'House' Season 6 Episode 11 'Remorse'

'House' Season 6 Episode 11 'Remorse' features a powerful, beautiful, and ruthless female executive who comes down with intense pain in her ears. This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with her.

Spoilers surely follow.

Dr. House undertakes the diagnosis of the latest patient because (a) she is hot and (b) her husband is decidedly not. House is as interested in this little tid bit of human nature as he is in the disease.

House is also reaching out to a man who was once in medical school with him with whom he had switched term papers as part of his therapy. He had wanted to see if the professor was biased against him and would thus grade him poorly even on another's term paper. The fellow student informs him that he never finished med school and is now a sacker at a grocery store. Mind, this kind of "My Name is Earl" sub plot could become a House spin-off, except House is rather selective in his remorse. No reaching out to Cuddy or Wilson whom House knows very well and whom he has shafted many times.

In the meantime, House's team is quite taken with the patient. She is beautiful and charming and it is obvious that her frumpy husband adores her. Thirteen, who in the ordinary course of events, would also be taken with a beautiful, charming woman notices something off about her. An exam of her brain under an MRI confirms the awful truth.

The patient, while understanding the concepts of love and compassion enough to fake them, is incapable of feeling most emotions. She is, to use a medical term, a psychopath. She is a relatively harmless psychopath, though. She is just cruel, manipulative, and self absorbed. She chooses not to kill people because that doesn't really interest her. She is, however, annoyed with Thirteen for outing her and makes that annoyance known in-well-annoying ways.

Meanwhile the disease progresses from her heart to her kidneys and then her liver with the usual bad results for a patient on 'House.'

House finds that his old school chum is losing his home. As a way of compensation for arranging him to flunk med school, House offers to pay for several months of mortgage. The old school chum refuses, revealing that he had in fact graduated from med school and had spent 10 years as an orthopedic surgeon. Then he developed a gambling problem, which led to his overcharging Medicare patients, which led to having his license to practice lifted, which led to his current circumstance.

House demands that he take the check anyway. The paying of the mortgage is not so much for the old school chum's benefit but for House's. Unlike the patient, House can feel remorse and really would like to make amends, even if his sneaky act in med school caused no real harm.

Meanwhile it is discovered that the patient's ailment is not only affected her heart, liver, and kidneys, but her brain. The cure will fix the former three, but not the latter as her brain has already rewired to psychopath.

Or had it? As the cure progresses, she suddenly becomes quite cruel, driving her husband away with insults. Thirteen recognizes it right away. They have restored her ability to feel as well, and now she also feels remorse for what she has done. She knows that she is no good for the man she married and now must be cruel to be kind. And it hurts really bad.

Source: House, Remorse, TV.Com