Episode Report Card Sara M: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Baby in a Corner
By Sara M | Season 7 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.18.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Cuddy is insane, so she asks House to baby-sit for her child. House does so, but takes his eyes off of her long enough for her to swallow a dime. Instead of telling Cuddy about it, he's stuck searching Rachel's poop for the next 24 hours and hoping a dime will show up inside it. This keeps him away from PPTH for most of the episode, but his Cottages (now with two bonus lady Cottages, although not really, since the first one is fired in seconds and the second wisely decides not to take the job and tells off Taub on her way out) have things under control with their latest patient, a newborn baby with all kinds of problems. Health-wise, things are going poorly, and family-wise, she's stuck with an older mother and adult sister whose relationship is strained for reasons we never really know. It turns out that the mother has both melanoma AND lung cancer, and her body's antibody reaction to the lung cancer was also keeping the melanoma at bay. It didn't stop it from spreading to her baby in utero, though, so as soon as Mom gave birth and her antibody-filled blood supply to the baby was cut off, the baby began to die from the melanoma. Mom decides to put off treating her cancers so she can keep giving her baby cancer-curing blood transfusions and spare her having to go through chemo. And then she dies from a cancer-related blood clot, but the Cottages are able to suck enough blood out of her body to save the baby, who will now be raised by the adult sister who kind of hates her. She'll still be a better mother than Cuddy, though!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We begin watching a woman give birth while her daughter videotapes it all. Mom's not too uncomfortable that she can't scold her daughter for taking her sweet time to show up in the delivery room, and the daughter says she had to take care of some work at her job, thereby telling us that she is old enough to work in a law firm. That means there will be quite the age gap between her and her soon-to-be-sister, and it also means that she's definitely not too young to take a few acting classes, as she is absolutely terrible at this. All she has to do is a voiceover right now, and she is conspicuously bad. But nice continuity putting the nurse from Lockdown in there. When it comes time for the baby to enter the world, Mom insists that her daughter film it, while the daughter refuses to film her mother's vagina. I can understand that, but if this was that important to Mom, then she should have talked it over with her daughter before game day, you know? We get a glimpse of the baby before a bunch of monitors go off and the doctor whisks the baby away. "Is something wrong?" Daughter asks. No, idiot. I'm sure all those monitors going off and the medical people rushing into the room is sign of good things, so why don't you keep filming, just in case you can capture your new sister's death on camera as well as her birth. Finally, one doctor takes her attention off the dying baby to tell her sister to turn the camera off already.
Oh, Jennifer Grey is playing the mother, Abbey. You'll recall that her real-life father, Joel Grey, has also appeared on this show. Let's hope she fares better than his character did. House passes out the very thin files of their newest patient, an eight-hour-old baby who can't breathe. That sounds like a big problem, but not so much that House can't turn away from the case as soon as Cuddy comes in asking for a minute of his time. It turns out that she wants a lot more that one minute; she needs House for the night. But not in a good way; the nanny can't work late because, unlike Cuddy, she spends time with her children and has to see her daughter's recital, and Cuddy has to stay late at work for a board meeting. Cuddy's back-up baby-sitter, her mother, has a cooking class. And finally, Cuddy lost her freaking mind. So she wants House to baby-sit. Even though ANYONE ELSE would be a better choice. Hell, leaving the kid tied down to her crib unsupervised would be a better choice. Leaving the kid tied down to an Iron Maiden would be a better choice. House tries to play the work card to get out of it, saying that he has a sick baby to take care of, while Cuddy's child is healthy, if sorely neglected. Cuddy cares even less about other people's children than she does her own, and says House can take care of his patient from her home via the phone. Cuddy won't even agree to give House sex in exchange for the chore, saying that she's still waiting for him to hire a female doctor. Even if, apparently, said female doctor isn't qualified. As long as the new hire has a vagina, that's all Cuddy wants.
House agrees to baby-sit and heads back into the meeting room to diagnose the sick baby with liver failure that is causing her lungs to fail. Um, what? The baby's doctors haven't already checked for liver failure? I'm no doctor, but the little I know about newborn babies is that they always test their livers because often, newborn livers aren't fully functional. Which is usually pretty obvious anyway because of that whole jaundice thing. I know this because I worked in a hospital lab where we always had newborn blood for liver testing (I'm pretty sure all newborns are tested for this) and also because I had jaundice when I was born and so I got to spend the first day or so of my life in an incubator with little tiny sunglasses on. I look so cool in my baby pictures, you guys. Anyway, House sends Chase and Taub off to take care of the baby while he talks to Foreman about hiring a new female Cottage, apologizing for asking Chase to do it last week. "Go hire someone who likes The Bridges of Madison County," he orders. "You want me to hire a white girl?" Foreman asks. More like a white AARP member. Let's give the younger white women some credit, here. Foreman already anticipated this assignment and has the job search narrowed down to two candidates. House tells him to stop smirking. Foreman does not.