I don’t watch this show very often. But I watched several episodes in the recent marathon on (I think) USA.
At the end of one episode, Forester had just been brought out of a chemical induced coma, and was asked to move his toe. He couldn’t. Then he was asked to raise his right arm, and he raised his left arm instead. The camera pulled back, dramatic tension accrued,
and that was the end of the episode.
The next episode in the marathon did not follow up at all. Apparently the proper follow-up episode was not aired in the marathon.
So what the heck happened next?
Why couldn’t Forrester move his toe, and more interestingly, why did he raise the wrong arm?
Do you mean Foreman, the doctor portrayed by Omar Epps? If so, I believe you may be referring to the end of the two-parter entitled “Euphoria”, in which Foreman is exposed to a sickness that affects his brain:There is a mad rush to determine the cause of the sickness, with House himself visiting the apartment where it originated. Cameron decides she can no longer wait for House to figure it out, and performs a brain biopsy on Foreman. The aftereffects of the brain biopsy are what you posted in your spoiler boxes, but it turns out they are near-trivial side effects of the successful surgery. The left-arm/right-arm bit was portrayed as a somewhat common effect of certain brain-intrusive procedures (no idea how true that is), and is referred to in a later episode as having been dealt with. Foreman takes a little time to recover, but has no lingering after-effects.
the episode seemed to present these problems as serious ones, an occasion for some dramatic tension, and it was just left at that. I don’t think I missed anything, but maybe I did…
Well, the part that you may have missed (being a new viewer) is that Cameron and Foreman have a little bit of history at that point as the result of Foreman having published a paper on one of the team’s cases that Cameron felt he had “stolen” from her (she’d written a draft and had left it with House, but House failed to follow up with her and Foreman’s paper got published). So there was the added emotional tension that she may have just brain-damaged Foreman in the middle of this dispute.
No, I knew that. I caught the tension, as I said. What I thought was strange was that the tension wasn’t resolved within the episode. Like I said, the episode simply ended with the problems I mentioned still hanging.
Okay, sorry, my point was, as far as I could tell from watching the marathon, there was no playing out of a recovery, ever. At the end of the episode, something was wrong, and that was it. I asked here on the forum what happened in later episodes, to find out if and how the recovery played out in non-marathon episodes, and as far as I can tell from the answer provided, basically, the recovery was not played out. The toe problem was mentioned briefly in some episode or other, and apparently, that’s it. And that seemed strange to me.
But was the previous answer from this thread incomplete? Or did I fail to understand it?
I understand what you’re saying. The way the episode ended I fully expected it to be addressed in the next episode of the marathon. It threw me off as well.
Well, maybe they didn’t play the next episode in that marathon. The next episode actually does address it, somewhat. Foreman comes back to work, and has a different, more easy-going attitude.
Frylock, thanks for the timely post. I also watched the House Marathon on the USA Network and had the same questions you did. After the Is Omar Gonna Die episode is the House Gets Shot episode; the two didn’t seem related at all.
Quixotic, thanks for pointing out that there was another episode dealing with Foreman’s recovery. I guess I’ll have to wait until the next House marathon.
As someone else has already pointed out, in the next episode, Foreman has a completely different attitude on life. His brush with death has reordered his priorities. He’s happy and content – and House simply cannot stand that.
At the end, Foreman sits down with some medical flash cards and begins drilling himself on some concepts he had forgotten. That, as far as I can tell, is the last we hear about it. So they didn’t let it play out THAT long, but they did give it a little time.
I was out of the house for the first 2 episodes of the marathon, so I taped them on my VCR. I watched them yesterday (Monday), and it looks like the very first episode played was actually the follow-up episode to the last one shown during the marathon. Go figure.
I was actually pleased, because I was pretty pissed at the cliff-hanger too.
I was out of the house for the first 2 episodes of the marathon, so I taped them on my VCR. I watched them yesterday (Monday), and it looks like the very first episode played was actually the follow-up episode to the last one shown during the marathon. Go figure.
I was actually pleased, because I was pretty pissed at the cliff-hanger too.
I was out of the house for the first 2 episodes of the marathon, so I taped them on my VCR. I watched them yesterday (Monday), and it looks like the very first episode played was actually the follow-up episode to the last one shown during the marathon. Go figure.
I was actually pleased, because I was pretty pissed at the cliff-hanger too.
Yeah, they’re not. That’s a bit unfortunate; there are two episodes between “Euphoria” (Is Omar Gonna Die) and “No Reason” (House Gets Shot). The one immediately following “Euphoria” is “Forever” and it does address Foreman’s continuing rehab, as Snooooopy pointed out. And yes, it did seem just a little bit pat the way Foreman rebounded and was his old self soon enough. Sort of like this season, with House’s leg (though I believe we are supposed to be wondering at this point (post-ketamine) exactly how much of House’s pain is psychosomatic).