Although he has recovered from the gunshot wound administered by the husband of a former patient at the end of
House's second season, Season Three finds the unabashedly misanthropic Dr. Gregory House (
Hugh Laurie) still suffering from a plethora of emotional wounds, wracked with self-doubt about his efficiency as a nephrologist specializing in unusual medical cases, and asking himself if he should actually start treating (and regarding) his patients as human beings. This self-reflection doesn't last long, and soon House is his old obnoxious self, the holy terror of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Nor does he let up on the overuse of prescription drugs like Vicodin and Ketamine to ease the agony of his leg pain (an experimental treatment to alleviate the pain this season only makes matters worse). In fact, one of the year's most omnipresent--and ominous--storylines involves a detective named Michael Tritter (
David Morse), who enters the clinic as a patient and ends up as Inspector Javert to House's Jean Valjean, dogging the doctor's trail and persecuting his colleagues in hopes of ultimately throwing House in the slammer for drug abuse and falsifying perscriptions. In other major Season Three developments, a romance blossoms between House's longtime associates Dr. Robert Chase (
Jesse Spencer) and Dr. Allison Cameron (
Jennifer Morrison). And after a medical misjudgment which totally shatters his self-confidence, Princeton-Plainsboro's ace neurologist Eric Foreman (
Omar Epps) abruptly resigns. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide