I love Dollhouse. Even in the early episodes, where it hasn’t
quite figured out what it is yet and spins its wheels doing Engagement of the
Week plots, there’s so much that I liked about it, and I felt super-vindicated
when it pulled out all the stops later on.
Today isn’t about the series as a whole, or a specific character or
relationship. Instead, it’s about a
single thread from the first season finale (the aired finale, anyway – no
“Epitaph One” in this post.) The
discussion necessitates some important plot spoilers from the episode, “Omega.”
All
right, so Alpha is obviously insane. He
was all kinds of messed up even before his composite events, and acquiring 40+
complete personalities in one go didn’t help matters. His plan, to imprint a random damsel with
Caroline and get Echo to kill her original self, is crazy. There’s nothing
worthwhile to be mined from this plan.
It’s villainous with a capital ‘lunatic,’ and you won’t find any
ambiguity in it, morally speaking.
However,
the judgment and philosophy that fuels
his plan is really interesting to me.
When Echo (still wearing a specific imprint at this point) puzzles over
why Alpha is showing her Caroline, he tells her, “She abandoned you. She walked out on you when you needed her
most […] She left you to the jackals, to the wolves. To the predators.” I love this idea, because it flies in the
face of most of the morality discussions Dollhouse
was inspiring at the time. While fans
were talking about sex, violence, and overall trauma committed against the person, the personality that’s been
removed, without their consent, the show looked at the body itself as a
separate victim.
Not
that the person doesn’t have a right to disgust, horror, or outrage. Madeline hates to think of what she did, and
what was done to her, when she wasn’t in the driver’s seat, and even a brief
comic beat, Tony getting a little panicked when he finds gay-coded clothing
among Victor’s eclectic engagement wardrobe, shows that the people behind the
Actives have no say in what they’re made to do.
But in this episode, the person, Caroline, is confronted for what she
allowed to happen to her body. As Alpha
explains, when “the road got a little rocky, seas got a little choppy […] she
thought, ‘I’ll go to sleep.
Night-night. See you in five years.” What happened to Caroline is undeniably
horrible, but she, her actual
personality, wasn’t present for it. Her
body was. While Caroline “vacated the
premises,” her body was shot, stabbed, and screwed. It was spun about, made to surge with every
chemical it could produce (along with others it could ingest,) bereft of the
inhabitor who could protect it with her agency and awareness.
After
Alpha manufactures a composite event for Echo, the newly supercharged Active
acknowledges the truth in Alpha’s accusation.
“You walked away from me,” Echo tells Caroline. “You left me alone in that place. Why did you do that?” Despite Alpha’s blatantly-evil scheme, Echo
recognizes the injustice done to her, the body, when Caroline signed away her
rights to it for a number of years. I
don’t know why I love this idea so much, but I really do. The thought that a body would take its
mind/soul/personality to task over its treatment – I love it. When we think of rights related to our
bodies, we tend to think of our bodies as our property, but here, our bodies
are our dependents, looking to us to ensure their safety. It’s such a unique perspective, and I’m glad
that this unique show gave me an opportunity to see it.
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