Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Amber’s death leaves Wilson so shaken that he quits Princeton-Plainsboro and breaks off contact with House. House tries to pull him back by hiring private investigator Lucas Douglas to follow Wilson, while also using Lucas to learn about Cuddy’s personal life and his own new team. Wilson returns, but his anger does not disappear. House keeps pressing at the boundaries of friendship, and the strain becomes sharper as Cuddy takes on the demands of adopting and caring for baby Rachel.
House’s fellows face their own changes. Foreman and Thirteen begin a relationship while he leads a Huntington’s drug trial that becomes dangerous for her. Kutner and Taub bring different kinds of risk to the team, but Kutner’s sudden suicide leaves House unable to accept the lack of an explanation. The case of a suicidal man with chronic pain makes House confront his own dependence on Vicodin, while sleep loss later brings Amber back as a hallucination. She helps with diagnoses at first, then becomes a distraction that House cannot control or explain away.
In the finale, House believes Cuddy helped him detox from Vicodin and that they slept together, but the apparent night together never happened. After House insults her, she goes home; he spends the night alone; his addiction and worsening hallucinations have distorted what he remembers. When he discovers the bottle he thought was Cuddy’s lipstick, Amber and Kutner appear to him again. House admits that he is not okay, and Wilson drives him to a psychiatric hospital. At the same time, Chase and Cameron marry, with the rest of the team gathered to celebrate them.