bete noire } { personality section
On first impression, Remy Hadley is a level headed girl, who’s good in a crisis and quick on her feet. She’s a doctor, so to an extent she has to be, but it’s also something that’s applied to her personal life as well. It takes a lot for her to panic in any situation, which helps her adapt quickly to any scenario that’s presented to her. She can be rather guarded, but she’s also friendly and personable, and knows how to put someone at ease quickly and easily.
As a doctor, Hadley is quick and efficient, and always willing to think outside the box, which makes her an effective member of House’s team. She doesn’t mind doing what it takes to get the job done, even if it involves conning her way into a patient’s home, or tracking down a drug dealer to get a sample of their product. She’s always willing to break the rules in favor of solving the puzzle, and in that respect, her and House are very similar. The difference with Hadley, however, is that she doesn’t lose track of the fact that the patient is still a person, their choices are valid, and they should be treated as such. Part of this stems from the fact that she, herself, is the patient with the incurable disease, and she can relate to the patients in that way. Though she is compassionate with her patients, she doesn’t often blur the doctor patient-line and go too far in caring for that person. She knows that House is doing what is best for the patient, even if it invades their privacy or pushes at their comfort boundaries.
Olivia Wilde once described Remy as a “big bowl of secrets” and in all honesty, that’s what she is. She plays her cards very close to the chest, partially because she knows that it will keep House intrigued-she spent most of her first year in Princeton Plainsboro being referred to as a number rather than her own name-but also because she is, by nature, a private person and takes measures to make sure that people don’t invade that privacy. She isn’t the kind of person who looks for pity or sympathy from other people-she’s practical. She’d rather fix a problem than complain about it, and she would prefer the same from the people around her, even though she knows that’s not how most people operate.
Hadley has also has a strong need for control. Her mother died at a young age, and while her brother and father were still alive, her brother also developed Huntington’s Chlorrea-the same disease her mother died from. As a doctor, she knows that the chances of her developing Huntington’s are fifty-fifty, but for a long time she didn’t get herself tested for the genetic markers of the disease. She claims it’s so that she wouldn’t be inhibited by the disease-without knowing, she could do things without worrying about how her body would react-but it’s more likely that she was scared to learn that she could be subjected to the same fate as her mother. Given that Anne Hadley was in the advanced stages of Huntington’s during Hadley’s formative years psychologically, the impression of this person who slowly lost control of not only her physical body but also her emotional and mental states was not a fate that Hadley wanted to be subjected to. By not knowing, she could retain that illusion of control of herself, and of the way her life is proceeding around her.
This is another one of the similarities to House that Hadley can exhibit, though she isn’t as overt about her need to control. Where House will do whatever it takes to find the truth and control the situation, she would do the same, but the idea of control is more inflicted on herself than others. House had control taken from him in the surgery with his leg and he uses the puzzles of his patients to regain it-Hadley has a disease that threatens to take the same control from her, and she fights against that loss of control with her choices regarding herself. After House forced her to confront the fact that she had tested positive for Huntington’s, and was eventually going to by, she indulged in reckless behavior in a series of one night stands, some of which that involved drugs. It’s the drug use that nearly got her fired from her position at the hospital and into hot water with Cuddy. It took a long time for her to come to accept the fact that she was going to die, and that she had to deal with this disease as it was a part of her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she likes it.
She is also the kind of person who would do whatever it takes for the people she cares about. At the point where she’s entering Bete Noire, she had just been released from prison for what was charged as excessive prescribing. In reality, she had euthanized her brother, who had late stage Huntington’s and asked her to. The police couldn’t prove that she had killed him, but his death still weighed heavily on Hadley’s mind throughout the six months she was in prison. After she is released, it’s shown that she’s still clearly grieving for her loss, and is now worried that she’s alone, and that there will be no one there to do this for her when she wants to die, taking away that last vestige of control she had. She will start to pursue a similar form of reckless behavior once she settles into Bete Noire, searching for that kind of control again.
She’s also going to be highly agitated as House has invaded her privacy yet again in order to learn her secrets, but that’s a whole other story.