Episode 8 - Needs
28 September 2009
Synopsis: Adelle gathers her senior staff to discuss how to stop the actives from glitching. Dr Saunders suggests they allow the affected actives to resolve the issues which are causing them to glitch. Echo, Sierra, Victor, November and Mike all wake up in their pods with their original personalities but no memories. They try to fit in with the other actives but Mike is found out and wiped. The other four escape but Echo returns to try and free the other actives. November remembers her dead daughter Katie and goes to her grave. Sierra and Victor confront the man who brought her to the Dollhouse. Echo takes a gun and forces Adelle to free all the other actives. Once each of them reaches emotional closure they fall asleep. Meanwhile Ballard wakes from a dream wondering how the Dollhouse knew that he had talked to Mellie about them. So he searches his apartment and finds a bug. Then he gets a phone message from Caroline who found his name in her file.
The Good: I don’t remember any show being as hard to assess as Dollhouse. Most shows give off a tone, a sense of where the show’s focus or moral voice is. That makes them much easier to enjoy or analyse one way or another. But Dollhouse continues to evade classification. What I can’t tell if that means the show will grow into something deep and dark and great. Or whether it will remain so difficult to engage with that it fails as a television show. Ultimately if a show can’t engage with its audience then it will fail.
This episode begins with Adelle addressing all her senior staff over the recent spate of glitches and the odd behaviour of certain actives. What is so encouraging about this scene is that it addresses the obvious issue which had become increasingly difficult to accept as a viewer. Last episode Echo broke off from one engagement to go and interfere with another and it was practically impossible to imagine how she could be sent out on other engagements after that. So Adelle looks competent and the show tells viewers that everything which goes on in the show is significant and will have repercussions.
The story that develops with the actives gaining consciousness is very intriguing and keep viewers interested in what is going to happen. It is made clear early on that this is a test of some kind when we see Adelle and Laurence discussing the impending escape. I think that was a necessary part of the story to avoid the logic holes which would have developed from the ease of their escape.
The reactions of the four actives who escape bring out some very interesting moments. Caroline emerges as once more trying to save people and make the world a better place, even when she has no memories (bar a mountain – see The Unknown). She finally becomes a character that viewers can fully support as she tries to help all the helpless actives rather than save herself. She brutally takes down one of the handlers, risking her own well being to continue her mission. Then she holds Topher to account for his role in the Dollhouse in a scene with some seriously dark implications (see Best Moment). Finally she marches Adelle and the other actives out of the Dollhouse before reaching her emotional closure.
The implication from her need to rescue the other actives is interesting. Caroline presumably knew all about the Dollhouse when she accepted Adelle’s offer to join it. I assume therefore even when she agreed to join a large part of her still hated the idea of it. Hence her un-quelled desire to destroy it and free the others being exploited.
Meanwhile we learn that Sierra was forced into the Dollhouse by a man who she turned down. This is a difficult one to swallow. Apparently this rich man had her sold into slavery because she refused to have sex with him. Taken at face value it is about as dark and horrific a story as could be told and asks demanding questions of Adelle and company’s collusion in her exploitation (see The Bad and The Unknown).
Victor’s love for Sierra implies that even without memories and in the simple minded doll state, people are still people. They still develop emotional attachments to other people. It’s yet another interesting twist in the ongoing question of what defines people as people and makes them more than computers or pets. Together with that is the fact that the actives all had distinct personalities even without memories of their old lives. Caroline still wanted to save people, instinctively, even without the memories of all the activism she was involved with before or the upbringing which gave her that desire. Victor goes further than even that when he implies that on some level the actives do know what is going on around them but can’t do anything about it. That implies that no matter how much their minds are wiped they retain an independent consciousness which can’t be sedated.
Dr Saunders puts in an impressive acting performance throughout. She plays a strange role where she seems deeply uncomfortable with how the actives are exploited, wants to care for them but also needs to maintain a professional distance. She conveys all that conflict with real skill and has become one of the characters on the show that I would most like to know more about. Once more addressing her scars (when Caroline reacts as a normal person would to their distressing presence) reminds us of Alpha’s ever looming presence in the story.
The episode also neatly gave us more information about the Dollhouse. We got to see the handlers hanging out in their break room and a large warehouse full of outfits for all the actives. We also got a sense of just how deep underground the Dollhouse is. Topher also seems to confirm that the actives will be given a huge cash settlement once they leave.
The final moment of the episode was in a sense, morally reassuring. Caroline manages to leave a message for Paul Ballard which will further his determination to expose the Dollhouse and bring it down. He also shows off his logical detective skills by tracking down the bug which was watching him and Mellie.
The Bad: I still think practically every attempt to inject humour into the show fails. The show is so serious and dark that for me it swallows up humour entirely. When the actives escape their pods we get an attempt to make jokes about them being alien abductees but the tone of the scene is their disorientation and those jokes fall flat. Similarly later Victor finds some revealing outfits laid out for him in the clothes storage. It’s an attempt at humour until you remember the exploitation which he is subjected to in outfits like that.
I wasn’t too happy with the original scene of the actives emerging from their pods either. They jumped to conclusions about where they were within seconds rather than reacting with disorientation and confusion in a more organic way. Again the attempts at humour didn’t help convince me of how real people would react to such a frightening and confusing experience. The fluctuating electricity at the Dollhouse also seemed like a pretty convenient plot device to allow Echo to succeed in reaching closure.
Jimmy (the tech expert Ballard visits) claims that the technology the Dollhouse uses doesn’t even exist yet. He claims that all of his friends combined still couldn’t explain how it works. It’s all very plot exposition rather than making Jimmy seem like a real person. The most glaring part of that to me was that if he really was a tech expert shouldn’t he have been more fascinated by this supposedly amazing bug. He shows no desire to examine it further or ask Ballard where he got it.
Sierra’s story is the most difficult part of this episode. All we are told is that a man forced her into becoming his sex slave. Saunders and Boyd seem to know about it and accept it. Norman goes further and really rubs it in our face that he owns her and can do what he likes to her. Without any hint that there is more to her story that stands as a despicable tale. It puts a black mark against everyone in the Dollhouse and makes it impossible for me and I imagine a lot of viewers to get emotionally invested in any of the Dollhouse employees. After all they are colluding in forced slavery. Now it’s possible that Sierra’s story has a lot more to it which could explain this. But her story is an example of why this show is so difficult to get into. There are so many unanswered questions about the morality of what is going on that it leaves me feeling uneasy. Am I really watching a bunch of immoral villains every week? My feeling from the tone is that they are meant to be flawed humans and not monsters. But when plot strands are left open like this it becomes hard to suspend my disbelief.
The Unknown: I suppose it’s worth asking whether Ballard’s dreams about Echo and Mellie mean anything significant. Fans are bound to speculate that he is an active and that the desire to find the bug in his apartment was somehow fed to him.
Why does Caroline remember a mountain as a safe place? I’m assuming it’s not connected to one of her engagements in “Gray Hour” (104). Adelle also says that Caroline couldn’t live with the consequences of her actions. We still don’t know what happened to her in the two years between breaking into Rossum and becoming an active. Adelle claims she is protecting all of the actives from unbearable memories. Does she believe that’s true? Is that true? Certainly Sierra’s story doesn’t seem to imply that. Was Mike only included as a test to push the other actives to escape? Or did he have some issue which needed resolving?
Best Moment: Caroline confronts Topher in his office about what is going on in the Dollhouse. While she quizzes him and draws the obvious conclusions about exploitation and slavery he begins to sound like a very different apologist. My mind went to the Nazi’s who had to justify the holocaust. “Does it hurt when you do it?” she asks about the imprinting process. “Pain is nothing more than nerves talking to your brain” he says justifying his daily work. “I’m just the science guy” he whines, distancing himself from the responsibility of what he is doing. It’s his genuine terror at what would happen if he were to receive a treatment which is very telling and well acted.
Once more it’s a scene which showcases the deep, dark, complex stories which Dollhouse is capable of telling. And at the same time it makes Topher such a difficult character to like or enjoy. What’s to stop me looking at him as someone constructing a gas chamber or working on a street corner?
Epilogue: Dollhouse may just not be a story you can tell in the format of television. By its nature television requires a shorthand way of communicating. There are only forty minutes or so to get across your story. You have to get an audience to bond with the characters and care about what’s going to happen. Dollhouse is so dark and so deep that it mires you in endless uncomfortable questions of morality.
This is a good episode, it’s an interesting, logical story. It has acting and writing to recommend it. But it still leaves me uncomfortable and without a bond to it.
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