finds distasteful due to the mundane ailments he encounters—in exchange for agreeing to lecture. House leaves Cuddy’s office and finds a woman named Stacy, who we learn is his ex-girlfriend, in need of his diagnostic skills for her husband. Despite its atypical inclusion of regular characters, this pre-credit sequence offers two obvious potential patients—the ill doctor whom House must replace and Mark, husband to Stacy—although the deviation from the usual location external to the hospital suggests a greater break with conventional form could be occurring as well. A viewer could reasonably presume the still-young series was varying its conventional start, but the opening of “Three Stories” offers the ultimate misdirection, as the episode eventually reveals that the conversation between House and Cuddy involves the case of the week.5
After the opening credits, House begins his lecture to the medical students. He poses that there are three patients with leg pain and asks the students to diagnose the cause, as he gradually builds the stories of the patients. Although the series rarely uses techniques such as dream sequences, flashbacks, or imagined alternate realities, this episode eschews the realist techniques that normally characterize House by portraying characters whose conditions and embodiments shift each time House retells their scenarios. The cases begin as that of a farmer, golfer, and volleyball player, but House rewrites their histories and attributes each time he elaborates on the cases to the students, making “reality” difficult to discern. The actor playing the farmer (a middle-aged man) also appears as the volleyball player at first as well—although House describes the volleyball player as a teen girl. The golfer is actress Carmen Electra as herself, yet Doctors Foreman, Chase, and Cameron are interjected into the cases in a manner suggesting the scenario is real. Eventually three distinct actors embody the possible leg pain patients (none of whom are Electra) as House works through possible diagnoses, treatments, and consequences with the room of students.
FIGURE 3.1. In an atypical episode, House eschews realist techniques by portraying characters whose conditions and embodiments shift as House retells their scenarios. Here, actress Carmen Electra temporarily appears as an injured golfer.
Beyond the context of the lecture, this episode’s inclusion of three different patients is uncommon, as the show usually features just one case. This unusual number of cases further confounds viewers’ efforts to understand what is “really” going on, which isn’t made clear until the episode is two-thirds complete. After multiple diagnoses and treatments of the farmer and volleyball player, House reveals the patient who began as a golfer, and is assumed to be a drug-seeker, has tea-colored urine. He offers a few additional indicators of the possible condition to the dumbfounded students when Dr. Cameron, a member of his diagnostic team, suggests “muscle death.” House berates the students for not thinking of muscle death, while explaining that none of the man’s doctors thought of it either, and that it took three days before the “patient” suggested it was muscle death. The episode then cycles back through vignettes in which the farmer and volleyball player are diagnosed and their doctors inform them that their legs may have to be amputated. When the episode turns back to the golfer/drug seeker/muscle death patient, Cuddy appears as the doctor. She delivers the news that amputation may be necessary. The scene transitions back to the lecture hall where House explains that an aneurism caused the muscle death, and a camera pan of the audience reveals all of House’s team, Doctors Cameron, Foreman, and Chase, now seated in the back row, hanging on every detail. Foreman mutters, “God, you were right, it was House,” and the scene cuts to House in bed as Cuddy’s patient.
The remaining fourteen minutes of the episode shift to a more reliably realist style, although they do cut back and forth between flashbacks of House’s treatment and his account of the tale to the class. In these scenes, the audience learns that Stacy was his girlfriend at the time of the aneurism, that House refused amputation—the better way to resolve the issue—and demanded a bypass to restore blood to the leg. But as Cuddy predicted, the pain was so great that he needed to be placed in a medical coma until the worst of it had passed. Stacy waited until House was in the coma and, as his legal health-care proxy, allowed further surgery to remove the dead tissue. House’s ongoing chronic pain results from the extent of the muscle removed in this subsequent surgery and the delayed diagnosis.
Beyond the idiosyncrasies of this particular episode, House’s treatment of character development is uncommon in a number of respects. First, it is most curious that the series waits until nearly the end of its first season to explain the origin of House’s chronic pain. A conventional way to compensate for building the series around such a disagreeable protagonist would be to add layers to the character, to explain the origin of his pain, and/or to give it a cause that would warrant and justify the subsequent suffering and attitude that results.6 Consider how CBS’s The Mentalist explained the steady agitation of its less-than-personable protagonist as a result of the murder of his wife and daughter. This backstory is explained multiple times in the pilot and reemerges constantly throughout the series so that new or occasional viewers thoroughly understand the personality traits of the character and see how the exceptional tragedy he experienced justifies his focused search for the killer.
Instead of following such conventional explication and reiteration, the first season of House offers little explanation for House’s physical or psychic ailments until this episode. The unconventionality of this strategy of under-explanation is furthered by the degree to which future episodes of the series do not recall House’s origin story to audience members who missed this particular episode. Such recapping is easily and unobtrusively performed in other series by recalling crucial background details when new cast members are added. For example, in this case a new doctor could be informed of why House needs a cane by another character. Each episode of House introduces a new patient and in most cases provides a moment where House’s poor bedside manner could be explained as a result of his chronic pain, including some details of its origin. However, the series does not recall this episode, or the information imparted in it again until late in season seven. In the interim, an entirely new group of doctors have become House’s primary team, and the series never depicts them inquiring about House’s pain or another character explaining the limp.
It is also notable that this crucial origin story is told in such a convoluted manner. Viewers do not realize they are being told House’s story until they are deep into it, and even once Foreman makes clear the significance of the story, the preceding deviation from realist narrative and inconsistent blending of three different stories make it difficult to identify what parts of the previous narrative of the golfer/drug seeker were real. Moreover, why confuse the story by suggesting the patient could be a drug seeker? Viewers know House as a drug addict, but he would not have been before the injury. The significance of the episode’s more complicated techniques becomes clear if one considers the narratives and narrative techniques not chosen: House could have directly explained the incident in telling another character why he and Stacy broke up; the classroom technique could have been retained with just one case; all three cases could have been used without the constant variation in situations. These “easier” ways of incorporating the same information suggests the choice of complex techniques was deliberate.
The episode provides an explanation for House’s devotion to his guiding mantra that “everybody lies,” a crucial component of his character’s psychology, in two different ways. First, the audience and lecture hall of medical students see that diagnosticians must face unreliable information from patients through House’s repeated and varied presentations of the patient’s situations and ailments. Patients, even when not trying to confuse a diagnostician, change their stories and omit vital details in ways that require physicians to reconsider everything they thought they knew. The deviation from realist storytelling illustrates to the viewer how diagnosticians might also feel that they don’t “know” anything. With the things thought to be certain and true proven false, the episode appears to allegorize House’s view of the world and justification for his conviction that everybody lies. The episode also depicts House’s betrayal by Stacy, providing insight into his general
