House is forced to cover a diagnostics lecture, presenting three cases of leg pain to a classroom of medical students. The cases unfold in sequence — a farmer whose dog bite is mistaken for a snakebite, leading to amputation; a teenage volleyball player whose over-thorough workup accidentally uncovers cancer; and a third case that begins as a joke before revealing itself to be House's own medical history. Over the course of the lecture, House lays out exactly how he got the limp, the cane, and the Vicodin: a clotted aneurysm, a risky surgery he chose over amputation, cardiac arrest, and a medically induced coma — during which Stacy, his girlfriend and medical proxy, authorized a procedure against his explicit wishes. He survived. The relationship did not.

This episode reframes everything established in the first season. The lecture structur ...