Directed by: Deran Sarafian
Teleplay by Peter Blake and David Shore, based on a story by Peter Blake
A young woman at work is on the phone with her boyfriend in the parking lot when the building starts shaking. There are earthquakes in New Jersey? Next thing he knows, the office building has collapsed, and the astonished boyfriend has been knocked to the ground.
At the hospital, Dr. House is playing an actual electric guitar (he was pretending his cane was a guitar in the previous episode), trying to master a special arpeggio technique, when Dr. Cuddy orders him to take the case of the woman who was in the collapsed building
House tries to rope a janitor into his team, "Dr. Buffer." The janitor plays along, to a point.
House claims he solved the case all by himself. But Cuddy insists he must hire a team, as if anyone of them were there the patients case would have been solved days ago, and supposedly she doesn't care how he does it. So House calls in every doctor from the pile of résumés Cuddy dropped on his desk into an auditorium, about forty of them, with the intention of gradually culling them down to the three who will be his new team.
Meanwhile, Dr. Wilson kidnaps House's guitar. To retaliate, House steals Wilson's patient.
Note that Omar Epps, Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer are all listed in the opening credits but none actually appear in the episode, though their characters are mentioned.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Bittersweet Ending: The case's conclusion. Megan is revealed to be Dead All Along and both her boyfriend and mother are devastated to say the least. On the other hand, Liz's boyfriend learns she is still alive and he's relived that his girlfriend survived the explosion.
- Exact Words mixed with Tempting Fate: "Hire a team. I don't care how you do it, just do it," Dr. Cuddy says to Dr. House. Of course House comes up with a hiring process that will be costly and time-consuming.
- Ripped from the Headlines: This episode was inspired by the real life case of Whitney Cerak and Laura Van Ryn. The two young women, recently enrolled at Taylor University, were involved in a horrific car crash, not a building collapse. But from there, events took a turn that piqued the House writers' interest: Cerak was incorrectly identified as Van Ryn. When healthy, the two ladies would have been easy to tell apart. But with the injuries, the Van Ryn family mistook Cerak for their Laura, and the medical staff had no reason to second-guess that identification. "The Van Ryns, they loved me like I was their daughter because they believed that I was their daughter," Cerak recalled later in remarks quoted in an Indy Star article reprinted by the ''Detroit Free Press''
. "And even after I wrote 'Whitney' and their world changed and they knew that I wasn't their daughter, they still treated me like I was their family." - The Reveal: The woman on the phone with her boyfriend did not survive the building collapse. House and the team had been treating another survivor. They were quite similar in aspect (coloring, build, etc.) and given the patient's injuries, the deceased woman's loved ones could not tell it was someone else.
- Shout-Out: Dr. House at one point asks out loud if he's in an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
