"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 24-year-old funeral-home cosmetician named Irene 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, 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 due to Thirteen's error, 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 as he can't take his constant "turning of the other cheek"), so Cameron advises Cole to stick up for himself more as the only way to earn House's respect and be in with a chance. 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 with his egocentricity and risk-taking ways. Henry points out that Irene 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, Henry suggests that they ask the patient to ask her mother about her mother's symptoms. Irene 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 her mention of frequent falls and odd hand tremors, House diagnoses her with probable hereditary Parkinson's disease. The doctors run more tests based on the assumption, but Irene soon develops lesions 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 soon realizes that Dr. Amber Volakis was behind it all, taking advantage of the situation to attempt to unsettle her and throw her off her game. Meanwhile, an extended tirade by House causes Cole to punch him in the nose; consequently, a surprised House loses the bet to Cameron. Amber deduces that Irene's symptoms might result from ergot poisoning from mold in the organic rye bread that she's eaten, causing LSD-like hallucinations, worsened by the bromocriptine they gave while assuming Parkinson's Disease, and that the reason Irene kept requesting milk is that it is a natural treatment for the contamination of the bread - a natural evolutionary craving by the body to attempt repair itself. The team treats her, and it works, though Irene is sad to realize her cure means losing her mother once again. In the end, holding a bunch of peonies and much to everyone's surprise, House fires Henry in a Bachelor-inspired elimination - the remaining candidates each receiving a stem. While he admits that Henry has a lot of excellent ideas and they seem to share exactly the same wavelength - that's precisely the problem; House needs people with a different approach from his own. Henry accepts with grace and takes his exit as a compliment of sorts. 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 a further five percent. Cuddy says she's not going to give him any of those requests, she's not even going to give him the raise she offered and he originally rejected. When he asks why, she says that he hasn't rethought things - he just got blackballed 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 administrator who hired "House Classic." The episode ends with Foreman nevertheless agreeing to come back.
