The Moth Chase

Introducing Both the Beginning and the End…

…of Dollhouse.

Dear Moth Chase readers,

Let us introduce our friends, Martin and Travis, who will be blogging with us for the next few weeks on the final episodes of a show they both requested we cover, Dollhouse.  Martin and Travis are both fellow grad students at different programs and great guys, and we’re excited to welcome them to themothchase’s ongoing procrastanalysis!

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

ox,
Kathryn and Natalie

Sup’ Travis,

I’m sure you have heard: Dollhouse has been cancelled. Why should anyone be blogging about the show, then? That is the question I hope to address in this post. Now, since neither one of us are Whedonites (we just discovered Buffy, after discovering Firefly), the obvious point is that we can’t claim it’s simply because we’re Joss Whedon fans (although, now, we obviously are).

The way I would go about it would be precisely to start with the end.

Not just the end of the show or the end of last season, but, in fact, the end of our world.

That’s exactly what Epitaph One, the thirteenth unaired episode of the first season of Dollhouse is about. Frantically yet methodically we are introduced to a whole new cast of characters trying to survive in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world. In the year 2019, people can be imprinted remotely, by wave, and we find our characters trying to get underground in order to avoid being either imprinted or killed by those imprinted above ground. The world is in the midst of a global war launched by telephone call: those who answered were instantly imprinted to destroy those who weren’t. As the episode unfolds we see the role of the Rossum Corporation in the various events leading up to the end.

Aside from the brilliant indictment of corporatism, what Epitaph One does so remarkably well is to attack the very medium to which it is wedded. This is both its amazing vision and its ultimate downfall. Taken as a modern reflection on the conditions of its own possibility, Epitaph One and Dollhouse more broadly finds itself in the strange predicament of attacking corporatism while relying on Fox for its existence, on questioning technology while depending on the same for its actuality, on decrying the objectification of women while lavishly promoting itself by means of Eliza Dushku’s scantily clad body, on championing freedom while revealing the fundamental impossibility of its reality.

All of these elements come to a head in Epitaph One, but most prominently surrounding the creation of the episode itself. Made in six days, with a new cast, and on the whims of a studio request for a 13^th episode for the foreign market, Epitaph One sees Joss Whedon caving to corporate interests while at the same time working to undermine them. This irreconcilable procedure, as I mentioned above, is precisely its downfall. Whedon wanted a show with an insatiable creative drive that extended beyond limits of genre, style, and medium, but was wedded to corporate interests that demanded boundaries, limits, and ratings. In yearning to do the impossible, the show trudged on in its aporetic glory, but from the very first episode we knew it wouldn’t last and Epitaph One simply confirmed it (although actual news of its cancellation would come only later).

In framing the show in this way, I hope you and our readers will notice an element of frustration, fairly or unfairly, with Whedon himself. This summer, Whedon produced an internet-only quasi-musical with Neil Patrick Harris called “Dr. Horrible.” A stunning production that showed the possibility of bypassing corporate involvement, one surely wishes, in the case of Dollhouse, that Whedon would have used the experience to become self-aware of his aspirations for overstepping various boundaries and pursued his agenda in a way in which the disappointment of cancellation would be a non-issue. This stunning mixture of triumph and defeat is precisely why the show deserves to be discussed.

Holla,

Martin

——–

There’s nothing quite like the blinding light when that curtain’s cast aside, and no attempt is made to explain away the things that really, really, really are behind*

Martin,

First, I want to say thanks for a great, thoughtful first post to get us started on this quixotic task: blogging an-already cancelled show notorious for its poor viewership! I think you’re exactly right: Joss Whedon is the product of his contradictions (I’d love to talk more about this feminist who makes shows centering on “scantily clad bodies,” but I’ll save that for another time), and I think it’s insightful to look at “Epitaph” as an attack on its own medium; in a certain respect, I think his in/famous “meta” irony has always been about a need to comment on the possibilities and limitations of the medium of television. Even before David Chase invented the modern “megamovie” (as Vincent Canby has called it) with the Sopranos, a show whose entire point was to explore the cultural contradiction resident in our fascination with organized crime, Whedon was exploring just how far television could be pushed as a mirror held up to the culture.

Recall the episodes “Needs” from season one? The glitches started cascading in some of the Actives – they were retaining too many memories and reflexes from their imprintings. Adele’s solution was to turn them lose in the Dollhouse, let them escape, so that they could come face to face with the traumas that led them to accept enslavement in the name of forgetfulness in the first place. There was a moment when the awakened Actives stumbled into the wardrobe room – huge racks of clothes that were, quite literally, the personas they would adopt as actors in new narratives. They began to realize that they were characters in search of an author (Scott Tobiasread this episode much like I do). Something happens similar in the second season of Buffy. In the episode “Halloween,” a spell turns everyone into the embodiment of the costume they’re wearing: Willow becomes a ghost, Xander (Buffy’s version of Topher, and, both of them, I think, a proxy for Whedon himself) a soldier, and Buffy becomes, literally, a fainting, hysterical, damsel in distress. In both cases, highlighting the artificiality of the medium – look! what you’re watching involves people wearing costumes and taking on different personalities! – allows something astonishing to happen: the characters, as they encounter firsthand the inherently artificial way they are constructed, become subjects for the first time. Xander finally gets to be the hero, and actually kicks considerable amounts of ass. Willow is not quite the wallflower we think. And Buffy, always the victim of her destiny,* for once was relieved of the burden of being the Slayer – only to find herself robbed entirely of agency, almost fatally so.

I think I first realized what Whedon’s up to when it occurred to me that, had Quentin Tarantino worked in a comic book store rather than a video store, he would look a lot like Whedon. The unabashed geekery, the unapologetic postmodern instinct for pastiche, the wild and untamed imagination that sometimes shades into self-indulgence – all the parallels are there. Except: whereas Tarantino struggles to connect us to his characters at a visceral level (only Inglourious Basterds really succeeds in getting past the sterile gaze of Tarantino’s unhinged formalism), Whedon is at heart a humanist. This is why Buffy is so much more than a teen soap opera with fangs and witches; why Mal (of Firefly) makes the old Han Solo stereotype of the cynical idealist seem so fresh; and why Dollhouse puts us face to face with the fragility of our fantasy, asks us to enter the hall of mirrors created by our confused desires and our barely-hidden traumas, and holds before us the hope that, on the other side, we might actually become selves. Just as whenHelo Ballard comes face to face with his obsession in “Man on the Street,” only to have his obsession beat him to a pulp, so the mirror of oursevles and our culture that Whedon holds before us exposes the sham that our “everydayness” is (for are we all not, at some level, blanks who put on a costume and a persona in order to negotiate our days at the far shore of forgetfulness?). That, I think, is why Dollhouse is so brilliant. And why it is so little watched.

As Will Sheff sings in another song, “You’re lying when you sing along.”** But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

Travis

*There’s a lot be said about Whedon’s political paranoia here: the Whedon hero/ine is always defined by their fight against forces utterly beyond their control, but that is somehow never tragic. I have a feeling we’ll be talking about that a lot before Dollhouse ends its run, though, so I’ll hold off for now.

**Okkervil River lyrics: “For Real;” “Pop Lie.”

——-

“The Public Eye”/”The Left Hand”

Well, Martin, let’s just start by stating the obvious. That was a pretty insane two hours of television.

I won’t even try to summarize the episodes. Here is the gist. Senator Perrin, we find out, is a homegrown Raymond Shaw (with a bit of a Dubya frat boy backstory), with wife Cindy a slightly less creepy version of Angela Lansbury (some superb double misdirection there, by the way). Rossum has used the Dollhouse investigation as a MacGuffin to set itself up as a corporate savior, and has a Manchurian Candidate in the making. And Rossum is willing to frame its trouble-prone LA office in order to get there. Madeleine/November is in the hands of the DC Dollhouse’s Bennett (I’m not clear on exactly what’s going on there – is she off to the attic?). And Echo is finally on the loose.

The show went to a very special level of crazy when Bennett (Summer Glau, River from Firefly, of course) came on the stage. The scenes between her and Topher were priceless (“Wasabi peas?” “I’m excited and scared.”…”Your skin is like a pig…because it’s pink.”) And after Victor glitched into a pole-dancing valley girl in “Belle Chose,” it was obvious that Enver Gjokaj was an amazing actor. But seeing him as Topher redux was astonishing – the impersonation was so good at times I forgot that they were actually two different actors.

I want to talk about Topher, our favorite sociopath in a sweater vest, for a moment. I never really understood the Topher-hating in season one, but I think it’s inarguable that, between “Vows” and “Belonging” (eps. 2.1 and 2.4), he’s becoming one of the most morally complex characters in the shows.  Everybody, you’ll recall from “Belonging,” who’s in the Dollhouse administration is there because they’re morally compromised. Topher is there, though, because he has no morality at all; the irony of that line from Adelle being that he’s emerging as the most morally compromised of all. And our awareness of that tragedy is heightened by the fact that he’s developing a technology that is responsible for the apocalypse, which technology we’re watching emerge from episode to episode.

Topher’s problem speaks to the central illusion “Dollhouse” is premised upon: our vain hope that in forgetfulness lies respite and absolution from responsibility. Here’s what I mean by that. We had two Topher doppelgängers last night, highlighting the split that runs right down the middle of his character: one double, literally, in Victor, in all his benign geekery (“Glasses?” “Glasses on a chain.” “For the win!”). And we have his way-smarter (and “badder”) alter ego in his Washington, DC counterpart Bennett.* When Topher begins to realize what Bennett really is, a seriously malicious evil genius, it’s another step in his realization that he, as the literal author of the characters the dolls become, is doing things that cannot be undone to bodies and to minds.

Topher’s dilemma is that (as we saw with Sierra in “Belonging”), while the dolls can forget (sometimes) what he makes them do, he cannot. This connects to the political paranoia I mentioned last week, for I think Whedon wants to say that our greatest political problem is that we have become a culture endlessly self-mediating in the shiny oblivion of our own entertainment. There’s a kind of nonchalance in the way the political angle is handled (Topher’s response to the “fascists” stealing the presidency: “It wouldn’t be the first time”). Rather, the really scary thing lies in the fact that, when the apocalypse happens, it will come about by a broadcast signal.  When people find “Dollhouse” (especially the sexual exploitation) uncomfortable, it’s because Whedon is commenting on the basest nature of our contemporary viewing habits. Are not the images flitting across the screen “shells” that we craft to project our fantasies? To some extent, we are all clients of the Dollhouse: here we are now, entertain us.

And, as Ballard comments early in “The Public Eye,” “No ever really leaves here, do they?”

*So, Summer Glau is pretty much a shoutout to nerds everywhere on these episodes, yes? Imagine the conversation in the writers’ room: so, the kids are into sexy librarians these days, right? Let’s go with that, and make her a techno-dominatrix, too.

Travis

—

Travis,

I’m totally with you on the intensity of these two episodes. It seems that not only did Dollhouse return, it returned with a vengeance. I’m glad to see the show going out with a bang instead of a whimper. In response, I’d also like to take up your title as my theme. And we can start with your comments about Mellie November. I think you hit the nail on the head: I don’t think it’s the attic, but rather the simple fact that “no one ever leaves here,” a fact that Adelle and Ballard hinted at with the revelation that even released actives have “active” architecture in them, still. She is being (re)activated.

This idea that “no one ever leaves here,” to my mind, speaks to the orientation of the show on a variety of levels. On one level, we have the variety of individuals who are thrown into their situations, both figuratively and literally. When the Senator asks: “They didn’t create me—only parts of me—how can I untangle it?” Echo responds simply with: “does it matter?” Putting the same question, in a flashback, into the mouth of Cindy Perrin (Stacey Scowley does a stunning job as a detestable villain) is quite clever: it shows us that any freedom is always compromised. After all, it is not that Cindy Perrin’s question is inauthentic, she means it (even though it is staked in the context of your aforementioned “Manchurian Candidate” scenario). On another level, we see how Echo and the other characters (e.g. Sierra) continually must resort to relying on the Dollhouse for help. As the exchange between her and the senator illustrates, with him objecting: “You want to take me to them? They’re all bad guys.” Echo: “I think her bad guys are badder than my bad guys.” Continually, from every angle (including, obviously the future) we see that everything around every character is utterly wrong. This is true of everyone: from Boyd to Paul to Topher (as you nicely point out) to Adelle (who even though showing courage ultimately bows under pressure). The show embodies, scene after scene, episode after episode, Adorno’s claim that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” There are no good guys, anywhere.

Of course, through the show we see glimpses of something akin to goodness or morality, but these are ultimately mere flashes. Indeed, they can only be flashes. At the end of Minima Moralia Adorno writes of the ultimate impossibility of redemption: “But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.” Dollhouse illustrates this week after week.

Ultimately, all we have is the basic fact of reason: the characters in the show—much like ourselves—cannot but help make decisions. From their first personal perspective, they cannot wait around to see what their motor-neurons or programming will do, they must act. But seen from our perspective, from a “sideways on” perspective, we see that all of their decisions are continually comprimised from every angle, at every step. Even “genuine” freedom is a compromise: as Echo shows in her wariness of Caroline (and, in turn, as we see in Caroline’s treatment of Bennett). In this sense, the episode’s ending is highly fitting: while Echo has finally garnered her freedom, we find the show’s present world in its most uncompromisingly wrong state…just a few political moves shy of the events of Epitaph One.

Holla,

M

—-

There *is* a me

Dollhouse: “Meet Jane Doe”

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)*

Martin,

“My name is Echo.” With that line of dialogue tonight, something radical has shifted in the Dollhouse universe. “There’s a lot of noise from the chorus girls,” Echo says, “but they’re not me. There is a me.” Even without the second episode – whose action-packed zombiepocalypse I’m happy to leave to you to try to summarize – “Meet Jane Doe” was clearly bringing us back to the encounter with Alpha, the Dollhouse’s errant Ubermensch. Escaping last week in a doll state, we now find Echo swiftly transforming from renegade somnambulist to something entirely different: an agent, an “I” who, encountering something less than ideal about herself in Bennett’s memories of Caroline, has come to own the identity of many as herself. But while Alpha is the very embodiment of a schizophrenic madman, the fluidity of whose imprints is only the occasion of megalomania and sadism, Echo – whose owning of her name is a refusal of Omega as much as of Caroline – is emerging as something completely different.

Here’s where I want to disagree with your read of last week’s episodes a bit; if I understand you rightly, you see a fundamental tragedy to the moral ruin of Dollhouse’s universe. Granted, things don’t look good; we continue our steady march toward the dystopia of “Epitaph One,” and what I thought last week was a genuine moral awakening on Adelle’s part was clearly not – she took the ethos of craven self-preservation to a whole new level this week. And even Topher’s emergence as a moral agent seems doomed to irrelevancy (much like Blockbuster). But there’s still Echo; there’s still something being held out here that signifies, even in the grip of something overwhelmingly totalitarian, that out of the flowing images and swirling data bits of contemporary telesociety, we still manage to craft small fragments of a narrative that might tell us a bit about who we are. More than ever in history, we contain multitudes, and we contradict ourselves. But in Echo’s case, the fractures of those contradictions seem to be the occasion of genuine creativity. And fascinatingly, the assumption of her identity has to do with nothing so much as the fleshliness of her embodiment. The ugliness of being a doll is that one is generally a sex slave – yet Echo can say that she’s been saving a body for Caroline all this time. No longer.

Urge and urge and urge/Always the procreant urge of the world. So Whitman says earlier in the poem. One of the other fascinating moments in tonight’s episode was the reunion of Echo and Ballard. Watching Ballard turn the corner in season 1′s “Man on the Street” and run into the literal incarnation of his obsession, with the climactic fight between them (shades of Buffy season 2), has morphed into the charged yet sublimated sexual tension that serves their common interest – taking down the Dollhouse – in this episode. In a very real sense, the shifting center around which every character in Dollhouse is built is their desire. This is what Adelle and Rossum traffic in, the baseness of human desire. But desire is also what drives Echo, Ballard, and certainly Sierra and Victor, who continue to be the show’s unabashed sweethearts. The only ones who are not marked by their desire? The ones who profit from it, Adelle and Harding. There’s something to be said there about the contradictions of network interests in television shows, the self-aware male gaze of Whedon as auteur, and the song of ourselves this show at times manages to be.

–Travis

*Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

—-

Alpha’s Echo

Hi Travis,

Wow—so many things to discuss this week! What an incredible journey to the conclusion of this season and so the show. I’ll take up just two themes from your post and from this week’s episode: the notion of embodiment and your claims to some sliver of hope.

I completely agree with you on the last point—perhaps I didn’t make myself clear last time around, so I’ll use this opportunity to elaborate a bit. I think that the show operates along a certain orientation of hopelessness, but by the same token there are always present bursts of hope. Where I would locate the hope (and I’m not sure that you would agree) is precisely in a mere spontaneity (to use a Kantian term). Echo and others possess a basic spontaneity of reason that allows them to achieve acts that are outside of what we (society, handlers, programmers, Rossum, etc.) would expect. This spontaneity precisely seems to be tied to their bodies: their fundamentally human (animal) embodiment. We’ve seen this illustrated in Victor and Sierra’s coupling, Echo’s headaches, Topher’s pangs of conscience, etc. These are the glimmers of hope: but they are fragile and inherently fugitive moments.

Precisely because they are tied to bodies that are not only inherently finite and frail, but also because these same bodies are precisely the site of programming and indoctrination, whether social or more direct as in imprinting, such moments cannot last. If they were to last, they themselves would become codified sequences exhibiting all of the same failures (of society, of self, of friendship, of life) that the show highlights episode after episode. These moments must remain fundamentally transient. To my mind, we see this quite clearly with both of these episodes: there is no paradise—not for Echo, not for Alpha, not for the Dollhouse, not for Joel Myner, etc. Of course, the promise of breaking out of the structural limitations of the world continually underwrites everything: without Caroline’s ideals, Adelle’s merciless drive, Ballard’s care, Topher’s curiosity, etc. the show would not even get off the ground. But these are all fleeting moments that seem in fact to be tied to somatic drives. This stress on embodiment (obviously always present when dealing with sex trafficking) paradoxically is made a focus in these shows through the subtlety in which it is presented. Echo’s “self-awareness” is garnered at that moment when she is able to see Caroline as occupying her body—and “she doesn’t like it.” Similarly, Ballard’s “brain-death” illustrates this from both sides of the coin: in the care that all of the characters cannot but help show to his unconscious, brain-death body, but also in the mercy that Echo cannot but help show to a body that speaks with his voice. At every step, the show highlights our continual dependence on our body, but also our human, all-too-human ability to lose sight of this dependence, our continual drive to forget this aspect of our humanity. In this sense, there is a neat dialectical economy between this somatic element and the spontaneity of reason, which oscillates between positive and negative, with neither being entirely good nor evil, but illustrating the inherent interdetermination between these various dualities (mind/body, good/evil, society/individual, etc.) on all levels.

Where I would like to get your thoughts and perhaps push you on a bit is on your estimation of Alpha. Alpha and Echo are obviously two sides of the same coin. But where you see him as a “schizophrenic madman,” I would tend to read him as the precise inverse of Echo vis-à-vis their estimations of the world. Where Echo embraces these fleeting moments of hope, Alpha takes them to precisely be insignificant, opting to embrace instead wholesale nihilism. As he says: he simply doesn’t care. Now, it may be that this nihilism is beginning to collapse on itself (as his “acquisition” of Ballard seems to suggest), but it also may be that perhaps this nihilism has more fight in it. It seems that Alpha’s question to Echo always centers around her namesake: is she merely to be an echo of the world—hoping to change it, but always without success—or is she to become the Omega to his Alpha, thereby completing a circle which rejects the aforementioned omnipresent nihlism precisely in affirming it.

Holla,

M

—-

Dollhouse: “Stop-Loss”

Martin,

What’s the old saw about the fact that knowing the hour of your death focuses your mind wonderfully? Although I never fully agreed with the worries about Dollhouse’s unevenness in the first season (I think the procedural vs. serial debate in particular was a red herring), there’s no question that the bulk of this second, and last, season of Dollhouse has been truly superb in the economy, pacing and overall quality of the episodes.

As for “Stop-Loss.” At first, it looks like it’s going to be a farewell to Victor/Tony – his contract is up, and he’s released, like a parolee from prison, into a world that no longer fits him and in which he longer has a home – this despite the fact that so little, including the war in Afghanistan, has changed. But no one ever really leaves here: within 24 hours, Scytheon, Rossum’s version of Blackwater, has assimilated him into a hive-mind paramilitary group, “Mind Whisper”. As they did with Mellie/November/Madeleine, Boyd and Topher launch an unauthorized rescue operation using Echo, who no longer even blinks as she morphs from one imprint to another, as their supersoldier, and Sierra as Victor’s indelible connection to his humanity. Of course, the Dollhouse captures them at the very moment of their escape (with Topher’s remote wipe technology now, apparently, fully deployed). The episode ends with Adelle’s (apparent!) seething hatred for Echo on full display – and a chilling final scene as Echo, Victor and Sierra are plugged into the Attic.

There’s a lot to talk about, but I just want to lift out two themes. First, we’ve been talking about the Alpha-Echo connection/opposition, the way in which both are a fully aware matrix of their imprints, though with radically different results. Last night, however, Victor for the first time emerges as a third factor in this equation. The connection with Sierra is so strong, so fundamental to his being, that even on engagements he can no longer function without awareness of that connection. That relationship has become his answer to Echo’s “there is a me:” something that constitutes an identity that nothing can erase and that, more importantly, he affirms – the marvelously focusing power of the erotic.

Then, of course, there’s Mind Whisper, which is the precise inversion of Alpha and Echo (and to some extent Victor): while they are selves containing multitudes, Mind Whisper is the erasure of the selves of the multitudes in one military-industrial corporation. Foreshadowing the human supercomputer of the Attic,* this Borg-like complex is the ultimate military weapon, just because its components have nothing left to fight for but the perdurance of the collective and the total oblivion of their selves.

This is a fascinating insight into Whedon’s vision of evil. Consider what constitutes the monstrous in his universe thus far – the vampires in Buffy and the Reavers in Firefly. These are shells of persons who are entirely emptied of humanity – the vampires are demons inhabiting the body and mind of a person, but completely dispossessing the soul; the Reavers have been irredeemably deranged by a chemical agent (ironically named “Pax”). Mind Whisper is a nice callback to that vision, but the twist that Dollhouse provides is that this state of being completely displaced of one’s humanity in fact perfectly describes the dolls. And yet! the dolls are not at all emptied of their humanity. The moral center of this show is the fight for freedom  and personhood on their parts, and as we see at the end of “The Attic,” the answer to the collective of slaves in Mind Whisper is a community of resistance. Whedon’s vision of  power and of evil has evolved, I think, but I’ll save discussion of that for the future. I’ll just observe for now that there’s an interesting eschatological vision here that eschews neat oppositions of good and evil, power and counter-power, and locates the struggle for goodness in the way in which we succumb, or not, to the forgetfulness of ourselves, and remember the loves that remind us who we are.

*I’ll leave “The Attic” to you, but I have to throw in one observation about the episode. This was clearly Whedon’s take on the Matrix (call it Matrix 2.0), and I anticipate Whedon being criticized for being derivate here, but two things come to mind. First, Whedon got there first – I was thinking about the Buffy episode in season 1, “Nightmares,” and Buffy fighting off “the ugly man” of Billy’s dream (as a vampire!) as the precursor to this episode as much as I was the Matrix. Second, in a very important sense “The Attic” is a subversion of the mythology of the Matrix – the escape from the Attic does not take place through a solitary messiah figure, but through a community (Echo, Victor and Sierra) who are now very close to equally powerful and self-aware.

–Travis

——

Hi Travis,

Thanks for an interesting post. I think I am going to have to disagree with you slightly on these last two episodes. I found them somwhat uneven and—dare I say it—disappointing. I’m with you about last season—I never found it uneven. It was well done and introduced the show perfectly and then Epitaph One took it to a whole new level.

With these two episodes, however, I found myself somewhat disappointed, not only in the fact that the show is being cancelled (a perpetual disappointment, it seems), but in the fact that things are obviously being rushed. For example, you allude to the hive mind as an inversion of Echo and Alpha. And that’s exactly right…and also extremely interesting. But in “Stop-Loss” it is little more than a plot device to introduce how nefarious Rossum really is and to reunite Sierra and Victor (or Pria and Tony). And hive mind as a metaphor for the army? The whole episode had an unfortunate cheesiness (as opposed to Whedon’s usually brilliant camp) factor (“2010, I think — I don’t know how long we’ve been off the air.” Was pure genius…) I wish that this little side plot would have been developed and that the relationship and psychological economy between the dolls and the hive could have been explored in more detail.

Now, with “The Attic,” things seem to pick up. I want to take up your point of how “redemption” (if we can call it that—since it is still essentially Adelle’s bidding, which may or may not be redemptive in character) requires a community. Note, however, that it is not just a community of individuals (Sierra, Victor, Echo, Dominic), but actually a community within individuals: Echo being able to access and control her various personalities is a crucial link in the chain.

This stress on community—whether external or internal—to my mind is questioned at the same time it is invoked. Both of these episodes highlight various ways of having both deformed communities (the hive mind, the Attic—communities of silence and fear, respectively) and genuine communities (of lovers, of friends, and, of enemies). What is interesting, however, is precisely the centrality of Adelle in the question of community. For whom does she speak? For whom does Echo speak? What is the nature of their relationship? Our community of protagonists is precisely localized around Adelle–but the only thing that Adelle has consistently demonstrated is a committed pragmatism. Does this represent the rest of our community?

It is interesting to see how Echo responds to Adelle’s comment that: “It’s the only way we can get an edge.” She states simply: “We?” This question to my mind calls to mind Stanley Cavell’s take on community in The Claim of Reason that:

To speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them—not as a parent speaks for you, i.e., instead of you, but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e. speaks your mind. Who these others are, for whom you speak and by whom you are spoken for, is not known a priori, though it is in practice generally treated as given. To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff—on some occasion, perhaps once for all—of those for whome you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff on some occasion, perhaps once for all—those who claimed to be speaking for you (27).

What will be interesting to see in future episodes is precisely how these voices pan out: who is truly speaking for whom. With Clyde’s revelation that his Attic hell is precisely Epitaph One, we have a huge twist on the show: perhaps the events of Epitaph One are not actually real, in which case I wonder what it says about our conversations thus far…for whom have we been speaking?

Best,
Martin

—-

Onwards to the Apocalypse…

Hi Travis,

…so I’m not really sure how I feel about this week’s episode of Dollhouse. First of all, the episode is so disjointed and non-linear that it is difficult to tell any sort of coherent story about it. Second, the episode feels incomplete serving largely as a bridge between two halves, the other half of which we have not seen yet. For that reason, I will largely say a few things, staccato-like about my impressions of the episode. Ultimately, on the one hand, it’s obviously an entertaining episode that gives us more background on not only Caroline, but also Dr. Halverson. On the other hand, the “twist” feels like a total Scooby Doo: we didn’t predict it because it’s not developed and nothing in Boyd’s past would point to it. This is all either entertainment genius or entirely cheap writing.

Of course, there is also  the predicament of figuring out precisely what we have “learned” about Boyd. Is Boyd the head of Rossum? Is he a doll working for the head? Is he head of Rossum, but a head who has gone “rogue” and is working against Rossum? These are all questions that will only be revealed in the final two episodes. And in that sense, those two episodes will determine the success of this episode.

Obviously, the other huge event in this episode is the death of Bennett Halverson, one of the, in my opinion, great creations on this show (and not just because of Summer Glau’s acting presence). Having her be killed by Whiskey aka Number One aka Dr. Saunder’s carries some sort of ironic twist (a lost imprinted employee doll returns and kills current employee that is employed in bringing back a doll) that isn’t even yet fully apparent in its twisting deviousness. But by that same token, this action feels like a cheapening of Amy Acker’s character  (who was also one of the most interesting on the show), since it also seems to employ her character as an instrument for advancing the plot in a certain way. Now, in part, I am sure what is registering as my apparent disappointment is in part sadness at the impending demise of the show, but at the same time, I am almost certain that some of it has to do with what now appears as lazy or compressed writing. Perhaps the last two episodes will justify everything and this episode will look very different, but right now it feels like one of the season’s worst.

I should add, however, that Adele Dewitt and Echo have become significantly more interesting characters, mostly because of their general overlap. Notice, that Dewitt is more and more becoming well, generally unlikable, while doing “the right thing.” In her desire to overthrow Rossum and to stop the apocalypse, she is largely willing to go to any means (e.g. throwing Dominick back into the attic is not an issue). By the same token, Echo seems quite capable of adopting a similar “ends-justify-the-means” attitude…not only in her support for some of Adele’s tactics, but also in her willingness to use others to achieve her ends (including, e.g., herself as Caroline). In this regard, Echo is actually beginning to look a lot more like Caroline: someone who also was perfectly willing to use those around her for “the cause.” In this regard, the show is starting to come full circle…the only thing left is the return of Alpha.

Lastly, I wanted briefly to mention the allusion—explicit this week—to Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” The play, which in 1921 introduced the term “robot,” is quite interesting in this context because it argues explicitly what the show introduces implicitly: the development of normativity from  non-normative means. In the play, the robots ultimately fall in love and so—for all intents and purposes—become human. We have, obviously, seen Echo evolve in a similar manner. What remains to be seen—amongst other things obviously—is whether the apocalypse will be necessary (as it is in “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) or whether it can be averted…

Until next week,

Martin

****************

Dollhouse: “The Hollow Men”

Martin,

So we come to the end of the world as we know it. When we return for one last visit to the Dollhouse universe intwo weeks, this world will be gone, not with a whimper but, as it happens, with a bang (to invert T.S. Eliot’s famous line evoked in this episode’s title). Last night was far more straightforward (until that last Battlestar Galactica-referencing denouement) than the extraordinary last few episodes. I didn’t share your misgivings about last week – in fact, I kind of wondered if we had watched different shows! – as the major twists felt very appropriate to me. The show has hinted at a mysterious past for Boyd more than once,  and so the big reveal of “Getting Closer” was, I thought, very satisfying. Likewise, the shooting of Halverson by Whiskey/Saunders (who is after all a doll, and thus infinitely manipulable) was, I thought, executed with perfect Whedon-style abruptness.* In fact, the reveal of Boyd makes his flirtation with Saunders earlier this season far more intriguing – how long has all this been in the works between the two of them?

I did have a few misgiving about this week’s episode, even as I felt it accomplished its purpose with admirable economy. Boyd’s motivations are a bit dim to me – although it’s obvious that Rossum intends to use Topher’s teletechnology for evil and not for good, and Boyd wants to quarantine his inner circle, there was also a suggestion that Boyd saw the use of the technology as unavoidable elsewhere. And the spinal fluid thing was a touch too midichlorian-y for me. But those quibbles aside, my biggest lament is the scene between Ballard and November/Mellie. The scene was written well enough, and in fact Mellie’s auto-da-fé was the perfect end for her tragic character. It was her only way out, and her only way to avoid killing the man she loved. But the episode was so packed and driven by the action that we never really had time for her suicide to sink in.

This is a problem for Ballard’s character, whose effectiveness has always been a function of his relationships with Echo and November. His obsession with Echo – and his encounter with her in “Man on the Street” that I cannot stop talking about, because it haunts me to this day – and the torturous complexity of his relationship with Mellie gave him a depth I don’t think he can carry on his own. In large part, I think this is due to Tahmoh Penikett’s flat affect (something that undermined his fascinating character in BSG as well); but his character has also been in limbo a bit this season, while the action has propelled him on, well, like a doll controlled by something alien and inexorable.

There’s part of me that wishes that, with full knowledge of Dollhouse’s inevitable end, Whedon &co. had decided to let the show end a bit more like Firefly. That show came to its premature conclusion full of unexploited possibilities – especially the backstories of Inara and Shepherd Book – but its conclusion in the extraordinary (unaired) “Heart of Gold” and “Objects in Space” episodes lingered with the characters, further inscribing them in our minds as vivid, fully-rendered persons. Serenity brought the story to a satisfying conclusion (especially the character of River), but its feel was very different – more like the second half of Dollhouse, action-driven and full of “blow your mind” twists that, while superb viewing, didn’t resonate with me quite the way Firefly’s unrushed character studies did. That said, Dollhouse has paid its dues in this respect, and so much of this finale builds upon the way in which Adelle, Topher, Sierra and Victor (once again as Topher FTW!) have emerged as full-blown moral agents.

I actually liked this week’s episode, so I suppose there’s a bit of mourning for what the show could have been, given another season or two, in my somewhat-critical tone here. So let me close with something more appreciative. Eliot’s poem speaks of “the hollow men…the stuffed men/leaning together/stuffed with straw,” whose “quiet voices, when/we whisper together/are quiet and meaningless.” In the face of the apocalypse, and an increasingly ubiquitous and ominpotent corporate power, we might be tempted to conclude that the Dollhouseuniverse is likewise the tragedy of the bleakness of our contemporary political and economic landscape – a world ruled by the collusion of totalitarianism and capitalism, mediated by the illusion of a television screen that plays out our anesthetizing fantasies before us, night by night. But I don’t think so – and here’s why I’ve come to love Whedon’s work so much. Underneath the brutal honestly that his characters (so many of them women played with a depth of complexity that is still so rare on television) are portrayed with, the hopeless of their moral dramas and the inescapability of their fates, they are nearly always persons who bring humor, pathos, bizarre non sequiturs and most of all, the indelibility of their fully realized humanity to the dilemmas that Whedon’s writers always find ways to place before them.

There are some things that cannot be undone – this, I think, is the lesson of this show.** The show has built, continually, toward the conclusion that even in the face of inevitability the personhood of the dolls cannot, in fact, be erased – Mellie was the latest example of that this week. Likewise, the fierce, if perhaps myopic, idealism of Caroline cannot be turned aside. The love of Sierra and Victor is ineradicable. But on the other hand, there are powers that, once loosed in this world, will remain forever: Topher’s technology cannot be uninvented (something he is all too aware of), and Boyd’s betrayal is unforgiveable (Echo’s use of him as a human bomb trigger is driven at least as much by vengeance as it is cold calculation, I think). While I’ve understood where you’re coming from, Martin, in your concerns about the instrumentalist ethic of Adelle and Echo in this show, I’ve always found that to be secondary to something more elementary: the tragedy of characters acting out a path preordained for them, even as they held out for the hope of a way out in the long march toward “that final meeting/in the twilight kingdom.”

-Travis

*I had actually hoped, last week, that it would be revealed that Saunders shot Halverson out of her hatred for Topher (remember that brilliant scene between the two of them from 2.1, “Vows”?). Also, no – but the act was still thoroughly logical.

**And, indeed of Buffy - the extraordinary season-spanning arc of Angel and Buffy is perhaps one of the most profound meditations on this theme I’ve ever seen.

—

Hi Travis,

Thanks for your post…I think it summarizes our different impressions about Dollhouse and I think about Whedon in general. Let me start with our agreements. I completely agree on your last point: the tragic element that you mention. To lean on some German philosophy, Adorno writes in the concluding section of Minima Moralia that:

The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.

Joss Whedon has managed to demonstrate Adorno’s point through the story arc of Dollhouse. In that sense, it’s been a fantastic success. Week after week, season after season (well only 1 season), he’s shown that the best we are going to get are mere glimpses, flutters of something better which are instantaneously squashed by various elements within the world, elements which press down upon the individual. Nonetheless, not to resist these elements would precisely to be complicit with them and yet in resisting them one at the same time extends their dominance. This aporia drives Dollhouse, not only its world and worldview, but also individually, almost all of the characters on the show: from Ballard to Echo to Topher to Adelle to even—I would argue—Boyd.

In that sense, Whedon’s universe represents the despair of hope and the hope of despair by reworking the very tropes of hope and despair. To hope is to despair and to despair is to hope: to again parrot Adorno, the only meaningful response within such a world is to practice these basic acts of “humanness,” all within the broader matrix of inhumanity and barbarism; and yet in practicing this humanity, the characters at the same time project the limits of that humanity and thereby the ubiquity of control and dominance. The limits of the former, however, are the bounds of the latter, and vice versa…thereby showing the intimate relationship between the two. There is—as we’ve discussed—no escape and this final episode shows that flawlessly: the thoughtcalypse (braincalypse?) happens regardless. This is why Alpha’s presence in the final chapters of Dollhouse is so missed: his thoroughgoing nihilism represents another response to the world that Whedon presents and it is a shame that Dollhouse’s cancellation left that option ultimately unexplored.

Where we disagree, however, I think, is in our estimations of Whedon’s failures. To my mind, I still stand by my assessment of last week’s episode: the Boyd double cross plot arc is to my mind totally stupid. The exchange between Echo and Boyd (“I loved you!”) proved to be the most ridiculously lackluster of this season and one almost wishes that the show never went down this path. Although, it is obvious that the necessity of wrapping up the show in a meaningful fashion presented this as a more viable option than I believe the story really allowed. Similarly, I found the ending to Firefly woefully incomplete without Serenity’s magestic story: not only in giving us the background to River, but also to the Reavers, to the war, and most importantly to the precarious bonds holding our characters together, which are brought to the fore by the mystery and stakes of Serenity.

To return to Dollhouse, however, I agree with you about Ballard—but perhaps some of that is intentional, no? After all, we get a nudge in this direction from Boyd himself (“Except for Ballard—you just have that one family member…”) I also agree about the spinal fluid bit…all that aside, I also ultimately agree with you about the show: it was, to my mind, a success. I am eagerly awaiting Epitaph Two. I find myself wondering now whether Amy Acker’s character in Epitaph One was simply Clyde gone deranged or what and if so, how that plays into the broader arc.

Lastly, I wanted to conclude by returning to Boyd’s death. I am still deeply puzzled (or perhaps disturbed or some combination of the two) by this event. Of course, obviously, your analysis is spot on: there is some element of vengeance involved…but surely it seems entirely misplaced, given that Boyd has been wiped. In this sense, we seem thrust back to Dollhouse’s omnipresent theme of embodiment: Boyd’s body is marked as responsible for his actions as Boyd-as-Rossum-founder. In this sense, the worry is precisely that even if Boyd is wiped, the Rossum bogeyman still lingers on and so must become the object of revenge in addition to neutralization. But this seems patently unfair since after all even Echo herself carries serial killers and all sorts of “not nice” personalities. I found Boyd’s death striking: but I am still unsure precisely why…of course, we as the viewer share Echo and company’s disdain for Boyd and his betrayal, but by the same token we have a long-standing sympathy for dolls and don’t even know if Boyd is the original. His death seems to signify precisely what I attempted to sketch in the beginning: the aporetic presence of both hope and despair. It bekons towards hope because it represents a genuinely human, genuinely decided, genuinely Echo action of vengeance, and yet, at the same time, it represents the omnipresence of despair: the ubiquity of inquity, whether tied to the inescapability of Boyd from his past or the inescapability of Echo’s human-all-too-human drive for revenge.

Yours,

Martin

****************************

Hi Travis,

Well, that’s it: the end, my friend. And what a fantastically satisfying and emotional end it was!

As I think I’ve mentioned to you before, I thought that Epitaph One was the absolute highlight of season 1 and I think Epitaph Two is undoubtedly the highlight of this season. I’ll leave aside all of the details which can be gleaned from the episode (but wow – how cool was it to see a freakshow Victor and a butterball Harding?) and focus instead on trying to understand where we ended up at the end of these two seasons.

There are so many different themes coming together with this episode, that it is, like all of the other great episodes in this show, hard to get your bearings. I would like to focus on everyone’s motivations. We get such a wide variety of characters (all fleshed out by now) that this seems like a good place to begin. What are the various motivations we see on display? We see, that Rossum is motivated by hedonism. We see also that the desire for pleasure persists, across bodies and across lives, utterly insatiable. In this sense, it’s interesting to see how efficiently and quicly Whedon is able to deconstruct capitalism: corporate greed is merely a way, albeit a dangerous one, to entertain oneself (the imagery of Topher’s inventions, “playroom,” and “toys” just reinforcing the point). With this move, though, we’re led back to one of the questions we’ve already discussed: what are we to make of the show and ourselves watching the show? Of Fox’s involvement with the show? Are we just a bunch of dumbshows eating our way (à la butterball Harding) through television entertainment? Or is there something more going on here? And if so, what is it?

Turning to the other available motivations on the show: we see Tony/Victor’s allegiance to principles…but it is hard to determine which: rightness or family? After all, he insists on fighting the war at the expense of sacrificing his family life; in doing so, he must also become the very thing he is fighting: an addict to technology. We see the logical conclusion of this position in the characters of Romeo and his gang. Victor explains their drive as a desire for more than humanity—they do it “just to feel the thrill of perfection.” But what do we make of the actual superhumans on the show?

As I’d hoped, we get the return of Alpha. And here I have to lodge one of my very few complaints about this episode. The Alpha character was woefully shrifted. It’s such a shame that we did not see his development. I’d previously glossed him as a nihilist and we see that nihilism has slowly, perhaps hesitantly, given way to something different: but what? The few hints we get: that he’d lost his stomach for battle and that he wanted to help out those that needed help are woefully inadequate and it is difficult to understand what to make of them and how he got to be where he is. The most interesting thing is Alpha’s comment that peace does not come easy to him and his leaving the Dollhouse in order to maintain that peace (or at least to avoid warfare on those he associates with) speaks to that uneasiness (I will return to this point shortly). In the superhuman category we also have Echo (“Oh God—she’s so cool!”) who by this point is consumed by destroying Rossum (as her “mini-me” suggests, but who she blithely ignores). But what, exactly, are her motivations? Again, it is diffcult to determine (this, of course speaks to the greatness of these characters). It is not the desire for some sort of restored humanity since she makes an exception of herself and others close to her, nor, is it a desire for superhumanity since by helping the techheads she and those like Victor could probably have taken Rossum out much quicker. It seems that the answer is: life. But it is not the simple, Luddite-esque (“Did he just call me a Luddite?” – totally classic!) life that Pria desires, but rather life: simple, all-too-complex everyday life.

Life with all of its moral ambiguities, its disappointments, and its violence, but also with its courage, with its excitement, and ultimately, with its possibility for the friendship of others. Life with the acknowledgment of one’s incredible solitude (even with hundreds of personalities) and, at the same time, one’s incredible nearness and dependence on others (whether living or dead). In short, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein, Echo is concerned with our form of life, if that is taken to be the interpenetration of the social and the biological within one finite lifeform.

What seems to drive this home is, of course, Ballard’s death: one of the most well done and yet puzzling aspects of this episode. I still don’t know what to make of Echo’s acquisition of Ballard. Of course, on the surface, we finally get her putting down her guard: but looked at closer, is the point that Echo can only open up by consuming the other? And if so, what does that suggest? And what, then, is the opening? Is it not merely a closure? I guess to conclude, I would again lean on the sort of aporeticreading I have been suggesting before. It seems that Echo has a desire for something like what Lévinas called infinity: an utterly insatiable yearning for something utterly inexpressible and singular and beyond (yet not merely beyond) and she does so while being a multiplicity and while realizing that it can only be realized in the briefest glimpses and moments of everyday life. In this sense, the acquisition of Ballard is merely the best representation of a trace—to speak again with Lévinas—a trace of a past that never was (nor could be…even were they to have been together when he was alive). Her acquisition of him is the realization of this, and as she walks away, there is a certain contentment, but there is also, I would argue, an undeniable sadness (gray hair and all).

In short, then, all we have is life. To quote Dr. Bennett Halverson: “we become what we do…we are best defined by our actions in the moment.” In this sense, once again, the show reinforces the inadequacy of all theoretical constructions and dualisms: Topher is truly Topher only when he combines courage with learning, Adelle is only Adelle when she combines her motherly care with her ruthless instrumental rationalitye, Victor is Victor only when he is a warrior tempered by his desire for Pria and so forth. All we have is the everyday, with all of its failings—and all that boils down to is what I earlier called a form of life: the intertwined saturation of the social and biological…inseparable, inescapable, overbearing, and ours, wholly ours. Hence, Alpha’s uneasiness.

Yours,
Martin

———–

Martin,

First, let me agree: what an ending. For me, this was an episode that required two viewings. So much happened, and so quickly, that it was only a second viewing that the true weight of some developments sunk in. That’s actually something fascinating about Joss Whedon: how much his storytelling operates on economy, for all the metanarrative indulgence and winking asides and hot chicks kicking ass, at heart, he’s just a damn good story teller. And that’s why, in the end, Dollhouse worked.

First, and here I will disagree with you a bit (surprise!), there’s Alpha. On the first viewing, my reaction was something along the lines of – “Wow. That’s cool.” I was willing to accept it, just on the basis of its awesomeness, and because Alan Tudyk nailed this character (and somehow…it just felt right on some level). But on the second viewing, something caught my attention: that devastated, lingering look when he learns of Ballard’s death. He’s the only one to show any kind of emotion. This is something Echo can’t afford to feel; but it’s something Alpha must feel. There’s a reversal there, but there’s also something true to how the characters have developed. On that second watch, I caught all the little moments where the writers set up Alpha’s redemption, and it was so well done that I realized, that with just a few spare scenes, Alpha (along with Topher) had become the moral center of the episode (for example, I totally missed why he asked Topher for that little favor the first time). In giving Ballard back to Echo, he is not only showing compassion to her, he is definitively renouncing his obsession with her, and he is making atonement for his near-murder of Ballard a few episodes back.

I even think we’re given enough backstory to figure out his motivations. Alpha prided himself on being special; but in a world where everybody’s wiped, and anybody can become a techhead, things start to look very different. That hubris and nihilism somehow got turned inward, and as you say, he lost his stomach for the fight. So when he departs to be alone, knowing he will revert to his original psychopathic self (until he evolves again), it’s an act of contrition and mercy. I found it powerful stuff. Don’t worry – his perversity is still there (why else rebuild the Dollhouse with a bunch of blanks?). But, like Topher, he’s become something else.

Topher. I will say again, proudly, that I never understood the hatred of this character last season, but we knew from the beginning of season two that something extraordinary was going to come from him. When you cut through the tics and mumbling, the casual Cartesianisms (did you catch that about the pineal gland? Between this show and BSG/Caprica, genius stuff is being done on the mind-body on television right now), there was a profound affecting sadness that haunted Topher’s eyes. The same expression was worn by Echo (and Eliza Dushku, not always the best actress, was phenomenal in this episode, I thought) – a weary kind of sorrow that knows that one is no longer at home in this world. Here is, I think again, the theme I pointed out last time: there are some things that cannot be undone. Topher has one path before him. Likewise, with Ballard’s death (executed with quintessential Whedonite abruptness), the final price has been paid by Echo, who long ago accepted a grim determination that had left something of her humanity behind. There’s a familiar Whedon theme here (Buffy, River, Echo), the price of responsibility; but there’s another point far more interesting.

Echo had a doppelgänger, and she got to start over. There is no starting over for Echo. With the “reboot,” Caroline was lost forever.* I rewatched Serenity recently (after talking about it last time), and I was struck by the theme of the world without sin: what awakens from the aftermath of the reboot (not what they called it, but still) is a world reborn to innocence in Dollhouse. But a world without sin is also one that is beyond good and evil (Reavers and the dead inhabitants of Miranda: both come from the same source), where the only law is murder and the only logic consumption. This, I think, is what Alpha saw – the world as a reflection of his own subjectivity – and why he flinched. The only trick is that, having stared into the abyss, there’s really no turning back. And those, like Topher, Echo and Alpha, who have seen that darkness, there’s really only the fate of theWandersmann remaining, to wander, always the “movement of perpetual departure.” The thing that cannot be undone is our humanity, even if that means it is preserved in its loss.

- Travis

*I’m putting this is a note so as to not offend our gracious hostesses: you connect Echo to Lévinas; a few weeks ago, I realized with a start that Echo is the embodiment of Hegelian absolute Spirit: indeterminate infinity (Caroline doesn’t know who she is), determination negation (the multitude of her representations), subjectivity sublating its negations into its own self-knowledge. Of course, in a sense, Lévinasian infinity is just the inversion of this. Fascinating. We’ll talk more when he have that beer someday.