Thirteen (House)

Dr. Remy Hadley
House character
First appearance	"The Right Stuff"
Last appearance	"Charity Case"
Portrayed by	Olivia Wilde
In-universe information
Nickname	Thirteen
Occupation	Physician: Diagnostic medicine fellow (Season four – eight)
Family	Anne Hadley (mother - deceased) John Hadley (father) Unnamed brother (deceased)

Remy "Thirteen" Hadley, M.D., is a fictional character on the Fox medical drama House, portrayed by Olivia Wilde. She is part of the new diagnostic team assembled by Dr. Gregory House after the disbanding of his previous team in the third season finale. The character's nickname derives from the episode "The Right Stuff", when she is assigned the number during a competition for her position at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

The show depicts Thirteen as a secretive character who does not divulge personal information; her surname was not used on the show until the fourth season's penultimate episode "House's Head", nor her given name until the fifth season episode "Emancipation". Instead, several of the character's traits are implied before they are depicted as true. In the season four episode "You Don't Want to Know", Thirteen tells House that her mother died from Huntington's disease; a test she performs several episodes later confirms she carries the gene. After hints were given regarding her character's sexuality, actress Olivia Wilde confirmed that her character is indeed bisexual. This is confirmed by Foreman in the episode "Don't Ever Change".

Characterization

Thirteen is reluctant to reveal information about herself, creating an air of mystery which is partially the reason for House's interest at the beginning. Early on, House tries to guess what her 'big secret' might be, such as asking if she is the "daughter of an alcoholic father". In "Mirror Mirror", a patient who mirrors the most dominant personality he is with, describes himself as "scared" when alone with her. She hints her secret in the eighth episode of the fourth season, "You Don't Want to Know", when she tells House her mother died from Huntington's disease, but she does not wish to know if she carries the gene. Not knowing, she explains, allows her to summon the bravery to do things she thinks she cannot do. House surreptitiously obtains a sample of her DNA and has screening performed, but in the end throws out the unopened envelope containing the results. The season four finale reveals she does indeed have the dominant mutation for Huntington's.

In the fifth episode of the fifth season, "Lucky Thirteen", Thirteen says that her Huntington's is more aggressive because the generation that received the gene has more repeats of the CAG triplet of the previous generation, greatly decreasing her life expectancy and hastening the onset of symptoms. She exhibits self-destructive behavior, using recreational drugs and having repeated one-night stands. House fires her for recklessness but eventually rehires her. Thirteen continues to exhibit self-destructive behavior, which climaxes in the ninth episode "Last Resort" when she risks her life to test medication for a man who took the hospital clinic hostage.

Character history

In "Epic Fail", Thirteen reveals she attended Sarah Lawrence College. In "97 Seconds", she correctly diagnoses a collapsing and disabled patient with Strongyloides, and treats him with ivermectin, but the patient fails to take the pills because his mobility assistance dog eats them, causing the death of not only the patient but the dog as well. House chastises her about not supervising the patient taking the medicine, but does not fire her because he feels she will not make the same mistake again. At the end of the fellowship competition, Cuddy tells House that, since he already has Eric Foreman on his team, he may only hire two additional people, so House fires Thirteen and Amber, claiming fellow applicants Chris Taub and Lawrence Kutner outperformed her, and that if he could keep Thirteen, he would. Cuddy overrules House's decision, forcing him to accept a woman into the fellowship to create a team of four diagnosticians, realizing only a minute later that this had been House's plan from the start.

At the end of the fourth season, Thirteen is diagnosed as having the mutated Huntington gene. After nearly dying from a medicine overdose in "Last Resort", she asks Foreman to admit her to his Huntington's drug trial. Several episodes later, the couple embark on a relationship, which affects Foreman's professional judgment to the extent that he fixes the drug trial, which causes serious side-effects in Thirteen. Foreman almost loses his medical license in the process and resulting in House ordering the couple to break up. The couple fake a split and continue their relationship in secret, but come public after House discovers they are still seeing each other. As Foreman takes his position after House quits, he fires Thirteen in "Epic Fail" in order to save their relationship, but they end up breaking up as a result.

In the sixth season episode "Instant Karma", Thirteen buys a one-way ticket to Bangkok, Thailand and is seen boarding the plane at the end of the episode despite Wilson's attempts to prevent her from leaving, in order to convince Thirteen she is the only person on the team that House has not treated badly or manipulated, and that he needs her. In the episode, "Teamwork", Thirteen eventually returns to House's Team with Chase, Taub, and Foreman.

In "Lockdown", the seventeenth episode of season six, Thirteen says she attended "Newton North," the shortened name used to refer to Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts. Interestingly, this is the high school that Anne Dudek, the actress that played Amber during the 4th and 5th seasons, attended.

In one scene of the Season 6 episode "The Choice," Thirteen has trouble controlling the hand that holds her drink, an indication that her condition is starting to worsen. She subsequently requests a leave of absence in the season finale "Help Me," citing personal reasons.

As House and Cuddy skip work the day following the season 6 finale, Thirteen is stuck at the hospital until House returns. Chase briefly proposes having sex with her, who, in turn, is skeptical. In the Season 7 premiere, Foreman finds information about a Huntington's drug trial in, and flight info for, Rome, leading Foreman, Chase, and Taub to believe she is going there. But she disappears without saying goodbye. Foreman then discovers that all those clues about Rome were purposely planted by Thirteen as a red herring, and no one knows where she went, or why.

Thirteen returns in the show's 150th episode, "The Dig," in which it is revealed that she has been in prison for the past six months and grew up in West Virginia. Thirteen reveals to House that she had a brother who developed Huntington's; she helped kill him in order to end his suffering. House later tells Thirteen that he is willing to euthanize her if she wants him to do so, once her health deteriorates severely enough.

In the following episode, a unknown woman arrives at Thirteen's apartment, with a serious wound to her abdomen. It is revealed that she is Thirteen's old cell mate when she was in prison. She requests that Thirteen helps her, with the added request she does not take her to hospital as she will be found and presumably taken back to prison. Due to the fact she cannot be taken to hospital, Thirteen phones Chase to help. She requests he brings certain medication and medical equipment, to which Chase agrees and brings to Thirteen's apartment. Upon arrival, he noticed that the woman needs serious medical attention. Thirteen explains that she can't go to the hospital and treating her here will have to suffice. As the woman's condition deteriorates, Chase is adamant they need to get her to a hospital, but Thirteen still refuses, saying she promised she wouldn't take her there. A scuffle emerges as Chase tries to get access to the patient in order to take her to hospital, to which he forcefully pushes Thirteen out of the way; banging her head with great force on the floor. Upon arrival at the hospital, the woman awakes to find she has been treated fully, but is handcuffed to the bed; Thirteen has turned her in. Thirteen apologises, to which her friend starts to lash out, saying she only used Thirteen in prison to have someone to talk to. Thirteen regretfully walks away.

In "Charity Case," Thirteen was called in once more by House to help solve a case. Thirteen then decided she wanted to help people again and joined the team once more. In the end, House saw that Thirteen was happy with her girlfriend and fired her once and for all so she can live out her last days being happy.

Concept and creation

"Cameron is a person who feels the compulsive need to heal. She's attracted to the most wounded characters, as evidenced by the fact that she married someone who was dying. "Thirteen" is hidden, and hasn't yet revealed very much about herself. She doesn't really want to look into the future, and House finds that enormously compelling. So, to me, they're both different. They are both beautiful, however. That much is true".

—Executive Producer Katie Jacobs.

Along with fellow actors Peter Jacobson (Taub), Kal Penn (Kutner), and Anne Dudek (Amber Volakis), Wilde did not know which character would be cut until the actors were given the scripts. Producers watched to see how the actors developed their characters and interacted. Wilde thought this technique 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 replaced 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 her character as a "big bowl of secrets" in stark comparison to her own openness.

Thirteen's sexuality was initially written ambiguously: Foreman and House suggested she is bisexual; and Thirteen herself hints that she is bisexual. In response to the ambiguity, Wilde confirmed in July 2008 that her character is bisexual, the second time she has played a bisexual character (the first being on The O.C. as Alex Kelly). On the show, jokes are made to the character being bisexual, such as Dr. House referring to her as "Thirty-one", and saying "oh, I'm sorry – I thought that either way was good with you". Thirteen is very comfortable with her sexuality.

Thirteen has been compared, sometimes negatively, with Allison Cameron, the previous female diagnostician. Wilde described Thirteen as "almost the opposite" of Cameron, who is "compassionate and emotional", and attributed 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. Thirteen resists handing her trust to people, and has proven herself to be a rather difficult person."

Name

The name "Thirteen" comes from the character's introduction: House assigned numbers to her and others during an extended competition for the job and persistently used it in reference to her; she did not correct him with her real name, and the nickname stuck. Although the producers gave the character a full name, and told Olivia Wilde what it was, they chose to keep it a secret from the viewers as part of the ongoing relationship between the character and House. Before the character's official name was revealed, none of the actors, besides Wilde herself, knew the character's name, due to it having disappeared from call sheets and from around the set.

In episode 11 of season five ("Joy to the World"), she reveals she is called Remy, when she goes to get a patient dropping out and with whom she shared an experimental treatment for Huntington's disease.

In later season five episodes, the character refers to herself as Dr. Hadley, and so do other doctors.

In an interview with The Star-Ledger, however, David Shore commented that he will not be using Thirteen's real name too often, because "she will always be Thirteen".

In the Season 6 episode The Down Low, a fake pay stub shows Thirteen's middle name to be "Beauregard", though it is uncertain if that is actually her middle name.