Episode Report Card Sara M: A- | 1 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Fratricide
By Sara M | Season 5 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.18.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.A 16-year-old factory supervisor and emancipated minor comes to PPTH with fluid-filled lungs. Kumar takes an immediate liking to her because she's an orphan just like him until he realizes that she's lying and her parents are very much alive. Alive and raping her, so she ran away from home and forged her emancipation papers. The team soon figures out that she has arsenic poisoning, but when they cure her of that, she gets even worse and lesions suddenly appear in her brain. House figures out that the arsenic was actually alleviating and concealing the symptoms of something much worse, and a brain biopsy comes up positive for cancer that only the bone marrow of an incestual rapist or his Queen of Denial wife can cure. Predictably, Sophia would rather take her chances on a random donor match. Even a hilarious attempt from Taub to get Sophia to realize how precious life is by claiming to have Huntington's doesn't change her mind, so Hadley tracks the girl's parents down -- only to find out that Sophia isn't Sophia after all, and assumed some other random girl's identity. House steps in to get the final absolute truth from Nophia, figuring it must be worse than dad rape, which was worse than duo parent death. It really isn't -- Nophia's baby brother drowned in the bathtub when she was supposed to be watching him. Nophia decided her parents would never forgive her and ran away. House convinces her that the only thing worse than being responsible for one child's death is being responsible for two, and Nophia's parents are called and there's a happy family reunion that includes bone marrow party favors.
Meanwhile, Foreman tries to go it alone with a super secret case until his young patient is on the brink of death and he appeals to House for help, only to be rejected and forced to come up with the answer himself. He does, and Foreman's confidence gets a boost. And Wilson decides not to give House any of the advice he seeks regarding Cuddy, so nothing progresses on that front this week. My only question now is, what kind of factory hires a 16-year-old as a shift supervisor?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Welcome to the drama factory! A woman is trying to get a co-worker to donate to a fund for another injured co-worker, but he doesn't want to give. I'm guessing he doesn't help out when the mothers come around with their daughters' Girl Scout cookie orders, either. The woman persists, saying that they're like a family. The guy says they're only co-workers, and in the case of the injured guy, not even that anymore. "I can't believe you just said that," the woman says. See, now, this is why men don't want to work with women. Look at all the talking and drama-making they do! Their supervisor is also a female, and she walks up to tell the woman to go back to work. She does, and the supervisor reminds the cheap guy that the injured man is the person who got him off the night shift. Cheap guy doesn't care. The supervisor continues that the injured guy covered for him on Labor Day weekend, but before that can cause the Cheap Guy's heart to grow three sizes, all kinds of things go wrong in the supervisor's chest, according to the Magic School Bus Cam. I guess sending people on guilt trips taxes your system. Also, maybe if that other guy hadn't been so nice and selfless and covered everyone else's shifts, he wouldn't have been all tired and had the accident that injured him in the first place, hmmm? Something to think about. In distress, the supervisor chooses the absolute worst place to lie down: on the conveyor belt that's rolling towards some kind of crusher device. I wonder if that's how that other guy got injured, too? The cheap guy sees her in time to save her life, thereby freeing him from having to donate to her get well soon fund. Not like he would have done it anyway.
House de-elevators to find Wilson waiting for him. House admits that he didn't ask Cuddy out, to which Wilson just says "oh." House finds this suspicious, but repeated attempts to keep Wilson's elevator door from closing with his cane and asking him why he doesn't seem to care are not productive.
House enters the meeting room to find the Cottages seated around the table. Kumar reads off the stats on their latest patient, a 16-year-old with fluid in her lungs. Taub says the girl's factory worker job means she probably works with a lot of immigrants. People from other countries make your lungs fill up with fluid, I guess. My dad is an immigrant, and my mom married him because he made her heart fill up with love. Aww! Now I don't have to feel so bad for forgetting their anniversary, because I wrote that. Kumar tells us that the reason why a 16-year-old is working in a factory in the first place is that we've gone back in the time before child labor laws, which gives House an exciting new sci-fi twist! Actually, she's an emancipated minor. House says that makes her either an Olympic gymnast who suffered a career-ending injury, a child star who already blew her money on drugs and apparently couldn't find any convenience stores to rob instead, or a lying runaway. Yes, because those runaways just love working in factories. Kumar says the girl's parents died last year and she has no relatives. Instead of going into foster care, she got her GED and became emancipated. So now, instead of attending high school and living in a foster home, she's working in a factory? Yeah, that's great. Not to knock people who do work in factories, but that one is all dimly-lit and you'd think the state would at least force the girl actually graduate high school. Foreman thinks the girl is pregnant, but Kumar says she claims she isn't sexually active. Foreman reminds Kumar that they never believe what their patients tell them. "Not every teenager is having sex," Kumar says feelingly. I guess we know one teenager who didn't have sex, don't we? Kumar thinks that the patient is too busy working full time and paying rent to have sex, because it's not like people with jobs ever have time to have sex. Just ask Hadley. House gets all annoyed and tells them to stop arguing and just give the girl a pregnancy test since it takes all of five seconds. That's the first time he's ever advocated giving a test to prove something. This Cuddy thing has really messed with his mind.