Dollhouse: Man on the Street

Until now one of the major things that I felt that Dollhouse was missing was paranoia. The basic premise of Dollhouse is one which is filled with room for paranoia. How can we know that anyone on this show is really who they say, or even who they believe themselves to be?

If this technology really works then why use real people inside the dollhouse? How do we know that the doctor, or the scientists or even the woman who runs the dollhouse hasn’t been created with this technology to be exactly what they need. A person with the skills and moral ambiguity that they need to be the perfect dollhouse employee.

This of course might add a bit more instability to the dollhouses since it appears the technology isn’t perfect but it also appears that if you leave them in personality longer that there would be less glitches. This is why would have a few “actives” who you changed regularly and kept in a safe docile state the rest of the time surrounded by other “inactives’ who had their changed only once, perhaps with a single personality rather than the mix of personalities that they use on the actives, basically cloning a single person’s mind.

This episode goes even farther than simply distrusting the people inside the dollhouse though. With the ability to make people into anything you can have sleeper agents. Perhaps they can even kidnap someone, copy their mind, make a few quick adjustments and then replace the same person except with a few adjustments.

So now you can’t trust the people in the Dollhouse, you can’t trust people outside the Dollhouse, but there is one final person who you can’t trust. Yourself. if you were an active you would, by definition, believe you were who you were. In some ways you would even be that person except controlled by others. What are you beyond your personality and memories?

In addition to all of that we also find out that this isn’t the only dollhouse, and more importantly that the fulfillment of dreams isn’t their goal, only their business. That means that they exist for some other, probably more nefarious reason.

We were told that this was going to be a “game changing” show and for me it certainly was. For the first time since Dollhouse has been on the air I really want to see what happens next week. I guess that means it’s time for Fox to cancel it.