I watched three seasons worth of House in a span of about 5 months earlier this year. I started out innocently enough, borrowing the Season 1 DVDs from a friend of mine after some other people recommended the show. Before I knew it, I was hooked, and had to get through all the episodes as fast as I could so that I’d be caught up with everything by the time the Season 4 premiere rolled around. Mission accomplished.

Here’s my recap of last night’s ep (the first one, incidentally, that I watched during the original broadcast time), which was called “Alone.”

Patient of the Week: A woman named Megan is brought in after her office building collapsed. In addition to the usual disfiguring injuries you’d expect to find in a patient who survived such an event, Megan also suffered from a fever. Cuddy couldn’t pinpoint the cause of the fever, so she orders House to get to the bottom of it.

House, who apparently has been inactive in the two weeks since he lost his team, agrees on one condition: if he gets to the bottom of the mystery all by himself, Cuddy has to leave him alone for a week. She agrees.

After bouncing ideas off one of the janitors and talking to the patient’s boyfriend and mother, House rounds up Wilson to go to Megan’s house. They find nothing of value there except her diary, which hints that she may have been suffering from depression. House assumes that she must have been on antidepressants, which interacted weirdly with something the paramedics gave her on the scene. He prescribes a counteractive course of treatment, and thinks he’s won.

But next, the woman’s pancreas start showing signs of problems. After various test, House believes that Megan is an alcoholic going through withdrawal. The boyfriend vehemently denies this, but hey, everybody lies, right? So House orders a different treatment for this. But Megan soon suffers from internal massive bleeding, which shows that House was wrong yet again.

After more investigation, thinking, and reasoning, House finally gets to the bottom of the mystery based on a random comment that Wilson made. House’s treatments should have worked; the fact that they didn’t indicates that the patient isn’t who they think she is. It turns out that “Megan” was actually Liz, a co-worker of similar height, build, hairstyle, etc. The real Megan had died from her injuries the day before.

Character Interactions: Cuddy and Wilson want to force House into hiring a new team, so they try various tactics. Cuddy issues a memo to all doctors and nurses saying that no one is to help House at all. Wilson “kidnaps” House’s $16,000 guitar and sends him menacing notes saying the guitar will be destroyed unless House starts interviewing candidates.

In the end, we see House addressing a whole classroom full of doctors, telling them that six weeks from now, most will be gone. That’s right, we’re getting Greg House’s very own version of Survivor!!

My Reaction: I was so excited to see a new episode of House that it would have taken a real crapfest to leave me disappointed. As it was, I enjoyed this episode quite a bit. The PoTW was somewhat interesting, and the character interactions were absolutely hilarious, not only with House and Wilson (which we expect by now), but also from unexpected sources. Remember what that doc in the operating room said to House? “You want to look at vaginas, there are websites for that!” I was dying after that one!!

Okay, now it’s time for me to backpedal. I often expressed how much I disliked House’s team of Foreman, Chase, and Cameron. I thought each of them was annoying in their own special ways, and it seemed that I was always complaining about something one of them said or did.

But after going through an entire episode without them, I have to admit that I missed them. House (and House) just isn’t the same when there isn’t a team of underlings to order around. If nothing else, their screw-ups served to emphasize how brilliant House is. Without them, his mistaken guesses are magnified a hundredfold, and he seemed pretty ordinary.

The opening credits were exactly the same, which leads me to believe that the team will be back in some form in the near future. I’m all for having new characters come on board this year — as long as it doesn’t screw up the dynamic that the old team had going.

At this point, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach because I really don’t want to read spoilers or anything like that.

Bottom line: House is back!!

(And an aside: I didn’t see House pop a single pill in that ep. Is he off Vicodin now?)