House always leaves us with a moral. In last night's episode, “The Down Low,” it was “you can’t always get what you scheme for.”

Drug dealers Mickey and Eddie seemed like good friends and stand-up guys—you know, except for the whole selling-cocaine thing. But as we eventually learned, Mickey was a cop who was trying to arrest his pal Eddie. He wouldn’t tell House’s team where he lived because—why, exactly?—oh, right, because it might have endangered the investigation to which he’d devoted the last 16 months of his life. The big bust was coming up, and he had to be there.

But all his secrecy was for nothing, because after many false diagnoses, Mickey turned out to have an advanced and fatal case of Hughes-Stovin Syndrome. The drug bust went fine even without Mickey’s presence, and Eddie was marched at gunpoint to a police car as Mickey died in his wife’s arms.

How to reckon the moral calculus of the situation? On one hand, Mickey screwed Eddie over. On the other hand, Eddie was a snitch-murdering drug dealer. And on the other other hand, Eddie was the one who was willing to take a risk—taking Thirteen to the Dry Cleaner of Doom—to save Mickey’s life. Also, he cared enough about his child to read the free parenting magazine in the waiting room. So maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. In fact, maybe we were meant to think that life is fair in the end, since relatively straightforward Eddie lived and sneaky Mickey died.

Once again, we saw in this episode that Princeton-Plainsboro has the world’s most judgmental doctors, with Chase and Taub browbeating Mickey for his drug-dealing ways during his spinal tap. Worse still, Thirteen tried to comfort Mickey with the empty words “You did the right thing”—right after he'd learned that he had only days left to live. What ever happened to doctors who just want to heal the sick?