The third season of House, M.D. premiered on September 5, 2006 and ended on May 29, 2007.

At the beginning of the season, the main storyline centers around House's temporary lack of pain in his leg due to ketamine treatment after being shot in the previous season finale. Later in the season, he leaves a stubborn patient in an exam room with a thermometer in his rectum. Because House is unwilling to apologize, the patient, police detective Michael Tritter, starts an investigation around House's Vicodin addiction. The third season concluded with a cliffhanger finale, in which House fires Chase, Foreman leaves as he already resigned and doesn't change his mind and Cameron resigns, leaving House without a team for the fourth season.

David Morse joined the cast for seven episodes as Tritter. He was cast for the role after having previously worked with House'​s creator David Shore on the CBS show Hack.

Production

Season 3 of House M.D. returned to television in September 2006, and contained 24 episodes. House, M.D. - Season Three was released to DVD on August 21, 2007.

Although the series seemed to settle back into a regular pattern, by the season's end it was clear that the series was going to undergo a fundamental change for Season 4. First came the resignation of Foreman, followed by the departure of the rest of House's team, leaving House to himself and opening the door to bring in new characters.

Overview

House recovers from his gunshot wounds, but despite his pain temporarily disappearing and the fact that his leg is working again, he is soon back on Vicodin. He runs into a particularly difficult patient at the clinic, who turns out to be a police officer, who then makes it his business to get House sent to jail for possessing Vicodin illegally. Unfortunately, House has used Wilson's prescription pad to forge his own prescriptions, even though Wilson has been supplying him with Vicodin freely. House nearly goes to jail, but Cuddy then perjures herself in court to have the charges dismissed.

Allison Cameron looks at her poor social life and decides to fill the hole in her sex life with Robert Chase. She demands a "no strings attached" relationship, and everyone predicts that Chase will dump her at some point, leaving the vulnerable Cameron heartbroken. Instead, it's Chase who becomes emotionally attached. When he professes he wants a deeper relationship, Cameron cuts off the sex. Chase won't let the matter drop and institutes the tradition of I love you Tuesdays, reminding Cameron how much he likes her every Tuesday, and insisting that given her empathetic nature she can't possibly not have feelings for a man she's worked with for three years.

Work continues normally until Foreman, fearing that he's becoming too much like House, decides he wants to leave the hospital for good. Despite Cuddy and Wilson imploring House to get Foreman to stay, House instead fires Chase for no reason and then Cameron decides to quit as well, leaving House without a team to help him. However, when Cameron realizes Chase will soon be out of her life, she quickly changes her tune and shows up on his doorstep.

This season also features the last appearance of Brenda Previn in the episode Que Será Será. It also marks the only appearance of Foreman's mother Alicia Foreman.

Major Events

• House seems pain free after recovering from surgery, but the pain returns as does his Vicodin habit.
• Fearing House is getting too cocky, Wilson and Cuddy lie to him after he miraculously diagnoses a wheelchair bound patient with Addison's disease. However, worried that House has lost his confidence, Cuddy finally reveals the truth.
• Cameron assists with the suicide of a terminally ill patient.
• A beautiful 17-year old girl becomes infatuated with House. House eventually diagnoses her with a fungus that lowers inhibitions.
• House insists that his blood-stained carpet be put back in his office.
• House receives a rare gift from a patient - an autistic boy's PSP.
• Foreman starts dating Nurse Wendy.
• House mistreats a difficult patient at the clinic. When he refuses to apologize, the patient, a police detective, arrests House and finds Vicodin on him. House is charged with illegal possession of a narcotic.
• After Wilson bails House out of jail, Tritter searches House's apartment and finds 600 tablets of Vicodin. House is charged with trafficking in narcotics.
• Tritter checks House's prescriptions and realizes that they're all signed by Wilson, but some of them have completely different penmanship. Wilson lies and says they are all from him.
• House reveals that he became a doctor when he met a buraku in Japan who was the best doctor in the hospital but none of the other doctors would listen to him until all other options were exhausted.
• Tritter starts putting the pressure on House's team and Wilson. Wilson's car is seized, his bank account is frozen and he loses his prescription privileges, forcing him to suspend his practice. Although Cameron and Foreman also have their accounts frozen, Tritter leaves Chase alone so that they will infer that he's the rat.
• Cuddy keeps supplying House with Vicodin, but severely restricts the dosages. It starts to affect House's work and he nearly amputates the limbs of a young girl thinking she has necrotizing fasciitis. In fact, Chase figures out that she has porphyria and saves her from surgery. When he confronts House, House punches him, leading Wilson to believe House is out of control. Wilson soon makes a deal with Tritter to admit House forged prescriptions.
• Tritter and Wilson come to House with a no-jail-time deal which House rejects out of hand. To put the pressure on House to take the deal, Cuddy cuts off his Vicodin. When House still outperforms the rest of his team, Wilson realizes he made a mistake and withdraws his cooperation with the investigation. At the deadline, House tells Tritter he will accept the deal. However, Tritter has learned that House stole a dead patient's oxycodone and tell House the deal is off the table.
• At the preliminary hearing, Cuddy fakes records and perjures herself to make it look like House only got a placebo. The charges are dismissed and Tritter agrees to drop the matter.
• House loses his parking spot to a research physician in a wheelchair. He manipulates Cuddy into giving him his spot back by spending most of a week in a wheelchair himself.
• House tries to steal a spinal nerve from a patient who is insensitive to pain so that he can graft it to the nerve in his leg.
• Nurse Wendy breaks up with Foreman.
• Cameron and Chase start a no-strings attached relationship and start sleeping together in dangerous places, like the hospital storage room, the sleep lab and a patient's house.
• House fakes brain cancer to attempt to get injected with an experimental pleasure drug. However, his team finds out the fake files are actually a syphilis case.
• House catches Cameron and Chase making out. The word of the relationship spreads quickly.
• When Chase wants to get serious, Cameron breaks off the relationship.
• Chase institutes I love you Tuesdays in an attempt to get back into a relationship with Cameron.
• Foreman's mother and father visit.
• Foreman irradiates a patient thinking she has an autoimmune condition. She actually has an infection and the treatment quickly results in her death.
• Wilson's second wife Bonnie Wilson is seen for the first time. She dumps their dog Hector on House, but later takes him back when her condo starts to allow dogs.
• Foreman treats a sick marrow donor and withdraws the marrow without an anesthetic because the donor can't tolerate it. He saves the lives of both the donor and the recipient as a result, but his guilt over doing it the way House would drives him to resign from the team.
• Wilson reveals he is on antidepressants.
• House tries to sabotage Foreman's interview at New York Mercy. As a result, Foreman summarily rejects Cuddy's offer of his own team at Princeton-Plainsboro.
• On Foreman's last day, House fires Chase, alienates Foreman when trying to ask him not to leave, and has to accept Cameron's resignation.
• Cameron realizes how much she misses Chase and they start a relationship.

Cast

Main Cast

• Hugh Laurie as Gregory House (24/24)
• Lisa Edelstein as Lisa Cuddy (24/24)
• Omar Epps as Eric Foreman (24/24)
• Robert Sean Leonard as James Wilson (24/24)
• Jennifer Morrison as Allison Cameron (24/24)
• Jesse Spencer as Robert Chase (24/24)

Recurring Characters

• David Morse as Michael Tritter (7 Episodes)
• Marco Pelaez as Marco (3 Episodes)
• Kadeem Hardison as Howard Gemeiner (2 Episodes)
• Leighton Meester as Ali (2 Episodes)
• Kimberly Quinn as Nurse Wendy (2 Episodes)

Notable Guest Stars

• Joel Grey as Ezra Powell
• Pruitt Taylor Vince as George
• John Larroquette as Gabriel Wozniak
• Patrick Fugit as Jack Walters
• Meredith Eaton as Maddy Ralphean
• Dave Matthews as Patrick Obyedkov
• Kurtwood Smith as Obyedkov
• Katheryn Winnick as Eve

Episodes

Number	Name	Original Air Date	Plot
1	Meaning	September 5, 2006	A pain free House returns to work and to rigorous exercise. Without argument, he accepts two seemingly routine cases. He quickly solves one, but his team and Cuddy worry that he's obsessing so hard about finding a cure for the second that he might actually kill the patient.
2	Cane & Able	September 12, 2006	The team treats a young boy who believes he has been abducted by aliens. House finds the cause, but the treatment seems to run into a dead end.
3	Informed Consent	September 19, 2006	The team struggles to diagnose a famous scientist who decides he is ready to die. When the patient refuses to consent to tests, House promises to assist with his suicide after 24 hours.
4	Lines in the Sand	September 26, 2006	House is drawn to the case of an autistic boy, apparently only for the reason that the patient can't communicate well enough to give House any clues as to his condition.
5	Fools for Love	October 31, 2006	House treats a young black woman who has trouble breathing. However, as the mystery deepens, her devoted young white husband seems to come down with the same illness, but he refuses to let them test his wife and insists they leave him untreated so he can undergo the dangerous tests instead. Meanwhile, House refuses to make peace with an angry clinic patient.
6	Que Será Será	November 7, 2006	House deals with a mysteriously ill morbidly obese coma patient. When the patient spontaneously regains consciousness, he refuses any tests that might prove his condition is due to his weight. Meanwhile, Detective Tritter steps up the pressure on House.
7	Son of Coma Guy	November 14, 2006	The son of a patient in a persistent vegetative state starts having severe symptoms of his own. Needing a better medical history, House takes a long shot to try to bring the vegetative patient back to consciousness.
8	Whac-A-Mole	November 21, 2006	The team treats a young man who is the guardian of his younger siblings. When they treat him, he keeps developing new infections. Meanwhile, Tritter is putting pressure on Wilson to rat out House.
9	Finding Judas	November 28, 2006	The team treats a young girl who is the subject of much contention between her divorced parents. When they can't stop arguing, the court makes Cuddy the patient's medical proxy. Meanwhile, Tritter tries to get one of the team to turn on House, but instead finds help from an unexpected source.
10	Merry Little Christmas	December 12, 2006	Tritter offers House a deal and to put pressure on House, Cuddy cuts off both his work and his Vicodin. However, Cuddy is treating a young woman with dwarfism and, without House, she and the team can't seem to find any answers of their own.
11	Words and Deeds	January 9, 2007	House and Tritter head for a showdown in court, and House takes a desperate stab at rehab to avoid jail. Meanwhile, the rest of the team tries to treat a firefighter who has the symptoms of an old woman.
12	One Day, One Room	January 30, 2007	To punish House, Cuddy banishes him to the clinic. While dealing with a rash of suspected STD cases, he realizes one of the patients is a victim of rape. He tries to pass her off to someone more qualified, but the patient insists on being treated by House.
13	Needle in a Haystack	February 6, 2007	The team treats a mysterious patient with an even more mysterious illness. When the facts provided by the patient don't check out, they find out he is an ethnic Romani who refuses to allow them access to his home out of respect for his parent's belief that the doctors will pollute it.
14	Insensitive	February 13, 2007	House wants to treat a patient who cannot feel pain, and may have his own agenda in order to treat his own pain. Cuddy meets a new man, only to have House track their every move and run interference.
15	Half-Wit	March 6, 2007	House becomes intrigued with the illnesses being suffered by a young piano playing savant. However, his team is more worried about him when they learn he is traveling to Boston for experimental treatment for brain cancer and work overtime to ensure the diagnosis is correct.
16	Top Secret	March 27, 2007	When House has a dream about being in combat, he wakes up only to have Cuddy assign him the case of a Marine whom House just saw in his dream. Certain that he has seen the man before, he spends more time trying to learn where he could have possibly met him than he does treating the patient.
17	Fetal Position	April 3, 2007	House treats a famous forty-two-year-old photographer who suffers a stroke in the middle of her pregnancy. House quickly diagnoses what's wrong but it appears the only way to save the patient is to terminate the pregnancy.
18	Airborne	April 10, 2007	On a trans-polar flight from Singapore to New York, House and Cuddy face a “Flight Into Danger” as the passengers around them keep getting sick, and even Cuddy seems affected. Meanwhile, back in Princeton, Wilson leads House’s team when a middle-aged woman seems to be suffering from her recent decision to live life to its fullest.
19	Act Your Age	April 17, 2007	A six year old girl is admitted after collapsing at daycare, but her symptoms seem typical for someone ten times her age. The mystery just keeps getting worse until the girl's brother also starts exhibiting strange behavior.
20	House Training	April 24, 2007	Foreman's personal life intrudes when his mother and father come to Princeton for a visit. On the medical side, he appears to have more insight into the case of a young woman than any of the rest of the team until a seemingly obvious step turns out disastrously wrong.
21	Family	May 1, 2007	A bone marrow transplant to a critically ill patient is threatened when the donor, his younger brother becomes ill as well. Although the younger brother doesn't appear to be in danger from his illness, the team's techniques to diagnose him in time to help his brother bring him to the brink of death as well.
22	Resignation	May 8, 2007	When a young student comes in coughing up blood, House and the team can only come up with a list of zebras to explain her symptoms, and even worse, all of the possible diagnoses appear to be terminal. Meanwhile, Foreman breaks the news of his resignation to the rest of the hospital.
23	The Jerk	May 15, 2007	The team deals with a teenage boy whose personality is even more obnoxious than House's is. Meanwhile, Foreman's exit plan runs into a snag when someone sabotages his job interview.
24	Human Error	May 29, 2007	A pair of Cubans make a dangerous attempt to escape Cuba merely so that they can meet House to diagnose the wife's illness, which has stumped the Cuban doctors. When the patient suffers a huge reversal and it seems the only cause could be Foreman screwing up, House refuses to accept it and desperately looks for another cause.

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