Episode notes
House closes season five believing he spent the previous night with Cuddy — that she helped him detox from Vicodin and they slept together. He arrives at work sober and certain, carrying what he thinks is her lipstick. The case involves a man whose corpus callosum was surgically severed, leaving his hemispheres unable to communicate and his left hand acting on impulses his verbal mind never approved. House runs a misdirected search for pancreatic cancer before identifying clots from a damaged left atrial appendage. He announces to the hospital lobby that he and Cuddy slept together. She fires him. When he reaches for the lipstick to prove his point, it's a Vicodin bottle. The entire night was a hallucination. Both Amber and Kutner appear simultaneously. He tells Cuddy he's not okay, and Wilson drives him to a psychiatric facility where he checks himself in.
The episode uses the split-brain case to make its argument explicit: the left hemisphere is an interpreter, generating coherent explanations for things that have already happened without its input. House has been doing exactly that all episode — and all season. His diagnostic certainty, his campaign to confirm the night with Cuddy, the lipstick as evidence: all of it was the interpreter constructing a story around a bottle of Vicodin. The season ends without resolution on whether he returns to medicine, what his relationship with Cuddy now is, or what Kutner's death meant.
—
Part of the Explained Podcasts network. More shows: https://explainedpodcasts.com
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/house-s05e24-both-sides-now/id1896325454?i=1000766399050
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1PoEzVUchVc9gEcTwQLzx1
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/