Tonight's "House" features sundry disrobed women who are only peripheral to the storyline and yet it's not quite cravenly exploitative - just another reason it's one of the best shows on TV

By TV's obdurate rule of diminishing returns, "House" should, at this point, be a shell of its former self, particularly when you look at the self-inflicted damage other equally successful shows have suffered in the past couple of years. And it's had its share of potential jump-the-shark moments - Sela Ward's turn as his ex and David Morse's relentless cop story arc come to mind - but series creator David Shore and his writers have spun away before any irreparable damage was done to the series, and Hugh Laurie and his supporting cast are generally so spot-on you're willing to ride out the missteps in anticipation of the next great episode.

Which brings us to tonight's episode, "House's Head," mainstream TV's equivalent of an art-house movie. It opens with House getting a lapdance in a strip club but not sure why (well, if you have to ask, fella...). Turns out he has a pretty serious scalp wound, and just fragments of memory of seeing someone exhibiting symptoms of a serious malady - but who? And where? And when?

He exits the gentlemen's establishment - that's what they call them, right? even though a real gentleman wouldn't be caught dead in one? - and around the corner, there has been a grisly bus accident, one that House somehow simply strolled away from to go to the strip bar, which somehow was so insulated that no one within was aware of the conflagration not a hundred yards from its front door.

Oh, well; these things happen on TV shows. From there, however, tonight's installment of "House" becomes a medical mystery where no one without brain damage is sure that there's actually anything to solve. House is driven to a worrying extent to find the person he may or may not have seen and save them. "Why does this matter so much?" he's asked, to which he can only respond, "I don't know."

Throughout the episode, House noodles around inside his own psyche, remembering bits of minutiae that may or may not be important. Details are sketchy - he recalls visiting a bar, but the bottles there are generically labeled "LIQUOR" OR "BEER." The bus driver is initially considered to be the afflicted person House witnessed before the crash. Wilson's (Robert Sean Leonard) girlfriend (and House's former charge) Amber (Anne Dudek) pops up in his semi-hallucinations, leading Wilson to believe that House is sweet on her. One of the pre-commercial patient collapses is that of House himself. A cool beauty who wasn't actually on the bus appears and reappears in House's internal dramas. Artful lighting dances about House's face as he tries to make sense of all of this.

All this is prelude to next week's episode, the fourth-season finale. For a show that, if anything, may be more rigidly structured than even all those crime procedurals, "House's" writers do find inventive ways to break from the formula.

And for "House" fans who've always wanted to see Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) perform a pole dance, your episode has arrived.

- "House:" 9 tonight; Fox (Channel 11).