Dollhouse: Do Its Strengths Balance out Its Flaws?

Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s newest TV creation, has an interesting premise: a super-secret organization mind-wipes recruits and imprints them with personalities and skills suited to match a client’s needs, only to re-wipe them after each “engagement” is completed. The problem with this concept is that it makes it nearly impossible to sympathize with characters who have a different personality in every single episode. We’re promised that the main “Doll,” Echo (Eliza Dushku) Is beginning to gain self-awareness through memories that aren’t completely wiped, but so far the process is slow. Character development, come quickly!

Of course, Whedon has developed characters slowly before, notably with River Tam, who moves from near-catatonia at the beginning of Firefly to displaying mad ninja skills in the Serenity movie. Echo and the rest of the Dolls can be imprinted with ninja skills for a job, but as the resident tech-nerd Topher explains, it’s safest to keep them childlike and helpless in their default state between engagements. The Dollhouse staff refer to the default state as “tabula rasa,” or blank slate, a nice nod to John Locke’s belief that we enter the world completely empty, without character or personality, and are formed by our sensory experiences. However, the Dolls aren’t actually supposed to learn anything from their experience when they’re sent out as actives, because their minds are wiped clean afterwards. In their tabula rasa state, they utter truisms they’ve apparently been programmed with: “Massages are relaxing,” “It’s good to try one’s best,” etc. They gaze with vacant stares and tilted heads. It may be meant as a scary portrait of de-humanization, but, compared to River’s quirky madness/insight, it’s incredibly dull and frustrating.

However, one reason River’s character can develop slowly on Firefly is that she’s surrounded by such a strong cast of other characters. On Dollhouse, the other recurring characters aren’t terribly compelling yet: in addition to the Dolls, we have Topher, who’s really far too young, nerd-hip and annoying for the amount of scientific know-how he’s supposed to possess; Paul Ballard, an FBI agent determined, a la Fox Mulder, to uncover the secrets of the Dollhouse even though no one else believes in it; Adele DeWitt, who’s the highest executive we’ve met so far in the Dollhouse system (though she’s had phone conversations with at least one apparent superior). Really the most interesting character is Boyd Langton, Echo’s handler, an ex-cop who’s in charge of protecting Echo when she’s out on an engagement. His reasons for coming to the Dollhouse have yet to be explained, but his genuine desire to protect Echo makes him more sympathetic than any of the other characters. Finally, we have the mystery character Alpha, a former Doll who somehow absorbed all the various personalities ever imprinted upon him and is now trying to bring down the Dollhouse. The Alpha mystery is compelling, but let’s hope the resolution is creative enough to justify the build-up.

So far, the most interesting (to me) aspect of Dollhouse involves the imprinting process. The Dollhouse promotes itself (how exactly a super-secret organization promotes itself, I’m not sure) to its clients by promising that the Dolls will be more satisfactory than a “real” person, whether for “romantic” assignments, museum heists, or hostage negotiation. Topher imprints the Dolls with ideal qualities collected from real individuals; the combination of qualities is supposed to be made to fit the situation or the client’s needs in a way that no actual, un-programmed human could. What’s particularly interesting, though, is that Topher also programs in flaws to compensate for the Dolls’ strengths: near-sightedness, asthma, etc. The ideal Doll needs balance, he sort-of explains. Sometimes, though, what he programs in as a strength turns out to be a flaw: a programmed-in memory of kidnapping and child abuse is supposed to add emotional incentive for Echo as a negotiator for the return of a kidnapped child, but it backfires when she “recognizes” her actual abuser as one of the kidnappers (though the abuse had happened to one of the people whose personalities Echo was imprinted with, not to the person Echo was before she became a Doll).

The latter is an interesting take on Locke’s theory of sensory experience; how are our characters formed when we’re imprinted with other people’s sensory experiences? If we’re a collection of sensory experiences that come from different individuals, are we still a “person”? Finally, is there some inherent quality that makes us a person, or are all of us merely a result of whatever experiences have happened to us? In other words, are the Dolls merely an exaggerated metaphor for all of humanity?

There’s also that idea of how flaws add to the strength of a person. One of the things that intrigued me about Serenity (which I actually saw before Firefly) was its critique of human efforts to perfect ourselves—in Serenity, through the attempted eradication of sin (which, of course, backfired in a major way). In Dollhouse so far, it’s hard to tell whether Topher’s flaws-are-part-of-the-ideal-human philosophy will ultimately be what sets the Dolls free or if it’s merely part of the misguided quest to engineer perfection.

I had considered abandoning Dollhouse after the third episode, because the writing doesn’t have the clever (admittedly, sometimes too ostentatiously so) banter of Joss Whedon’s usual shows. However, things picked up a little in the fourth episode, and the fifth episode is going to deal with a religious cult. Gotta tune in for that. For now, I’ll keep watching and hoping that the show will get better.

Discuss:

What makes a person a “person”? How does the Christian idea of personhood relate to the idea that identity is merely an amalgamation of the experiences that have happened to one?

To what degree can we try to better ourselves and society while staying without building a Tower of Babel or trying to do what only Christ can do (i.e., salvation)?