"House" - "Euphoria" Trivia Quiz

Answer: He's very happy and can't stop laughing -- even after he's shot.

One can sympathize with Baby Shoes in this situation. He's been caught fair and square (hiding in a dumpster), and he knows it. He holds his hands in the air as the cop starts reading him his rights. But as the cop starts laughing harder and harder, Baby Shoes grows understandably nervous. Officer Luria clearly isn't taking the Miranda rights very seriously -- and more importantly, he's waving his gun around to punctuate his jokes. "Be careful with that," Baby Shoes pleads, but the cop isn't listening; when Baby Shoes shoots, he clearly believes that it's self-defense.

The bullet shatters on Joe's bulletproof vest, and fragments embed themselves in his forehead -- and he still finds it funny!

Answer: Foreman published an article about a case that Cameron had also written up for publication.

The case was from the episode "Autopsy," earlier in the second season: an adorable nine-year-old girl, a cancer patient, was cooled down for several minutes so that the team could locate the blood clot in her brain; she was essentially dead during the procedure. Cameron wrote an article about whether "informed consent" can ever really be informed when it comes to such complicated procedures; she submitted it to House for his review and it sat abandoned on his desk for months. Meanwhile, House signed Foreman's article -- which focused on the details of the procedure -- almost immediately, and the first Cameron heard of it was when she saw it in a medical journal.

Cameron feels that Foreman stole an article he knew she was working on; Foreman insists that she doesn't own House's cases. The fight has been brewing for several episodes at this point, and shows no signs of abating (in part because of Foreman's clumsy explanation that he and Cameron are colleagues and not friends). Things will come to a head in this episode.

Answer: Not only is the apartment filthy, but it also contains an illicit greenhouse of marijuana plants.

Joe Luria is not your standard-issue law-and-order cop, at least not when it comes to his personal life -- or his side business ventures. His apartment is filthy enough to be an obvious health hazard, but his greenhouse is surprisingly clean and well-organized, including an extended sprinkler system that waters the illegal plants on a timer. Foreman brings a garbage bag of samples back to the hospital, but none seems to yield the answers the team is looking for.

Answer: Anton's blindness

Anton's blindness is a rare condition whose sufferers do not realize that they're blind; in fact, even when confronted with evidence of their blindness, they continue to insist that they can see. (In Joe's case, pressed for answers, he guesses wrongly what Cameron is wearing.)

As the team continues its fruitless search for answers, Foreman becomes more and more hostile towards the hapless Joe (who had accused him earlier of having a problem with cops) -- at one point accusing him of being "one part bully and nine parts hypocrite." Cameron -- who, to be fair, has harangued plenty of patients herself -- begins to be bothered by this unprofessional behavior.

Answer: Foreman laughs inappropriately when House shoots a corpse in the head.

House wants desperately to do an MRI on Joe, but can't because of the bullet fragments that remain in the officer's brain -- the bullets Baby Shoes used are ferromagnetic. To see whether this is really a problem, he uses the same bullets to shoot a corpse (the body had been donated to science) and then runs the body through an MRI (the results are rather gruesome for the body and damage the machine so badly it must be shut down for two weeks of repairs). In House's words: "Oops."

The team watches House do this in the morgue. Cameron and Chase are appropriately revolted, but Foreman seems to find it funny. When he starts laughing uncontrollably on seeing Joe start to bleed from his head wound ("Am I the only one who finds this funny?"), it's clear that his euphoria signals something sinister. Foreman is off the case.

Answer: He stabs her with a contaminated needle.

Cameron is tending to Foreman in the isolation ward -- checking vital signs, updating him on the case -- when he realizes that no one is going back to the apartment. He's sure there are some places he didn't check -- the cupboard above the sink, for example -- that could contain the key piece of evidence, and he's furious that the possibility isn't being investigated. So, in a rather shocking move for a character who is normally so ethical, Foreman stabs Cameron in the leg with a contaminated needle, punching right through her biohazard suit, and tells her that now she has to go to the apartment to save herself.

She goes, donning full biohazard gear, but does not find much of use. Her continued health, however, is a clue: it means that the mystery infection is not transmitted through the blood.

Answer: To avert an epidemic, health regulations require that the CDC handle the autopsy.

Following regulations to the letter, Cuddy has called the CDC -- and their autopsy results are a full three days away. (It takes them hours to come to collect the body.) House tries to get Foreman to do a quick brain biopsy on his roommate, but is foiled by the appearance of Anton's blindness: Foreman biopsies the mattress, thinking that it's Joe's head. House then brings Foreman's father to Cuddy's office to plead with her, but she is unmoved; she must also, she says, think of the families that would be affected if the disease were to spread.

In an effort to find another brain to biopsy, House takes his prized pet rat -- the one and only Steve McQueen -- to the apartment, retracing Foreman's steps as exactly as he can. As soon as Steve shows signs of euphoria (and how does one detect that in a rat, exactly?), House can kill him and autopsy him. It's a move of desperation, but Steve doesn't seem to be getting giddy ...

Answer: Joe had Legionnaire's disease, and Foreman doesn't.

Visiting Joe's police station earlier in the episode, House realized that the rancid filters in the air conditioning system had led to Legionnaire's disease -- and Joe worsened very quickly once the Legionnaire's was cured. Foreman, of course, doesn't have it. House now develops the hypothesis that the mystery infection isn't recognized by the body, so there's no immune response -- but the presence of Legionnaire's DOES prompt an immune response, allowing the body to fight both diseases. To buy Foreman some time, House shatters a vial of Legionella bacteria on the floor of the isolation ward, exposing him to the new disease.

Naturally, he doesn't bother to obtain consent.

Answer: Cameron

House assumes that Foreman's father will get medical power of attorney -- and that Mr. Foreman, not knowing much about medical matters, will then defer to House. It's a reasonable assumption! Foreman, however, wants a procedure done that House disagrees with.

A white-matter brain biopsy will definitively identify his mystery illness, but it may leave him with serious and irreversible brain damage, and it is to this that House objects. Foreman, who is no fool, knows that House won't honor his wishes and that his father won't stand up to House -- so he asks Cameron, at the same time offering an apology about the article he wrote.

Answer: Naegleria fowleri, an ameba that had contaminated the water in Joe's greenhouse sprinkler system

Naegleria fowleri causes primary amebic meningoencephalitis, a rare illness that is almost invariably fatal (partly because it's diagnosed so late). In the show, however, Foreman gets an extremely lucky break. Despite undergoing the dangerous white-matter brain biopsy, he awakens from his coma pain-free and with his mind mostly intact -- though he does have some lingering confusion over left and right.

Steve McQueen, the rat whom House tried to infect, also turns out okay. It seems that Foreman was simply unlucky enough to visit the greenhouse while the sprinklers were on -- the ameba passes into the body through the nose -- and Steve, visiting at a different time of day, was safe.

Thanks for taking the quiz on what I consider a powerfully plotted and acted episode. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it!