Season 3, Episode 13
Original Air Date: April 4, 2008

"Home But Not Alone" was the first new episode of Ghost Whisperer to air after the 2007-2008 WGA strike. It was also the second episode with the new buff Ned, played by Christoph Sanders.

RECAP--SPOILERS BELOW

Ned goes out on his first date, which has his mom Delia rattled. She is going through the typical mom-of-a-teen anxiety, but little does she know that she has another reason to worry. Lisa, the girl he is dating, has a ghost protecting her, which results in accidents happening all around Ned. Melinda does a little research and thinks that it is the girl's dead father who is making things happen. Once Delia finds out, she orders Ned to stay away from the girl. Delia is still skeptical about the whole ghost thing, but asks Melinda to look into it. We see a lot of Lisa's sister Amy and her little brother Henry, but their mom Karen seems to be keeping a low profile. Just when Delia starts to wonder why she can never get a face-to-face meeting with Lisa's mom, Lisa goes to Ned with a tearful story about how Karen disappeared a couple days' ago.

The whole neighborhood rallies around the three kids and a search commences. After a couple days, Amy gets a phone call that is supposedly from their mom. However, Melinda can see that it is clearly fake. After some strange behavior from the flowers in the garden, Melinda figures out that the bald-headed ghost she has been seeing is not their dad but their mom. Amy initially becomes angry, but then breaks down and reveals to Melinda that their mom died of cancer. She has been doing her mom's work-at-home telephone job because she sounds so much like her. It was their mom's idea for the kids to bury her in the backyard because she didn't want the kids to be separated by Social Services. Melinda calls the authorities to find the body. Amy takes the kids and tries to do a runner, but her brother Henry stops a police officer in the street and tells her. Melinda finds out from the ghost that there may be relatives out there. She uses her husband's connections and finds out that the kids have an aunt Tracy, the ghost Karen's sister. When Tracy and Karen were little, their mother died. Tracy was 19 and old enough to take her sister, but she was overwhelmed with grief so she told the court to put Karen in foster care. That's why Karen felt the kids had no one. Melinda convinces Tracy to take the kids and Karen gets over her resentment and crosses over.

This episode and the January episode entitled "Slam" have made it clear why the show runners brought in Christoph Sanders to take over the role of Ned. Both episodes have had Ned's love life as part of the story. Tyler Patrick Jones, the original Ned, is 14 and old enough by most people's standards to at least be interested in girls. However, from checking out various fan forums for the show, most viewers assumed that Jones was much younger. The show runners must have realized that fans would have been outraged if they had Jones kissing girls all of a sudden, so they brought in Sanders. The switch in "Slam" seemed a bit awkward, but I had time to get used to it over the break.

As for the episode itself, this was a standard plot with a feel-good ending that would have fit perfectly in the first season. According to an interview that John Gray did with SciFi .com, viewers will get more insight into Melinda's familial connections to the dark side before the end of season three. I hope so, because I really hate it when a show drags things out too long.