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House Character's Backstory: Dr. Remy Hadley is best known as "Thirteen" due to her number card during eliminations for the fellowship.
Her mother died when she was young as a result of Huntington's disease, a genetic illness which gives a child of a victim a 50/50 chance of contracting. She reveals in season 5 that she in fact hated her mother just because she yelled in front of her friends and that she now regrets not having said goodbye. In the season 4 finale, Wilson's Heart, she tested herself for this disease and the result came back positive, meaning that she does in fact have the disease and can expect to deteriorate and eventually die as a result of it.
When House had to choose between the people he wanted on his new team, due to Cuddy making him take Foreman back, he eliminated Thirteen. Cuddy then played right into his hands by saying that he can't have an all male team and he had to hire Thirteen as well. This was part of House's plan all along.
Thirteen is the only currently-known doctor on the show that is not heterosexual; her bisexuality has been explored since the episode "Don't Ever Change." Dr. Foreman was the first character to judge her as such; House arrives at the same conclusion at the end of the episode. She has since made various jokes about dating girls while refusing to confirm or deny her sexuality. Although fairly ambiguous in the show, Olivia Wilde has confirmed that Thirteen is indeed bisexual in a July 2008 interview.
Hadley's compassion and care for others is one of her best traits, but she has major problems dealing with death and patients that are terminal, perhaps out of fear of her own mortality from her Huntington's disease. She is also afraid of getting attached to people because she doesn't want to 'pull someone down' with her, which is why she was hesitant to begin her relationship with Foreman.
| Reason for Becoming a Doctor: Currently unknown, although Dr. Hadley originally felt that not knowing whether she had Huntington's empowered her to take challenges and risks like competing for a position under House.House blurts out her reason is to make her life matter before it's over. |
| Medical Specialty: Internal Medicine |
| Personality type: Mysterious, self-contained |
| Possible Name Connection: An X-Men character codenamed "Gambit" also has a mysterious background whose real name is "Remy" LeBeau. Her name could be a sign of the writers paying homage to the comic book/movie character's mysterious background, given her very uncommon first-name. |
| Signature look: Wavy brown hair (sometimes straight), casual dress, lab coat, usually high black boots |
| Vice(s): Difficulties in coping with death |
| Virtue(s): Compassionate |
| Endearing trait(s): Secrecy about personal life, compassion towards patients, doesn't hide when she's angry at someone (ex: a patient) |
| Annoying trait(s): Anxiety, hesitance |
- "I'm sure you have many reasons to keep yourself a mystery, besides the fact that you're bisexual... Uh, denial would have worked before the long vacant stare."
- ―Foreman
Character Biography
Remy Hadley was the child of John Hadley and Anne Hadley and was born in the area of New York City sometime in the early 1980's. While Remy was still quite young, Anne started exhibiting the symptoms of Huntington's Disease, particularly the inability to control her movements or emotional state. As a result, she often lashed out at young Remy and her friends, usually embarassing her and finally resulting in their alienating each other. When Anne was finally institutionalized when Remy was about ten, Remy refused to accompany her on the trip to the care facility despite the urging of her father. Her mother passed away well before Remy started to appear on the series in Season 4.
Remy's age is somewhat of a mystery. In House's Head, when House started talking about the movie Altered States, which was released in 1980, she remarked that she didn't think she had been born by the time that movie came out. When House said that this made her too young to be a doctor, she accused him of forgetting what year it was (2008 at the time). In reality, Olivia Wilde was 24 when she started on the show.
As Remy entered puberty she began to realize she was attracted to both sexes. From her reaction to a patient who also admitted attraction to the same sex in the episode The Softer Side, it appears that she had to handle a great deal of confusion over this during her high school years. However, by adulthood, she was perfectly comfortable with her sexuality, although she preferred to keep her preferences to herself when dealing with colleagues.
At some point during her teens, she appears to have attended Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, where she describes herself as "The Queen of Truth or Dare".
Remy obtained admission to Sarah Lawrence College, a small co-educational college in Yonkers, New York, just outside New York City, where she was a student in residence taking a pre-med program. Sarah Lawrence is known to have the most expensive tuition of any university in the United States. This indicates either that Remy's family was well off enough to handle the tuition, or that she was smart enough to earn a partial scholarship. It is likely both elements were true as she was obviously smart and dedicated enough to get into medical school. However, despite her acadmic schedule, she did find the time to explore her sexual desires further, including an interlude with her roommate - a cheerleader from Iowa.
It has not been revealed where Remy went to medical school, or where she did her internship and residency. However, by the time she reaches the application process, she has completed a residency program and has been designated a specialist in internal medicine. However, it must have been clear to Remy from her medical education that she had a 50/50 chance of developing Huntington's disease just as her mother did. Despite the existence of a test for the genetic marker that ensures a patient will develop Huntington's, Remy rationalized that not knowing either way was a better option as it allowed her to plan for the long term by going to medical school and applying for desirable jobs in her field.
As an applicant
Remy sent her resume to Gregory House and was thrilled to hear she had been selected for an interview, although when she arrived at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital she was surprised to see 39 other applicants vying for the same position. Her nickname comes from the number she was assigned - 13. However, it doesn't seem to have fazed her a bit. In The Right Stuff, she soon chimed in with the first reasonable suggestion, immediately getting the attention of Dr. House - she surmised the patient's synesthesia may have been caused by a thrombosis and asked if the patient spent "A lot of time above 25,000 feet". The patient was an air force pilot and House ran with her suggestion, although it turned out to be wrong.
Well, like you said, you wouldn't interrupt Buddy if it wasn't important.
She also unwittingly exposed Henry Dobson as a fraud when she agreed to perform an echocardiogram that had been assigned to him. As a result of her performance, she was made part of the final 10.
She seemed to be well on the inside track in 97 Seconds as part of the "Women's team". House had already diagnosed the patient with strongyloides and broke up the remaining applicants into two teams of five to see if they could reach the same conclusion. Thirteen came up with the same conclusion and gave the patient ivermectin to treat it. However, the patient didn't respond to it, leading House to the believe that it might be something else. As a result, the patient died, as did his assistant animal, an English Shepherd. House thought that was too great a coincidence and searched the room, finding the empty pill cup with dog teeth marks on it. The patient had strongyloides, but didn't take the medicine - the dog swallowed it instead and due to the breed of the dog, it was fatal to it.
House: When I asked you if you had seen the patient take the pills, the correct answer was "No".
Surprisingly, House decided to keep Thirteen on after that, although he had dismissed the rest of the women's team. He explained that it was unlikely that she would make a similar mistake again.
Although by the next episode, Guardian Angels, the real names of the rest of the applicants started to be known, Thirteen was still portrayed as secretive, so much so that she refused to reveal her name to her fellow applicants, directing them to keep calling her "Thirteen" instead. She survived that episode when House decided to fire Henry because their thought processes were too similar. She also survived Mirror Mirror when House deliberatly refused to fire anyone so that Robert Chase would win all the bets in his "Which applicant gets fired next" pool so he could split the proceeds. She survived Whatever It Takes when Travis Brennan poisoned the patient to fake a case of polio.
However, Thirteen was really in trouble by the episode Ugly. House was concerned that he was overestimating her abilities because she was good looking, the same issue he had with Samira Terzi, who turned out to be completely useless despite her previous experience in diagnostics.
House: Oh my god! Is she really that good looking?
Wilson: Apparently
- House, when Thirteen comes in with the same diagnosis, Lyme disease, that Thirteen had come up with before and immediately dismissed.
However, Thirteen was right, and it saved her. She was the only applicant who believed that the patient was still ill and that he would not survive his facial reconstruction surgery. Not only that, she came up with evidence of Lyme disease, the target shaped rash, by looking at old pictures of the patient's face that did not show discoloration around the hairline. The rash was hidden by his hair.
Thirteen survived You Don't Want to Know when Jeffrey Cole tried to save his own job by making a deal with the Devil and House fired him as a result.
By Games House was forced to make a choice of only two of the remaining four applicants. However, he managed to manipulate Cuddy into hiring Thirteen as well by choosing Lawrence Kutner and Chris Taub, who Cuddy suggested hiring in order to try to manipulate House into hiring one of the two remaining women. Cuddy realized that it would look bad if all the fellows were male and allowed House to hire Thirteen as well.
As a fellow
Thirteen continued to be slow to reveal any information about herself within the show. However, by Don't Ever Change, Foreman suggests to Thirteen that the reason for her secrecy is that she is a bisexual (for example, she was once seen looking interestedly at pornography House was watching). Thirteen neither confirms nor denies this, but her lack of anything to say at the moment seems to confirm's Foreman's suspicions. However, the rest of her co-workers adopt Foreman's suspicions and House clearly calls her out on it at every opportunity.
You do it both ways right? You know, the ultrasound - both lying down and standing up. - House, ostensibly telling Thirteen how to confirm the patient is suffering from a hanging kidney.
Thirteen refused to confirm or deny the rumor, but is not above teasing her teammates about it. In Living The Dream, she said, perhaps jokingly, that she thought she had dated one of the actresses on the show.
However, in the episode Lucky Thirteen, her sexual preferences became open to the entire team when she brought her most recent one-night-stand to the hospital after she suffered a seizure in bed. However, this did not change House's teasing attitude, or the attitudes of her colleagues towards her. This was probably because they had suspected it all along.
Dosya:House MD- Thirteen one-night stand
Look, whatever you think we did, we did- Spencer, dealing with House's questions about what sexual activities she and Thirteen had engaged in the previous evening.
However, in the same episode, it is clear that Thirteen's behavior is deteriorating; staying up late at night and engaging in promiscous sex with other women. This was clearly due to the fact she decided to take the test for Huntington's, which turned out positive. When Cuddy catches Thirteen giving herself intravenous fluids after a particularly late night, House manages to convince Cuddy she can't give Thirteen a drug test, but then fires her. However, once he sees her bond with Spencer on a personal level, he reinstates her. He only fired her to see if she could form relationships that might stabilize her behavior. (As a parallel, Darryl Nolan decided to help House reinstate his medical license when he saw him form a bond with Lydia).
However, the Huntington's diagnosis continued to make Thirteen take unnecesary risks. In the episode Last Resort, she agrees to be a guinea pig for a hostage taking patient, and injects herself with every drug that is being given to the patient to allay his fears that they are giving him a sedative. It is only at the end when she is near complete kidney failure from the drug overdoses that she realizes she wants to live and refuses to take the last drug, which most likely would have killed her. She straightens out after that incident.
After House goes to Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital, Cuddy keeps Thirteen and the rest of the team on staff. However, when House announces he's not coming back, she starts working for her then boyfriend, Eric Foreman. They solve the case (with a little help from House). However, Foreman realizes that he can't work with Thirteen while she remains his girlfriend because she won't stand up to him. He fires her and she eventually heads off for an indefinitely long trip to Thailand.
However, she eventually returns and although she's offered a job in a community clinic, she agrees to come back to work for House in Teamwork.
Production notes
Along with fellow actors Peter Jacobson, Kal Penn, and Anne Dudek, Wilde did not know which character would be cut until the actors were given the scripts, which she thought improved the acting during the "Games" story arc. However, the story arc inspired a spirit of camaraderie between the actors instead of competition, due to the high-profile roles. While Thirteen's name was originally intended to be revealed during the story arc, the production team decided against doing so. Thirteen's actual name was on all documents, including the call sheets, with the word "Thirteen" to further the in-joke in the show's narrative between House and Thirteen that he could simply check her file to find out her name. Wilde describes Thirteen as a "big bowl of secrets", one such being the possibility of the character having Huntington's disease, in stark comparison to her own openness.
Thirteen has often been compared with Allison Cameron, the previous female diagnostician, often negatively, even by Cameron's actor, Jennifer Morrison. Wilde described Thirteen as "almost the opposite" to Cameron, who is "compassionate and emotional", and explained the comparisons to the similarity in the tasks that House delegates to both characters, and that "with two girls on a show, people are always going to compare them."
In House's Head, Cuddy calls Thirteen "Dr. Hadley", however House then comments that Cuddy doesn't even know her name. While it's possible that was not her name, it seems more likely that Hadley is her real name and House was merely commenting on how Cuddy didn't call her "Thirteen" like House and his team do. However, in Adverse Events, Thirteen tells a confused patient that she is, indeed, Dr. Hadley. The first time her first name is revealed is in the Season 5 episode, Emancipation, where she introduces herself as Doctor Remy Hadley to the suspected family of a patient.
Personality
Thirteen is level headed, bright, enthusiastic and generally not afraid to speak up when she thinks she is right. She has good relationships with patients and it is shown she isn't as judgmental when it comes to drug-using patients. This could be attributed to her own history of drug use.
She has deliberately kept the details of her life guarded, preferring to go by her assigned applicant number, 13, even after she was hired. Foreman believes that this is because she is bisexual and wants to keep her private life private.
It is also clear that Thirteen's personal history is a lot darker than any of the other characters. For example, it is clear she engages in promiscuous sex. In the episode Joy, she correctly identified a drug dealer who met up with the patient, while Taub mistook the same woman for a prostitute. In addition, she was able to distinguish unadulterated cocaine from that mixed with impurities and was also aware the dealer kept both pure cocaine (for new customers) and impure cocaine (for addicts) and asked for the impure sample for testing. In the episode The Down Low, when she was seemingly cornered by gangsters, she easily fell into the role of a prostitute, convincingly telling Eddie that there was "no kissing" and that if the interloper wanted to join in it would be an extra $50. In Private Lives, she admitted that at the age of 17, she fell in love for the first time with a man of 30 who was merely manipulating her.
However, despite her adventurous nature, it is clear from her encounter with the mirror patient in Mirror Mirror that although she puts up a good front, she is often in a state of fear and anxiety.
Relationship with House
Unlike the other fellows, who are generally an open book to House, Thirteen continuously manages to stump him. House often guesses her personal history, such as "daughter of an alcoholic father", and Thirteen repeatedly states that he is "wrong again."
While trying to get more insight into Thirteen by putting her in the same room as the mirror patient in Mirror Mirror, House inadvertently gave more insight into his personality than he intended. Pulled by House's dominant personality, the mirror patient started mirroring House instead and started saying how sad it was how he couldn't approach Thirteen and how beautiful he thought she was.
House apparently thought so highly of Thirteen that he took a huge risk to hire her. Given the opportunity to hire only two applicants, House picked Taub and Kutner and rejected her in order to force Cuddy to hire her in order to put a woman on the team.
In the eighth episode of the fourth season, "You Don't Want to Know", House notices that Thirteen gets angry with herself for dropping a folder. He finds that reaction unusual (most people would just laugh or ignore the incident), and decides to switch out Thirteen's decaffeinated coffee with regular coffee. When Thirteen gets unusually anxious and jittery, and starts getting upset as a result, he does some digging and finds a very old picture of Thirteen's mother Anne in Thirteen's purse (on the pretext he was looking for lunch money). He figures that either Thirteen hasn't seen her mother in 20 years or the mother passed away some time ago. He searches obituaries on the internet and finds that Anne died of a lengthy illness. He guesses Parkinson's Disease, but Thirteen tells him that her mother died from Huntington's disease. House is incredulous that Thirteen has not had herself tested for the key gene, but she replies that she does not wish to know if she carries the gene, because not knowing allows her to summon the bravery to do things she thinks she can't do. House surreptitiously obtains a genetic sample and tests it, but Thirteen throws away the test results before he can open them. However, in Wilson's Heart, Thirteen is unable to deal with the prospect of a dying Amber. House tells her to deal with her fear or lose her job, so during the episode, Thirteen tests herself. The test come out positive, indicating she will inevitably contract the disorder.
As her behavior changed, House figures out correctly that Thirteen has tested herself and the test was positive, although she initially denies it.
As for Thirteen's impression of House, she quickly became convinced of House's incredible talents and when everyone else distrusts his judgment, Thirteen usually stands by him. When everyone else wrote off House as wrong in Ugly, she continued to believe in him, and eventually proved both of them right. In House's Head, she ignores the rest of the team and Cuddy by looking for an air embolism House thinks is in the patient's heart. Once again, her faith in House's abilities was not misplaced.
However, despite her faith in House, Wilson pointed out that she is one of the only fellows House has ever had who has not "fallen under his spell". Indeed, House has been particularly inept in trying to manipulate Thirteen (although he did succeed in getting her to return to the team in Teamwork).
Relationship with Foreman
From the beginning, Eric Foreman appeared to have a better understanding of Thirteen than his boss did. Foreman was the one who correctly figured out Thirteen's secrecy was an attempt to keep her bisexuality private. In Lucky Thirteen, he also found out that the reason she didn't want House doing an environmental scan of her apartment was that she was keeping her genetic test results there and was afraid House was looking for them. Foreman went with House and intercepted the results himself. He was also the first to figure out that Thirteen was engaging in self destructive behavior because of the positive genetic test for Huntington's. In Last Resort, we also see him offering Thirteen to be a part of clinical trials for Huntington's. At the end of the episode, he is waiting by Thirteen's bedside when she is recovering from kidney damage. In Let Them Eat Cake, Thirteen reveals to Foreman her guilt about hating her mother when her mom was dying.
They eventually wind up in a relationship, with Foreman moving into Thirteen's apartment. He also got her into the clinical trial for the Huntington's medication he was testing. However, when Foreman switched her from the placebo to the real clinical medicine (with disastrous results - Thirteen develops a brain tumor, which he and House managed to treat with radiation therapy), House realizes that Foreman was losing his objectivity. He ordered them to break up. However, Foreman convinced House they had done so while they continued to carry on their relationship. However, it was obvious to everyone except the methadone addled House that they were still together, and Lawrence Kutner finally outs them to the rest of the team.
Foreman clearly enjoy's Thirteen's sexual nature, as is shown in Both Sides Now at Chase's bachelor party when Thirteen is about to do body shots off a stripper:
Wilson: Are you sure you're comfortable with this?
Foreman: Are you kidding? I paid $50 to see this!
However, as of season 6, episode 2, Epic Fail they are no longer a couple. After Foreman claims House's job as head of the diagnostic department when House quits, tension begins to build between Thirteen and Foreman. Thirteen believes that he is letting his promotion go to his head; he scheduled a dinner reservation for 7:00 without asking her if that was ok. In addition, he realizes that Thirteen isn't willing to challenge his conclusions because she is afraid it will affect their relationship. At the end of the episode, he fires her, because he believes that the only way to preserve their relationship is for the two of them to not work together. This, however, leads Thirteen to end their relationship. She heads off to Thailand to think things over, but soon returns to Princeton.
Beauregard?
The only evidence we have of Thirteen's middle name is from a seemingly fake pay stub in the episode The Down Low. It was all part of an elaborate deception to convince Foreman he was the lowest paid of all the fellows. Taub was trying to mislead Foreman by saying he knew what Thirteen's middle name was and showed him the pay stub. The use of the middle name may have been to deceive Foreman with a "red herring" by convincing him that the pay rate on the stub was too high to be Thirteen's and thus was a fake.
This article was the featured article in February 2010