Episode Report Card Sara M: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Maybe Dead Baby
By Sara M | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 12.06.2004
We begin with a close-up of a baby's face. When a show that has a pattern of introducing the disease of the week in the pre-credits sequences opens with a baby, you know things are going to get sad. The baby seems well aware of this, its tiny brow knotting in worry. The new parents coo and fuss over their child and argue good-naturedly about what her name will be. Dad likes "Amber," but Mom disapproves of giving her daughter a "stripper name." Only good Christian parents with family values who let their brothers deliver their children give their kids stripper names. Dad rattles off a few more name choices, each more strippery than the last, until Mom tells us her choice of an appropriate name for their daughter: Max. She didn't carry all that weight around for nine months to have a baby that wasn't a tough biker, now, did she? Mom and Dad move on from the name discussion and onto how perfect and wonderful their child is and how lucky they are to have her, which means poor Maxine is that much closer to a mysterious life-endangering illness. "Say 'hi' to Bear!" Dad says, waving what will soon be known as the TEDDY BEAR OF DEATH DEATH DEATTTHHHH in Max's face. Max barfs. Mom is concerned; Max shouldn't be spitting up, she hasn't eaten recently. Dad fetches the delivery doctor as Max's eyes go all half-closed. Doc enters the room with an announcement that after the babies are born, they are no longer his job. Doc is the ob/gyn version of House, except that he's not likable at all. He takes Max and notes that she is baby is lethargic and hot. And having a seizure. And spitting up nasty green stuff. And credits!
House watches some General Hospital on a huge flat-screen television while eating Jell-O and sitting in a very comfortable-looking chair. He isn't in his living room, though: this is the ob/gyn doctor's lounge, and they don't take kindly to non-ob/gyns sneaking in to their ridiculously opulent palace and partaking of their luxuries. House could give a shit about what people think of him, though, so when Doc and a friend enter and ask what he thinks he's doing in their lounge watching their TV, House just says he stopped by the maternity ward to get some milk for his coffee. Yummy Mummy! The ob/gyn ignore the intruder and decide whether they want flat or sparkling water that was surely made from the tears of the Virgin Mary herself, so well-outfitted is this lounge. The conversation turns to the latest work news, and Doc mentions his encounter with new parents who dared to get upset when their baby almost died. Doc says that the baby will be fine; it's just a bowel obstruction. Dude, that doesn't sound fine at all! Cut over to House's easy chair, from which House is suddenly absent. I wish they had his Jell-O container still hovering in mid-air to illustrate how quickly he left the room, like they do in cartoons.