Dollhouse 2.04 "Belonging"

[hazelk]

This was Priya’s story and yet from the very beginning was full of other people projecting other stories onto her. She was a princess, a bird, a free spirit, an artist, a bird-woman. A nereid destined to become the love object of a mortal, a selkie doomed to be caught in a fisherman’s net. Those stories always take the lover’s point of view. Priya’s wasn’t The Seal Wife so much as The Rape of Persephone. The ground before her opens and she is dragged down into hell. Hell is the crazy place.

Whedon has a thing about bad men making mad women. Drusilla was his first but later there was Fred being sent to Pylea and then River and then Dana. Even Glory’s insanity was an effect of imprisonment in Ben. The one case of organic madness that I can remember was Normal Again Buffy but that Buffy and Priya share another common characteristic of Whedon’s mad women. Being that much of what people assume is their crazy speaking is quite simply the truth. Their presentation evokes Freud’s ‘neurotics’ and ‘hysterics’ whose own accounts of events and responses to them were dismissed or re-interpreted as repression.

Priya rejects other people’s interpretations of her story. She’s not a princess, she’s not what they think she is, she paints birds simply because she finds them beautiful. She was just a girl who liked to move on. Then Topher came, the poster boy for not listening, not looking hard enough. Priya was re-made as Sierra and Sierra had no choice but to become every story other people wanted to tell about her. Priya’s birds were empty shapes she could fill as she would, Sierra’s came off the peg, the same bright colour as her dress but always accompanied by darkness. Echo thought the darkness was a man, Saunders thought it was Topher. It could have been Nolan but if that were all, then she could have washed him away like the paint, she could have erased him. I think it wasn’t him but what he did to her. Nolan ripped a hole in her psyche and filled it with a rage she could never move on from, had to keep coming back to, could never be done with.

Controversially, she comes back to the Dollhouse. Boyd says she belongs there now - shades of Dana, the innocent victim turned monster (or so they said). Maybe that is what the writers were aiming for, the series does seem fascinated by the question of what might make someone choose to sign themselves over (I’m not saying that their choosing it would make it all right – giving people what they want is as fraught as deciding for them what they need). It plays out a little differently though. When Priya first comes back she clearly knows she’s going to be wiped, she asks if ‘we’ (meaning the dolls) are happy. But she seems bitter about it, as if someone (my guess would be Boyd) had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse - sign up or we let Rossum take you. Boyd’s work might have covered her tracks as far as the authorities were concerned but Rossum knew the Sierra deal and wouldn't be so easily fooled. Rossum might well not care that Nolan had been disposed of. He’d become an unstable liability who knew too much. From their point of view the sulphuric acid solution would also be the safest way to deal with Priya but Sierra was a valuable asset. Blank slate or permanent dissolution, rock or hard place?

Then she spots Victor and her attitude changes subtly. Not being a romantic, I don’t think it’s for love. I prefer to think it’s finding that love was real and that therefore Sierra is. Priya doesn’t remember one second of her engagements, the imprints aren’t real, but what she feels as Sierra persists, is truly part of her. They can wipe her but at some level she’ll still be her. She passes her other secret on to Topher, it can be his penance, and chooses not death but sleep. It could be mere sophistry except that we know how this story ends. Sleeping Beauty does wake up.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I prefer to think it’s finding that love was real and that therefore Sierra is.

Great insight, yes, as is the comparison to Dana.

[hazelk]

Thank you!