"Joy to the World" | |
---|---|
House episode | |
Episode no. | Season 5 Episode 11 |
Directed by | David Straiton |
Written by | Peter Blake |
Original air date | December 9, 2008 |
Guest appearance(s) | |
|
|
Season 5 episodes | |
"Joy to the World" is the eleventh episode of the fifth season of House and the ninety-seventh episode overall. It aired on December 9, 2008.
A troubled sixteen-year-old, Natalie, is singing at her school's Christmas program when she suddenly becomes disoriented and vomits. She is brought to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, where the team discovers her liver is failing for an unknown reason. In House's office, they are exchanging Christmas gifts when House receives a mysterious gift wrapped in green wrapping paper. Kutner reads the note aloud, as it says "Greg- made me think of you." The present turns out to be Dr. Joseph Bell's Manual of The Operations of Surgery. House, annoyed, throws it in the trash. Afterwards, House conducts a differential diagnosis, with the team entertaining ideas such as alcohol abuse and pill-popping. None of the symptoms fit with the entire picture. When Chase and Kutner question Natalie's classmates, Chase gets angry enough with their cruel attitudes to let them know they're in serious trouble and they should act like human beings and tell him something that isn't bullshit; one of the popular girls says they slipped "magic mushrooms" into Natalie's food, and when she asks if Natalie will be OK Chase snaps at her that he has no way of knowing. Meanwhile, Foreman and Thirteen are still involved in the Huntington's drug trial. A woman whose disease is quite advanced drops out of the trial, saying that Foreman told her to "get over it" when her medication made her nauseous. Thirteen, annoyed, accuses Foreman of being like House.
The gift House received turned out to be last year's gift from Wilson, which House never opened. Wilson accuses House of needing to create the false illusion of a gift because he just cannot be nice to anyone. They end up betting that he cannot get thanked by a patient. Later, after Natalie's tox-screen was clean, Taub and Kutner find painkillers in her school locker, which makes them think she tried to kill herself. They later suspect tuberculosis, thinking she might have picked up something from the soup kitchen she normally attends.
To win the bet he made with Wilson, House puts on his lab coat (only the fourth time House is seen doing so, with the other occasions being the episodes "Mob Rules", "Sex Kills" and "Games") and acts very kind and caring toward his patients. A slightly dim woman, Whitney, who comes to the clinic with a terrible headache, compliments House on his hospitality, to which he responds, "If you can't be nice, why be a doctor?" He later deduces she is pregnant, much to her surprise. He then sarcastically insults her for not recognizing the common symptoms of early pregnancy, such as missing her period and putting on weight. She insists that she and her fiance are virgins, and asks for House to run a paternity test after he suggests that she has had an affair. He does run the test, but after sharing the results with them, he looks surprised, and leaves. He comes back later with the same set of results, and with a look of disbelief, states that Whitney is pregnant as a result of human parthenogenesis, a never-seen-before scientific phenomenon. Her baby only has maternal genes due to a spontaneous gene mutation which fertilized her egg, without ever needing male sperm. Her baby will be a virgin birth. Later, however, it is revealed that House faked those lab tests and just told them that story to cover up Whitney's blatant infidelity (as shown by the real results of the test), thereby 'saving' their potential marriage in House's eyes but saddling the fiance with a cheating potential future wife and someone else's baby (this is the "mistaking Good for Evil" that Cuddy refers to later in the episode but fails herself to rectify).