Dollhouse, Season 1

[chuckro]

Y'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!"

Comments

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I agree with your analysis of how the original meat's personality affects the imprints, but it may or may not be colored by season two (not being vague, I watched them all in pretty much one run so I forget which episodes happen when) so I'll hold off until you've completed the whole series to be safe.

I agree that it's a good independent arc, though, if a little fuzzy around the edges.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I mean, I could end all of my posts with, "...Or perhaps I'm wrong," but it seems needlessly redundant, as every written work should be followed by that.

Season two may totally refute this hypothesis, or take place in a dystopian future, or introduce time travel. I have no idea, and won't until the DVDs come out, I buy them, and I get a chance to watch them.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Actually, your idea of "the meat informs upon the personality" explains what the hell was going on in "Epitaph One." I mean, we know the evil...whatever was snatching brains. But the reason people went a little crazy? Not as well explained. If the copying over and over destroyed the brain with the interference, that would make more sense.

[wavilyem.livejournal.com]

Funny, I didn't really think season 1 was *that* dark. Creepy yes, thought-provoking yes, but perhaps watching Battlestar Galactica (which deals with similar consciousness downloading technology as well as a massive human holocaust) skewed my definition of dark :) Also, keep in mind that Epitath One never aired in the US so I don't really think of it as part of S1.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Oh, I figured some other country deliberately mass-mind-wiped. Topher's little monologue about reprogramming an army to kill everyone not programmed to kill everyone did seem to imply that this was someone's deliberate act. And once you've got that many people programmed to cause chaos, it wouldn't take much for the chaos to overwhelm everything.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I think what I liked about it was how gray everyone was. There really were no good or bad guys - the good guys weren't necessarily sympathetic and the bad guys were set up so you could really empathize with them. The actual work of the Dollhouse is horrific, but they repeatedly showed ways in which it didn't seem that bad. Caroline was coerced into this, but she's annoying and naive and seems willing to forget her lover dying in her arms anyway. The grad student was an asshole and deserved punishment, as did Alpha. November seemed to walk out unharmed and with money, perfectly content. Some of the Lonely Hearts assignments were sweet, the hostage negotiator necessary, the abused kid counseling really helpful.

And then they'd smack you and remind you how awful this was.

I didn't care about Caroline at all. I did find myself caring about Echo, though - the noble innocent underlying all of the personalities. Same thing with Victor and Sierra. I kept waiting for her to break through the persona each time, and she nearly always did. They all had a rudimentary personality - Echo's altruism, Victor's protectiveness, Sierra's vulnerability, November's nurturing, Alpha's batshit-loco.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

they're the man in the prestige
Some parts of this show remind me a lot of the Prestige, actually. I think Topher is really Hugh Jackman's character--creating a life and then killing it, over and over, without ever letting himself grasp the true horror of what he is doing.

One thing that I really liked as the season developed was that, at the start, it looks like Echo's supposed to be the Kwisatz Haderach or something. That she's soooo special, that she's fighting against the imprint. Then you realize that she's not special at all. (This underlined by finding out that Alpha isn't focusing on Echo because she's special, but because she fights his victim type--a very nice touch.) They just have no idea what the long-term effects of imprinting are. They have a house full of potential Frankenstein monsters and they only have the illusion of control. The guidelines they have are really mostly made up, based on supposition--they're playing with dynamite. So you get this creeping sense that something will go horribly wrong, inevitably.

Once you see some of the behind the scenes stuff, you'll learn that Epitaph One never aired, actually, and was made as part of some kind of requirement for 13 episodes for syndication, since they trashed the pilot. So I don't think it was ever meant as an audience (or network) fuck you over the potential cancellation. It was what it was because, since they knew it wasn't going to air, they knew they could get away with far crazier stuff.

In the commentary for that, they also point out that Whisky has potentially just put everyone to sleep at the end. That she has, in fact, led many people to finding the Caroline imprint, then sending them on their way. Which means that the kid really isn't in any way Caroline, just one of a number of a copies, who will all wake up and do the exact same thing. Creepy.

And I'm sorry, but the MotW episodes of Pushing Daisies were never as crap as Dollhouse's MotW episodes. You need the world building of those eps, but the actual storylines of the first few were utter shit. This is a show that needs not to have episodic plots independent of the mytharc. Pushing Daisies' MotW storylines, on the other hand, were always well written of themselves.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, the last episode of season one of Legend of the Seeker deals with the exact same kind of thing.

I think it is an inevitability that any show built on the threat of a potentially bad future the characters are trying to thwart must have an AU episode that shows you that future. Heroes did it. Dead Zone did it. Supernatural did it. Stargate did it. Legend of the Seeker did it. By the same token, any series built on characters dealing with the fallout from one major life-changing event must inevitably have an episode showing the road not taken. (Supernatural, Farscape, Dead Zone, Hercules, Stargate Atlantis...)

I have just come to expect that genre shows will always always show me the alternate future/timeline, usually shortly before the end of season one, in order to heighten the tension at the ultimate culmination of the storyline.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think they were afraid of programming in general. They realized that once you've lost the isolated, centralized control, you can't trust anyone who has the potential to program or be programmed. That's why identity becomes so important--it shows you're neither a programmer (a fraud) or a programmed person (a ghost).

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I agree with chuckro that it is darker than even later seasons of Buffy--I think he is really expanding on the ideas brought up by the Warren character. But while those seasons of Buffy repelled me, for some reason, I don't find Dollhouse as threatening to watch.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I loved how they showed that everyone was a user. Good guys, bad guys, even the bad guys who seem to have a rational, (greedy), pragmatic view of what they're doing can't help but using dolls.

Joss has some interesting things to say in one of the commentaries about how easy it is to fantasize about someone and not realize how you'd have to change or hurt that person to make them fit your fantasy. And I think that's what he's trying to say here with the show by making it literal--it's easy to forget you are using people. And it's very easy to rationalize using people.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

This is a show that needs not to have episodic plots independent of the mytharc.

I don't know about that. I think if there weren't some episodes at the beginning at least playing with the "new character every week" thing, I would have been disappointed. It is part of the appeal of the idea. Otherwise, it's all squick.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but Eliza Dushku cannot carry it. As I pointed out in my own post, the fact that her memory gets etch-a-sketched at the end of the ep means I have no emotional investment in it, either. It's like that show that was on...eight years ago? where the premise was they had a time machine that could only take one person back one day. So every episode, something went horribly wrong, and at the end of the ep, he went back in time and it never happened. Hard to have drama when there are no consequences.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I think Topher is really Hugh Jackman's character--creating a life and then killing it, over and over, without ever letting himself grasp the true horror of what he is doing.

Hugh Jackman's character was different, though, because he was doing it to himself. He was setting himself up to be killed over and over, which is why the simile is closer to the rich people trying to "trade up". Topher actually makes me think of the Voyager episode with Tuvix, except that Janeway aknowledged what she was doing and why it was an evil done for the greater good.

Then you realize that she's not special at all.

I hadn't really been thinking about that, but you're right. The show starts with the implication that Echo is particularly special, but as we see Victor and Sierra's glitches (and Whisky's, eventually) and the reasons behind Alpha's actions, it becomes clear that any doll could potentially be Echo or Alpha, it was mostly just dumb luck.

Which means that the kid really isn't in any way Caroline

The kid is now Caroline-in-kid, who is a fundamentally different person from Caroline-in-Echo. They didn't make it clear whether the wedged Caroline was a version that has the composite imprints, but it seems likely that it is. Which means that the kid potentially has access to 50 people's worth of memories and skills, but knows that none is "really" her, giving her the motivation to build a new identity. I wouldn't be surprised if, in Safe Haven, there are dozens of people with the Caroline imprint who go by "Carolyn", "Carrie", "Lynn", "Chuck", or "Margaret" and each act in subtle but significant different ways, driven by the body's original persona.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

The thing is, every one of those episodes made it clear that the experience was, in some way, staying with Echo. They stated that her memory gets etch-a-sketched, but then showed every time that it hadn't. It was clearly leading to something.

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.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I want to ask about where Epitaph One actually fits, but I think I'll wait until I watch season 2 and then discuss it.

[wavilyem.livejournal.com]

Good call on waiting until after season 2 to discuss where it fits into the story [wink]. For storytelling purposes, I think it would have make more sense to have changed the order and put Epitaph One where an epitaph would normally go (i.e. at the end of the series) but thanks to Fox, there is a reason it was put on the S1 DVDs. Here's the full explanation from wikipedia in case you're interested:

The episode was not aired in the USA due to different contractual obligations with the Fox Network (the television broadcaster) and 20th Century Fox Television (the production company). 20th Century Fox needed thirteen episodes for the first season's DVD release and to sell to foreign markets, and having paid for but then scrapped the unaired original pilot episode, Fox only contracted the subsequent twelve episodes, but not the thirteenth. While Fox renewed the show for a second season, they still have no intentions of broadcasting "Epitaph One." Due to Fox's decision not to air "Epitaph One," 20th Century Fox opted to promote the episode as a special incentive to buy the DVD and Blu-Ray set releases of the Dollhouse's first season, in which the episode, and the original unaired pilot, are both included. In the United Kingdom the episode aired on the UK Sci Fi Channel on August 11, 2009.

lots of Carolines

[lyriendel.livejournal.com]

My first thought after watching that episode was that Whiskey had probably sent lots of Carolines on their way as guides, but then I thought, wait, they had to *break in the wall* to get to her imprint. That should make it the first time, unless Whiskey keeps repairing the wall over and over, which seems unlikely to me.

Re: lots of Carolines

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Thing is, the wall they had to break? It wasn't there in the flashback when Victor put the wedges in there. It was a piece of particleboard that had been put over a pre-existing shelf. I think she was, in fact, replacing it every time.