Dollhouse 1.06 "Man on the street"

[hazelk]

The story that first brought Joss Whedon to prominence was the one where the blonde girl meets a monster in the alley. But instead of being killed by him she destroys him. It’s had many different iterations since then. Sometimes the girl turns out to be the monster, sometimes the monster turns out to be an ally. Sometimes she kills the monster but it breaks her heart, sometimes she kills herself and saves her heart. More than once the twist is that she’s not alone.

This time the story starts out already twisted. There’s no alley, the monster breaks into the girl’s home. Where she destroys him and she’s not alone and it breaks her heart. Unlike all the other versions this is not a story about the seemingly powerless finding themselves powerful. This is a story about an already powerful woman using that power to punish a rapist employee. In the woman’s story she’s both playing the role of avenging angel and asserting her own dominance. Hearn knows how these things work. If Mellie killed him (and I think that’s what we’re to assume happened) he will have died at the hands of a potential victim and the last thing he hears will be DeWitt’s voice setting that in motion.

It’s an unsettling story in part because the power Hearn had over his actual victim he had only because Dewitt gave it to him. He was Sierra’s handler, she was imprinted to trust him like a father and he abused that trust as well as physically violating her. Incest on top of rape. Because he could and possibly also to show he could get away with it under the very noses of his bosses. All those fucked up power differentials are still in place.

The most unsettling thing, however, goes beyond the self-contained world of the story. It’s that despite its much darker underpinnings, this version of the girl in the alley still evokes the same emotional response as its predecessors. When Mellie’s eyes open in response to DeWitt’s cryptic words and she turns on Hearn it’s still vicariously thrilling, the sympathetic adrenaline rush still cuts in. But it’s a lie. It’s a lie because it’s not Mellie herself fighting back but an alien (to her) persona that’s been forced into her mind. By the end of the scene she’s been doubly violated. It’s more compromising than cathartic to watch.

The film studies part
The implication that none of us are as innocent as we might hope of the desires fuelling the Dollhouse is explicit in several of the vox pop interviews. The desire to use a Doll - every serviceman deserves an Ida Lupino (and did possess her image) and the desire to become one - to have your sins erased, to be cared for, just sign on the dotted line.

Ballard’s ‘white knight rescues lady fair’ fantasy is so pervasive it probably launched 1000 fics before the episode even aired. Patton Oswald’s internet mogul’s history was more of a ‘be careful what you wish for’ with a hint of Citizen Kane. If Kane had spent one day a year with a replica sled in the mountains of his youth. The rich are different and when pushed Joel Mynor is no longer the lovable dork Rebecca knew and knows that. It seemed to be not just his lost wife he was paying for but his own lost innocence and violating both it and her by very act of recreating it, again and again and again.


The skience part
“Every part of you that makes you more than a walking cluster of neurons dissolved. At someone else’s whim. If that technology exists it’ll be used. It’ll be abused. It’ll be global. And we will be over. As a species. We will cease to matter. Maybe we should.”

Do species need to matter? Not biologically speaking but from a storytelling point of view they do. Let the illusion that people are not socks slip for a moment and the whole edifice of disbelief suspension totters. On thing this episode achieved was to shore up the story by building some world around it giving it the equivalent of a Hellmouth or a Wolfram & Hart where before all it had was a singular Big Bad. The Dollhouse goes global and the technology has a purpose beyond renting out dreams to the highest bidders.

It always was a puzzle that the technology for making programmable people seemed to have no other applications. I can believe in it not revolutionizing brain science - it comes across as being very analogous to cloning in that respect. Cloning was supposed to shed light on how eggs are programmed but although achievable it’s still such an unreliable process there’s little can be learned from it beyond proof of principle. Not clear whether programming people is similarly volatile. If it were stable the rich could use it to live forever in donor bodies instead of just renting them for services. If it weren’t necessary to wipe people before uploading new skills universities could become redundant. My own guess is that Adele and her bosses are after similar goal to that which the Alliance were attempting with River. If unlocking latent superhuman abilities were the game, Alpha would be no accident and Dewitt’s laissez faire attitude to Echo’s signs of exceeding parameters would suddenly make more sense.

The hopeful ending
Victor likes Sierra. She makes him feel better. A different kind of better than any global plans to create a race of superpeople. Sierra reciprocates. They sit together. Echo watches over them. These people have let themselves be razed and their earth be salted but in the ruins small green shoots are beginning to grow.

Comments

[quinara]

Don't worry about it - good luck with the storm! :)