Alone (House)

House episode
"Alone"
Episode no.	HOU-401
Airdate	September 25, 2007
Writer(s)	Peter Blake & David Shore (teleplay) Peter Blake (story)
Director(s)	Deran Sarafian
Guest star(s)	Kay Lenz, Conor Dubin, Liliya Toneva, Katie Adams
House Season 4 September 2007 - 2008
Alone The Right Stuff 97 Seconds Guardian Angels Mirror Mirror Whatever It Takes Ugly You Don't Want To Know Games It's a Wonderful Lie
All House episodes

Alone is the first episode of the fourth season of House and the seventy-first episode overall. It first aired on September 25, 2007. This is the first episode of House in which none of the members of House's original team of Allison Cameron, Robert Chase and Eric Foreman appear. Despite this, each of the actors who portrays the characters on his former team are credited and are still under contract to appear throughout the season. The only other previous absence of any of these characters in an entire episode was Dr. Cameron in the Season One episode "Babies and Bathwater", as she had resigned, albeit temporarily. The episode title refers to House diagnosing his patient by himself as well as the accident victims being without their respective families.

Plot

When an office building collapses, House has to work fast to diagnose a young woman, Megan, who survived the disaster. Due to her injuries, Megan's only form of communication is blinking with one eye. House, without a team since Foreman and Cameron quit and he fired Chase, talks through his ideas with empty seats and then a janitor who thinks House is talking to him. The janitor's suggestion that Megan's condition might be lupus is an inside joke, as lupus is frequently suggested as the cause of a condition on the show, but never turns out to be the diagnosis. Cuddy continually hassles House into hiring a new team and tells him he needs the team to bounce ideas off of. To this end, noticing that House is doing this already by using anyone who will listen, Cuddy sends out a memo telling all hospital staff to not engage House in conversation about his patient because it "enables" him to persist in his belief that he can operate alone. In typical fashion, House's first instinct is to break into Megan's home to look for clues. When the janitor, posing as a fellow (poignantly named "Dr. Buffer"), refuses to do this without payment, House tricks Wilson into accompanying him. House discovers her diary which shows some resentment in Megan towards her boyfriend and deduces that she must be on antidepressants. When confronted with this by House, as well as discovering the janitor, Megan's boyfriend and her mother complain to Cuddy, who agrees with the diagnosis. However, the diagnosis fails as new symptoms continue to appear. In order to force House into interviewing and subsequently hiring a new team, Wilson kidnaps House's prized electric guitar, an original 1967 Gibson Flying V whose worth Wilson estimates at $12,000.00. House tries several methods of revenge to force Wilson to give his guitar back which include erasing his Tivo'ed shows and moving one of his cancer patients to a different area of the hospital without telling him. Wilson retaliates by sending House a Polaroid picture of the guitar with the caption "I'm not dead...yet" and a guitar's bridge. When Cuddy discovers a doctor working on a diagnosis House has made regarding Megan's possible alcoholism, she discovers House has sent out a second memo from Cuddy's e-mail telling staff to ignore the first memo. House walks down to the hospital clinic where he begins to ask any doctor within sight about his patient's symptoms and what might be the cause. Nobody will respond except for a young female doctor (previously seen as a first-year medical student in the third season finale "Human Error"). House notes that her caring demeanor "reminds him of someone," presumably Dr. Cameron. During his conversation with her, he decides it must be two separate conditions. House makes several startling revelations about the patient that surprise her boyfriend and mother. Her boyfriend believed that she wanted to have children and they were trying to do so. House states that she has had an abortion and apparently lied to him about it. The patient is also a heavy drinker, something which shocks both of them. House continues to give treatment based on the woman's condition and medical records, none of which work, and her condition continually worsens. Wilson then charges into House's office and demands to know where the moved cancer patient is. He says that if his patient gets the wrong medication due to the wrong chart, he could die. This triggers House to realize that the patient he has been treating has been getting the wrong medication because it is the wrong patient. House wakes the patient from her comatose state using amphetamines and asks her name. The woman struggles, but mouths "Liz". Liz is actually Megan's co-worker who worked in the same area of the office building that collapsed. Both have the same hair color and build. Since the patient was badly bruised and comatose, it was impossible to initially tell who she was and EMTs do not second guess family identifications. Megan had died earlier in the episode without anyone realizing it, and any form of identification for either patient was crushed in the collapse. Cuddy comes into House's office to talk about the case. She mentions that while House did solve the case, he would have solved it much earlier if his team was in place, as Cameron would not have believed that something was wrong with the relationship between Megan and her boyfriend, Foreman would have never have agreed with a multiple conditions diagnosis, and Chase would have worked harder to prove House right, the first time the three deposed team members are mentioned by name in the episode despite multiple conversations about them. House apparently realizes the validity of Cuddy's point and decides to hire a new team, though he will do it his way. While playing his now returned guitar (with the broken bridge now taped back on), he tells his new prospective fellows, 40 of them, that this will be "the longest job interview of (their) lives" and he will test them in ways that they might deem 'unfair, demeaning and illegal.'

Cultural References

• House: You could be practically living with Sylvia Plath. Referencing the depressed and suicidal poet Plath (1932-62) who documented her numerous suicide attempts, miscarriage, and drug overdoses in a diary.
• House: Am I in a M. Night Shyamalan movie? Referencing the director responsible primarily for supernatural/supranatural movies such as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water.
• Episode plot mirrors the real-life case of Whitney Cerak.^[1]

References

1. ^ http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-indiana-mistaken-identity_x.htm

External links

• "Alone" at the Internet Movie Database
• "Alone" at the House M.D. Guide
• "Alone" at the Medical Reviews of House