Dollhouse, Season 1
Mar. 17th, 2010 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroY'know, everyone told me the series really picks up after episode 6, but I think the first half of the season is really necessary to explore the concept and set up the tension in the second half, and it was definitely entertaining throughout. (The early episodes, with their "monster-of-the-week" style, were on par with most episodes of Pushing Daisies in terms of wit and concept, and you can get me watching for quite some time on wit alone.) If you like Whedon in general, it's worth the time. (Also, however Season 2 turns out, Season 1 is perfectly fine as an independent arc.)
It's a really dark series, and actually kinda caught me off guard, as it's much darker than Buffy, Angel or Firefly pretty much ever was, even in the later seasons. It doesn't pull punches, but it does try to force you to think about the ramifications of the setting.
I mean, the ramifications of the setting are the entire point of "Epitaph One"--if this technology exists, what will eventually happen? (One character notes during the series that the first thing people do with new technology is to use it as a weapon. That's incorrect: The first thing they try to do is have sex with it. The second thing they try to do is use it as a weapon.) The idea that this technology would destroy civilization, given what was presented as the track it was developing on? Totally believable. Cruel to do to your audience when you think the show is cancelled, but even so.
The thing is, there is some hope in the otherwise, "Fuck you, audience!" last episode, if you were paying attention to the message of the episode before it: Alpha is insane because his non-imprinted personality was insane. The original him is still in there, no matter what they wipe. And that's presented to use right before we see the results of Echo's "composite event"--that she remains sane, if overly noble and idealistic. Because Caroline was overly noble and idealistic. And every imprint we see Echo take eventually follows a noble, idealistic path, whether that's on- or off-mission. We only see the same imprint in different people a couple of times, but you can see the subtle differences between Taffy-in-Echo and Taffy-in-Sierra.
I think the idea they're pretty clear about is that this technology is new, and there's still a lot that even the Dollhouse builders don't know about it. They put it into production without a real awareness of side effects or reprecussions.
Which brings me to ostensibly the scariest (because it's most realistic) application of the technology presented--rich people "trading up" to new, younger bodies and living forever. The problems with this all surround the idea of "self"--where is the "real" you? For all the standard sci-fi conceit of uploading yourself into a computer, that's not "you". Your awareness, your consciousness, for good or ill, stays in the meat. Echo without Caroline's memories is still fundamentally Caroline, and the consciousness that experiences Echo's actions is Caroline's. If you download a dead person into a Active, they talk and act and think they're the dead person, but they're the active doing an amazing imitation. They're a photocopy, not the original person somehow transferred. (To pull in another source, they're the man in the prestige--the original is the man in the tank.) It's the classic teleporter question: Am I stepping into a gateway, or an incinerator?
So when D. Gustingly Richguy III gets himself downloaded into, say, Victor and lets his old body die, he dies. The new entity, Richguy-in-Victor, is a fundamentally different person than the original Richguy, because his core personality and his consciousness are Victor's. The show seems to indicate that he'll eventually glitch (like Whiskey did, even though she seemed comfortable in the Dr. Saunders persona), which means he'll revert to being Victor, albeit a screwed-up Victor with conflicting memories.
So the hopeful message to take away from all of this is that, yes, if this technology existed then society would be fucked because memory would no longer be trustworthy. But for all that the "software" of memory defines you, the "self" is independant and inviolate and will eventually come through.
"You're asking me to believe in thinking meat? Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!"
It's a really dark series, and actually kinda caught me off guard, as it's much darker than Buffy, Angel or Firefly pretty much ever was, even in the later seasons. It doesn't pull punches, but it does try to force you to think about the ramifications of the setting.
I mean, the ramifications of the setting are the entire point of "Epitaph One"--if this technology exists, what will eventually happen? (One character notes during the series that the first thing people do with new technology is to use it as a weapon. That's incorrect: The first thing they try to do is have sex with it. The second thing they try to do is use it as a weapon.) The idea that this technology would destroy civilization, given what was presented as the track it was developing on? Totally believable. Cruel to do to your audience when you think the show is cancelled, but even so.
The thing is, there is some hope in the otherwise, "Fuck you, audience!" last episode, if you were paying attention to the message of the episode before it: Alpha is insane because his non-imprinted personality was insane. The original him is still in there, no matter what they wipe. And that's presented to use right before we see the results of Echo's "composite event"--that she remains sane, if overly noble and idealistic. Because Caroline was overly noble and idealistic. And every imprint we see Echo take eventually follows a noble, idealistic path, whether that's on- or off-mission. We only see the same imprint in different people a couple of times, but you can see the subtle differences between Taffy-in-Echo and Taffy-in-Sierra.
I think the idea they're pretty clear about is that this technology is new, and there's still a lot that even the Dollhouse builders don't know about it. They put it into production without a real awareness of side effects or reprecussions.
Which brings me to ostensibly the scariest (because it's most realistic) application of the technology presented--rich people "trading up" to new, younger bodies and living forever. The problems with this all surround the idea of "self"--where is the "real" you? For all the standard sci-fi conceit of uploading yourself into a computer, that's not "you". Your awareness, your consciousness, for good or ill, stays in the meat. Echo without Caroline's memories is still fundamentally Caroline, and the consciousness that experiences Echo's actions is Caroline's. If you download a dead person into a Active, they talk and act and think they're the dead person, but they're the active doing an amazing imitation. They're a photocopy, not the original person somehow transferred. (To pull in another source, they're the man in the prestige--the original is the man in the tank.) It's the classic teleporter question: Am I stepping into a gateway, or an incinerator?
So when D. Gustingly Richguy III gets himself downloaded into, say, Victor and lets his old body die, he dies. The new entity, Richguy-in-Victor, is a fundamentally different person than the original Richguy, because his core personality and his consciousness are Victor's. The show seems to indicate that he'll eventually glitch (like Whiskey did, even though she seemed comfortable in the Dr. Saunders persona), which means he'll revert to being Victor, albeit a screwed-up Victor with conflicting memories.
So the hopeful message to take away from all of this is that, yes, if this technology existed then society would be fucked because memory would no longer be trustworthy. But for all that the "software" of memory defines you, the "self" is independant and inviolate and will eventually come through.
"You're asking me to believe in thinking meat? Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!"
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Date: 2010-03-17 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 01:46 pm (UTC)Also, while yes, I agree that Dushku is one of the weakest actors on the show (honestly, though I thought November was very cute and played her role well, her range seemed to be all variations on the same character, too), it does work with the revelation that every active is fundamentally the baseline Caroline/Echo with something else pushed on top of it. Despite the show's claims that she's a different person every week (as per my thesis above), she's not.