Guardian Angels (House)

"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 assaulted by one of the corpses she's working on. The fellowship applicants think it might be Mad Cow Disease, which she 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 realizes 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 the 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 and a necrotic spleen. 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 freak her out. 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 The Bachelor-inspired elimination. While he discovers that he has a lot of great ideas, and he and House seem to be on the same wavelength, House ends up firing him anyways because he doesn't need someone to tell him what he already knows.

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's been blackballed and no one else will hire him.

Cultural References

• House greets the candidates from his office through a speaker phone amd 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.
• 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. Anne Dudek, who plays Amber Volakis, appeared in the series.
• House gives a "rose" (actually a peony) to each candidate he does not fire. This references The Bachelor.

External links

• "Guardian Angels" at IMDb
• "Guardian Angels" at the House M.D. Guide