Predictions: The Long-Term Dollhouse Story Arc

Posted: April 10th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: TV | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

matrix-rain

Dollhouse‘s “anybody could be a doll” motif reached a new level this week with the suggestion that Adelle Dewitt, mistress of the institution that imprints hot young things with alternate personalities, may be a doll herself. What does it all mean? If the show lasts long enough, how far could the solipsism possibly go? Here are some options.

  1. Everyone – or almost everyone – is a doll. The doctor, Topher, the handlers, etc. After all, the house is just one arm of a huge organization. Why wouldn’t the parent organization put dolls in charge of the Dollhouses, to make sure that they run correctly?
  2. The dolls, much like the slayers at the end of Buffy Season Seven, will all suddenly become fully integrated super-beings, remembering all their pasts, retaining all their accumulated skills. In this sense, they’ll be like Duncan Idaho in the novel God Emperor Of Dune. Speaking of the Dune series, the Bene Gesserit pass along memories from one woman to another, building an accumulated consciousness; it looks like this is going to play out explicitly in next week’s Dollhouse. All such stories are metaphors for the duality between individual death and racial immortality, etc.
  3. The Dollhouse is ultimately controlled by a sinister entity who is trying to control the world. This could be a part of some classically evil plot to gain political power, or an alien force trying to control humanity, or something more subtle and believable, like a network of banks trying to stabilize the economy.
  4. Everybody is already a doll, and has been for a long time. A sort of Matrix/They Live scenario, in which we realize that the alien/evil-force takeover has already happened. Life is a joke, the rules of society have no meaning, and there’s no such thing as free will.
  5. In a similar scenario, more the Childhood’s End angle, humanity has mostly become the soulless tool of some sinister power, but a secret underground is working to change things. So, even within the Dollhouse, Echo and others are being encouraged to assimilate their personalities and go beyond their original programming, to reach some greater purpose, and become the saviors of humanity, etc. A bit like Kubrick’s starchild in that regard.

Other thoughts? I’m probably not getting it exactly right, but I’ll be surprised if the actual plan isn’t similar to one of the options above.

image by jurvetson

  • http://Website Eric NJB

    Not to get too “literal” when you’re trying for humor, but the show’s writers have actually answered, pretty definitively, the question of whether Adelle (or most of the Dollhouse staff) could be a doll. Episode 7, “Echoes”, exposed nearly every regular or recurring cast member to a “memory drug” created by the Rossum Corporation. The drug had an effect on everyone who came into contact with it, but the effect was completely different depending on whether or not you had been through the mind-altering Doll process.

    Non-Dolls basically got stoned immediately. Dolls didn’t react for a while, then began “glitching” (reacting to hidden memories surfacing, usually traumatic ones). Importantly, NO ONE we saw in the episode knew the Dolls had a different, delayed reaction to the drug until after everyone had come into contact with it, so no one was in a position to “fake” a reaction for the sake of fooling someone–and both reactions were pretty debilitating, in the midst of a crisis situation, so “faking” a reaction would have been borderline suicidal under the circumstances.

    EVERY member of the Dollhouse staff we saw in the episode got high (i.e., the NON-DOLL reaction). This includes Adelle, Topher, Boyd, and Dominic (whose reaction is now irrelevant after last week’s episode). The only regular/recurring staffers who didn’t appear in the episode (that I recall) were Ivy and Dr. Saunders, so we do not officially know whether or not they are Dolls.

    However, as per the writers, Adelle DeWitt was categorically NOT a Doll as of Episode 7. I find it difficult to believe (given we just saw a wipe process performed in Episode 9, and it was excruciating and difficult to do to someone who understood what was happening and hadn’t consented) that there has been any opportunity since Episode 7 for Adelle to have been turned into a Doll when the cameras weren’t looking.

  • http://miconian.com miconian

    Hi Eric, thanks for commenting.

    You make some valid points. On the other hand, who knows? The writers are inventing the universe, so there may be rules we’re not aware of yet. Maybe some dolls were created with a different process than others, and have different types of vulnerability. Maybe Adelle is not a doll per se, but has had her life manipulated in some other, parallel way. The deeper question is, what will the complete metaphor of being a doll turn out to be in the long term? Whatever it is, it’s likely (as these things so often are carefully crafted fiction) that all or most of the characters will be bound by the same metaphor, whether or not they are its most direct manifestation.

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