House: Poison (Season 1, Episode 8)

To save a boy suffering from pesticide poisoning, House and his team have to find out how he was poisoned.

The Plot: (Spoilers):

High school student Matt Davis (John Patrick Amedori) is taking his AP Calculus exam when he starts feeling nauseas and disoriented and collapses on the floor. At Princeton-Plainsboro, Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) reports to Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) that Matt’s heart rate is falling and he’s not responding to atropine. House asks why he cares. Foreman says that Matt’s toxicology screen was negative, his CAT scan was clean, there’s no infection and no diabetes. House realizes that Foreman doesn’t care and just finds Matt’s illness interesting, which House thinks is a good thing. House sends Dr. Foreman and Dr. Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) to search his house for drugs that the toxicology screen wouldn’t detect, like copier toner. While they are gone, Matt has a seizure. All Cameron and Foreman find (aside from Cameron’s observation that Foreman now wears the same type of shoes as House) is some potentially contaminated tomato sauce, but the seizure rules it out. Cameron says that pesticide poisoning fits Matt’s symptoms, and Foreman realizes he DOES wear the same shoes as House.

That's how calculus presents

House goes to the clinic and sees an 82 year old woman (Shirley Knight) who has suffered a personality change and has become flirtatious, including with House, much to the annoyance of her middle-aged son (Kurt Fuller). He admits her for tests.

Matt’s blood tests confirm he is suffering from an organophosphate and he is given medications, but his heart stops. The treatment isn’t working. Foreman mentions that his old professor at Columbia developed a series of targeted treatments for the Army, but they have to know exactly what Matt was poisoned with to know which one to use. Foreman goes to call his professor, Cameron goes to check the home for pesticides and Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer) implants a pacing wire into Matt’s heart. Cameron finds an empty can of disulfoton at the home and House has Chase give Matt the treatment, but Matt’s mother (Roxanne Hart) protests that Matt didn’t use pesticides on their garden because it was part of a school project and pesticides were prohibited and she won’t let Chase give him the treatment. House goes to Dr. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), wanting a court order to force Matt to get the treatment, but she doesn’t offer any help, so House talks to Matt’s mother and convinces her to let them give Matt the treatment, but by then another high school student has been admitted to the hospital with the same symptoms. They go to the same school, but don’t seem to have anything else in common. The other boy’s family lives in an apartment and they have no pesticides at home. The team realizes that they both had to be poisoned from the same source, but they have to find it. They discover that both kids ride the same bus, and Chase and Cameron check out the bus. The driver reports a truck spraying near the bus route.

After receiving her test results (and a love poem, entertainingly read aloud by Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard)) House goes to see the old woman from the clinic, whose tests reveal that she has syphilis. She admits she got it in high school, before she met her future husband, but she was treated. House says the treatment only suppressed it, and now it’s back and has attacked her brain. He gives her a prescription for penicillin.

The team has discovered the County sprayed ethyl parathion along the bus route to combat West Nile Virus. The parents of the second kid approved the treatment, but Matt’s mom refused, waiting for a second opinion from the Center for Disease Control (CDC). House sends Cameron to convince her to allow the treatment, which she does, but both boys go into seizures. The team was wrong and the boys were poisoned some other way.

Cameron "hustles" the single mom

House says that the progression of their symptoms suggests that the poison was absorbed through their skin, and from their admission times they must have been poisoned before they got on their bus. House thinks they must have been poisoned through a contaminated consumer product that came in contact with their skin as part of their morning routine, and sends Cameron and Foreman to each of their homes to find a product they have in common.

House’s elderly patient returns and tries to give back the prescription, because she doesn’t want to stop the feelings she’s having, but House tells her that the damage to her brain is permanent, so she agrees to take the penicillin.

Cameron and Foreman find the same laundry detergent at both homes. House thinks the detergent could have been contaminated and the boys were poisoned through their freshly-washed clothes, but the parents of the second boy say that his clothes were new and were never washed, and he doesn’t even know how to use the washing machine. House checks Matt’s clothes and finds his jeans were also new. House orders the clothes tested for contamination. They determine the chemical is phosdrin. One again, Matt’s mom refuses treatment, waiting for the CDC, and this time she refuses to be convinced. House goes into Matt’s room with the medicine and his portable TV, telling Matt’s mom he’s going to wait there in case she changes her mind. She gets a call, and is told the CDC can’t make a determination, leaving it up to her. She agrees to the treatment. House gives Matt the treatment and leaves the room, and Chase reveals it was he who made the call, pretending to be the CDC (with a bad southern accent).

House waits while Matt's mom gets a call

It turns out both boys had bought stolen jeans out of the back of a truck near the school, from a man who also worked as a day laborer in a field, and had apparently spilled pesticide in the back of the truck that contaminated the jeans. House and Foreman run into Matt and his mom in the hall, and she reveals that the real CDC called, implying she knows what they did, but she lets it slide. Matt asks who they are, and his mom says “they’re the arrogant jerks who saved your life.” House and Foreman get into the elevator to leave and notice their matching shoes.

House and Foreman wear matching shoes

My Review:

This episode has an interesting mystery, as the team figures out the big picture right away, and then has to spend the rest of the episode hunting down which pesticide is the culprit, making it a lot more like a police investigation than some other cases. All their ideas are plausible, though the theory of being exposed on the bus to spraying along the road doesn’t entire work, as if that were the case shouldn’t most of the students on the bus have gotten sick? They also end up finding the pesticide by testing the boys’ clothes, but it seems like that would’ve been an easy way to test most of the other theories along the way (Matt accidentally spaying himself with pesticide while gardening or exposure on the bus to spraying along the road), saving a lot of time and trouble (but giving us a less interesting episode). I like the mystery overall though. Matt’s mom was well played by the actress, but I find it hard to believe that a mother would actually act that way, and the drama was a little overdone. The side plot with the 82 year old woman is fun and entertaining and is probably the best part of the episode. The episode is also a little bit of a Foreman episode, showing that he is starting to accept House’s way of practicing medicine and is become more like him. Knowing what will eventually happen to Foreman in later seasons, it’s interesting to see this development so early in the series. We don’t see much of Cuddy or Wilson in this episode, though Wilson’s reading of the love poem was great. Poison is an entertaining episode of House.