Boyd: What you're doing could have consequences you can't predict or control. Some people are not ready to wake up.
Echo: I don't care. Something bad is coming, like a storm, and I want everyone to survive it. They need to wake up.
Last week, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse had a particularly telling episode, that spoke to me on two big, broad issues--maybe even meta-issues, one might argue. First is the issue of moral accountability & the awakening of conscience where it has previously been absent. Second is the issue of awakening awareness & power, that was addressed by tremayne earlier this week in a really perceptive dairy, "On Reality-Based Optimism". For those of you not familiar with Dollhouse, what's wrong with you? TV doesn't get any better than this. As good as, here and there. But not better.
Anyway, it's contemporary science fiction. And to get you up to speed, Wikipedia will do rather well:
The story follows Echo, a "doll" or "Active" for the Dollhouse, an organisation which hires out reprogrammable human beings to wealthy clients who use them for a range of purposes, such as sexual encounters and high-risk illegal activities. Echo, like her fellow dolls Victor and Sierra, exists in a child-like blank state [tabula rasa], until the programmer uploads her with the skills and memories to make her a whole other human being. Actives such as Echo are ostensibly volunteers who surrender their bodies to the organisation for five years in exchange for a vast amount of money and a solution to any other extenuating circumstances in their lives. Echo, however, is unique in remembering small amounts even after personality "wipes", and gradually develops an increasingly cognizant self-awareness and personality. This emerging personality is even distinct in some ways from that of her original identity, college graduate Caroline Farrell. This concept allows the series to examine concepts of identity and personhood.
As Echo continues to evolve, and learn to work beyond the limits of her current personality imprint or default programming, she runs the risk of going to "the Attic", a place for broken dolls. She is an object of fascination for the escaped doll Alpha (a genius and serial killer who sees Echo as a potential mate) and FBI Agent Paul Ballard, whose obsession with the urban legend that is the Dollhouse costs him his career, before he comes to work for the organisation as Echo's bodyguard or "handler". Ballard sees the Dollhouse's activities as immoral and illegal, but becomes increasingly complicit in the business which he equates with murder and sex traffic. Within the house, opinions are divided; director Adelle DeWitt sees her role as honourable, programmer Topher Brink's view is entirely scientific and amoral, and handler-turned-head of security Boyd Langton, like Ballard, is more concerned with the ethical and theological implications of the Dollhouse's technology.
From the beginning, there've always been some fundamental mysteries. Like WTF is going on here, anyway? The purpose of the Dollhouse is unknown. It's a business, but it has a purpose beyond just making money. How do we know? Well, we've been told several times. And even though we know very well not to trust anything, this admission of a hidden purpose is just about the only thing you can trust.
But a little more basic is the question of how the dolls came to be there in the first place. Which is sort of a big deal, since they're essentially slaves--albeit "only" for five years. We're told that it was "voluntary," but this is where the whole "not trusting anything" ethos really kicks in. We've seen bits and pieces of Echo's "voluntary" process--she was in some really serious trouble, though big pieces of the story are missing. We know that another doll had lost a daughter, and probably was suicidal. That kind of thing. But we've never been "fully briefed" as they say in the trade. And this most recent episode was as close to a linear accounting of how one doll--Sierra--came to the dollhouse as we're ever likely to get (told entirely in flashbacks, of course). And in the telling of this tale, a good deal more is both revealed, and altered.
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