After spending too much time in non-reality and committing himself to Mayfield psychiatric hospital at the end of Season 5, there's nowhere for House to go but up. He detoxes painfully from the Vicodin in a montage and, sober and no longer hallucinating, decides that everything is fine now and he can go back to his life. Not so fast, says Andre Braugher, also known as Dr. Nolan. House can leave any time, but if he wants to be able to practice medicine again, then he has to stay and get better until Dr. Nolan writes a letter to the medical board. House spends some time trying to think of a way to blackmail Dr. Nolan, but Wilson won't help him out, nor will he appear in the episode again.

House tries to trick the doctors into believing he's all better, but Dr. Nolan easily figures out that House isn't taking his meds and is faking improvement. So House decides to pull a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and free fellow patient Freedom Master (well, Steven. But he prefers to go by his made-up superhero name) from the hospital for a day of fun so he can re-discover his delusion that he's a superhero. It works like a charm, which is a bad thing. Because Freedom Master then decides to fly off the second story of a parking garage and almost dies and House has to admit to himself that it's his fault and his reasons for doing this were more about sticking it to Nolan than they were about doing something good for Freedom Master.

And that's when House decides to truly participate in the recovery process and admit that he has a problem, even though I thought he already admitted that at the end of last season and that's why he is in the mental hospital in the first place. He takes his anti-depressants and truly opens up to Dr. Nolan in therapy sessions and makes efforts to get close to people and let them get close to him. He helps his annoying manic-depressive roommate rap in the ridiculous Ward 6 Talent Show! He connects with a catatonic patient's visiting (and married) sister-in-law so much that they have sex because the night staff at Mayfield clearly went to the same training school that the PPTH security staff did! He's even there for Dr. Nolan when his father dies! And he apologizes to Freedom Master for indirectly causing his internal injuries and broken bones, at which point Freedom Master is able to get over his near-catatonia and break the catatonic woman out of hers, even though she's been totally non-responsive for a freaking decade. And yet, her voice sounds perfectly fine the first time she uses it in ten years. Okay.

Her miraculous improvement is bad news for House, though, as her brother transfers her to a rehab facility in Arizona and moves his family there with her -- which means his wife can no longer cheat on him with House. This makes House very sad, and when he goes to Nolan about it, Nolan says that the fact that he connected with someone else enough to be hurt by her and then came to Nolan about it means that House is ready to go back to the real world. So… he was in a mental hospital because he doesn’t like people and is a jerk? Really? What about the hallucinations? Why did those happen? Why were they never addressed? Aren't hallucinations and making up a relationship with your boss so convincing that you can't tell the difference between it and reality kind of a major problem that needs more than just talk therapy and anti-depressants? And are we really supposed to think that House has no idea how to connect with other people when we know that he had a long relationship with Stacy? Or that he'd be willing to take anti-depressants after they caused him to miss a diagnosis in that episode a few seasons ago? It can't be that easy. It shouldn't be that easy. Oh, well. Hugh Laurie was awesome and House is back. We'll see exactly how the new House fits in with his old life next week.