150th episode of ‘House’ reveals ‘Where has Thirteen been?’

Olivia Wilde took a long break from House to shoot the big-budget Western Cowboys & Aliens, but those at Princeton Plainsboro Hospital remained aloof to reality — as most TV characters do. In the season six finale of House last May, Dr. Remy ‘Thirteen’ Hadley (Wilde, who turned 27 last month) requested a leave of absence from the hospital for personal reasons.

Upon the premiere of seventh season, Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) and his team — Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps), Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Dr. Taub (Peter Jacobson) — learn Thirteen’s personal reasons were to participate in a drug trial for Huntington’s, a neurodegenerative genetic disease that was passed down from her mother. By the end of the episode, the team realizes Thirteen was not going to Rome for the trial. She had only planted clues to make them think so. No one knew what happened to her. She was gone and no one knew why she lied.

Until the 150th episode that airs this Monday (8:00 p.m. ET/PT) when Dr. House meets Thirteen as she is let out of jail for…

You’ll have to watch and see. Along the way, House will learn more about Thirteen’s struggle with her disease and, through some confessions of his own, lure her to admit why she was serving a six-month jail sentence in New Jersey. I can tell you that House does seem to have more than one motive for picking up his estranged ex-employee. Besides figuring out her charges and why she lied, he needs help beating a cocky, young rival in an annual spud-gun competition and Thirteen has some related experience.

Even after this episode, some questions may remain. Do you have any ideas?

• Thirteen’s been missing for a year. Where was she for the first six months of her leave?

• Does House ever feel compassion?

• House and Cuddy have broken up, and Thirteen’s back. Is Princeton Plainsboro Hospital returning back to “normal”?

• How will student-team member Martha M. Masters (Amber Tamblyn) exit the show? (The answer is scheduled to come in the April 18 episode.)

Read below for more on what House executive producer David Shore has to say about what is coming up for House and his team and the challenges the show presents.

The House appeal. “At the beginning I didn’t think there were that many medical abnormalities we could deal with. And I was hoping we’d be getting a bit of a niche audience. I was hoping this character would touch base with enough weirdos out there. Apparently there’s a lot more weirdos out there than I thought.”

Writing is everything. “I’m very uncomfortable referring to myself as a producer. I’m a writer. Obviously a certain amount of my job is producing and I always feel like I’m playing hooky when I’m doing that part of the job.”

His own critic. “I don’t lose sleep over [some of directions the show has gone in]. That’s not to say I’ve been thrilled with everything I’ve done. But I am pretty good at kind of accepting that that’s what we did and learning in the sense of going forward with hopefully a slightly different perspective, but there have been a couple things over the years and I’d rather not mention them.”

One more year? “I would be absolutely astounded if there wasn’t [an eighth season]. We are working under the assumption that there will be. There is no deal in place but negotiations are ongoing. I fully expect there to be a Season 8.”

Romance on the rocks. “I think there’s some truth to [the series returning to a normalcy after the end of the Cuddy-House relationship]. In a sense it was sort of a reboot. Having said that I hate the return to normalcy because I was very pleased with what we did with that. I thought we did something that could have went very wrong and when you have millions of viewers, a number of them are going to believe it did go very wrong. We worked very hard to keep House as House and Cuddy as Cuddy and have fun with them in a relationship and, as one of the directives, to never to see either of them just content and happy.”

Keeping the show fresh. “The answer to that is to keep pushing it. The real challenge is to be aware of the question and not to respond to the question by just going ‘That’s fresh and new.’ To still be asking the basic questions is what excites me about this story. To shock for the sake of shock is the death of the show. OK, maybe not the death, but it’s a big mistake. It’s a question we’ve had to ask since day one.”

Masters plan. “We have an episode that’s coming up that’s a [Martha M.] Masters episode. It’s right after the return of Thirteen. Loved her. She’s great. The plan was never to have her stay forever, but it became very, very tempting. Then we did an episode that was exactly that. Her exit.”

Lots of opinions. “I like to let the work speak for itself. Everyone has their own interpretation of [House]. And I want them to have that. I want them to see what they want to see then challenge them. He is a human being. It would been a very eucritic character that’s all about rationality and searching for objective truth. We were conscious from day one to not let him fall into a Spock-type of character. I hope he is a human being. I don’t think I’m saying very much there, but it was important to us he is multidimensional.”