Guardian Angels (House)

House (TV series) episode
episode_name= Guardian Angels
episode_no= HOU-404
airdate= October 23, 2007
writer= David Hoselton
director= Deran Sarafian
guest_star=Azura Skye, Caroline Lagerfelt


season= 4
diagnosis = Ergotism

"Guardian Angels" is the fourth episode of the fourth season of "House" and the seventy-fourth episode overall. It aired on October 23, 2007.

Plot

While having a seizure, a funeral-home cosmetician (Azura Skye) hallucinates that she's being raped by one of the corpses she's working on. The fellowship applicants think it might be Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human form of Mad Cow Disease), caught from one of the corpses at her job. They dig up the corpse and biopsy its brain, but the result is negative. The applicants soon discover that patient acts as if her dead mother is in the room. She also claims to see the ghost of Stark, the patient from the previous episode who died as a result of a mistake by Thirteen, which unsettles the young doctor.

Meanwhile, House begins to go out of his way to harass the Mormon doctor, Cole, and makes a bet with Dr. Cameron that he won't physically or verbally retaliate. House says he's probably going to fire him next, but Cameron advises Cole to stick up for himself. Elsewhere, Cuddy asks Foreman to return to her hospital, and offers him a raise, but he refuses. Foreman interviews for other jobs only to find that no one will hire him because he's too much like House.

Henry points out that the patient isn't just suffering hallucinations; it's also a delusion if she doesn't realize that her mother is dead. Although the doctors don't have access to her family's medical records (since they were probably lost in Ukraine), Henry suggests that they ask the patient to ask her mother about her mother's symptoms. The patient doesn't acknowledge that her mother has died, but she realizes that there was a time in the past when she was sick, and she is able to remember the symptoms from that time. Based on that, House diagnoses her with hereditary Parkinson's Disease.

The doctors run more tests based on the assumption, but the patient soon develops wounds on her arms, an enlarged spleen and a necrotic liver. As they continue to test her, Thirteen finds Stark's dog's collar in one of the labs. However, she realizes that Dr. Amber Volakis was behind it all, and was only trying to unsettle her. Meanwhile, an extended tirade by House causes Cole to punch him, and he loses the bet to Cameron.

Amber eventually realizes that the patient's symptoms might result from ergot poisoning from mold in the organic bread that she eats, causing LSD-like hallucinations, and that the reason the patient kept requesting milk is that it is a natural treatment for the contamination of the bread. The team treats her, and it works. In the end, House fires Henry, in a "Bachelor"-inspired elimination. While he discovers that Henry has a lot of great ideas, and he and House seem to be on the same wavelength, House fires him because he needs people with ideas different from his own.

After other job rejections, Foreman tells Cuddy that he'll accept her offer if he gets an office, an assistant and the pay raise she promised him plus 5%. Cuddy says she's not going to give him any of those requests, and she's not even going to give him the raise she originally offered. When he asks why, she says that he hasn't rethought things, and he just got rejected having no choice than to return to the one who hired "House Classic." The episode ends with Foreman saying: "I can start on Monday."

Cultural references

*House greets the candidates from his office through a speaker phone and says "Good morning, Angels". This and other lines reference the TV series "Charlie's Angels", in which Charlie always addresses his female 'Angel' agents via speakerphone. He also refers to Dobson as "Bosley", the bumbling male sidekick of the three Angels.
*House refers to Jeffrey as "Big Love." This is a reference to the HBO series "Big Love" about a Fundamentalist Mormon in a plural marriage. Amber Volakis (played by Anne Dudek) is also called "cutthroat bitch" by House. Coincidentally, Anne Dudek was also on Big Love.
*House gives a "rose" (actually a peony) to each candidate he does not fire. This references "The Bachelor".

External links

*imdb title | id= 0412142 | title="Guardian Angels"
* [http://www.housemd-guide.com/season4/404guardian.php "Guardian Angels"] at the [http://www.housemd-guide.com/ "House M.D." Guide]
* [http://politedissent.com/archives/1783 Medical review of "Guardian Angels"]