"House" Season Finale: He Can't Remember...

...and then, finally, he can, and it's worse. I just got finished watching a rough cut of tonight's "House," which is part one of the two-part season finale, and without spoiling anything, I can tell you it's a wowser. There's high drama and medical mystery, as he takes insane risks to retrieve his memory of four missing hours in his life.

Oh, and we get to see Cuddy do a pole dance. Seriously.   

Tonight's episode actually opens in a strip club where a disheveled, boozed-up House is getting a lap dance. But he doesn't remember what he's doing there, and he quickly realizes the memory loss is more important than the lap dance. He stumbles outside to find emergency personnel tending the terrible aftermath of a violent bus crash. He was one of the passengers, and apparently wandered away from the wreckage and into the strip club. But why is he full of booze? Why was he on the bus? And why does he feel the terrible certainty that someone is going to die if he doesn't remember soon?

To find the answers, he has to climb back onto the bus in the moments before the crash - so he spends most of the hour trying drugs and hypnosis and more to get back the four hours he lost.

At times his subconscious intrudes, which is how we get the Cuddy strip show.

The episode is called "House's Head," and I'm not sure if that's a nod to the short-lived but legendarily weird Fox sitcom "Herman's Head" from the 1990s. Inside House's brain is a damn interesting place, though - no surprise - as we return again and again to the bus and the strip club and a mysterious bar, trying to solve the mystery of his missing time. There's a smoky underworld weirdness to these sequences that reminds me of Jack Nicholson and the ghostly bartender in "The Shining." (Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit plays the bartender here.) Finally, we re-live the bus crash, and the scene echoes the most awful moments of "Catch 22," the desperate scene in the shot-up bomber while one of the crewmen is dying. But the "House" gang has a couple of shockers up their sleeve.

When part one ends, you'll be screaming pissed that you have to wait a week for part two, I can tell you that from personal experience.

Did I mention that Cuddy gets down to some very tiny lingerie and heels?

Don't miss it.