| "Guardian Angels" | |
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| House episode | |
| Episode no. | Season 4 Episode 4 |
| Directed by | Deran Sarafian |
| Written by | David Hoselton |
| Original air date | October 23, 2007 |
| Guest stars | |
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| Season 4 episodes | |
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| List of House episodes | |
"Guardian Angels" is the fourth episode of the fourth season of House and the seventy-fourth episode overall. It aired on October 23, 2007.
While having a seizure, a funeral-home cosmetician named Rina (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 the 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 Rina 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. Rina 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 Rina 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 Rina's symptoms might result from ergot poisoning from mold in the organic bread that she eats, causing LSD-like hallucinations, worsened by the bromocriptine they gave while assuming Parkinson's Disease, and that the reason Rina 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, who accepts with grace, 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 has rethought things and will 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 - he just got rejected because he was "House-Lite," i.e., simply a version of House and his doctoring style, and had no choice other than to return to the one who hired "House Classic." The episode ends with Foreman saying: "I can start Monday."
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