Both Sides Now (House)

Template:House (TV series) episode "Both Sides Now" is the twenty-fourth episode and season finale of the fifth season of House MD. It originally aired on May 11 2009.

Plot

House and the team are intrigued by Scott (Ashton Holmes), a man who has undergone a corpus callosotomy procedure to treat epilepsy. The procedure left him with independently functioning left and right brain hemispheres and two distinct personalities, resulting in loss of conscious control over some of his actions, including those of his left hand, a condition known as Alien Hand Syndrome. As the two sides of Scott’s brain struggle for dominance, his warring personalities make it increasingly difficult for the team to figure out what is causing the unique problem. The team is forced to use some unusual methods to get him to cooperate with their necessary testing.

Meanwhile, Cuddy tells House that their relationship must be that of employer and employee. House tells Wilson about his kicking his drug habit and having sex with Cuddy; Wilson responds by saying "Wow" twice after House's statement (as Wilson put it: "one for each"). House tells him that Cuddy is trying to avoid her true feelings for him, and Wilson advises that he talk to her, advice which House ignores. Instead he begins a campaign to annoy and provoke her, an attempt to break through her composure. When, as part of this plan, House refuses to make his scheduled appearances in the clinic, Cuddy begins referring patients to see House in his private office, specifically an elderly man (guest star Carl Reiner) who claims that he has been having a problem with "squawking"; however, Cuddy avoids a direct confrontation with House.

In a sub-plot, Chase and Cameron collectively decide to put their wedding back on; Chase allows Cameron to keep her dead husband's semen, which Cameron had offered to have destroyed.

In a final attempt to provoke Cuddy into examining her true feelings for him, House announces to everyone in the main lobby of the hospital that he had sexual relations with Cuddy. Cuddy responds by confronting him in a hallway, and then firing him after he suggests that they move in together. House consults Wilson, and then goes to talk to Cuddy in her office, and she seems confused about what he said. House realizes that her reactions do not add up, and that something is wrong with his analysis of the situation. He then has a flashback to the night before when he thought he told Cuddy that he needed her help with his addiction. He suddenly confronts the reality of what has happened: he never told Cuddy he was hallucinating that night, his final words of the evening were: her "go suckle the bastard child who makes you happy"; she left the office and went home, never accompanying him to his apartment. His memory of her staying by his side while he detoxed was a hallucination, and, in fact, he spent the night popping Vicodin by himself. In reality, House and Cuddy did not have sex; House's experience was just himself walking around the house, intoxicated on the pills.

House snaps back to reality, with a hallucination of Amber saying in his ear, "So this is the story you made up about who you are. It's a nice one," to which a hallucination of Kutner adds "Too bad it isn't true."

Cuddy takes House to Wilson, who takes him to the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. Wilson and House share a silent goodbye, and House is led into the hospital by some of the its employees. At roughly the same time this is occurring, Chase and Cameron are getting married. Cuddy shows up in the audience after the ceremony has begun, though House and Wilson are not present.

Production

Although Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital is fictitious, the building into which House is admitted is actually an abandoned mental asylum in New Jersey, Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. Some filming also occurred there for the sixth season.

Music

The song that plays at the end of the episode during the montage of Cameron and Chase's wedding and House going to the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital is "As Tears Go By" written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham, and originally recorded by the Rolling Stones. The performance used is by the Vitamin String Quartet.