This is partly a response to PotterGal's brilliant article on the same episode, and partly the result of an idle day spent watching too much House...!

I don’t know if you are familiar with this French play by Edmond Rostand called “Cyrano de Bergerac”. If not, here’s a summary that might help you see where I’m going with this:

Cyrano de Bergerac, a cadet (nobleman serving as a soldier) in the French Army, is a brash, strong-willed man of many talents. In addition to being a remarkable duelist, he is a gifted poet and is also shown to be a musician. However, he has an extremely large nose, which is a target for his own self-doubt. This doubt prevents him from expressing his love for his distant cousin, the beautiful Roxanne, as he believes that his ugliness forbids him to "dream of being loved by even an ugly woman."
Roxanne is also loved by the handsome Christian, who unfortunately can't put two consecutive words together when it comes to pitching woo. Cyrano agrees to help Christian win Roxanne by feeding him the right words for his midnight courtships and love letters; in this way, Cyrano can vicariously express his own ardor for the fair lady. Years later, Cyrano's deception is revealed, and he dies happily in the arms of his beloved Roxanne, who realizes that she has really loved Cyrano all along--by way of Christian.

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Wonderful play, one of the most romantic love stories ever – but back to my point!

To me, “Adverse Events” deals with perception – how others see you and how you want them to see you, but also with deception – hiding who you really are, whether to serve your own selfish intentions or because you believe you do so to protect your loved one’s untainted happiness and blissful ignorance. These themes, explicitly developed in Taub’s and the patient of the week’s mirroring subplots, also relate to House himself, and, I would argue, more specifically to his interaction with Cuddy via PI Lucas. And on closer look, there are significant parallels between the House/Cuddy/Lucas triangle and Cyrano’s story.

From the very beginning of the House/Cuddy/Lucas interactions, there’s a purposeful confusion around Lucas’s identity, the motivation behind his actions and on whose behalf he’s really acting – his or someone else’s (namely House’s).
The first occurrence of this is the humorous misunderstanding on Cuddy’s question in the first scene in the cafeteria:


Cuddy: “Is this him?”
House: “No!”
Lucas: “Yes!”
House: “She means, are you the private investigator whose bills I’m trying to slip through as medical expenses.”

Later, after Cuddy mistakes the man seating in the waiting lounge for Lucas, he exclaims, obviously proud of his ruse: “He does look like me, doesn’t he?” but Cuddy won’t admit she was fooled by the cheap trick: “You gave him your hat”, meaning the resemblance was only superficial and perhaps feeling a bit angry at herself for falling in his trap.

To a certain extent, this confusion of identity can also be transferred to House and Lucas: they do look superficially alike (same fashion sense, stubble) and seem to have more than a few personality traits in common (a talent for observation and witty comebacks, social awkwardness, lack of know-how with women, etc.). And in this particular episode, Lucas is so much House’s double that when they’re using the wireless earphones to communicate covertly, people around them think they’re actually talking to themselves when they are really talking to each other!

It seems obvious to me that this resemblance is one of the reasons Cuddy is quite clearly attracted to Lucas. It’s a simple syllogism: Cuddy likes House. Lucas acts as House’s doppelgänger. So Cuddy likes Lucas too. She might realize later that she only fell for House Lite. House Classic is undoubtedly the one she’s really into. For the moment though, she’s having difficulties telling the two apart:

Cuddy: “Tell House that if he wants to know what I’m doing, all he has to do-“
Lucas: “It’s not House, it’s me.”

And she should be confused because, officially at least, Lucas is acting on House’s orders. The man she sees flirting with her, offering her roses, snooping in her office and asking her questions to find out “something personal, something embarrassing (…) anything [he] could use to scare her into saying yes” may look like Lucas from the outside, but he’s really House, the puppeteer, the stage director safely hidden in the wings, prompting his lines to the lead actor who stands in the limelight and giving him instructions on his character’s motivation:

Lucas: “I’m not good at lying.”
House: “I know, that’s why your cover is you want to do her.”

Ironically enough, what House doesn’t fully grasp until that moment is that Lucas has a motivation of his own for agreeing to the deception. For him, this isn’t just a cover. Far from being House’s puppet, he now claims to have a say in the script: “I don’t just want to do her. I like her.” Playing Dr Frankenstein, House has created a monster that he seems to no longer control:

“You’re doing this for the same reason I’m doing this. We’ll see who gets there first.”

Just like Christian realized Cyrano wasn’t just helping him get to Roxanne but actually had a hidden agenda, Lucas is not fooled by House’s claim this is just a game to obtain blackmailing material on Cuddy. After all, Lucas is very observant and he was able to see in “Not Cancer” that House really wanted him to spy on Wilson because he was pining for him. Unfortunately for House, Lucas isn’t Wilson: he won’t go along with the charade just to humour him as Wilson did in “Act Your Age”. This time, Lucas has vested interests in his mission.

This is the reason why he is so eager to come clean to Cuddy. Double-crossing House, he confesses to her he was commissioned by him to set a trap for her and makes it clear his interest is genuine – a confession that seems to win Cuddy’s favours.
At the same time though, the photo comes into play.
I admit that House’s purpose in showing this picture to her is still very cryptic to me. Was it, as he told Taub about spying on him, to provoke and “see how everyone reacts”? (“Shocking. Discuss.”) Or was it, as Lucas thinks, to show her a different side of him, the side that once joined a cheerleader team to impress a girl he liked?
Whatever reaction he expected from Cuddy, I’m almost sure he hadn’t foreseen that his plan would backfire on him as it did (although I think he’s still unaware there’s something brewing between Cuddy and Lucas behind his back). Adverse decision indeed. The point of the photo is lost on Cuddy.

Or is it? Lucas said she didn’t buy it, and even though he’s very observant, there are a lot of things he’s unaware of. It is possible there is a secret message in there that only Cuddy is able to read. Even we, faithful viewers, know very little about House and Cuddy’s shared history. For instance, I too, like PotterGal, would like to know when House told her he was on the lacrosse team. And House’s remark that he spent half his life negotiating with that woman is also very mysterious. Does this mean that back in college there were already some arguments between them? About what? What did he need to negotiate about then?


Interpreting this in retrospect, with the late revelation that the photo is actually real, I think the photo was a test to see how she perceives him and perhaps an invitation to change her perception of him. Maybe PotterGal was on to something when she wrote that it’s possible he wanted to prove he could change for her, surprise her with what he’s willing to do and who he’s willing to be out of love. I agree that the photo tells us he wants her to actually see him for who he really is, to look beyond the snarkiness and the sarcasm and the cynicism and see the person he won’t reveal to just anyone. To me, a storybook ending would have the episode end with a conversation similar to that of the patient of the week and his girlfriend:

“Why did you lie to me?”
“I want to be… The way you look at me… The way it makes me feel… I want to be what you see when you look at me.”
“You think I’m that shallow? When I look at you, I see you.”

But this is House and Cuddy. Just like Taub and his wife, they don’t do storybooks.
House’s idea of romance is to use PI Lucas as his Christian, a cover to test the waters with Cuddy while keeping his cards close to the vest. Because House is fundamentally a Cyrano, someone who thinks he’s unworthy of anyone’s, let alone a woman’s, attention.
Now, in the play, Christian does get Roxanne first, but only because Roxanne falls for the deception and doesn’t realize what she loves about him is actually all Cyrano’s doing. Tragically, she uncovers the truth and the identity of her real lover only when Cyrano is on his death bed.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing House and Cuddy don’t do storybooks after all…