain medication and his almost always being eventually right. The later seasons are examples of his mind either trying to shock or scare him awake or trying to help him deal with his underlying problems and flaws, such as his selfishness, the way he takes friends for granted, etc.

House is in Purgatory or something like it.

House died due to complications when he had his leg surgery; the various medical cases he does and his clinic hours are his way of working off the sins he had in life. Certain figures think that House deserves hellfire and so try to either make him give up or keep backsliding into the worst behaviors while others want to try to help him improve himself. Cuddy teaching him that he needs others, if only to bounce ideas off of and Wilson providing him with a friend, probably the only friend he's ever had and could ever have.

The network or producers kill off Kutner

.Okay, the actor had asked to leave the show. He had good reason to. But surely Kutner could've been Put on a Bus like the various members of the old team were - say, he resigns to take some well-paying sports medicine post. Instead, he had a Bridge Dropped On Him. And it happened so abruptly that some promo clips from later episodes haven't had the character excised yet.

• He wasn't Screwed by the Network. He's choosing to go work in the White House and work to enhance causes he believes in, such as arts and the voices of ethnic minorities. If anything he's going Screw Destiny on the Networks. But his suicide is lame in a major way.
  • The problem isn't that he left, or even (for viewers) why he left. It's how he left.
• Wait...House airs on FOX. Newscorp owns broadcast Fox and Fox News. Kal Penn leaves to join the Obama administration and... Goddammit, Fox.
  • Because The Simpsons and Family Guy totally aren't allowed to express the writers' moonbat opinons.
  • The Simpsons and Family Guy have Negative Continuity, run on Rule of Funny, and take Refuge in Audacity. FOX allows those shows their moonbat opinions because they look like moonbat shows. House is a semi-realistic Medical Drama with continuity averaging positive, and it had Very Special Episodes even before the incident being theorized about. FOX and Universal do care about the messages the show sends; else, we would not have a "House is not an addict" WMG.

Wilson wasn't there when House had the infarction because Wilson didn't live in Princeton yet.

Okay. Wilson lost touch with his brother approx. 13 years before late season 5, before House met him. House had the infarction approx. 12 years before that time. Tight schedule!

Here's a provisional timeline:

1996 1990-1991: Wilson hangs up on his brother will doing his finals for his final year in med school. The brother promptly disappears.

1996-1997 1991: House attends a medical conference in Louisiana. Wilson, just starting his medical career, is there, distracted by his first set of divorce papers. Presumably his brother had been as disruptive to that marriage as House was to later ones.

1996-1997 1991 -1992: Wilson commutes from wherever he works (New Orleans or Atlanta) to Princeton, taking a weekend off every month or so. House is the only person he knows in Princeton, so he crashes on House and Stacy's couch. He becomes friends with Stacy during this time. (Hopefully it didn't go further than that.) He does not let House know the real reason he's visiting, but acts like he's only building the friendship that started at that conference. Eventually, that's more true than not.

1997 1992: House has his infarction. When he recovers, Cuddy hires him out of pity. House, taking advantage of Cuddy's then-sincere generosity, gets Wilson into PPTH on his heels.

• Note — dates have been changed in the timeline because Wilson gave a hard date for Year Zero in "Lockdown," and it is considerably earlier than what had been commonly assumed.
• The last two strikethroughs are simply wrong. (Sorry.) "Knightfall" and "The Choice" introduced a Series Continuity Error into the relative timeline — it would have had Wilson be married to Sam and Bonnie at the same time. Word of God made a patch, and possibly a retcon, to the general relative timeline. Results confirm the hard dates 1990-1991 for Wilson and Sam's marriage, but suggest that 1996 is the correct year for House having his infarction and becoming head of Diagnostics... None of this discredits the main theory, but it makes it both less likely and less necessary (five years is plenty of time for Wilson to relocate).

Kutner is Kumar.

Because Kumar is planning on being a doctor following Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps he ended up joining the Witness Protection Program or some such between then and his appearance on House. His adoptive parents are no such thing and are helping him maintain his cover; and he was murdered because his cover got blown.

Chase is moderating his accent.

This theory won't fly everywhere; maybe it's only popular In America! But it's bandied around a lot...

We had twenty years prior to House to learn what an Australian accent sounds like. Chase's accent, while noticeable, is milder than those of, say, "Crocodile" Dundee or Steve Irwin. Clearly, he's toning it down deliberately to seem more refined or be more comprehensible. If he didn't, he might sound like pure "Outback" - or worse, Czech-Australian. (That last possibility isn't usually brought up but, since he is Czech-Australian and we've heard his dad speak, it's just possible.)

• Discredited. Lo and behold, very few Australian people sound like Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin. This Australian troper thinks Chase's accent pretty typical, especially if Chase comes from the city. (Where in Australia does Chase come from?)
  • Melbourne.
• This Australian Troper would argue that in order to have obtained a Medical degree in Australia Chase would have likely attended a university in one of the major cities. Hence why he has a perfectly ordinary urban Australian accent rather than the rough rural Crocodile Dundee type accent so often shown on television.
• The actor was in Australian soap opera Neighbours for many years, and he's always spoken in that accent.
• We now know that this theory might be possible. Chase can drop his accent with minimal preparation, so he might be able to adjust it.

Chase spent Summer 2008 competing on Top Chef: New York under a fake identity.

He hid his accent thoroughly, but anyone who watched that season of Top Chef knew who "Jeff" was on sight. Seriously, the "Miami Beach Dildo Club"? He was playing a Housian prank on the producers that went considerably farther than anyone expected. (For those who don't watch Top Chef, "Jeff" got booted out in seventh position and then got to the semi-finals as a wild card.)

• Alternatively, that was one of Chase's half-relatives. This possibility is much more likely, since we didn't see any epi-pens floating around.
• The odds of this being Chase himself have gone up slightly now that we know that he can hide his accent thoroughly. Though if it was him, he should have remembered it before taking the speed-dating bet. Top Chef is just as popular in his 'verse as ours; he would be recognized, and it would affect how people treat him — consistently with how he did get treated in "Private Lives."

PPTH has an interesting age superstition going

First, we have "Cursed," which has conflicting info on how old Chase was at the time. Now we have "Simple Explanation" and its supplementary material; Foreman says Kutner's 28, but the Princeton newspaper says he's 33, and his birthyear supports the newspaper. Forgive the tense. And, since the link to the supplementary material was cited right next to the suicide hotline, we have to take it more seriously than usual.

This is the third age-related anomaly on the show (surely Cuddy isn't 38!); but now there's a pattern. Stated age and life-experience are four years off for Chase and five years off for Kutner. Now, let's suppose Cuddy took four years off her own age when she said she was 38. That would mean she's really 42 - which is the age of her actress, and thus plausible...

Clearly, custom at PPTH is to ignore a doctor's years in pre-med when stating his or her age directly. Interestingly, House keeps this superstition (he's the one who said Chase was 26 in Season 1.) It would be interesting to see what age House claims to be, since he likely spent more than five years in pre-med. Possibly a lot more.

• Discredited because of "Lockdown".

Kutner was in love with Amber.

We know Kutner asked Amber out and was rejected. It seemed casual at the time, but assume for a minute that he was hopelessly in love with her. First, he sees her get fired in such a brutal manner that even she is upset. Then he has to suffer through Wilson dating her and House constantly scheming against her. Then she dies horribly, almost right in front of Kutner, and he can't reveal any of his true feelings out of respect for Wilson. Even after she dies, House is still making callous jokes about her. All this takes a heavy toll on Kutner, and leads to him committing suicide.

• Finally! This explains a lot about Kutner. Further evidence may be taken from how he mourned Amber - in front of a TV eating Lucky Charms. Most doctors at PPTH are so messed up that the more callous someone acts about a death, the deeper it must have struck.
  • Honestly, it looked like he was just this side of catatonic in that scene, a bit glassy-eyed and going through the motions. Could just be memory distorting it, though.
• Maybe he was having the visions of Amber before House was.
• Amber!Cancer

Kutner was in love with Thirteen.

They had been friends early on; he had even given her comfort when she first was diagnosed with Huntington's. Kutner was shocked to learn she slept with Foreman. (She replied that it was because Kutner was busy at the time.) He seemed to have some interest in her, and he was jealous enough that he told Foreman that her being bisexual gave her twice as many people to cheat with. He finally couldn't stand watching her together with Foreman anymore, and shot himself.

• Watching her go through House picking on her, living through the whole one-night-stand episode, and knowing about her brain tumor made it worse.

It wasn't Lupus.

In that case, it was just House's dream.

House is an elf.

Or a half-elf –- the human half would explain why he has Perma-Stubble and lacks pointy ears. His coworkers let him walk all over them because they know that they can’t argue with elves. Vogler either didn’t know that House is an elf or was a secret agent working for dwarves. Tritter simply didn't know House was an elf. ("Moriarty" didn't argue with House - he just shot him.)

• And his infarction was due to a wound received from a Nazgûl thousands of years ago.

Thirteen is moonlighting as a stripper.

She has the looks for it, and there is no other way that she could legitimately attend Chase's bachelor party.

• Alternatively, she wasn't legitimately attending Chase's bachelor party; House just agreed because of the chance that she would get drunk and make out with a stripper, possibly topless. (She did do some making out...)
  • That alternative is what the powers that be were aiming for. However, that possibility didn't occur to House (he initially said "no") until after she suggested it, and she also suggested that she herself might strip in the same breath. So...
• And now she's gone to Thailand. She clearly wants to brush up on her skills.
• The entire Princeton underworld knows about her skills! Then again, she used to deal with it regularly, so they would.
• And she is now leaving PPTH to pursue this vocation full-time. Carpe noctem.

The hallucination in "House Divided" is a Knight of the Blackened Denarius.

It knows things an ordinary hallucination shouldn't and tried to make House kill Chase. It took the form of Amber to try and further erode his sanity so that it can fully take him over. It came quite close...

• What's more, the real Amber acted the way she did because she had the Coin originally. House accidentally picked it up during the bus accident. This is also why she didn't fight harder to live.

The hallucination in "House Divided" was The First.

It knew things it shouldn't and tried to make House kill Chase. The First always seemed to like making people on the side of good kill others or themselves and House, despite an asshole, has saved hundreds.

The guy that shot House will be revealed as the guy who shot Kutner

.House was grasping at straws, but it has been a long time since they added anything to that sort-of-Myth Arc. And it might get fans off their backs about giving the character a bridge drop instead of a bus ticket.

Season 5 Penultimate Episode spoilers: House is still on vicodin; he just doesn't know it

.That was way too short a detox for him to be walking around and doing other stuff. Amber went from a hallucination to full-blows dissociative identity disorder, and she's taking pills and dosing his coffee/mugs with vicodin while neither he nor Cuddy are looking.]] That's why the next episode has a guy with Alien Hand Syndrome: It's going to provide the clue that shatters House's wall of security.

• Confirmed.

House's real dad is Hawkeye from M*A*S*H.

We know from the paternity test that his mother's husband wasn't his real father. And Hawkeye was also in the military.

House's dad is actually Sergeant Gunnery Hartman.

Outside of the fact that they're portrayed by the same actor, House's father behaves no differently from what a domesticated and out-of-the-military Gunnery Hartman would act like. Further supported considering how the scene in which Hartman dies was potentially a dream sequence. If not that, then it's possible that Hartman survived the gunshot wound and when discharged altered his identity so as not to be linked with the dead trainee. Finally, what really tipped me off... Gunnery Hartman. Gregory House.

House is Hawkeye from M*A*S*H.

Think about it. Hawkeye is snarky, clever, has blue eyes, and has almost no respect for authority; the same goes for House. So... as soon as Hawkeye got back to the States, he used a Fountain of Youth, changed his name, and took a job at PPTH.

• Not so fast. M*A*S*H happened during the Korean War - the 1970s zone of the Korean War, but still, the Korean War. Even given how long M*A*S*H ran, Hawkeye is getting out no later than 1960 in normal time, and possibly much earlier. House is set in (near) modern times, and Dr. House is 48 going on 49. If Hawkeye became House via Fountain of Youth, he'd still have to relive much of his childhood, teenage years, college, and med school all over again... This in no way discredits the general theory. To be as jaded as House takes time.

Foreman was trying to hurt or kill Chase in "House Divided"

Chase is allergic to strawberries. This is in his medical file. Odds are high that, post-Vogler, House tried to use that to torment Chase at least once when we weren't looking (say, sending Chase on a donut run, demanding a dozen strawberry iced - or maybe ten of those and two of something Chase likes). Foreman is not the sharpest knife in the diagnostic drawer, but he likely got the idea that Chase had a strong aversion to strawberries at the very least; and if House tried to secretly trigger the allergy - well, everyone in Diagnostics would find out.

And then, some time later, Foreman learns that Chase's bachelor party contains a strawberry-flavored stripper, either directly or via Thirteen. He was, canonically, the one who urged Chase to take one last drink off that stripper.

House is going to marry Lisa Cuddy.

She will take his name, ensuring that, even if our favorite diagnostician is sidelined, there will still be a House M.D. in the thick of things.

• Between "The Greater Good" and "Moving the Chains," this is looking like a match made in Purgatory.

Cameron's full name is Allison Cameron House.

No Relation. Probably. Or at least no direct relation. It will be revealed when she and Chase go to change her name - Chase will want her to add his name to hers.

Cameron stopped using her true last name after she entered medical school; it's bad enough to be overshadowed by a genius with the same last name when you are related to him, and she really was ambitious. She uses "Allison Cameron" on the hospital roster and her research papers (the ones that didn't get stolen). Since she was married before, and got all but disowned when she married her first husband, Chase hadn't needed to meet her family before the ceremony.

This is also why she accepts Chase calling her Cameron after they are engaged (both times).

The Vicodin has been making House hallucinate people all along.

He just didn't notice it until it made a dead person show up.

This can explain away any out-of-character stuff that has ever popped up. There's been a good amount of it.

This also means that some characters may have been dead for a while without House knowing it - presumably they'll all be gone when he gets back from the asylum.

• The first confirmed instance of House hallucinating someone when he was awake and not on a more direct hallucinogen happened in the first episode of the fourth season. The absolute latest we can trust what he sees to be real is the main body of "Merry Little Christmas," before he loads up on stolen oxycodone. If Cuddy abandoning him could cause a psychotic break, how much worse from Wilson abandoning him when he had already OD'd? What comes after, even from his POV, isn't entirely wrong - we know he couldn't have gone to jail for very long - but it may not be entirely right, either.
  • Alternatively, "Wilson turning his back on OD'd House" was the first hallucination. Wilson, a trained medical professional, leaving his best friend without even bothering to make sure that he will survive the night? Not likely. A doped-up House breaking and seeing his best friend and moral compass leave him in disgust? Very likely.

It's not All Just a Dream

House isn't in every scene. We can presume that, for the most part, anything we see take place when he isn't in the immediate vicinity is real....

We may have to write off much of the first half of season 5. Scenes from Thirteen in season 5 before Foreman concludes that she cleaned up her act are also dubious. But she's probably reliable for the second half of the season. We will eventually have to take Thirteen's scenes with a grain of salt again, but that shouldn't happen before season 9.

This can reassure us, for instance, that most of the patients of the week exist, since we usually see them before they enter the system. It should also assure us that the core cast is, for the most part, alive.

House is hallucinating the weather at Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital.

Because that was way over the top.

• House does fit other elements of the Fisher King archetype.

In season 5, Amber Volakis is real but a ghost.

She's blocked from heaven because she's the CTB, and she's willing to let House believe she's a hallucination because he would never believe the truth.

This, naturally, is never going to be confirmed; but by its nature, it probably can't be Jossed.

She is haunting House because only he can give her whatever it is that will set her free from her current half-existence. She wants to make sure he doesn't find it.

This allows for her immateriality, the ability of House to feel her sometimes anyway, her Offscreen Teleportation, and her use of Hammerspace. It also explains how she knows things that a subconscious mind shouldn't know.

Strangely, many of those who buy into this theory believe she's a force for good. This despite that "assassination attempt."

• After House detoxed, Amber found a way to haunt Wilson. Wilson hasn't given much thought to what she is...
• Corollary to "Amber is a good ghost":

Chase is an evil djinn.

Somehow, some time ago, a djinn bottle got mixed up with the gin bottles at Chez Chase. The first Mrs. Rowan Chase released the djinn and made a wish that trapped it in a human body, whereupon he took on the ID of Robert Chase. Djinni aren't allowed to break out of their own soul-jars, and so he's been stuck pretending to be human ever since. Since he isn't really human, he often is aloof and inhuman - especially early on. His apparent combo of ambition and laziness just naturally goes with being from a race that has great power (when free) but gets forced into long periods of inactivity.

He's a bound djinn. He always does what anyone else asks of him when possible, no matter how hard, humiliating, or illegal it is, even if it's against his express desires or his own self-interest (which he tries to protect when he acts on his own). House has no way of knowing that Chase is compelled to be like that.

And he is positive about the existence of the supernatural; it takes one to know one.

Thirteen is a mole sent to ruin House's life and the lives of those who work for him.

Throughout the "Survivor" applicant arc in Season Four, Thirteen played the nondescript applicant and, as Amber said, hid everything (including her name) to make herself more intriguing to House. She knew the patient in '97 Seconds' wanted to die, and so she deliberately didn't supervise his taking the pills. She knew that he wouldn't take them, he would die, she would be responsible, and everyone would move on anyway because it was simply a careless "accident."

She's been suggesting every false diagnosis she can think of to try to kill patients and to screw with House's head. She's been doing surprisingly well at that.

She read through the paperwork on the victims in the bus crash; after realising one resembled Amber, she visited the hospital where Amber was to see if it was Amber. Upon finding it was, she edited the paperwork so no one would realise Amber was there - she was hoping that Amber would die without anyone at PPTH knowing.

Throughout season five, she deliberately made herself the centre of the universe by doing everything she could to screw with everyone's heads, especially House's and Foreman's. Finally, she takes a more direct approach and kills Kutner to get to everyone. Then she tried to kill Chase by getting Foreman to get Chase to take a shot off Karamel.

Or Kutner suspected Thirteen, and she killed him to keep him quiet. She tried to kill Chase because Chase began to suspect her.

• She's still at it. First, she undermines Foreman when he's heading Diagnostics. Then, when she is forced to leave Diagnostics, she uses her relationship with Foreman to talk him into accepting a treatment suggested by Chase — which Chase intended to kill the patient with. This will eventually doom Chase, and so it's two birds with one stone.
• And now she's telling Chase that he and Cameron were meant to be — four months after Cameron left him. (He didn't fall for it.)
• It's getting worse. Now she has encouraged Wilson to start dating his first ex even though she believes that that relationship is (still) doomed.
• Mission accomplished, and so she goes. Fortunately for House, she left his boss alone....
• By this logic, all of the ducklings are moles because they all suggest wrong diagnoses off the tops of their heads. She's actually batting a pretty good average. She "underminds" Foreman by doing her job (serving as a sounding board for the boss), and "Epic Fail"'s A-plot was that Foreman's management style was pretty awful. And somebody needed to tell Chase that his relationship with Cameron wasn't completely devoid of emotion, which is what she did, not that they were "meant to be".
  • Thirteen generally fall in love with Foremen.So she broke up with him feeling guilty about using him but she still to had carry out her mission. But she noticed that she could no longer do it as she was still in love with Foremen. She left the team not wanting to tell them the turth.

Kutner was Thirteen's partner in crime.

He was a mole, too. He tried to kill patients twice by pretending he was saving their lives. He failed both times, though - one of his failed attempts even led to a correct diagnosis.

The scene in 'Guardian Angels' where the patient hallucinated him and Thirteen stabbing her arm with a needle wasn't a hallucination - they injected her arm with something so she'd think it was a hallucination.

Finally (perhaps out of love for Taub or fear of deathcats), he decides to give up being a mole. Then Thirteen shoots him so he can't expose her.

Alternatively, he was exposed by Chase. Unfortunately, people don't listen to Chase. Thirteen killed him to save herself and then tried to kill Chase.

Or Cameron exposed Kutner. Thirteen killed Kutner, and then tried to kill Chase as a warning to Cameron to keep quiet. Even she dares not kill the most generally caring woman at PPTH.

• But I thought I saw Chase in that the hallucination to. So is Chase a mole to?

Chase owns the death cat.

At the end of the episode with the "death cat," the patient of the week has left and has left the death cat behind. It and its litterbox are left in Diagnostics. It is not a hallucination - we see it when House isn't there and Taub is.

The cat has not been seen onscreen since.

About three episodes and one major disaster after that, House says that Chase has a cat. This is the first we've heard of it. If House is right about this, it could be the same cat. Chase is friends with Taub, more or less, since they're both surgeons; Chase took pity on Taub's plea to save him from perpetual litterbox duty and Kutner from letting his fear of death cats lock him out of Diagnostics. Chase is fairly cold-blooded; no cat is going to cuddle him for warmth...

And if he ended up cuddling the kitty a little (offscreen) during the last few episodes of season 5 - well, he'd done things to antagonize Cameron (bachelor parties, jealousy over dead husbands, you know the drill), and he was a little lonely...

House's laptop died shortly after the deathcat sat on it.

Since he had already solved the case by then, he didn't care - or maybe didn't realize.

• I would love for this to be real XD

Cameron is a Terminator.

She was built after SCC-Cameron was created and sent back in time.

Allison Cameron, like most Terminators, was originally built to go after resistance fighters; but she was captured and reprogrammed. She was sent back to prevent House's death. Just his death - that's why she isn't twelve years older than she is. House will, sometime in the future, save the life of a key resistance figure - or perhaps he already has.

Allison Cameron was given the appearance of a doctor who had recently died and taught as much about medicine as the resistance could teach her (because a doctor would be in a better position to save House's life than anyone else)- which isn't quite as much as her medical certificate indicates. The technician named her Allison after the freedom fighter and Cameron after the SCC-Terminator, and sent her back to protect House by placing her in a position where she would become one of House's team- history suggested that he would think with his hormones when he hired her. She was inserted into the timeline shortly before House hired her. Note that she talks much about her past, but we see little hard evidence of it. Her family is estranged, her first husband "dead."

Since having a Terminator "terminate" people is unacceptable for a doctor (beyond a certain point) and would risk her losing her license before she could finish her task, she got the "don't kill people" training before she was sent back. The technician who gave it to her went somewhat overboard - she came in believing that life was inviolate. House managed to break some of that back out of her.

• It is possible that an alternate!Future!Chase was on the programming team, though he clearly wasn't the only one. Perhaps he was the "dead first husband" (in which case the programming was finished by someone else) - which would add some hilarity to the end of season 5. Since Past(Present?)!Chase wouldn't necessarily be helpful to the mission, this ended up causing some complicated informal code during programming and a few personal complications after she was sent back, especially after her seduction of House started to fail.
• It appears that the mission will be complete, or mostly complete, before the next Christmas special. If it wasn't before the end of season 5.
  • Or that she failed at it. But she'll be back.

The last 15 minutes of "Under My Skin" could have happened.

With some adjustment for time and medical facts, natch. That is, if House had asked Cuddy to help him detox in reality, then Cuddy would have dropped everything to help him just like she did in the hallucination.

This theory is popular with people trying to ship House and Cuddy.

• This theory has support now! Seeing what Cuddy did at the end of season 6 without House asking...

Related theory:

Cuddy did audit an endocrinology class simply because House had enrolled in it.

Cuddy was an endocrinologist before she was a dean, so if this theory is true, then she got where she is because of House.

• This theory is insane, but there are people who believe it.
  • What WMG isn't insane?
    • The Kutner is Kumar WMG above sounds pretty plausible to me.

Kutner is a diehard Republican.

And he was very unhappy that Obama became president, and even less happy about what Obama was doing as president. If McCain had won in 2008, he, and ultimately everyone else in Diagnostics, would be much happier right now.

Think about it. If Kal Penn hadn't decided to become part of Obama's cabinet, Kutner would not have had to die. And if Kutner hadn't killed himself, then the other dominoes at the end of season 5 would not have fallen, and House would still be able to pretend that he's sane.

Wilson is secretly evil.

This would've been extremely wild before season three; since then, there have been moments (maybe story arcs) of evidence.

This theory is the basis for dark!Wilson fanfic communities.

Naturally, if this is true, he's Affably Evil. Usually.

• At the conference with his Breaking Speech, but House in his role as semi-demi-antichrist stopped him.
• The corollary of this is that House is secretly fuzzy, and that both just externalize the things they want others to see. House doesn't want to get to know his patients because it hurts, and Wilson loves to get to know his oncology patients because it's fun.

Kutner faked his death.

Any and all evidence to his supposed 'suicide' was planted by Kutner in association with a third party organization whom he may or may not currently be working for.

• Further evidence will be revealed in the third Harold and Kumar film.

House will detox from Vicodin completely and successfully.

And what is more, he will do it before the American federal government outlaws Vicodin. The show producers have inside info on exactly when that will happen.

• Confirmed!

If Vicodin gets banned, then House fanfic writers will be responsible.

Yes, Vicodin is a dangerous narcotic. But that isn't what the fanfic writers who write dying!addict!House are usually worried about. Overdosing on the narcotic hydrocone would look very like overdosing on methadone (which we've seen), and we know he isn't taking that much Vicodin.

But Vicodin is a combination drug, and the other half is acetometophin/ paracetemephol/ Tylenol. The dose of Tylenol it takes to seriously damage one's liver is only twice the highest recommended dose; if House is taking enough Vicodin to risk ODing on the narcotic, he's definitely ODing on the Tylenol. And liver damage is a slow and mostly silent killer.

Once the right (wrong?) people read this fanfic and check to see if it's true, they can then ban prescription combination painkillers with acetomenophin in them. Because Tylenol has long been considered safe, it is in all sorts of OTC drugs; the drug-mixing is the official reason. But the unofficial one will be silent Vicodin overdosing.

• It has nothing to do with fanfic, doctors have known about (and been working against Johnson & Johnson and the rest of big pharma to change perception about) the dangers of Tylenol for many years. Vicodin and Percocet were not the only drugs recommended for removal from the market. Tylenol is combined in at least seven other prescription painkillers. Vicodin alone is prescribed 100 million times a year, and in the US, more than 42,000 people are hospitalized every year for Tylenol overdoses (and several hundred people die). Some of those people never took narcotics in their life, they simply didn't read that their multi-symptom cough syrup had the same ingredient as their fever reducer, and those OTC combination medicines were recommended for changes by a much stronger vote (36-1 vs 24-13 for narcotics). The problem is that people don't read the label, they just assume (much like Dr. Cox) that the correct dose is whatever sticks. But a 2005 study found that most overdoses involve narcotics, and the FDA panel openly admitted this.

Allison Cameron will be Dean of Medicine at PPTH at the beginning of season 6

The reasons Cuddy had for trying to leave the position remain valid: Cuddy is still a mom who wants to learn to bond with her kid. The reason Cameron resigned from the Deanhood ceased to be valid, at least temporarily, at the end of Season 5. And, when Cuddy picks her replacement while she's on sabbatical, Cameron has an edge because she's had the position before.

This should make things interesting for both the Diagnostics Department collectively (since she'll be better able to obstruct it needlessly this time around) and for Dr. Robert Chase (who will be at least two levels below her in the hospital hierarchy, again).

• Jossed.

House is not addicted to pain killers.

His behaviour is not that of an addict. He seems to be in genuine pain. His response to coming off his meds in the season one episode "Detox" is not addiction withdrawal; it far more closely resembles a person with a dependency being denied meds. He doesn't need less meds, he needs more. Or different meds.

(NOTE, based on episodes shown in the UK.)

• This was once Word of God, but there has been at least one Flip-Flop of God since then, so this goes here.
• Drug seeking behavior and stock-piling are medically recognized as signs of dependence, not necessarily addiction. You can not take opiates long term without dependence and tolerance. But when the drugs cause problems in your life (social, mental, physical, whatever) and you still continue to use narcotics, or when you take prescription painkillers at unscheduled times to alleviate symptoms other than pain (ie boredom), those are signs of addiction. IRL, Vicodin is what the dentist gives you when you need something after you have a tooth pulled. House has had major damage to a major thigh muscle, leaving him with permanent nerve damage and a permanently incapacitated leg (which by itself would also cause fairly severe back pain, just ask Hugh Laurie about simply faking a limp). House, as a real pain patient, would realistically be prescribed something like a few oxycodone a day (without acetaminophen, to lower his long-term risk of liver damage) as needed for "breakthrough" pain, and ms contin several times a day for regular maintenance. He would also probably have to take a recommended daily dose of aspirin (or even prescription anticoagulants) to prevent recurrence of the thromboembolism. With such a course of treatment, the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners would probably have to limit his authority to practice, if they didn't revoke his license outright and force him into teaching.

Foreman's stock is going to rise high over the next year or so.

First, Cuddy probably appointed Foreman to head Diagnostics as soon as she had returned to work after the season 5 finale. He's the highest ranking person there, appointed by her - House only thought he could fire him because he was delusional; and Cuddy has tried to tap him to run diagnostics twice before. He's even getting better at it after that slight setback in season 2.

Second - well, no one should be surprised to hear that House will be at PPTH in season 6. But he will be spending [[strike}most]] much of season 6 trying to regain his license — which means he will lose it! He's still going to be solving cases because he loves puzzles, but he won't be able to take any official credit for it. Foreman has stolen credit before in the form of at least one of Cameron's research papers; he'll be happy to do it again, since he likes House much less than Cameron.

• It looks like the second point of this argument is at least half-wrong.
• Many details jossed, but main theory is still tenable. Though Foreman probably doesn't want to steal ideas from people who don't have working medical licenses.
• Discredited because of an international incident. What the hell, Chase?

When House gets back, Wilson will have a significant other who calls him John.

Mirroring Watson's wife in the Sherlock Holmes series break who called him James, and got put in a Bus Crash. The name confusion will be an early indication to the viewers (and House?) that she has brain cancer; that's how she met Wilson and why he's so interested (considering his already-outed obsession for people who need help).

• And he will be willing to risk his career for her.

Wilson will be having a relationship with Karamel, the stripper with the strawberry body butter.

She will call him John because of how they ended up together.

• Now Robert Chase will really have a reason to avoid the Diagnostics floor.

Allison Cameron is running Diagnostics through the mid-season break.

Resignation aside, she never did stop working in that wing; odds are, a high percentage of the paperwork for Diagnostics in Seasons 4 and 5 was in her handwriting. It could be bad, politically, for Cuddy to appoint Foreman as head so soon after the Huntington's debacle. Cameron has experience in diagnostics, is known for her ethics (rightly or wrongly), and has never had her license at risk.

This may allow two of the Wilson romance theories above to converge.

• Word of God says no. That's Foreman's job, again.

They caught House a lot earlier in season 5, if not between seasons 4 and 5.

The reason so many patients have been psychotic or having hallucinations (when you take out the House/Thirteen/Kutner-centric cases, it does seem like disproportionately many) is that they're other psych patients. House has been taking daily phys rehab walks around the psych ward they put him in and incorporating that into his belief that he's still okay and still doing casework. The season finale was a breakthrough because he accepted that he had a breakdown in the first place (hence the importance of Amber). None of season 5 can be trusted as canon (not Foreteen, not anything related to Kutner, maybe not even Chase and Cameron's Relationship Upgrade), although it may be loosely based on real news that the PPTH underlings told House to try and keep him updated in hopes that he snaps out of it. House may think he's still having problems for a few seconds when Kutner visits from his fellowship project in San diFrangeles or the Hamptons or wherever in a prerecorded set of scenes, but it will be Played for Laughs.

• He had his breakthrough because Kutner visited.

Chase has mentally slipped off the rails.

As punishment for his acts of betrayal, House tried to break his spirit. But his spirit either is unbreakable or was crushed pretty fine already (depending on whether you trust Foreman or insane fans more on this subject), and so something else had to give out instead. That something is his connection to the world around him.

The connection isn't completely broken — if it was, he'd be dead or in a coma. So, this is why part of House's subconscious might want him dead or in a coma.

• If this isn't already true, then it might become true.
• It became true no later than "Brave Heart." Seriously, if you are an intensivist who has developed a phobia of your hospital's intensive care unit for fear of what you may find there, then you are in big trouble.

The creators are going to renumber the seasons, right now, to hinder communication between Wild Mass Guessers.

Okay, so maybe D. Shore calling the next season "Season 5" is a typo in the TV Guide coming attractions. But he and his partner in showrunning are just the type who love to give internet fans trouble, and what better way than to move the references we use as shorthand?

The only question left if this is true is, what is the correct new season numbering?

• Further evidence: Katie Jacobs, a current producer for the show, told TV Guide that she would decide "next year" when the current season would end. This interview was printed late January 2010!
• And further evidence: House is distributed by Universal. Other shows associated with Universal have had confusing numbering conventions: Heroes has had five Volumes in its four seasons, and Battlestar Galactica has a "season 4.5." House is jumping onto this bandwagon a little late.
• It appears that a season divider has been informally drawn between "Wilson" and "The Down Low."

Season One (standard numbering) will end up in Canon Discontinuity.

This is the season with the Vogler arc, which the creators dislike; several characters behaved then in ways contrary to more recent portrayals. This is where we first deal with Cameron's deceased relatives. (There was one early episode where her dead first husband would've been relevant but was never brought up.) This is when Cameron tried to date House, planting the seed to a pairing that thrives in Fan Fic to this day. This is where much of our info on Chase, including one of his diagnostic successes, comes from. Most critically, this is the season in which it is sincerely argued that House is not an addict!

Clearly, for the good of the American people, this season must be set aside and treated like a rough draft. Things that are mentioned only in this season will cease to be canon. Many of them have ceased to be treated as canon in canon, so this is the next logical step.

• One purpose of "Lockdown" seems to be to clarify the state of the canon. Other episodes from the second half of season 6 also seem to provide support.

The distance between the pilot and "No Reason" is no more than fifteen months.

The rationale behind this: approximately three months passed between "Cursed" and the case part of "The Mistake." This distance cannot be signifcantly lengthened. The case is supposed to be six months before Chase's trial; but there are insufficient visual cues to indicate that this much time passed, and there are common-sense reasons to avoid letting that much time pass. Surely someone who is accused of committing aggravated homicide, even the unintentional variety, shouldn't be working while he's waiting for his trial?

So fanon, especially that of Fan Fic writers, often plays Fanon Dis Continuity so that the case and the trial happen close to each other, and make the intervening months extremely busy for Diagnostics....

• "Private Lives" may support this one. Wilson does an As You Know to Chase about how long Chase has been working with and around House — and that period started, at latest, a year before "Cursed" (assuming that one's still canon).

Allison Cameron will officially be Allison Cameron Chase as of season 6.

Just making this one official.

She may even get called "Dr. Chase" by some people, either naturally or in an attempt to throw House off. (House does not necessarily know that she succeeded in getting married.)

If Stacy Warner returns, then she'll be forced into "Chase versus the AMA," round 2.

It is strongly rumored that Robert Chase is gonna try to euthanize a patient. If Chase is still a Cosmic Plaything, then he will somehow mess this up majorly; and if he messes that up majorly, then his license will be in danger again. And Stacy will be there again. At least no one will hold it against her if she loses.

• Discredited — because Foreman got involved after the fact, he took the defense and will probably prevent that part from spinning out of control.
• Oh, and for the record, that rumor was only half true. Chase dysthanized a patient.

When Chase was actively avoiding his dad and being unfriendly to him in "Cursed," he was being unfair.

The only stated reason we have for Chase's non-diagnostic behavior in that episode is that his dad divorced his mum and remarried.

Now, think of Chase as he is now — that is, deep in love or a reasonable facsimile thereof with Cameron. Now think of how he treated Cameron, and perhaps life itself, in seasons 4 and 5 during those moments when he thought she didn't love him back. He may have been paranoid some of those times, but that's no comfort to Cameron.

This was the same sort of thing. It is not objectively justifiable.

Chase's parents abused him, in the loose sense of the word "abuse".

This is here because it is not truly supported in canon (Chase does say that his dad never laid a hand on him or his mother), and yet it is widely believed in the fandom. (Sit down, this might take a while.)

The argument for his mother abusing him, in the loose sense, is simple: she was an alcoholic, and Chase was caring for her during at least part of his teens, when technically she should've been caring for him. (Possibly earlier, depending on what timeline you're running.) Thus, neglect is unavoidable, and more violent abuse is conceivable. We may get more enlightenment on this aspect of this theory in season 6.

There are at least two schools of thought that lead to the idea of his father "abusing" him:

1. The benign one is that Rowan Chase simply could not be both one of the greatest doctors in the world and a good father at the same time. He "abused" Chase simply by being absent. Since the concept is common in Western works (Cuddy is struggling with it), it's easy to apply it here.
2. Chase's behavior toward his dad in "Cursed" is justified; Rowan did something objectively wrong. This version may permit active abuse; Chase might not want to advertise that sort, and so he may lie about it. Or he may have used Exact Words. (Rowan never laid a hand on him — there was always an intermediate implement.)

Chase takes after his mother.

This is from process of elimination. He did not get those looks from his dad. It is probable that some of his blue-bloodedness, and his romantic streak (such as it is), came from her.

If this is true, then it could mean trouble. She was an alcoholic. He drinks...

Thirteen will be leaving Diagnostics.

There are two ways for her to do this:

1. She could die. Despite her Huntington's, this is the less likely alternative.
2. She will have a falling-out with Foreman. To escape him, she will transfer to another wing of the hospital to practice her specialty. She's an internist, which means that most of the cases she can't handle should probably go to a specialist before they go to Diagnostics — but she likely will contact Diagnostics occasionally.

• The odds have gone up, but the mechnaism is not one of the listed ones. Foreman is running Diagnostics, and he is going to fire her; presumably, personal problems will lead to personnel problems. The big question is, will she be gone from Diagnostics for any length of time? She has been fired before, but returned the same episode. That won't happen this time, but the next episode is possible.
• Confirmed. But Wilson is going to try to get her back.

Taub will be leaving Diagnostics.

He's been barred from plastic surgery for as long as he remains anywhere near NYC. But he's been practicing real surgery, and there's always a chance that Cuddy will let him into the surgical department. He will then become a liaison between the surgical department and Diagnostics, like Chase.

Or he could always up and leave for somewhere where the cost of living is lower and the plastic surgeons don't know his name. It's not like that many of the fans will miss him. (If Kutner had lived longer, we might have.)

• Okay, this one might not be wild enough. He left Diagnostics once, only to return just before the episode was finished. And he is threatening to leave again in at least one season promo. Do not mark this as confirmed unless he leaves Diagnostics for longer than Cameron did after her first resignation.
• Probably true. But House will try to get him back even if it means blackmailing him again. He is the better living Number.

House and Grey's Anatomy share a universe.

Both are serious Medical Dramas that take place in hospitals which run far more chaotically than any Real Life hospital would dare. Both are heavy on soap-operatic plots; House just lessens the burden on the main cast by giving the patients of the week soap-operatic plots, too. And Princeton is far enough from Seattle that it's unlikely that something will happen in Canon to joss this.

The fellowships have no time limit

This is what the fandom assumed when Season 3 rolled around and Chase was still there as a fellow.

The fellowships are three years, but in the sense that a four-year college takes four years...

That is, a fellow may be allowed a fourth year if he isn't ready at the end of the third. That is why Chase was still there for most of season 3. Unfortunately, he didn't realize that a high percentage of his "grade" came from showing up and actively trying to diagnose; he was worse at that part in the end than when we first saw him. House fired him to prevent him from "graduating."

Foreman was three months away from "graduating" when he was hired as head of Diagnostics at New York Mercy, which effectively eliminated his need to finish the fellowship. (Cuddy made him an attending when he returned.) Cameron would've "graduated" between seasons 3 and 4 if she had never resigned at all, or late in season 4 if she had stayed when everyone else was gone.

There is an Artifact of Doom hidden in or built into the Diagnostics wing.

And anyone who spends a lot of time near that area will be cursed.

• Of course there is: The MRI Machine Of Doom! It's ring-shaped, and nothing good ever happens in, around or near it. The damn thing more often than not makes people sicker than when they came in, but the other doctors can't resist using it.
• Going with the WMG at the very top of this page, a Hellmouth is directly below it.

House will have an affair with Cameron to make Cuddy jealous.

Since Cameron can't say no to House, all House has to do is wait until the next heated lovers' quarrel, and he has his opening. House will then flaunt his relationship with Cameron to the whole hospital, making Cameron feel so warm and fuzzy that she practically forgets that wedding ring of hers, and making Cuddy's eyes flash green.

House having an affair with Cameron has the bonus effect of making Chase jealous. This is a bonus — House may even hope to force Chase into Mayfield. It does add some slight personal risk, though.

• It's too late for House to have an affair with Cameron now...

Chase will have an affair.

He will do something that will truly horrify Cameron. An affair, with the attendant hypocrisy on his end, would work.

• As of Season 6, it wasn't an affair, but he did horrify Cameron.

If this is true, then Stacy would make a good candidate if she's present.

• Cameron thinking he was having an affair was sufficient for the purpose.

Some woman, probably a Patient of the Week, will rape Chase.

And his relationship with Cameron will end in an Ironic Echo of how it began.

• There was another way to pull that off.

House is in league with the Horseman Pestilence.

Pestilence supplies House with interesting patients. No telling what House gives him in return.

• House has been prophesied to kill Pestilence. House lets him live so long as he entertains him. At the same time, House scammed Death into almost never killing his patients.

The fellowships are a sham.

Cuddy only made House take fellows so she could justify his heading a department at a teaching hospital. She doesn't expect him to create any new diagnosticians, and he had no plans to create any. So when Cuddy first learned that Foreman did see being a fellow of House as more than an end in itself, things got awkward.

• Practically confirmed.

Foreman will go down in history as one of the greatest diagnosticians that ever lived.

But not because of his leet diagnostic skills. This doesn't come easily to him, and he'll never be as good as House was when House was in top form. (Even if he once had the potential, that incident in "Euphoria" ruled out his being better than House.)

Nonetheless, Foreman will be one of the greatest diagnosticians that ever lived. And it will happen because he truly believes in diagnostics as a field of medicine. Unlike House (who considers his field a form of recreation with extremely high stakes), Foreman sees diagnostics as an real discipline. Foreman will be the one to ensure that diagnostics survives to the next generation.

That is why he left House's fellowship prematurely — he wanted there to be more than one Department of Diagnostics, more than one place to learn diagnostics. That didn't work out so well; but Foreman is as stubborn as hell about this field...

• It appears that he is again going to try to start a second Diagnostics department somewhere. He threatened to leave PPTH despite having nowhere else to go! The threat was defused, however...

Chase is going to get cancer.

He has a family history of it. And when he worked in Diagnostics, he spent too much time around the MRI of Doom. It'll be detected in a late season, though.

Chase is a descendant of Luke Skywalker.

There's a strong family resemblance. Whether he has any of the Force is up in the air.

PPTH is going to become a war zone.

Chase is responsible for the death of a patient who had been in the process of committing genocide. The friends of this Patient of the Week may want to take revenge on Diagnostics, Chase, or some combination thereof when it fully sinks in that what happened could have been prevented. These people have the resources to make it painful.

Bonus points if the successor to that dictator supports that dictator. (Very unlikely, but...) Then PPTH may literally become a war zone.

• The Princeton mafia may also start attacking PPTH soon.

Chase is going to federal prison.

Just for the record.

Chase will try to turn himself in to the authorities, and fail.

If he had done it immediately, before he started coming unhinged, then it might have worked...

Wilson is trying to undermine the Diagnostics department.

This theory was inspired by an exchange in "Instant Karma," though there is evidence dating as far back as season 3. (Though there was a time before he was like this.)

The syllogism goes like this:

• Wilson believes that House needs a diagnostician under him, or alongside him, who will consistently disagree with him and otherwise consistently resist the pull of House's ego.
• House is almost always eventually right. This means that anyone who consistently disagrees with him will be almost always ultimately wrong.
• Having someone who is both almost always ultimately wrong and stubborn in the department is going to make it more inefficient, and thus less productive.
• Therefore, Wilson values the deflation of House's ego over the Diagnostic department's success rate.

This is a problem because Wilson, being a natural charmer and stubborn himself, has a lot of influence with Cuddy.

• Forcing House to go to that conference didn't help.

No one but Foreman and Cuddy knows Thirteen's real name.

Otherwise, why would they keep calling her that? It's bad enough that when Cuddy called her "Dr. Hadley" around House, he didn't believe her.

She has even been clever enough to list herself as "Thirteen" on her personnel files.

• Foreman doesn't know her real name either, since she and Taub were able to fool him with forged personnel files.

Thirteen's first name, Remy, is another nickname.

Because Remy is not a sane girl's name. (Ask any X-Men fan.)

Inspired by an AU fanfic in which Thirteen has a sister named Danielle, nicknamed Dani. In that fanfic, "Remy" is short for Remembrance. That might be her real first name, too — one too embarrassing to use, given what sort of woman she is.

House killed Kutner.

He did it in retaliation for the "chair pee" incident.

He suppressed the memory to protect himself and to avoid a downward spiral, which prompted his psychotic break.

• If this is true, then Cuddy had better watch her back.

Thirteen doesn't have Huntington's. She has Lupus.

After all, lupus can look like almost anything.

Taub entered the witness protection program in order to successfully quit PPTH

This explains why he's the only one to ever manage it and why there has been no mention of forcing him to come back. They simply cannot find him.

• Now there's been a mention! And now that House is back in touch with Lucas, the two together can find him.

Chase infected himself during "The Tyrant"

There is no way that blood from a corpse in the morgue is going to look like blood from a living human being. (It clots pretty fast.) And, since the scleroderma patient in the morgue was female and Dibala was a guy, there would be hormone issues: even if Chase was unaware of those, the blood profile would've shown it. Since it didn't, that blood isn't from that corpse.

So, what was Chase doing down there?

Scleroderma is detected by its antibodies. Chase injected blood from the corpse into himself, waited for the antibodies (he would start to feel ill), and then gave his own newwly infected blood for the sample.

By the time he gets treated for this self-inflicted infection (he can't do it until the scandal has died down if he wishes to avoid Death Row — yes, New Jersey in this show has one), he'll probably be irreversibly damaged. Those hallucinations weren't entirely psychological.

• Does scleroderma transmit that way?

Cameron was in on the sample-switching

She ran the blood test, and she ran a complete blood test. She would have been in on all the irregularities; but she has acted like she didn't notice any. (And we know there were some.) So she knew the blood sample was not real...

Unfortunately, Chase doesn't know that she knows.

• Discredited.

Cameron knew of the irregularities in the blood test but was in denial about them.

Thus, if she had been intellectually honest at the time, then history would be taking a different track now.

When Chase finally told her that it wasn't Dibala's blood, she knew immediately where that blood did come from. Clearly, she noted the signs of blood from a corpse when she ran the tests but wrote them off because the sample seemed to confirm the theory she was pursuing.

Note: if the "Chase infected himself" theory is true — that is, if the blood she tested was Chase's own — then this theory gets messy. Though, given that things between the Chases have gotten messy anyway, the combo could happen.

House is the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes (who is real in this universe)

You have three guesses who the random guy who shot him in that one episode was the reincarnation of.

House is not better.

In "Brave Heart," House is hearing whispering. He finds out that the whispering he was hearing was Wilson, which makes pefect sense. Except he also heard it at the Hospital, where that explanation doesn't hold up.

Wilson is going insane.

House heard whispering at the hospital because Hallucination!Amber is "following" Wilson there, and he is still talking to her there. Eventually, he'll imagine that he has reformed House even more thoroughly than House has been reformed, or else endanger the life of someone over at Diagnostics (probably Chase, or Cameron if she sticks around long enough).

That incident between Cameron and Chase in "Hunting" when Cameron was under the influence of meth falls under the Consent Incompleteness Theory.

Either Cameron was competent to make the decision to have sex when she decided to have sex with Chase, or she was not.

1. If she was not competent to make that decision, then Chase statutorily raped her.
2. If she was competent to make that decision, then her consent is okay — but she pressured Chase into it (she wouldn't take his first "no"), so his consent is dubious. (We are presuming that "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization doesn't apply.)

So, there is dubious consent on at least one side, but we cannot be 100% sure which one.

• Yes but Double Standard Rape: Female on Male.

Kutner isn't dead

He's Just Hiding. He fled because the Princeton Mafia was after him. The body that was found was his evil twin, who opportunistically decided to attempt to impersonate Kutner the day that he fled. The Mafia mistakenly killed the evil twin and made it look like a suicide.

• Note — there is a Princeton mafia. One of its former members got treated by PPTH in season 1, despite some interference from Vogler.

That outfit Cuddy was wearing to the '80s costume party wasn't a costume.

It's what she wears on her days off.

If Chase attended an '80s party, he would wear tie-dye.

If Chase attended an '80s party, he wouldn't need a costume.

Yes, he has that kind of fashion sense.

If Foreman attended an '80s party, he would dress as Mr. T.

]]

If Thirteen attended an '80s party, she wouldn't get any of the references as it was 'before [her] time' and would refuse to wear a costume

Nevertheless, she would get hit on by everyone there.

At least one member of the first team is paying protection to the Princeton Mafia.

That Arnello case didn't go smoothly.

The Princeton mafia had Vogler rubbed out at the first opportunity.

If anyone can do it and get away with it, then it's the mafia.

Cameron and Chase didn't really break up

They simply realized that their relationship was fragile enough as it was. The last thing they needed was for House to keep mucking about with it, and House showed no signs of stopping. Cameron was the delusional one who refused to accept what Chase did in House's eyes; thus, she was the one to go, and Chase was the one who 'took a stand' by staying. They could have left together, but they saw firsthand just how far House was willing to go to keep the people he wanted on his team around.

• That, and there is no way Chase could have given that "you and my beloved are both evil" speech and gotten House to believe it.
• Discredited, sort of. Though, since they had sex immediately after Chase signed divorce papers... Let's just say that, so long as both of them are around, determining the state of this relationship is like determining the volume of a Klein bottle.

Cameron will return as a regular before the end of season 7.

If the "Cameron and Chase didn't break up" WMG is true, then this will be relatively simple. If it is not, then this is still quite possible, though at least one person will have to be thoroughly humiliated for it to happen.

Odds are, Cameron will return for about the same reason Foreman did — she'll determine that she has been irredeemably corrupted while working under House. This could take a while, though; she has traditionally had a strong moral compass, but we have no idea how she calibrates it.

• And we now have an opening for a female diagnostician!

Cameron will replace Cuddy as Dean of Medicine.

Cuddy is losing interest in the part of the deanhood that she considers most critical. She appears to be deadly serious about settling down with Rachel; and now that she's found an employed boyfriend, she may be able to drop out of this medical business altogether.

But, again, someone has to manage House. And surely Cameron has enough backbone to resist House's wiles now that she too has decided that he's irredeemable.

It'll take some coaxing. But Cameron is better at administration than at immunology (else she would've caught her last Diagnostics case herself), there aren't that many respectable jobs in immunology, and the deanhood at PPTH has got to be cushier than any place's ER even with the special hazards.

• This still could happen, but the reasons would be different now.

Foreman's brother Marcus is really his half-brother

But since Foreman's dad is a devout Christian, Foreman's mom kept her infidelity secret. Now that she has Alzheimer's, no one will ever know for sure.

Note: we do not know which son is fully legitimate.

Foreman's brother Marcus will become a recurring character

So he'll have someone to lean on other than Thirteen (once he and Thirteen kiss and make up).

Wilson is going to die from events in "Wilson."

Yes, it's safer to be an organ donor than to be a organ recipient. But it's not without risk. And, now that House is trying (not entirely successfully) to reform, the universe is out to get him. Wilson is officially his only friend and thus a target.

Years take longer than 365 days in the House universe

This would account for why the characters' timelines are so tight.

• Perhaps they are 420 days (421 on leap years). Twelve 35-day months, 60 weeks. Diagnostics takes a case a week, so...

There is more than one calendar in use in the House-verse.

PPTH uses one; the non-medical world uses another. And there are enough days difference between them that, in the last 33 years, five years have been lost from the medical calendar.

• Well, there is five years' difference between their calendar and ours...

Chase had known Dibala before "The Tyrant" happened.

Long before, mind you — probably while he was a kid and his family was still intact. (Dibala is old enough, and he never stopped being respected in the international community as far as we know.) But they connected much too quickly for there not to have been a connection between them before. And Dibala, no matter how insane he had gotten, would never have made such a suicidal confession to someone whom he had just met.

Chase didn't tell Cameron about the connection because Cameron was wishing the man dead as soon as she learned she'd be treating him. If Dibala had lived, then she would have held Chase's closeness to that tyrant against him.

House is on an experimental painkiller

He is off Vicodin, and presumably off all opiates (since they all work the same way). But he is not suffering significantly more pain now than when he was on Vicodin. No known non-opiates work that well, so he must be on an unknown non-opiate.

• New Jersey recently approved medical mj, so he could be toking up. Or possibly using one of the synthetic canniboids like JWH 018.
• If this is true, then House lied to an extremely terminal patient. Then again, it was an extremely terminal patient with a phone in his room.
• Perhaps the experimental painkiller has a proof number?

Chase and Cameron becoming a fully Official Couple disrupted the universe; they were the first domino

House did not start seeing hallucinations of Amber until after Chase and Cameron were engaged. "Amber" tried to kill Chase because that would've ended the problem immediately if it had worked, giving "her" peace. When Chase and Cameron married, Diagnostics ceased to exist for four months!

This happened because a moral pillar of the universe (which is what Cameron was) became engaged to and married a Cosmic Plaything. This resulted in two things: more and harsher play with House, who would be a Cosmic Plaything if he believed in the supernatural at all; and cosmic attempts to shake Chase free from Cameron, which ultimately created meta-structural damage to the universe, to Cameron, and to Chase.

For now, The 'Verse will survive even though Cameron has wished death on it. Wilson is still there (a hollow pillar is better than none), and Taub is a (skewed) moral pillar also. Too much is broken for things to return to the original status quo, but a new one is still possible.

Vogler didn't care about the Diagnostic Department's budget or turning that budget towards medical research.

He was just ticked that it made his e-penisdonation look so small, since 100 million dollars minus whatever the chairman job pays per year is just a drop in the bucket to the hospital when a single department gets five billion a year.

House had been embezzling from the hospital for a while before Foreman came.

Five billion dollars is easily justified with what Diagnostics does now and how it does it. But, immediately before Foreman joined, there was a period when House wasn't taking cases and nothing interesting was happening In-Universe. Five billion for videogames, cable, and cell phones that receive soap operas is effectively embezzling.

• It was for the entire diagnostic department, which includes the free clinic and any other diagnosticians that took care of patients who didn't have "interesting" cases. A hundred million a week minus legal expenses is way more than even House's method takes up, despite the MRI Machine of Doom and him being under budget, especially before they (presumably) reallocated the budget for his team's wages. He was still technically embezzling, but it was most likely all over-the-table.
  • Doesn't that imply that House is still embezzling "over-the-table"?
    • So?

Cameron took custody of the death cat when she moved away.

She is not superstitious. And she was not going to leave an innocent kitty in the possession of someone who, in her opinion, no longer knew right from wrong and, indisputably, was no longer taking good care of himself.

Foreman will be Put on a Bus because David Shore is leaving

David Shore, creator of House, has been working on a remake of The Rockford Files. NBC just picked it up. He'll want to focus his attention on the new series — he has to help NBC get 10 pm back.

This affects Foreman because Shore intended him to be an Audience Surrogate, and he is Shore's Author Avatar. Unfortunately, most of the vocal part of the audience doesn't identify with Foreman, and neither do the newer writers for the show. So, with Shore gone at least temporarily, putting Foreman on a bus with as much grace as the House 'verse permits (which is not much, but oh well) is better than risking derailing his character.

Thirteen is attracted to other women only when she is drunk or high or both

This is inspired by the synopsis to a season 6 episode of House in which all the men in Diagnostics are very attracted to the Patient of the Week, but Thirteen resists her charms. This sort of plot is not new; if everyone involved was heterosexual, then this would be expected with a sufficiently attractive patient. This could easily have worked in one of the Foreman-Chase-Cameron seasons.

The problem is, Thirteen is supposed to swing both ways. She is supposed to be attracted to both sexes. Since she used to sleep around freely and is currently unattached (barring surprise developments in "The Down Low"), there is no clear reason for her to be the one less attracted than anyone else... unless her bisexuality is mostly an Informed Attribute.

We know that she did canonically sleep with a woman at least once, since that woman was a Patient of the Week in season 5. But Thirteen was at her psychological worst then; she was intoxicated, she did not even get the name of the woman before she slept with her, and she was briefly fired because of substance abuse that episode.

Conclusion: she is attracted to women only when she is so intoxicated that she'll sleep with anyone who's willing; when she's sober, she's interested in men when she's interested at all. She's probably only a 2 on the Kinsey scale.

• Or she is able to look beyond looks and could see that something was off about the woman where the men could not? Or she just didn't find her attractive? 13 is bisexual, not attracted to just everyone.
• We should note that she might be alcoholic. (How many martinis was she implied to knock back during that night out "The Choice"? That's hard liquor, people...) Thus, this can be true even while she considers herself bi and proud.

Cameron will return when Chase becomes severely ill

She will have no choice. Her name is the only one on his "people to notify" list on his medical form — he doesn't want to recognize his remaining blood or step-relatives. He has probably had her listed there since the friends-with-benefits arc, and he is no longer sane enough to remove it.

Cameron will not be happy about this; but if her idea of "do no harm" extends to evil genocidal dictators, then it should also cover amoral former husbands. (Even if Chase isn't amoral, she thinks he is.) Putting Chase to sleep will not be an option.

Taub killed Kutner

And this will become known and a plot point in Taub's final season.

He did delay the discovery of Kutner's body by several hours. We have only his word about the excuse.

Taub also was far less moved by the event than one might expect — and everyone noticed at the time!

House has been in a Personal Heaven since No Reason.

His life may look like it sucks, but he's having the time of his life (figuratively speaking). House's liver isn't failing, despite having hallucinations from what is supposed to have been the Vicodin and institutionalizing himself still got puzzles to solve, got off light on his punishments, and got regular sex. His foils/enemies apart from Cuddy and Wilson never last more than 26 weeks. Kutner was killed, and House will figure out why (possibly after working on a tip from a dying underling), thus solving his most insoluble puzzle ever.

The Powers That Be tailored House's afterlife to his own mind from the instant the bullet dropped, because otherwise he could never be happy (as shown by his chat with Moriarty about not believing in the afterlife, therefore it must be a hallucination or coma), and threw in a hallucination, temporary (ha!) leg treatment, or drug overdose/trip (Vicodin, migraine-treating LSD, etc.) when he started getting bored or frustrated. Despite being a Jerkass, he got enough brownie points with his governing deity because he saves lives, or heck [Ineffable God to be potholed here if it survives the YKTTW], he may have gotten in with that Refuge in Audacity stunt where he got half a point more than God in House Vs. God ( Chase just refused to dock any of the point from Grace's remission and made it look like a tie), and most importantly, House forgot (in No Reason) that in Ionian metanarrative, afterlife believes in him.

House is Sylar in an Alternate Future.

Just like Sylar, he is calm, sarcastic, has more than a few mental issues, has a hunger for knowledge and most importantly, understands how things work.

This means that Wilson is Peter Petrelli.

Everyone knew who House was at the conference.

In the fourth-season episode "Ugly," a documentary crew films a Diagnostics case. It is suggested at the end of the episode that it went on the air, albeit with some editing. If so, then anyone who watched it — which would include any number of medical professionals — would know what House looked like — and House looks striking, as any Fan Fic writer will tell you. He didn't use a disguise when he checked into the conference, just a fake name, so there was nothing to stop the other attendees from recognizing him.

Why didn't anyone call him on it? Because House has an anecdotal reputation (which is why PPTH is the only place that could employ him). The other attendees were afraid that, if they called his bluff, he would attempt something genuinely destructive.

The mafia guy wasn't gay.

The website did have at least one packaging mixup, and sent him the wrong drug. He was still woozy from having just woken up, and was saying "So they took me off the treatment, and now... [I'm feeling better, so I guess they were wrong. Or you were wrong. Which of you said... um... Woah, head rush, I shouldn't have sat up so quickly]," *lies back*, and what the brother didn't understand was Joey's conscience bugging him to snitch ("Concerned Clare" variant), not Joey wanting to get out so he could come out.

The hepatitis was, if not caused by a pre-existing but unidentified condition or drug use ("everybody lies"), a result of one of the guys who had gotten prison raped (or taken drugs) spitting in his "gift for the made man" soup out of spite.

(I don't think this is the case; it's just annoying that everyone on the show and a lot of people in the fandom assume premise A when Premise B fits every fact but the hepC, which has at least three or four explanations that were never debunked).

The reason House tried to rip a new one into the patient in "Private Lives"...

She punched Chase hard enough that Foreman had to help him out of the room. Then she blogged about it, since she blogged about everything except what the doctors needed to know to diagnose her. Cameron is gone, and so Chase is now the official lobby art for Diagnostics. You are not allowed to damage the lobby art!

Chase is a Half-Human Hybrid

We don't know what the other half is, but it is where his beauty (such as it is) comes from.

Taub and Foreman are going to enter the employment equivalent of a Mutually Assured Destruction pact

Some of the promos for "Lockdown" show Taub punching Foreman. He can only get away with this if Foreman doesn't report him. Foreman is not fond of Taub, and Foreman does not owe Taub any favors prior to this episode. But, given where they appear to be locked down, Taub could have dug up any amount of blackmail material before that moment. So, if Foreman reports Taub, then Taub releases the material. If Taub releases the material without provocation, then Foreman both reports the assault and makes sure Cuddy knows where Taub got that info.

• Strangely, "Lockdown" itself neither confirms the theory nor josses it beyond repair. Foreman started the immediate chain of events that led to Taub punching him — but the why of it can't be safely reported by either of them. They may have bonded enough this episode that they won't need or want to get into a MAD situation. But they both have enough blackmail material on each other to carry one out.

Taub will learn about the Dibala incident through files in the file room alone

He is the only one in Diagnostics who wasn't there when it happened, the only one who wouldn't be told. And he has developed leet diagnostic skills, which is why he returned to PPTH.

• He didn't read the right files when we were looking. He was looking at personnel files for a while before the lockdown, though. Possibly a long while.
• Does Thirteen know?
  • She probably doesn't know everything, but she almost certainly knows something. Let's formalize it...

Thirteen knows that Dibala was murdered.

She hadn't yet broken things off with Foreman when "The Tyrant" happened. Even though she was no longer with Diagnosis, he told her what he knew before Dibala died. She knew that the blood sample seemed to indicate scleroderma, and she knew that there were reasons not to trust that sample.

She urged Foreman to accept the scleroderma result anyway. He does, and the result is disastrous.

Soon after, Thirteen is trying to flee Princeton, just like Cameron would do after she learned that Dibala didn't have scleroderma. Since she already knew why it might not be scleroderma, she was quicker to realize that the problem might be in the test itself. She didn't have as much contact with Foreman in the episodes immediately following, partly because she finalized the break-up, partly because Foreman was tied up with an M&M for most of the next episode. But she knew him well enough by then, and was forced to hang around long enough, that she'd know that this is not just a normal deadly mistake, but something on the level of switching her onto the experimental Huntington's drug that almost killed her ahead of schedule.

She doesn't necessarily know who was responsible. She probably knows that a Chase was behind it, but she cannot be sure if it was Robert Chase or Allison Cameron-Chase. And even if she doesn't know what Foreman did immediately after the fact, she knows that both he and she herself share some responsibility for this.

• She may know who is responsible now.

Taub is gonna be in pain for a few weeks after "Lockdown"

Foreman is the last person in the main cast that Taub should be able to knock down. Even if Foreman is too dignified or too worried about his job to fight back, Taub is gonna be sore for a while from the effort... This could cause problems.

• Taub didn't KO Foreman, but he may hurt anyway.

Something unusually horrible is going to happen during "Lockdown."

This is determined by external evidence.

The episode was filmed and ready to air by Valentine's Day, and given certain events mentioned in previews, would appear on the surface to be suitable for then. FOX would get the preview clips a little over a week before then so that they could make their promos. Instead, they take a two-month hiatus on new episodes — including half of a sweeps month, which would hurt FOX's own ad rates (even given that the Winter Olympics were also going on), and a period when the show after it, 24, was airing new episodes. It got bad enough that FOX was adding commentary footage to the Friday night reruns — yes, that's right, we had two months in the spring of 2010 when two entire 8 pm timeslots were filled with House reruns. Fortunately, this show has a large dedicated fandom.

So, why was FOX playing chicken with its own ratings this way? Well, what House episode aired around that week in April in 2009?

That's right, "Simple Explanation." It's perhaps the most painful Wham Episode of House ever because we had no reason to suspect that it was more than interesting beforehand — we had no idea that what seemed like the selling points before would look so irrelevant after. FOX execs were no happier about that than we were. They were likely told not to reveal that twist until after the episode aired; FOX sent out a huge press release about it at precisely 9 pm Eastern, spoiling West Coast viewers in the process.

This is symbolic timing. And, since "Lockdown" is no longer in the middle of a block of House episodes, viewers will be more alert this time around. But the work required to set this up is so drastic that something must be going on here that is even worse than the Ass Pull in "Simple Explanation."

Note: this probably should go under Poison Oak Epileptic Trees, too.

• Hmm... We learned that Thirteen may have never told her father she was bisexual, that Foreman's class-inferiority issues are still bothering him, and that Foreman may have tried to lie to Diagnostics about his background during the pilot. We already knew that House is lonely and wants to be lonely. So unless Wilson stealing a dollar and getting caught but not prosecuted is an Ass Pull...
  • Shrug. On the other hand, we may have seen a domino drop. Wilson appears to be taking romantic advice from Thirteen.
• Something horrible happened from House's POV.

"Lockdown" was delayed because of the final debates on the Real Life health-care bill of 2010.

In January 2010, the Congress finally got serious about debating health-care reform. House is generally assumed to be in a universe similar to our own, so the passage of a health-care reform bill — some of which has already taken effect in Real Life — would, in theory, affect how things work at PPTH. If opponents of the bill were right, it could make House-style diagnostics even less practical for PPTH to practice than it already is.

Now, House pays for its attempts to be at the cutting edge by being visibly vulnerable to Executive Meddling. So, FOX and Universal had to wait to see if the Real Life status quo would change and, if it did (as it did), decide the least destructive way to deal with it...

The dates of Wilson's first marriage in "Lockdown" are not a Series Continuity Error; they are an attempt to dodge health-care reform

We finally got a date for Year Zero to ensure that the writers would not have to deal with the effects of the new health-care bill (now law) until they are clear. This pushes some aspects of this show at least 20 Minutes into the Future (phones in 2000 in Real Life were still more brick-like than not, for instance), but even the average Internet-vocal viewer is more likely to notice recent social discrepancies than distant ones (see the '70s zone theory in M*A*S*H) and the tech in CSI: Miami.

• Discredited. Wilson's hard dates weren't a Series Continuity Error, but the relative continuity has been adjusted.

FOX delayed "Lockdown" because House is not an idiot

"Knightfall" (which aired the week after "Lockdown") clearly happens in springtime and was probably going to air in April no matter what. And, since House and Wilson share a condo, there is no way that Wilson could hide a new girlfriend from House for two entire months.

Foreman expected to be hit in the ear.

Not a huge guess, but that's why he wasn't ready.

• There was even a Fight Club reference in that scene.

The Vicodin in Lockdown was laced with something.

Specifically, something that causes near-future health problems in small amounts.

At least one of Foreman or Taub is gonna become an addict.

Or possibly, in Foreman's case, resume an addiction. No, we don't know he was an addict, but he apparently experimented with opiates in the rebellious youth that he tries to hide from everyone.

Taub hurt his leg during the lockdown. He's especially vulnerable.

• Taub quipped that he wanted to learn how House thinks by getting a limp and an addiction. Be Careful What You Wish For, Taub.

Chase was hallucinating during the lockdown.

It wouldn't be the first time for him. It has been demonstrated that he doesn't have to be under the influence to hallucinate — it can happen when he's sober if he's overly stressed, and finalizing a divorce ought to be stressing.

And there was something unnatural about his dealings with Cameron...

It's an insane theory. But for all we know, she just stayed in the clinic waiting room during the lockdown, and he ended up cuddling a shadow.

In "The Down Low," Eddie the drug dealer and Mickey the undercover cop were on the down low.

Or Eddie at least had feelings for Mickey, who didn't know. He did risk a really important deal by taking Thirteen to the place where they kept the drugs to see if they could find out what was wrong with Mickey.

House was hallucinating during the lockdown.

It's why the guard gave him such a weird look. The room was empty.

It's also why he could get away with "turning up the morphine" when he did. The difference between 2.5 and 4.0 would be noticeable. House "turned up the morphine" after the lockdown ended and shortly before that guard came; there is no way it wouldn't be noticed.

No more than two months separate "Ignorance Is Bliss" from "Lockdown."

All that was needed to finalize the Chases' divorce was Chase's signature, and it didn't even need to be notarized. Cameron had wanted to break ties with Chase ASAP; she has apparently decided that they couldn't be more than "friends with benefits." No way is she gonna wait six months, or even four months, for just Chase's signature. Heck, she probably could've forged his signature and gotten away with it; either her ethics or her lack of forgery skills forbade that course of action.

Also, there is a limit to how late one can reasonably expect a severe snowstorm in central New Jersey, and it's before mid-February.

The Renaissance Fair in "Knightfall" operates year-round.

That's what all the episode synopses implied.

The renaissance people would have to change fairgrounds, or vacate the one they prefer, about once a year to keep the sanitation issues from getting too absurd; but they run at least eleven months a year, including mid-winter.

One of House's current minions is going to die in the season 6 finale.

It will be death because Tonight, Someone Dies is a classic way to create cheap shocks. It will be a minion because House and Cuddy both probably have Contractual Immortality, and Wilson has a plot-arc that is some ways from being finished.

If this is true, then there is a 3 in 4 chance that House will be hiring early next season.

• Fortunately, no.

Wilson will die during the season 6 finale

This will throw House's life into chaos because of what Wilson means to him. It will throw PPTH into chaos because Wilson is its Head of Oncology (even if we can never be sure if he's doing that job). The Houseverse is cruel, so...

• Again, fortunately, no.

One of House's current minions will be severely injured, but not killed, in the season 6 finale.

Face it, it would make any of Foreman, Chase, or Taub that much more Houselike. Chase and Taub are especially juicy targets because there are several places to hurt them that would prevent them from returning to their original specialties.

If it's Thirteen, it will likely be a knock-on effect from her Huntington's (assuming that's still an issue).

• Not quite...

Someone will land in a coma during the season 6 finale.

• Fortunately, no — unless you count patients.

Chase will land in a psychiatric ward during the season 6 finale.

Probably PPTH's, but Mayfield is possible.

• Fortunately, no. Or is that unfortunately?

If any of the above season 6 finale guesses is true, then Chase will somehow be directly responsible.

There are no experimental cures for delirium tremens.

• Doubtful. Huntington's doesn't work that way...

Taub's marriage is going to collapse soon.

Because these storylines of his pledging devotion to his wife and flirting with another woman, in that order in single episodes, cannot be allowed to continue!

There will be a plot development between seasons 6 and 7 that will be plot-critical.

It's the magic of the internet and the sadism of the showrunners.

• The end of the season 6 finale and the beginning of the season 7 premiere were the same day, perhaps the same hour, In-Universe. However, this could still be true.

House will find religion in the season 6 finale.

The showrunners tell us that, in that episode, we will see House as we have never seen him before. But we have seen him in almost every emotional state, and in every state of health from "happily painfree" to "only the defibrillator can save you now." This rules out most of the reasonable options, and so it is time to consider the unreasonable options.

• Not quite. He did pray, but since neither he nor the patient were praying to anyone in particular...
• We did get to see House as he was never seen before, BTW. It was an incredible piece of television. This show is just on another level.

Dr. Nolan is telepathic.

The scenes in the penultimate episode of season 6, in which he appears to enter and observe House's recollections, have the same sort of imagery as Star Trek: Voyager's telepathy scenes. The scenes in House are less surreal than the ones in "Voyager" because House is more truly rational than even Tuvok & Seven.

This would go nicely with Nolan's being the demi-antichrist.

Dr. Nolan was hallucinating during most of "Baggage" (the penultimate episode od season 6).

Someone had to be, since there is no way that all the events of that episode could have happened the way we saw them. And it can't be House because getting caught hallucinating in a psychiatrist's office would probably put you on the fast track back to Mayfield.

There is also the grand tradition of psychiatrists being crazy. Dr. Nolan seems to be an exception, but seriously...

Dr. Nolan owns a Pensieve.

For reasons similar to the "Dr. Nolan is telepathic" guess. It's just a step removed.

Dr. Nolan's office is a holodeck.

Again, for reasons similar to "Dr. Nolan is telepathic." This would add a layer of reality to the events.

Why would the Houseverse have holodecks 200 years before humans in the Star Trek verse even found someone using the tech? Simple: no eugenics wars holding things back, and many aspects of tech in Houseverse are already ahead of our own. "Epic Fail"'s videogame demonstrated that VR is much farther advanced in this 'verse than in our own.

Chase has had problems with his sanity and with hallucinations since the case portion of "The Mistake."

And he is aware of the problem. This is why he didn't fight very hard to keep his license back then — he knew he was responsible for Kayla's death, but he wasn't sure how responsible. This also means that we may never know for sure what really happened then...

This is also one reason he all but withdrew from active diagnosing after season 1. He couldn't trust his senses enough to be a reliable diagnostician unless he got treated — but if he did get effectively treated, then by the psych-drug law he would no longer be able to practice medicine at all.

He went to surgery after he was fired from Diagnostics, not just because of the pay, but because surgeons working outside Diagnostics never work alone. He would never have had to rely solely on his own judgment. Getting assigned as House's "personal surgeon" threw a wrench in that plan, since standard Diagnostics practice at PPTH has become to allow only diagnosticians to work on Diagnostics cases in any capacity unless absolutely necessary, and, well, Chase didn't trust them any better than himself. But by then, Chase was already settled...

House did not have sympathy for Chase's mental illness after it showed itself during his original fellowship, which is why he fired Chase with little explicit reason. (Chase couldn't challenge it without risking the whole medical establishment knowing the truth about his sanity or lack thereof.) Events in season 5 and at Mayfield changed House's perspective, which is why he tried to fight to keep Chase at Diagnostics.

House was unconscious from blood loss at the end of the season 6 finale.

Arc words from the finale were practically "You're bleeding" and "we need to fix your bandage/bandage your shoulder". The Vicodin reference was just a red herring. (Unlikely with the ending they used and no tag, but plausible from a Watsonian perspective.)

• If this is true, then we will learn the truth from Wilson.

House IS dreaming at the end of "Help Me," the season 6 finale.

...And he did take the Vicodin. This is similar to the above theory. House DID take the Vicodin and was hallucinating that he didn't. He WANTED to not have taken the Vicodin, he wanted Cuddy to love him instead of being with Lucas, so that is what he hallucinated.

Note well: For most of "Both Sides Now" (the season 5 finale), he honestly believed that he hadn't taken any Vicodin since — well, since the scene with Cuddy in "Under My Skin" that turned out to be a Vicodin-induced hallucination. He thought he had successfully detoxed then. It happened before; it could have happened again.

Alternately, Cuddy is dreaming at the end of "Help Me."

She had a boatload of matters on her mind (PPTH, Lucas, Rachel,...) well before the day at the accident site; this is her subconscious brain's way of working out her issues.

Moriarty was...

• a former patient.
• a former lover.
• a med school/career/paper rival.
• the relative of a former patient.
• a madman with a gun who didn't care who House was.
• hired.
  • ...by House
  • ...by Chase.
  • ...by Cameron.
  • ...by Wilson.
• after someone else.
• just. That. Annoyed.

House finds the idea of Foreman having power over him intimidating due to his race

This was also true with Vogler and Nolan. This is why, while he uses everyone else (including authority figures) as his snark bait, when confronted by them one upping him he genuinely becomes hostile or experiences a Heroic BSoD. This could also be the result of David Shore using a Scary Black Man as a common foil antagonist for House.

The rape victim in 'One Day, One Room' lied about having an abortion.

Being adamant against abortion and hearing House's (somewhat questionable) childhood she chose to lied to him rather than argue or hurt his feelings. Cuddy being both baby crazed herself and knowing that house failed to follow procedure agrees to tell him what he wants to hear. Seeing the show's recurring theme of dishonestly and general outlook she will likely make a return with small mysteriously ill child. Leaving House to suspect abuse

House takes place in one of the 52 earths of the DCU

Not a great deal of ideas for this one but I briefly started thinking about this when I learned of Kutner's past. This is an earth where superheroes are not prominent or widely publisized and also one where character's have similar yet diverging backgrounds because of their ancestors. Kutner is an alternate Batman. His family was not rich like the Waynes but he suffered the same tragedy of seeing his parents killed in front of him by a mugger as a child. He could have gone the way of the crime fighter but between his foster care and other things he decided to become a doctor instead. Eventually he would have become a metahuman specialist like Doctor Midnite. He was murdered by someone working for Joe Chill who was the mugger on this earth as well. Joe Chill became more powerful in prison, gaining contacts and managed to have Kutner killed before his next parole hearing was due.

House himself is possibly an alternate version of Wildcat (Ted Grant). Wildcat did teach Batman and several other of the best fighting heroes how to fight, just in this earth he taught them how to diagnose illnesses better than anyone. I'm not sure about any of the others, but I doubt they all have to be superheroes, some could be alternate versions of characters surrounding the heroes.

Kutner faked his death...

He's on the run because NPH is after him. He met up with Harvey aka Harold and now they are running for their lives.

House will quit his job and become a one man band.

What? He's shown a lot of talent in music and seems to have mastered a variety of instruments, so he could do it if he wanted to.It probably wouldn't last longer than an episode, but wouldn't it be hysterical if that was how the show ended? House just quits to persue a career as a one man band?

Kutner never existed.

House just hallucinated him.

Martha M. Masters is a Time Lord

She is a genius with three doctorates who bears the names of one of the Doctor's companions (who is herself a doctor) and of his archnemesis.

House has been hallucinating the first several episodes of Season 7.

"Now wait," you may be saying to yourself, "they couldn't do that again! They already pulled that trick!" That's just what they want you to think. The big reveal will be in a few episodes.

Martha M. Masters is just an attempt to get people to like Thirteen more.

The writers noticed how people liked Cameron more after Thirteen was introduced, so when Olivia Wilde left for Tron, they decided to introduce an even more annoying character in an attempt to get people to like her better when she comes back.

House takes place in the Tezuka-verse

That "janitor" that House mentioned in "Son Of Coma Guy"? That was actually Black Jack. They meet regularly and gripe about how stupid the medical establishment is.

House will eventually attempt to out-diagnose (read:compete against) a Watson Captain Ersatz

IBM's stated plan (in real life) to comericalize Watson is to use the research to make what is essentially an electronic Dr. House to diagnose patiants. House, being an Insufferable Genius, will not let a computer out do him, while Not-IBM, wanting to test their creation, agrees to let them compete.

• House is often described as "medical Sherlock Holmes", so Watson has other meanings...
• The show's Watson will be called Wilson by House, because that's what his existing Watson expy is named

Cuddy is going to die

As Cuddy and House being together is making House happy and House can't be happy Cuddy is going to have to die to give House something to be depressed about as if they were to split up House would just spend his whole time trying to get her back and that wouldn't be nearly as dramatic and house wouldn't be as depressed.

• If this does happen, House will be at Cuddy's bedside, the way he wasn't during "Bombshells."

Cuddy and Wilson will get together

I've been thinking about this for a few episodes now. The creator of the show has specifically said he liked to keep things fresh, and he achieves this by placing House into new situations. Over the past years we've seen House go from leader of a team, to losing his best friends, to trying to be a better person to being happy in a relationship. There are very few dynamics left to explore without experiencing regression, which viewers hate. If I was writing the show, and I had just split up House and Cuddy to create drama and new situations, the next avenue to explore would be Cuddy in a relationship with another person; Namely, Wilson. There's been a definite increase in chemistry between the two of recent, I first incepted this idea during the episode where Cuddy is "dying". Wilson performs an ultrasound on her, in which she holds in her stomach to look more attractive. That moment peaked my interest, but I thought nothing of it until the break up. Mark my words, Wilson and Cuddy will be together by the season finale; That will be the main source of drama that this series ends on. I'll be back here post-finale to confirm or joss this, watch this space.

House is actually Adam from Good Omens.

Consider: Both like things to be interesting. House is almost always able to fix things, in the end. The vicodin is actually used to repress, but not eliminate, his omniscience, so he can see the answer, eventually. The limp is from his Father punishing him, but he's used his reality warping ability to change everyone's memories so that they believe it happened the way we saw in Three Stories.

David Shore is invoking tropes in an attempt to kill the series.

Shore is attached to a planned reboot of The Rockford Files, but House's continued commercial viability keeps him too busy to work on this. And therefore during Season 7:

• House and Cuddy resolved their series-long Will They or Won't They? sexual tension. And may have done so in ways that alienated some fans of the ship.
• When Olivia Wilde went on hiatus to make movies, her character was replaced by a suspiciously Sue-ish wunderkind.

Martha Masters isn't gone for good.

I suspect they will bring her back, I think she balances out the team quite nicely. It also would be good to have more than just 1 woman on the Diagnostic team. They may bring her back, at the end of season 7, or bring her back at the start of Season 8. Then they will probably kill her off. Much to my annoyance.

7x23 was made as a deliberate trolling of the fans

Notice several Leaning on the Fourth Wall examples: "Rewind to 37th minute" "It has no meaning" said to the plushie-cam, House's glance to the camera in the last scene, lampshaded degradation Cuddy and Wilson to the whining advisors, and more.

7x23 is proof that the House writing staff have been killed and replaced by Soap Opera Writers.

Between Taub's innane dual pregnancy plotline, House driving a car through Cuddy's wall and yet some how still being around in Season 8 this should be obvious to anyone. Nothing from that episode would have been out of place in All My Children.

• Lampshaded by House watching his favorite hospital soap, "Prescription: Passion" while sitting in his hospital bed.

House has been hallucinating since the end of "Bombshells."

At the end of the episode, we see House take a Vicadon tablet. We know that it is not is first recent one, and we don't know how many he takes at that point. House is hurting more at this moment than he has a in a long time; he was on the verge of giving his all to this woman he loves and she rejects him. You could see that he was visually crushed.

With the beginning of the next episode, House's behavior becomes more and more unbelievable, even for him. That episode culminates with him jumping from a hotel balcony into a swimming pool, which, let's face it, is insane. You're not likely to walk away from that if you're still alive, and House didn't seem to get a scratch.

After that a series of improbable events happens, such as his buying a monster truck, marrying a mail order bride (who promptly disappears), and picking up Thirteen on his was to a Vegetable Shooter Competition (the prison just happens to be on the way, and somehow he knew she could fix his gun). This ends with House driving his car through Cuddy's house, endangering her, her family (including Rachel), and he nearly hits Wilson to boot. The look on Cuddy and Wilson's faces say it all: this is too far even for House.

So, within a span of a few weeks, House has gone from loving Cuddy with all his heart, and loving Wilson as his best friend, to nearly killing them both and then celebrating by going to a tropical island to vacation. I propose that the beginning of Season 8 will find House still in New Jersey, in a hospital bed, possibly at Mayfield.

House is a Changeling

Because nothing is complete without a World of Darkness WMG.

Specifically, he's a Nocker Lost Grump. Lost - extreme suspicion regarding any supernatural claims, despite repeatedly experiencing downright bizarre things himself. Nocker - cynical, bitter genius who looks down on the mundane standards of everyone else.

The writers are Tropers

They've name checked at least half a dozen tropes, probably more. I distinctly remember them mentioning Kick the Dog, Manipulative Bastard, and probably more.

House personally pays for people's treatment when they don't have insurance

This explains why every patient can get whatever tests they need, damn the expense, no matter who they are. House is obsessive enough to personally bankroll any procedure if insurance companies won't pay for it/patients can't afford it.

House M.D's last episode will be House's suicide.

This will happen at the beginning of the episode and the rest will be how everyone moves on, or doesn't. This process will concentrate on the influence House had on everyone.

• This actually seems pretty likely. Supposedly Kutner will be returning, so unless the show is planning one hell of an Ass Pull and he is somehow not dead he will most likely be a hallucination. Something to push House over the edge, perhaps?
  • Confirmed and subverted. Kutner is indeed back as a hallucination, as are Amber, Stacy, and Cameron, and House is in the process of dying and it's all his fault. He takes advantage of the situation to stage his own death, living out his life on the run.
    • Actually as we are not shown what happens when Wilson eventually dies. He could live out his life on the run, or in prison, or more likely, this being House, he will commit suicide. Also Cameron is back in real life with a kid and implied husband.

House will end up with Dominika

Seems confirmed by the most recent episode. I sort of thought it might happen when she had to move back in with him. Would actually be pretty sweet.

• Jossed by the last episode. To be fair, though, he brought that on himself, as expected. No chance that was going to last.

The final episode will have a death count of at least 2: Wilson, followed by House. Thirteen is also a candidate.

Title? Everybody Dies. David Shore is writing and directing this one (first he's done in a couple seasons). Wilson just found out he has stage II cancer, and it's likely that treatments will fail, and will rapidly advance the cancer further to stage III. Thirteen's return may end in House conducting the Mercy Kill that was mentioned last season. Wilson's death especially, but Thirteen's death as well, will trigger the Despair Event Horizon that sends House overboard. COD will be Vicodin OD.

• Nope. Just one, and it's the patient of the week—although House uses it to fake his own death.

House is dying of Lupus.

Because why not.Or he could finally have syphilis.

Dominika's story is a Shout-Out to Firefly.

Dominika is like Saffron: beautiful, clever, deceitful and avaricious. She is a skilled cook, mechanic and pistoleer. Her scheme depends on a dubious marriage to the protagonist. Early in her last episode House referred to a prostitute as a Companion. QED.

House didn't actually survive the final episode

He was in no state to get out of that building

• Notice Wilson is the only one who sees him at the end. He meets him up with him out in the open in front of a townhouse overlooking a busy downtown street. That coupled with the fact that House is a world-famous doctor that would be recognized fairly quickly make it obvious he couldn't have faked his own death (or if he did, it would a pretty bad idea unless Taub was also in on it to aid in his cover in his old fashioned way). The House we see at the end of the series is a [[Irony hallucination of Wilson's]] brought on by rapidly failing health and numerous anti-cancer medications.
  • While he may be "world-famous and recognized", hes is so in name only, otherwise how do you explain the fact that he can pose as Wilson in a conference for people who are more likely to know who he is without getting caught?
  • This would also explain the timing of the text message Wilson recieves, or why he doesn't immediately realize it's his own phone ringing- He's not "really" hearing it, only imagining he does.
  • It's the result of PTSD or simple denial from him having cancer. Having seen so many of his own patients die from it, the emotional effects are particularly acute. He invents post-mortem House as coping mechanism; an escape from having to think about his cancer. Notice how during their bike ride (also — do they have identical bikes? Didn't house already have a crotch rocket? Now he's on a road hog?) when Wilson broaches the subject, "House" immediately deflects the topic. This seems precisely what a self-established escape mechanism would do.

Cuddy was actually there at the service

She just didn't get any screen time.

• Cuddy's initial departure was a front in a cooperative plan to fake House's death. She was in hiding the whole time. The whole thing was a scheme so grand not even House could pull it purely off by himself.

Cuddy didn't appear in House's visions because he deliberately blocked her out.

He was still so traumatized by the breakup that he couldn't bear to hear anything she would have had to say. Stacy was used instead because the wounds had the time to heal adequately.

House and Wilson both died at the end of the last episode

House died in the fire, in part because of his existential crisis, in part due to not being able to move fast enough to get out. Upon hearing the news of his best friend's death, Wilson commits suicide. After he dies, he is unable to process his own death and imagines himself at House's funeral. The text message was House trying to stop Wilson from realizing they were both dead. House, being the realistic one of the duo, obviously knew the truth but was protecting Wilson from the knowledge. The shot of them riding off together was House projecting an image that Wilson would feel comfortable in until they were both ready to move on to the afterlife proper. Essentially, they are in Limbo because Wilson doesn't know he's dead, and House won't go on without Wilson.

• Alternatively, Wilson died of an unexpected heart attack during House's actual funeral, and when he's giving his attempted eulogy, he's not really giving it and House texts him to let him know to shut up because he doesn't want to hear Wilson continue to complain about him in their afterlife.

Kutner was gassed by the murderous plants from The Happening

Unexpected suicide out of nowhere? Come on, you know it to be true.

House and Wilson are dual personalities of the same person.

An extension of the "House didn't survive the last episode" theory above. Most of the time we see Wilson he is with House — in his office, at lunch, etc. — and doesn't interact separately with anyone else; or he is without House (Cuddy's office). House is Tyler Durden to Wilson's "Jack". PPTH puts up with it because House/Wilson is both an awesome oncologist and diagnostician. Also explains why House does so little work. Also explains pretty neatly why House sees visions of Wilson\'s dead girlfriend — he was dating her all along. Just like Marla and Tyler/Jack.

Moriarty was shot dead shortly after shooting House, and immediately afterward, his ghost caused the coma dream.

Moriarty caused the dream in order to seek an apology from House. However, he was unable to end it because of House's existing physical and mental issues, forcing House to solve that problem himself.

• Pre-Jossed - in the next episode, it is revealed that Moriarty was never caught. A man named Moriarty eluding justice. Who'd've thought?

House is Thor

Thor used to have the debilitating weakness that if he let go of Mjölnir for more than a minute, he turned into doctor Don Blake, who has a crippled leg (and presumably a dry wit and acid tounge), while Mjölnir turns into a walking stick.

So, he was unable to turn back, then lost Mjölnir and never found it, changed his name to Dr. House and started a new life. Thus he extremely jaded from losing all his strength and powers.

House's Eureka Moments are divinely inspired

Many episodes follow the plot of House and The Team struggling in vain to find out what's wrong with the patient of the week. This is because the root of the problem is so rare and unusual that none of their standard practices work. Then House has a sudden flash of insight and he knows for certain what the problem is and how to fix it. This is because God wants to help.

The stuff he does in the clinic is all his medical knowledge and experience paying off, but the case of the week is not. He can't do his Sherlock Scan for the main patient like he does for all the clinic people, and this bothers him. It bothers him because he places great pride and invests a lot of self-worth into his skills and doesn't want to rely on something or someone else.

Furthermore, House has his suspicions about this sort of thing and it angers him all the more. It's the reason why he's so determined to disprove the supernatural and the religious. He goes as far as to stick a fork into an electric socket in order to provoke a near-death experience so he can disprove someone else's. If he can disprove it than all his achievements are truly his own.

There's one episode where he admits that he doesn't believe in God/The Afterlife/ etc because he finds it "more comforting" just like those that do believe find it more comforting. In another episode, he goes into surgery and shouts at the patient's family, "I'd better not catch you praying! I don't want to fight over credit for this." That's not mere snark but a serious statement.

Finally, how truly serious do you believe he was when he said he was going to "cure" a dead person?

If House ever discovered this guess to be true, he would put himself into a permanent vegetative state. He can't kill himself, because then he'd have to deal with what he would consider "the bastard" face to face.

House Played Lacrosse in High School/College

Went to a patient's high school lacrosse game after treating him, frequently uses his cane to throw his ball against a wall/toss and catch his ball/etc. A former athlete would likely hate being crippled even more than someone who never played sports, too.

House takes place in the same universe as Frank Herbert's "Dune"

Dr. House is a mentat. Vicodin is actually the geriatric spice/melange/life. You just have to look at those glowing blue eyes and the feats of insane brilliance, as well as his hallucinations after using too much "vicodin". Add in the deep superstition of religious figures (Bene Gesserit, anyone?) and the continual pain he's in (Remember the pain box?) It's actually possibly that House is one of many failed Kwisatz Haderachs, and is an ancestor for the Atreides or Harkonnens. The whole anarchist rage-against-authority thing could be a mask for hating the Padishah Emperor and thinking his power and corruption was too great, just like Muad'dib.

If House had chosen to be happy in season 2, the Tritter arc would have been MUCH shorter

If House had decided not to send Stacy away, and realized that he isn't the same person he was when he pushed her out of his life the first time, they would still be together in season 3. Tritter's bullsh!t and illegal methods of coercion and practical breaking and entering of the hospital would have been smacked down by Stacy's legal expertise, making the entire audience MUCH happier.

The series finale is a dying hallucination

The series ends as House has one last hallucination from heroin. Another strong argument for this is that the series ends with the song "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)", which was sung to House by a hallucination of Amber in an earlier episode.

House is a Time Lord

Really, this explains everything: his intelligence, his bizarre personality, his difficulties getting along with humans and even understanding them, the mystery surrounding his biological father, how he seems to be impossible to kill, and especially how he got out of that burning building, i.e. he didn't escape, he didn't die, he regenerated! And now Wilson gets to have the new regeneration of House as a buddy to share his dying moments, and it may very well be a different House, because although "people don't change," Time Lords DO experience personality changes when they regenerate. Or he could be a bizarre half-human half Time Lord; maybe his mother had an affair with the Doctor and House was the result! That would explain why no obvious abnormalities (like 2 hearts) have been found on any body imaging of him. And, like the Doctor, he's played by a British actor!