House works a medical case entirely through a webcam when Cate Milton, a psychiatrist stationed at an Antarctic research base, collapses after saving a colleague from a severed artery. With evacuation grounded for two months and Cate as the only medical personnel on site, House guides her and the station mechanic through improvised treatments — geological drilling equipment for a suspected kidney stone, a syringe to reinflate her own collapsed lung, red wine as a cellular stain for a self-administered biopsy, and eventually a trepanation performed by the mechanic. The diagnosis lands on a broken toe masked entirely by the cold, with bone marrow leakage causing every symptom.

The episode uses the remote format to examine what changes — and what doesn't — when House can only observe through a screen. His emotional engagement with Cate delays  ...