How often does your job coincide perfectly with the problems you are having in your personal life?

Apparently it happens almost every week for the gang at Princeton-Plainsboro.

House (Hugh Laurie) won't get off Taub's (Peter Jacobson) back over the age old family debacle: Taub knocked up his ex-wife and now she wanted to move away, taking their baby with her.

House stuck to his mantra that all parents screw up all children somehow, and spent the episode trying to assert his world view on the team, as usual. He is convinced that even Adams (Odette Annable), who claimed to have had perfect parents, must have been messed up somewhere along the line. And Taub, well, if he lets his wife and child go, or makes them stay, either way he's a bad guy somehow.

And, if I'm lying I'm dying folks, but the patient this week had the same exact family problems! Now how about that, it's almost like they did it on purpose or something.

The patient had only a few memories left of his biological father, whom he believed long dead, and decided that he wanted to drop out of school and follow in daddy's footsteps and become a clown. But in fitting with House's ‘everybody lies' mantra, the patient's mother had been covering for a deeper darker secret that I'm going to hold over your head for a few more paragraphs to try to make it seem more interesting than it really was. Kind of like what the show did.

In other news, Chase (Jesse Spencer) didn't really get much action, and neither did Park (Charlyne Yi). They both were here, said some lines (‘Do you only like tests with the risk of death?' was particularly notable from Park), but it just didn't seem to be their week to shine.

In Hilson soap opera hour, Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) got two tickets to a big boxing match, but House, still under ankle bracelet enforced parole, can't go. House pulled some B-level trickery to try to get Foreman (Omar Epps) to send him to a conference that happened to be right next door to the fight, to no avail. Even Wilson tried to talk some sense into Foreman, who said that the best they each could do for House was to play their roles: Wilson should be his friend and stay home with him, while Foreman had to try to hold some power over House and be an ass on the parole rules.

Too bad Wilson turned on the television to see House and Foreman front row and center.

It was funny, and poor Wilson just keeps getting knocked down at the tail end of episodes lately. Good thing he forgave House for no reason and isn't really fighting back(yet).

Anyways, back to the case. The kid was on his death bed, and his father finally showed up to try to see him off. House, with his keen eye for these things, somehow could tell that the father had syphilis. The reason the mother claimed daddy was dead was because he had molested his son years ago, and apparently the disease lay dormant in his system until he was kicked in the balls at the start of the episode. I mean, of course.

No PhD here, but it seemed like kind of a stretch to me, especially given House's x-ray vision diagnosis of the father. I won't pretend to know enough about syphilis to say if it can or can't remain dormant that long, but either way it was another text book case that seemed to serve more as a mirror to everybody else's family problem discussions than anything else.

On a side note, I'm still curious how House's medical license never seemed to have gotten suspended while in prison, and if it was, how he just kind of got it back.

All in all, it was pretty stale, and one of the less interesting weeks of late. Somehow bringing back Chase and Taub has weakened the team chemistry that Park and Adams shared, and everything else just seemed like a cookie cutter run through stuff we've seen on House before. It's a shame, but it sure as hell beats syphilis.