House - All Seasons

We are introduced to the brilliant, famous but extremely exasperating Gregory House. We learn that despite his considerable intellect and talents as a physician, he does next to no work at the hospital, merely coming in from 9 to 5 to oversee his three teaching fellows. This infuriates his boss, Dean of Medicine Lisa Cuddy. However she keeps him on because when the rest of the doctors are stumped, House swings into action.

Stacy Warner returns to PPTH, having been officially hired as the hospital's General Counsel. House eventually realizes that he still has feelings for her. In an attempt to prove that she feels the same way about him, he breaks into her therapist's office and reads her file. House learns that she is not sleeping with her husband Mark Warner. He tries to get back with her by killing a rat that has invaded her home, but soon changes his mind after learning that the rat has an illness that brings out the diagnostician in him.

House recovers from his gunshot wounds, but despite his pain temporarily disappearing and the fact that his leg is working again, he is soon back on Vicodin. He runs into a particularly difficult patient at the clinic, who turns out to be a police officer, who then makes it his business to get House sent to jail for possessing Vicodin illegally. Unfortunately, House has used Wilson's prescription pad to forge his own prescriptions, even though Wilson has been supplying him with Vicodin freely. House nearly goes to jail, but Cuddy then perjures herself in court to have the charges dismissed.

After losing his original diagnostic team, House decides that he doesn't need fellows as he feels that he can handle a case all on his own but after taking a long time to solve a case, Cuddy insists that he start looking for possible doctors to join his new team. House grudgingly accepts and gets forty applicants together and has a reality show style contest to see which lucky three applicants will stay on to get the vacant fellowship openings. Meanwhile, Cameron and Chase come back to work at the hospital, while Foreman starts work in a job similar to House's at another hospital. However, Foreman is soon fired for doing exactly what House would do and winds up back at Princeton-Plainsboro. House wants nothing to do with him, but Cuddy insists he can only hire two new fellows and must have Foreman on his team to keep an eye on him.

Wilson slowly starts to recover from Amber's untimely death, but begins to reevaluate his life and to contemplate resigning from his post at the hospital. House's original regret over his role in Amber's death seems to have worn off as instead of being supportive, he merely tries to convince Wilson that he is overreacting to the situation. However, Wilson winds up leaving his post.

After finally realizing that his Vicodin habit is distorting his view of reality, House voluntarily enters Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital to detox. However, detoxing turns out to be the easy part - House can't get his medical license back until he's willing to admit his problems run deeper. Although he resists at first, he finally gives in. At the same time, he falls in love, but then finds his paramour has no further interest in him. When he turns to his doctor instead of Vicodin for help, Dr. Nolan realizes he's ready to return to the practice of medicine.

House and Cuddy make their relationship public, but despite the fact that they are both happier than they have been for years, they both see problems. House is sure that Cuddy is merely hopped up on the sex and good feelings that are typical early in the relationship and that she will dump him once she realizes what she's gotten herself into. Cuddy is sure that her supervisory role over House is either going to poison their relationship or ruin House's medical skills, and she's uncomfortable with many aspects of House's past, such as the prostitute he's still seeing for non-sexual purposes. House is also not certain he wants to have a role in Rachel Cuddy's life and starts to balk at the responsibility, although towards the end of the season, House and Rachel seem to share a strange bond over a cartoon about pirates.

House starts the year in prison, serving out a long term for his various misdeeds in Moving On. However, it turns out that he didn't even try to get a lesser sentence and took a one-year term without complaint. He blows a chance for early parole in order to prove a fellow patient's diagnosis. Although he plans to withdraw from the practice of medicine, it appears the real co-dependent relationship is between House and the hospital. With House looking at serving at least another six months, the new Dean of Medicine, Eric Foreman approaches House with an offer to return to work.