The first episode of House‘s seventh season is a lot of fun and offers promising story lines for the coming year. It picks up right where season six left off. House and Cuddy really do get intimate in his apartment, even though House continues to play games. We are also teased with some comic relief involving Wilson that leads to a momentary scare that House is hallucinating everything, as was really the case the last time we saw him kiss Cuddy. We never really know anymore what’s going on with House and Vicodin, so this little wrinkle of suspense works.

And let’s not forget the further psychological complications. In the final episode last year, House lost a patient — a young woman trapped beneath a severely damaged building.

He could have died too underneath all that concrete and steel had the structure collapsed even more. So he is traumatized. And Cuddy is now in House’s apartment, not comfortable territory for her, and she has also suffered a psychologically traumatic experience: Earlier that day, she broke off her engagement with Lucas, the private investigator, and made a unilateral decision to be with House!

The title of the episode is “What Now?” So how do House and Cuddy answer that question? It isn’t much of a surprise that they begin to obsessively analyze their burgeoning relationship: Can this work? Which of us is really the one hesitant about “going public”? (Was House at all serious about making that sex tape?) They both would like to just let things be and enjoy what they have found together, but neither has the naivete or the intellectual blinders necessary for that to happen. And if they did, where would be the fun for us? We love the torture.

House hesitates to accept this new development because he fears happiness, seemingly convinced that bliss is nothing more than a temporary ruse that seduces suckers into false hope, the insidious prelude to an inevitable fall into a ghastly pit of crushing loneliness. But Cuddy knows House better than anyone else, and is well aware that he is one in ten million. So her reply to his doubts is truly extraordinary, the best one she could possibly give him. House is stunned when he realizes that her revelation works both ways.

Meanwhile, there is unusual mystery back at the hospital. While House and Cuddy are playing “house” and shirking their responsibilities at work (although House cheats a bit here by stealthily using his cell phone), Thirteen has planted clues for the other members of the team to find, indicating that she is leaving the next day for Rome to participate in some clinical trials of a new potential treatment for Huntington’s disease. Foreman, being overly concerned of course, digs further. What he finds should propel some interesting drama along this front in the weeks to come.

Can lovers work together productively? Foreman and Thirteen couldn’t, so their romantic relationship suffered and died. But Foreman ain’t House, and Thirteen ain’t Cuddy; so all bets are off. Will it be a clash of titans or a love story for the ages? We’ll have to wait and see.