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(S04E01) Look to your left. Now, look to your right. By the end of the six weeks one of you will be gone . . . as well as 28 more of you. Wear a cup. -- Dr. Gregory House

With that ominous statement I welcome you to House 2.0, otherwise known as season four of the medical drama. As you all know by now there was a bit of, er, housecleaning (wait for groans to subside) during the season three finale. That's when Doctors Foreman and Cameron resigned and Dr. Chase was fired (don't worry, they begin to return in other roles as the new season progresses). This has left House quite alone. And, while he's quite content about it the rest of the administrative staff at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital wants to see old Greg establish a new team.

That new team won't be established for several episodes. Until that time, though, House is going to need to bounce his ideas off of anyone he can find. That's where our episode recap beings.

This week's medical mystery belongs to a lovely girl named Megan. Megan's case is brought to House because she is experiencing an extremely high fever that will not subside. Oh, did I forget to mention that a building fell down on her after a gas main explosion? Well, I did, but that's not the reason for the fever.

House doesn't want to take the case, giving the reason that he doesn't have a team to assist. Cuddy tells him in no uncertain terms to hire a team. All of a sudden House changes his mind and decides to take the case with one condition: if he diagnoses Megan's high fever by himself Cuddy will leave him alone about hiring a new team. Cuddy reluctantly agrees, of course. I mean, it is House . . . how can she not give her consent.

Since House needs other bodies to bounce ideas off of he enlists the services of one of the hospital's janitors. He's so desperate to keep the floor cleaning supervisor close to him that House gives the man a white coat and clipboard to be his assistant. However, the janitor isn't so easily taken by the doctor. When House asks him to break into Megan's house to see if anything can be found, the janitor asks for nothing less than $50 to perform the task. Hey, I said he wasn't easily taken. I didn't say that the janitor wasn't greedy.

Instead of the janitor, House fools Wilson enlists the help of Wilson to investigate his patient's domicile. While lazing around the girl's bedroom House discovers a secret diary that tells a bit about Megan's depression and subsequent recovery thanks to anti-depressants. He relays this information to Megan's mother and boyfriend, who aren't too happy with the charming Doctor House since they found out that his assistant normally cleaned the hospital windows and floors for a living. Eventually all agree that the anti-depressants were causing the high fever and a treatment was prescribed.

That treatment only helps temporarily. While being interviewed by Cuddy the patient goes into cardiac arrest and has to be shocked back to consciousness. House, being House, shrugs this all off. However, Cuddy isn't taking his crap. She accuses him of grasping at straws since he's lost the team. So, seeing a line being drawn in the sand, House continues to investigate Megan's symptoms by bouncing ideas off of Cuddy. That's when the fever returns and House proclaims it is due to Megan's alcoholism, which neither the mother nor boyfriend learned about. He prescribes a bit of the hair of the dog to reduce the fever.

While all of this is going on there is mounting pressure for House to hire a new set of medical professionals to abuse. In a pretty diabolical and ingenious move, Wilson kidnaps House's prize electric guitar and doesn't tell the doctor where it is. Eventually, House caves and decides to start interviewing candidates. Wilson's quite happy about this turn of events, but decides not to give the guitar back until the interviews are done. To get back with Wilson, House pages him with a code, then breaks into his house to find out where his guitar is. Since he can't find it he deletes all of Wilson's telanovelas from his Tivo. Man, I'd be pissed at House as well if he did that to me!

Back to Megan. Thanks to House's diagnosis the patient's fever goes down once again. However, upon further exam it turns out that she has been silently screaming for several hours. Further tests reveal that she now has pancreatitis. House again tries to bounce ideas off of Cuddy, but she firmly decides not to enable House any further. But, this is House, so Cuddy caves in a bit (for the health of the patient of course), but re-emphasizes to Greg that he needs to hire a team. House just consults a Magic 8-Ball instead.

As House scans Megan's pancreas he discovers internal bleeding. Upon further investigation he discovers that his patient has an enlarged uterus due to an abortion and that she is on the pill. Things come together now: By taking the pill, along with blood thinners used after a recent hip surgery, Megan caused the internal bleeding. So, House prescribes an estrogen blocker to reverse the medicine's effects.

Good idea, except the estrogen blockers cause Megan to crash again. House is now totally clueless as to what's going on. So, he saunters down to the ER to try and bounce ideas off the staff over there. Unfortunately for him a memo was sent around the hospital telling its staff, in no uncertain terms, not to help House. Nonetheless, one ER doc does decide to help House out. From that he determines that all of the symptoms are due to both Crush Syndrome and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

House goes back to Megan's boyfriend and mother to tell them that the combination of the Crush and A.R.D. Syndromes leaves no hope for the girl. Then, all of a sudden, he sees a lump in her arm. An MRI reveals that there are growths everywhere due to an allergic reaction to a medicine that Megan wasn't even apparently on. This does not sit well with Megan's mother, who has had enough of House's antics (and, really, who hasn't).

House seems to have reached a mental block on the reason for all of Megan's symptoms. However, during a conversation about one of Wilson's missing patients (House took over his care in retaliation for Wilson keeping his guitar hostage), something about Megan's case gets triggered. After checking the hospital records it turns out that his patient was not Megan but Liz, who was another worker that was caught in the gas main explosion. Both had the same hair and body structure, and both were caught under the rubble of the explosion. It was Megan who had died earlier in the episode and not Liz.

Diagnosis successfully under lock and key, House tries to convince Cuddy that he solved it all by himself. Cuddy disagrees, and even goes so far to tell Greg that the case would have been solved days prior if Foreman, Chase and Cameron had still been working for him. Actually agreeing with Cuddy (but not telling her, at least on camera) House decides to begin interviewing candidates. In the last scene he is shown interviewing a classroom of potential replacements.

Final Comments

• The medical mystery entirely threw me. I didn't even think of it being a body swap, even when one of Megan's boyfriend's friends said that his girlfriend died in the explosion.
• It was a bit weird seeing House investigate a medical case alone. I'm so used to seeing one of the three team members following him around reporting on diagnostic findings and arguing with him. Don't worry, though, because that will all be corrected by next week's episode.
• This was your basic set-up episode. We wouldn't be seeing another episode where House chose a new team if this one didn't air first. I was able to watch both the season premiere and second episode and next week's is definitely the more exciting of the two. Not that this week's episode was weak in any way -- it was just different.
• Kidnapping House's guitar. Wilson is an evil, evil man. That subplot was very entertaining to watch and showed how well the cast (that remains) of House works together. It also shows that, no matter what, Greg never shows weakness to anyone, whether it involves a hire request from Cuddy or a guitar crime by Wilson
• I must be getting used to medical gore on television. The scene where surgeons tried to stop Megan's internal bleeding didn't even phase me. I must be watching too much Bones or something like that.

A strong episode to start the fourth season. Kudos go to Hugh Laurie for holding the ship this week. Like I said, this was just a precursor to next week's replacement hunt. So rest up and we'll see you here in seven days.