Discussion Series / Dollhouse

Please, o pretty please, somebody who has watched Buffy, remove the major spoilers from the Dollhouse trope list. Whoever Tara and Caleb are, I'd rather it stays that way while watching season 2.

Listed under 'Actor Allusion': 'Not exactly an allusion and it may have been a mistake, but in "A Love Supreme" (2x08) Alpha says to Echo "Faith! You are nothing but a science project!"'

Alpha's line here is actually, "Face it, you are nothing but a science project."

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Removed for being at best highly subjective and also in my opinion wrong:

• You Fail Logic Forever: Many of the Rossum executives, particularly in the flash-forward in Epitaph Two, seem to honestly believe that they are functionally immortal, because if their current body dies, back-up memory wedges of their personality will be copied into new bodies by their henchmen. They believe this to the extent that one of them routinely over-eats to the point of obesity, with the express plan of using up his current body because he feels he can just pick out another one like a suit. The problem with this is that they've explicitly established that it is not a mind-transfer technology, but a mind duplication technology. If one instance of "Clyde 2.0" dies, that specific consciousness is dead forever. It doesn't help him that another "Clyde 2.0" will be reactivated somewhere else. This may be someone explained due to the fact that Clyde 2.0 personality was stated to have been specifically designed to be subservient to Rossum, so maybe he was actually programmed to not care about this. However, some of the other super-rich Rossum corporate executives honestly don't seem to recognize the difference. This might not, of course, be a mistake on Whedon's part: if such technology existed in real life, yes, a lot of rich idiots would probably react this way, stupidly not making the logical connection that their current consciousness dies with their body.
  • To be fair, the definition of a 'person' gets pretty fluid by the show's end. If you don't believe in a soul or something similar (and Rossum employees clearly don't), you could make a convincing philosophical case that a perfect duplicate of you IS you.

Something that's been bugging me for awhile- why is there this giant geek imprint on the Interwebs that Dollhouse was some sort of monumental storytelling failure? It's weirding me out because Netflix thinks I'd like Dollhouse, and I read an Entertainment Weekly article a few months ago where their poll showed a majority thought that Dollhouse is his best work. Is there some big critical disconnect I'm just not seeing?

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Removed an example for Idiot Ball: the listing said that Ballard never offered Echo a treatment in "Instinct", and that if he had the problem would have been wrapped up much earlier. Having seen the episode recently, I can say that 1) he had plenty of time offscreen to offer her one 2) his snide remark to Topher, which was actually listed in the example, implied rather directly that he had tried offering Echo a treatment 3) the plot twist in that episode is a systems failure where the hormonal changes triggered by Topher's "mother" programming cause Echo to be unresponsive to her obedience triggers (such as immediate trust of her handler). So, Paul doesn't actually screw up here, and he isn't carrying the idiot ball, at least in this instance.

Echo during her "treatment."

This appears erroneous. The colour of the light on the head piece of the chair is blue during imprinting (making an "active") or wiping (putting them in tabula rasa, blank slate or "doll state"). The only time it is purple is when a doll is bonding with their new handler, whereby the "Everything's going to be alright" / "Now that you're here" script is played out.

I'm too lazy to change the picture, but had to point out the inaccuracy.

That cat's something I can't explain...

Umm, ok, I'm pretty sure the entire Whedon idolization in the first paragraph is unnecessary. It's not like he managed to wrap it up that well. To a viewer who know what was going on behind the scenes, it was fairly obvious he was scrambling to set up a finale (as the plot pace frantically quickened after it returned from the break and it was known it was gonna be cancelled).