It started as an anthology show that allowed Eliza Dushku to play a different character every week, but in its second season (2009-10, Fox), “Dollhouse” embraces its identity as a serial story exploring what makes a person a distinct individual. It approaches this theme from dozens of different angles, but rather than running off the rails, it’s not only comprehensible, but also compelling and insightful.
I had forgotten a lot of Season 2 from my initial viewing; I had remembered Season 1 better. I notice this odd phenomenon of recalling earlier seasons more than later seasons in a lot of my rewatches. But also, I think material this serialized and intellectually challenging plays better without a weeklong gap between episodes.
After a couple of episodes that take Echo’s personality-of-the-week into wild new arenas – she gets married as part of a long-term undercover mission in “Vows” (1), then is imprinted as a mother in “Instinct” (2) – Joss Whedon and his writing team focus on Echo as a character more so than Echo’s imprints.
So what makes someone an individual entity distinct from all those other humans roaming around the globe – is it their mind, body or soul? All three, it turns out; but what’s fascinating is that every “Dollhouse” character puts a different degree of importance on each of the three aspects.
As Dushku’s Echo evolves past her doll state and becomes a real person (she and Alan Tudyk’s Alpha are the only two dolls who have an ability – thanks to an aspect of their physical body – to resist mind-wipes and permanently store multiple personalities), she feels ownership over this body, even though it rightly belongs to Caroline.
After Topher’s (Fran Kranz) reverse-imprint pulse allows every body to return to its original mind state in “Epitaph Two: Return” (13), Caroline voluntarily imprints herself as Echo again. Admittedly, this isn’t total death for Caroline, as Caroline is one of the 100 or so identities within Echo (indeed, Caroline, when in the form of a 9-year-old girl, calls Echo “me”), but still, it’s a selfless move.
By contrast, Dr. Saunders (Amy Acker) does not want to give her body back to the doll Whiskey or the original inhabitant of the body (1). She understandably does not want to die, although she is ashamed that she’s “stealing” a body and also that she’s a programmed person. She hates Topher because Topher programmed her to hate him, and she hates him for programming her. But still, she wants to remain “her.”
Mellie (Miracle Laurie), on the other hand, kills herself (12, “The Hollow Men”) rather than continue living as a programmed entity – a notion that’s particularly painful to deal with when a code activates her sleeper state as an assassin targeting Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), whom she has been programmed to love.
Ballard, for his part, is horrified to learn he is a doll (11, “Getting Closer”). Even though he’s a doll imprinted with his own Ballard personality, there’s something about knowing you have been programmed that messes with one’s mind (no pun intended).
Indeed, not having one’s “own” mind bothers “Dollhouse’s” characters more than being separated from their own body. As noted, Caroline is ultimately OK with giving up her body so Echo may live. And when Topher is in Victor’s body (5, “The Public Eye”; 6, “The Left Hand”; and 12), he’s not too bothered by it. He’d rather be in his own body, but he thinks Victor’s is fine, too.
Clyde, Rossum Corporation’s co-founder, is even more blasé about what body he’s in. We see him in multiple bodies, including that of Whiskey (12). In “Epitaph Two,” as one body gets fat from gluttony, Clyde prepares to pick out a new doll body for himself.
The fun of Season 2 is following the narrative down the rabbit hole of these scientifically impossible yet fascinating scenarios. Despite having no relation to modern scientific plausibility (less is known about the brain than outer space or the bottom of the ocean), everything works as metaphors; as Whedon advised viewers back in the “Buffy” days: Bring your own subtext.
For example, Ballard’s relationship with Mellie is frustrating because when he meets her again in Season 2, she’s actually Madeline (the original owner of the Mellie body), and naturally Madeline doesn’t know him – and she has a gruffer personality than the kind-hearted, shy Mellie. No one can relate to this exact scenario, but everyone can relate to idealizing someone in your head and then coming to the harsh realization that they aren’t who you thought they were.
Another classically cruel Whedonverse romance comes in the form of Topher and fellow genius Bennett (Summer Glau, in an overlooked turn that’s just as good as River and Cameron). To Topher, Bennett is the real-life equivalent of what Mellie is to Ballard – his dream girl. (Actually, Bennett is only “real-life” in contrast to Mellie. Bennett is a TV trope when compared to the REAL world. The writers undercut the cliché a bit when Topher fires his anti-doll gun at her; it has no effect, so Bennett is – amazingly – real.)
At any rate, Topher and Bennett are giggle-worthy for a few episodes before Bennett gets killed in the war against Rossum. And thus she becomes the latest example of a Whedon trope – the Dream Girl Who Is Cut Down Just When She Has Made The Depressed Hero Happy, following the likes of “Buffy’s” Jenny Calendar and “Angel’s” Fred.
Perhaps to soften the blow of Ballard-Mellie and Topher-Bennett, or perhaps to twist the knife, Season 2 also doles out catnip to the hopeless romantics in the audience via Victor (Enver Gjokaj, who, by the way, gives a hilariously spot-on performance as Topher when he’s imprinted as such) and Sierra (Dichen Lachman). These two are attracted to each other regardless of what personality is in their mind. So with Victor and Sierra, we’re really talking about an attraction at the level of the soul.
How is such a thing possible? In the context of the show, both Anthony (the original mind in Victor) and Priya (the original mind in Sierra) volunteered to become dolls so they could forget their past. Visual artist Priya was tormented and raped by a stalker (4, “Belonging”) while war veteran Tony suffered PTSD (9, “Stop-Loss”). In the context of reality, well, when you think about successful love connections, they all transcend logic (mind) and physical attraction (body). We might as well call the remaining factor the soul.
Season 1 made a viewer think about the ethics of the Dollhouse (Is it a form of slavery, or is it OK if people volunteer to be dolls?), and Season 2 delivers more tough ethical questions, particularly in the climax of “The Hollow Men.” Echo defeats Boyd (Harry Lennix), Rossum’s co-founder, by zapping him with a device that puts him in a doll state. Then she straps a bomb to that doll to blow up Rossum HQ and destroy all its tech.
Arguably, Boyd himself had it coming, but the doll now inhabiting his body certainly did not. Then again, is a blank slate (other than the special cases of Echo and Alpha) a person? Is Echo’s action not the equivalent of killing a mentally challenged person? We would all agree about the wrongness of that, yet the show lets Echo off the hook, as this is the penultimate episode and the finale jumps ahead 10 years.
Indeed, on my first viewing, Season 2 struck me as having rushed storytelling. Although it’s not as bad as I remembered, there are some lingering oddities. Alpha erases Ballard’s brain, but how? Echo suddenly recovers from her headaches and has adjusted to having many personalities in her brain – but how? Why does DeWitt (Olivia Williams) give Topher’s plans for a universal-remote-imprint zap gun to Rossum? At the time, it seemed like she was evil, but that was later revealed to be an intentional mislead for viewers.
Above all, when thinking about this series’ premise, I wonder about the numerous blue-collar workers in the Dollhouses. A story arc early in Season 2 finds Senator Perrin (Alexis Denisof) investigating the rumor of Dollhouses, but shouldn’t Dollhouses be common knowledge with so many people employed by them? (Perrin, by the way, might be the scariest example of what Rossum can do with its technology: He’s a politician whom Rossum quite literally controls, as it can do remote wipes and imprints on him.)
In my review of Season 1, I characterized “Dollhouse” as being quite different from “Buffy,” “Angel” and “Firefly,” but in Season 2 it aggressively addresses many themes touched upon in those series. Watching this season and then thinking back on Whedon’s prior series, it’s clear that he’s always been interested in the theme of identity.
People are constantly body-switching, something that was explored in “Buffy’s” “Who Are You?,” when Buffy and Faith learn to sympathize with each other after spending time in each other’s bodies. The Victor-Sierra romance implies the existence of a soul, as with Angel, whose personality does a 180 based on whether he’s in possession of his soul. And the plot of a government (or a connected corporation) programming people’s brains was also seen in “Firefly” and “Serenity” via the Reavers.
“Blade Runner” comes to mind, too, as a viewer can’t help but wonder who’s a doll and who isn’t. So does “The Matrix” when our heroes maneuver through the Attic, a nightmare mindscape (10, “The Attic”).
And in the 2020-set “Epitaph Two,” the influence is any and all dystopian sci-fi movies. But rather than a nuclear bomb creating this future, it’s another invention that can’t be put back in the toothpaste tube: the ability to manipulate a brain like any other computer. It’s a free-for-all in the streets between Actives (aka dolls, those whose minds aren’t in their original bodies), Actuals (normal people like you and me) and Tech-Heads (dolls who can retain a foundational sense of self and who enjoy adding upgrades to their brains).
After 13 episodes of twists and turns (DeWitt’s a good guy after all?! Boyd was a bad guy this whole time?!), I came to one final realization of why “Dollhouse” is a great series rather than just a fun experiment and an open acting class for Dushku. By the end of the series, I thought of Echo as her own, fully formed character – not as Faith from “Buffy,” and not as a blank slate.