The Dollhouse Conundrum

One of the most interesting elements of this series, for me, was the idea of identity and therefore characterization. It’s pretty obvious that identity is at the forefront of this series, since the whole premise revolves around the concept of wiping out people’s identities and swapping, creating and exchanging them. Since I tend to argue that the characterization of main actors in the plot is vital to the completion of a convincing narrative, this idea poses a conflict for me. If the most important people in the series is the actives, who have no working identity of their own, how do you relate, empathize and feel something is at stake? Can we feel for abstract personalities stored in some widget somewhere that we have not met as a whole?

I felt like the show worked to solve that issue for me in Echo (and to some small extent Alpha, Victor, Sierra, November and in the Epitaph 1 episode Whiskey). For the most part, these people are wiped clean of any memories or even personalities. At first, Echo begins seeing clips of her old self and being confused by it, but as the series progresses, she does not only pick up ideas from her old self, but all the selves she has been. She remembers her handler fondly since he put himself on the line for her. She responds based not on the memories of Caroline, but on Echo’s memories. This was important for me. It proved that Echo as a character did not have to be only a puppet, but a living personality that had emerged from experience. There might have been confusion and naivete,  but she forged through as a person molded by her experience. They built a personality despite her having been wiped, she became something else. The other actives began to respond based on old memories from old personalities, this made them more problematic for me. I could not relate to characters I had been given so little to work with. Sierra wasn’t a person, she was a doll with ghosts of her past, but Echo was different. I felt like Alpha’s child-like attraction to Echo may have been something, but it is difficult to say since we get so little, and he did attack Whiskey in a way he would have with his old personality intact.

Whiskey in the last episode proved to be something interesting to me, and slightly creepy. She reverted back to a wiped doll, even though it is unclear whether she lost her mind or it was wiped. She did remember certain things and have a basic need to help the real people and gas the infected. This might be an instinctual response, but I doubt the other dolls would have had such prescence of mind to distingush between people who mean serious harm and innocent people. I’m not sure how I feel about her, but it does pose some questions. Why revert back to Whiskey? She went back to a wiped person, not some other personality or her original one.

It’s hard to feel for any of the other characters, since their motives are continuously suspect, but the dolls have no motivations so they might actually be the most likely candidates for empathy, for me anyway. But then again, their old personalities may have had some unsavory motivations they just don’t remember. Discussing this series in terms of characters is a bit of a conundrum.