Prometheus
Newsletter of the LFS
The hiatus in Joss Whedon's television work over the past few years has left his fans frustrated, even though it gave us a first-rate film and some better than usual comics. It's a pleasure to see a new series from him. Like his previous series, Dollhouse has strong ongoing continuity between episodes, unusually good character roles (especially for women, including Whedon alumnae Amy Acker and Eliza Dushku), and a fantastic premise. Dollhouse's premise is a new one: A technology that allows programming human brains, somewhat as computers are programmed. Several of its characters are ‘dolls’ or ‘actives’ who can have any abilities, any personality, and any memories needed to support a work assignment…but whose memories are removed between assignments, so that they have none of the ongoing continuity of memory that makes up most people's personal identity. This theme raises deep questions of metaphysics, the sort that perhaps only Whedon would think of exploring on broadcast television.
One of the main practical applications of the ‘doll’ technology seems to be an expensive and elaborate variant of prostitution. A client who can pay the fee can have the woman or man of their dreams, for a night or a weekend. And unlike real prostitutes, who are playing a role, dolls have no hidden inner self behind the mask; they really are enthusiastic about the things the client is enthusiastic about, attracted to the client as a person, and sexually passionate, but with no ongoing history. Like fictional characters, they have an imaginary backstory, but they really exist only from the start of the encounter to its end. This technology also has obvious uses in covert operations, and two of the first three episodes involve assignments of that type: hostage negotiations and bodyguard work.
The Dollhouse charges fees for these services, and it seems to be a private firm. In many ways it looks like a stereotypical evil big business. Its apparent CEO, Adelle DeWitt, is a model of corporate ruthlessness and focus on the bottom line; she's willing to expose the dolls to almost any risk, so long as the clients are willing to post large enough bonds to cover the possible loss. The central character, Echo, and her fellow actives (all named for letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet), really are "human resources" in the most literal sense. I'm reminded of 's exploration of a somewhat similar theme in A Deepness in the Sky, with the mind-altering technology of the Emergents.
But at a deeper level, Whedon's premise could be taken as a critique of socialism. Many scenes have focused on Topher Brink, the brilliant programmer who creates the actives' personalities. He has a very strong sense of his own genius and the intellectual inferiority of most other employees of the Dollhouse, including the handlers assigned to the actives; he believes that he can design a personality for any need and that he's always aware of what's going on with a doll during an assignment. In short, he's the analog of a central planner who believes that he knows better than the market what should be produced, and how, and for whom; he has the illusion of technocratic omniscience. But repeated scenes have shown that this is an illusion. Echo has come up with original solutions to problems during her assignments, which he failed to anticipate (though apparently his superior, DeWitt, recognizes this and regards it as an asset). A continuing motif is Echo's acquiring a persistent sense of self, especially through her emotional bond to her handler, Boyd Langton; and there's a recurring hint of threat, in that a previous active who regained full continuity of memory, Alpha, became a terrifyingly effective psychotic killer…and is apparently still alive somewhere. Libertarians watching this show may think of Mises's and Hayek's critiques of centrally planned economies as requiring a humanly unattainable omniscience.
Beyond this, Echo's sense of self also reflects the theme of personal identity and personal integrity as the source of resistance to authority. In a way, this show is another look at the themes of The Prisoner, a long-time favorite of libertarian viewers. In fact, there were episodes of The Prisoner that hinted at mind control technologies like an earlier generation of what the Dollhouse is based on.
That this show is even capable of being interpreted this way marks it as more thoughtful, with a more sophisticated premise, than is common in broadcast television. But this is typical of Whedon's work in that medium. Whether Dollhouse will come back for more seasons, or even make it through the first season, is uncertain: Whedon's previous luck with Fox hasn't been good, and the show's Friday night time slot isn't optimal for finding an audience. But if it fulfills the promise of the hints in the first few episodes, many of us will want to own the whole series on DVD
As it turned out, Dollhouse will be surviving for a second season, on the strength not so much of broadcast ratings, which were dismal, as of nontraditional distribution, including downloads and anticipated DVD sales. This in itself reflects the emergence of new markets for content, which can support more diversity—a good thing from a libertarian point of view. This seems like a good time to look back at the show from the perspective of the complete first (broadcast) season.
The steady decrease in audience size over that first season likely reflects the increasing focus of later episodes on what might be called Whedonesque themes: more of the metaphysics of personal identity and less of the straightforward action/adventure of the early shows. From one point of view, this could be considered a failure. From another, it reflects Whedon giving his core audience more of what they really wanted. And since that's the audience that will be buying the DVDs, and that has been downloading the episodes, it was a reasonable gamble. The early episodes gave Fox something that made sense as a program for the mass market; the later episodes stopped worrying about that mass market.
At the same time, the early episodes do make up part of a coherent design for the season. The action/adventure story of the first episode defines a paradigm: introduction of the task, imprinting of Echo with the appropriate persona, memories, and skills, overcoming of unexpected difficulties in completing the task, and final debriefing. But the next few episodes increasingly subvert that paradigm, as I noted in my original review. In the second half of the season, practically every episode is a major challenge to it, until the final two episodes threaten the very existence of the Dollhouse. Whedon managed to make the constraints Fox imposed on him provide a baseline of expectations, and then to create drama by violating those expectations.
Along the way, there's a steady stream of unexpected recognitions, as the viewer learns that one or another character is actually a doll playing an assigned role. These revelations are all well handled and dramatically surprising. And they help develop a profound sense of doubt in the audience: Do we actually know that anyone is a real person and not a doll? This sense of uncertainty increases the show's dramatic tension, especially as we look toward the second season.
For me, personally, the one big failing of this interesting and well written show is its star. The episode where Echo was imprinted with the personality and memories of a friend of the Dollhouse's chief executive, enabling her to discover who murdered the woman, fell short of convincing me: I never believed that Eliza Dushku was a woman of fifty in a much younger body, going among people she knew who didn't recognize her. Two of Dushku's co-stars, Enver Gyokai (“Victor”) and Dichen Lachman (“Sierra”), both lose themselves more convincingly in the roles they're imprinted with; this was especially evident in a scene where Victor was imprinted with the memories of a captured spy within the Dollhouse. Dushku's consistent personal style strengthens the feeling that there is an inner core of selfhood in Echo, more basic than her lost memories, but weakens the premise of the Dollhouse's power to reprogram its operative. I think, on balance, I consider that a flaw but not one so profound as to stop me from watching the next season, or adding the collected episodes to my library of DVDs.
And there are certainly unresolved questions for the second season to address. Above all, while we've gotten to know the Dollhouse itself, we know very little about its parent firm, the Rossum Corporation (an allusion to Karel Capek's classic play “R. U. R.” which coined the word “robot” for an artificial or intelligent being), or about the depth to which Rossum has penetrated the political and legal system. The final episode leaves the Dollhouse in a troubled state; this could be a starting point for larger revelations about Whedon's fictional world.
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