Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive

May

2009

Dollhouse 1.12: Omega

Posted on 22:48, May 8th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

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This season finale took remarkable twists sprinkled with wry humor that relieved the bleakness for brief pauses, only to deepen it in contrast. Two kinds of trust were explored, exploited, and broken. The first kind is a more general emotion that makes you willing to follow another: a belief that you will not be betrayed. The second is trust in a person to behave in a consistent manner or at least according to the picture you have of them.

We already know that the actives are imprinted with the first kind of trust in their handlers. The imprint Alpha uses to get Echo to leave the dollhouse with him has, naively, this sort of trust in the person she believes him to be.

The second is the kind of trust that DeWitt has in Ballard, as her statements to Boyd (in whom I suspect she has the same kind of trust) show. She trusts that she knows what he wants and that he will continue to act according to that; indeed, when we see that he has joined the employ of the dollhouse, it shows that what he wants has been programmed. The ex-agent exchanges service to an entity he considers to be evil for the freedom of a woman whose body he fell in love with because of the dollhouse. He gets to feel not only that he is a savior, but also (inaccurately) that he has atoned for raping her, and this is why he chooses freeing Madeline over freeing Caroline.

Similarly, Alpha trusts that when he implants all of Echo’s personalities into her, she will see the world the way he sees it. Her turning around and hitting him with the pipe (which I was hoping for since the moment she began to say she understand) shows how wrong this is. The difference in their responses is at least in part due to their original personalities: Alpha was a serial killer, Echo when she was Caroline was a recent college graduate who wanted to improve the world. Implanted with a composite of personalities, Echo can rebel not only against Alpha but also against the dollhouse; Caroline tells her that she needs to fulfill her contract, but Echo argues that no one can sign a contract to be a slave.

It is troubling that, in order to fully rebel, she must first have a set of personalities implanted by Alpha; only the person created by Alpha and the dollhouse (since it is the dollhouse that recorded the personality wedges in the first place) can defy their power. This is, however, realistic: only the people we become because of an experience of oppression can turn around and stand up against that oppression. Only people shaped by another’s power can fight against that power for themselves. Of course, you still have to decide to rebel; Whiskey accepts her implanted personality instead. This may depend upon who you were before.

This brings up the question of why Caroline trusted the dollhouse in the first place—why she signed the contract. Her other choice would likely have been jail. In the dollhouse, by contrast, she would be pampered: luxurious surroundings just enough of an Asian overlay to appeal to Orientalist desires, spa treatments, five-star dining. She traded her free will for pampering and a promise of riches in the end: many a recent college graduate could be said to do the same though less explicitly.

In the end, Echo is back in the dollhouse, but two things indicate that she is still struggling. First, she reaches out to touch Topher’s chest (looking at how unsettled he has been over the last few episodes, I have to wonder if he will end up being an ally in struggles against the dollhouse eventually) then, at last, she whispers her real name while in the sleeping pod.

I’m expecting great things from season two, though it would sort of fit the tone of the show if it just ended there with her still fighting but without any sign of how she might succeed.