CNN iReport

Three plots and one subplot are interwoven in “Moving The Chains,” Episode 613 of Fox network’s “House M.D.,” aired February 1, 2010.

Genius diagnostician Dr. Greg House of Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital scrambles with his team to treat a college football player who attacked the safety during practice, dragged him across the field, and then began to beat himself up.

These events, unfortunately, coincide with the start of NFL tryouts and threaten the player’s chances to compete. House’s team makes several false starts, but it is House himself who finally correctly diagnoses the player with melanoma. Unfortunately, the correct diagnosis – though curable – comes only once the player's chance to compete in tryouts has passed.

A subplot involves House’s discussions with a soldier about to be redeployed to the Middle East, whose gangrenous toe, easily amputated, poses no threat to his return to active duty. With a baby on the way, and misinterpreting House’s own limp as evidence of service in Viet Nam, the soldier expects sympathy from Dr. House. Instead, House disparagingly asks the soldier how old he thinks he is and tells him go to Canada like they did during the war in Viet Nam or to shoot himself in the foot. Eventually, the soldier does just that. His foot is amputated at the ankle.

Another subplot finds House hiring neurologist Eric Foreman’s (Omar Epps) older brother as an assistant. Marcus Foreman, a felon just released from prison, is played by guest star Orlando Jones. Eric Foreman doesn’t want his brother working there. In fact, he believes House has hired his brother only to upset him. And now there’s a sub-subplot in which oncologist Wilson (House's roommate, actor Robert Sean Leonard) discovers an angry opossum in his bathtub. Wilson assumes the opossum has appeared in retaliation for his having told House not to use his tub, which House has naturally done anyway.

Learning that Foreman had, back in the day, been fast with a flat-head screwdriver, House assumes it is Foreman who has been messing with the condo, loosening the towel rack he used to pull himself out of the tub and causing him to slip back painfully. These pranks were in fact played by Lucas Douglas, played by Michael Weston. Now-boyfriend of hospital administrator Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), Lucas was hired by House in Season 5 to keep an eye on Wilson and has since, improbably, become romantically involved with the head of the hospital.

House shares the fact of Foreman’s mother’s death with the rest of the team, a breach of Foreman’s privacy that causes Foreman to quit on the spot. House then discovers an alternative explanation to the football player’s hypothesized steroid use and others that followed in the wake of the linebacker’s illness: melanoma.

Despite House’s notorious, gruff exterior, Wilson speculates that House is motivated by kindness in hiring Foreman’s ex-felon brother, and as the episode ends, House’s face expresses a mixture of regret and inevitability. The football player will live, but not to compete.

Watching the soldier wheeled down a hospital corridor, an amputee unable to return to battle largely due to House’s own advice, House’s face flickers pain. House is a complex character, equally easy to like and dislike, whose flaws, sometimes remediable and sometimes not, reflect our own.

See Fox's official "House M.D." website at http://www.fox.com/house/