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More thoughts on Dollhouse... (spoilers for 1x11)
I've seen a lot of people wondering about Ballard's motivations and the difference in the way he's treating November vs the way he's treating Echo.
And it makes sense to me, the way Buffy telling Spike that he can never do anything good without a soul makes sense -- you have to take the character's worldview into account. In the Buffy example, believing that Spike can be good without a soul means that Angel/Angelus didn't have to happen. That Angel is a worse person than Spike. Buffy can't go there.
For Ballard, only the original person seems to count as real. And, with Echo/Caroline, that's precisely who Alpha introduced him to -- the 'real'/original person. He's 'met' Caroline through her college video. Caroline is, to him, a Real Girl.
In "Man on the Street", he's convinced by the client (and Mellie) that chasing after the idea of Caroline may make him as sick as the Dollhouse and its clients, so he tries to make a connection with Mellie, a sweet, real girl who cares about him.
Only she isn't. Finding out that Mellie wasn't real broke something in his heart. She's November, but November isn't real either. All he knows is that Mellie is a lie. He has no clue who November really is and no hope of believing that she can snap out of it, as he was told by November that she would be forced to kill Paul if the Dollhouse found out he knew the truth.
Because that's what the phone call at the end of "Needs" gave him. Hope that Caroline was still alive in Echo.
Here, I'm going to lay out what I believe each person's perspective of Echo (and the Actives) is:
Ballard: only the original person is real/anything else is a lie
Boyd: Echo is surprising and vulnerable; needs protection. I think he sees 'Echo' as the blank-slate persona. That's who she is to him.
Dewitt: Tends to treat the persona as a whole, could define 'Caroline's' behavior in "Needs" as definitively her.
Topher: "They're a bit bison." Doesn't seem to see or treat Actives as people, but isn't cruel to them.
Dominic: Actually seems to come close to Ballard in not seeing Actives as 'real' people. His words in "Target" and Ballard's in "Briar Rose" have discomfiting similarities.
Saunders: Hard to say. Treated the Dolls by treating the underlying needs of the original person.
Now, I'm going to chatter about the timeline for a bit.
Did they say somewhere that Echo's existed for three years? That sounds familiar but I may be pulling it out of my ass, so correct if I'm wrong. We do know that, in the beginning, Caroline went to college in the shadow of Rossum Corporation. She was an activist-type, particularly for animals, and she had a boyfriend that she really cared about. After she's been out of college for a bit, the two of them broke into the Rossum building and discovered that Rossum was experimenting on people as well as animals. In the escape, her boyfriend was shot.
Then, she and Adelle Dewitt engaged in a cat-and-mouse for 'almost two years' before Caroline gets kidnapped by people in a black van, held underground for two days, and given the hard sell by Dewitt.
She becomes Echo.
Three months before the episode "Target", Alpha composites. He kills several Actives, but not Echo. He, as per his words in "Briar Rose", promised her that he'd come back for her. He slices up Saunders' face, as something of an 'art project' it seems (he calls it a 'gift' in "Briar Rose" and, hey, he didn't kill her, so, there's that), blood gets on Topher's shirt (and he seems more than a little in shock) and Alpha makes his escape before Dominic and the guards are even on the scene.
When he returns in "Briar Rose", she remembers "something" about him and he "remembers everything" about her. He very definitely calls her Echo (again, I return to my speculation that Echo and Alpha had formed an attachment similar to Sierra and Victor's, but because they're both compositing, they were able to keep it hidden).
After Alpha, despite being told that he's been killed, Saunders doesn't leave the Dollhouse again.
Boyd is brought in -- he's an ex-cop and they place him in charge of the Active that Alpha didn't kill -- was it only because Alpha had killed her handler or because they wanted that extra protection there?
He has moral qualms, but overcomes them. He begins to feel a connection and a sense of affection for Echo. As time goes by, his sympathies line up more and more with the Dollhouse's.
During all this time, Dominic may already be reporting to the NSA. There is also another spy within the Dollhouse itself, one that knows there is a bigger purpose at work but doesn't know what it is.
Paul Ballard is placed in charge of the investigation of the Dollhouse and proves hard to shake. Dewitt places two undercover spies into his life -- Mellie to watch him and ask questions and Lubov to feed him disinformation and try to convince him that the Dollhouse doesn't exist.
Alpha kills two people, sends Caroline's picture (and the video, it looks like) to Ballard, and sets up Echo's engagement in "Target" (from what Topher guesses and he has more reason than most to know what he's talking about).
We know that he doesn't want Echo dead (per "Briar Rose"). Therefore, he wanted Echo to kill his agent. My roommate,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jic speculated that the real purpose was to get Echo to drink the drugged water, which seemed to encourage compositing.
"He's right about you. You really are special."
"What are you talking about?"
"Shoulder to the wheel, baby."
And she remembers that gesture, the hand to shoulder, even as her 'blank slate' self ("Ever tried to clean a slate? You can always see what was on it before.").
In this episode, Echo saves Boyd and saves herself, creating a two-way trust bond whereas before there had only been the one-way from Echo to Boyd. He's invested in her now.
In "Stage Fright", we see Echo and Sierra both remember a connection to each other. We also see Echo wary of showing that bond in front of Dominic, who she doesn't trust. Again, Echo is the one who saves the day in "Stage Fright", going beyond the limits of programming to actually solve the problem of Rayna wanting to die. It's revealed to the audience that Victor is an Active.
In "Gray Hour", Alpha (again, Topher's speculation) remote-wipes Echo in the middle of a dangerous engagement. She survives (with some help from Sierra), saves herself and the better of the criminals and declares to Boyd that she isn't broken. He appears to agree, but we also know that he says later that "they're all broken", which is more in line with his general actions toward her. She's not broken. Again, she kills to save herself. The second time Alpha's actions have led her in that direction.
In "True Believer", we have Echo sent in undercover -- Dominic tries to kill her at the end of the episode, Ballard sees her on tv and knows that Caroline really is a doll, and Saunders and Topher find out that Victor is sexually attracted to Sierra, even in his doll state.
During all this, whenever Victor is sent out on a 'Miss Lonelyhearts' engagement, he's really sleeping with Adelle Dewitt, who has him call her 'Catherine' while she calls him 'Roger'.
In "Man on the Street", Ballard comes face-to-face with two separate imprints of Echo, and also learns of the spy inside the dollhouse. Boyd discovers that Sierra's handler has been abusing her, and so Adelle sends the handler to be killed by Mellie, in her reveal as a Sleeper Active. Ballard sleeps with Mellie (not knowing she's an Active) because he doesn't want to be the kind of guy who lusts after people who are brainwashed. It's kinda funny, in a twisted way.
A virus from Rossum that affects memory leaks out onto the college campus. We discover that, deep down, Dominic actually feels like crap for attacking Echo back in "True Believer". The man who released the virus is picked up by the Dollhouse and 'offered' a job as an Active.
In "Needs", the Dollhouse sets up an experiment meant to stop their Actives from being miserable with their lives and compositing and whatnot, by giving them bits of their original imprint back to try to work it out of their systems. Sierra confronts the man who sold her to the Dollhouse (lending further taint to it, as she obviously was no volunteer), November appears to have joined up because her child died (I'm guessing in a way that she feels responsibility for), and Victor wanted to help Sierra.
Caroline wanted to free all the Actives (again, she had no issues with severely hurting/possibly killing the handler that got in her way). Before she gets wiped again, she calls Ballard.
And he gets his hope that he can save Caroline (which is echoed in his dream in the beginning).
In "A Spy in the House of Love", Ballard's world crashes down when he finds out that Mellie is a doll. She's not real, she never loved him, etc. Which means that he's going to cling even more to the notion of saving the one 'real' person that he has met through the Dollhouse.
Echo volunteers to help root out the spy, uncovers Dominic, also helpfully eliminating the man who had tried to kill her. Adelle stops her visits with 'Roger'. Dominic is placed in the attic. Boyd becomes head of security.
In "Haunted", Ballard tries to discover who Mellie/November might really be, only to uncover a list of identities as long as his arm. He doesn't know who she is. We discover that Topher has no friends and that Adelle does.
In "Briar Rose" both Ballard and Alpha set their plans to save the girl into motion (and Boyd is placed directly opposite, as the man who wants to keep her there so that she'll be 'safe'). Ballard breaks Mellie's heart, which triggers her to get picked up by her handler. He finds out where the Dollhouse is.
Alpha kills Keppler and takes his body to Tucson, distracting the Dollhouse to think that he's there. They send Sierra to investigate. Ballard finds 'Keppler' and they break into the Dollhouse together, handily providing Alpha with distraction #2 -- they're so busy taking care of Ballard that Alpha has the chance to get Echo and imprint her, and the two of them escape the Dollhouse.
And it makes sense to me, the way Buffy telling Spike that he can never do anything good without a soul makes sense -- you have to take the character's worldview into account. In the Buffy example, believing that Spike can be good without a soul means that Angel/Angelus didn't have to happen. That Angel is a worse person than Spike. Buffy can't go there.
For Ballard, only the original person seems to count as real. And, with Echo/Caroline, that's precisely who Alpha introduced him to -- the 'real'/original person. He's 'met' Caroline through her college video. Caroline is, to him, a Real Girl.
In "Man on the Street", he's convinced by the client (and Mellie) that chasing after the idea of Caroline may make him as sick as the Dollhouse and its clients, so he tries to make a connection with Mellie, a sweet, real girl who cares about him.
Only she isn't. Finding out that Mellie wasn't real broke something in his heart. She's November, but November isn't real either. All he knows is that Mellie is a lie. He has no clue who November really is and no hope of believing that she can snap out of it, as he was told by November that she would be forced to kill Paul if the Dollhouse found out he knew the truth.
Because that's what the phone call at the end of "Needs" gave him. Hope that Caroline was still alive in Echo.
Here, I'm going to lay out what I believe each person's perspective of Echo (and the Actives) is:
Ballard: only the original person is real/anything else is a lie
Boyd: Echo is surprising and vulnerable; needs protection. I think he sees 'Echo' as the blank-slate persona. That's who she is to him.
Dewitt: Tends to treat the persona as a whole, could define 'Caroline's' behavior in "Needs" as definitively her.
Topher: "They're a bit bison." Doesn't seem to see or treat Actives as people, but isn't cruel to them.
Dominic: Actually seems to come close to Ballard in not seeing Actives as 'real' people. His words in "Target" and Ballard's in "Briar Rose" have discomfiting similarities.
Saunders: Hard to say. Treated the Dolls by treating the underlying needs of the original person.
Now, I'm going to chatter about the timeline for a bit.
Did they say somewhere that Echo's existed for three years? That sounds familiar but I may be pulling it out of my ass, so correct if I'm wrong. We do know that, in the beginning, Caroline went to college in the shadow of Rossum Corporation. She was an activist-type, particularly for animals, and she had a boyfriend that she really cared about. After she's been out of college for a bit, the two of them broke into the Rossum building and discovered that Rossum was experimenting on people as well as animals. In the escape, her boyfriend was shot.
Then, she and Adelle Dewitt engaged in a cat-and-mouse for 'almost two years' before Caroline gets kidnapped by people in a black van, held underground for two days, and given the hard sell by Dewitt.
She becomes Echo.
Three months before the episode "Target", Alpha composites. He kills several Actives, but not Echo. He, as per his words in "Briar Rose", promised her that he'd come back for her. He slices up Saunders' face, as something of an 'art project' it seems (he calls it a 'gift' in "Briar Rose" and, hey, he didn't kill her, so, there's that), blood gets on Topher's shirt (and he seems more than a little in shock) and Alpha makes his escape before Dominic and the guards are even on the scene.
When he returns in "Briar Rose", she remembers "something" about him and he "remembers everything" about her. He very definitely calls her Echo (again, I return to my speculation that Echo and Alpha had formed an attachment similar to Sierra and Victor's, but because they're both compositing, they were able to keep it hidden).
After Alpha, despite being told that he's been killed, Saunders doesn't leave the Dollhouse again.
Boyd is brought in -- he's an ex-cop and they place him in charge of the Active that Alpha didn't kill -- was it only because Alpha had killed her handler or because they wanted that extra protection there?
He has moral qualms, but overcomes them. He begins to feel a connection and a sense of affection for Echo. As time goes by, his sympathies line up more and more with the Dollhouse's.
During all this time, Dominic may already be reporting to the NSA. There is also another spy within the Dollhouse itself, one that knows there is a bigger purpose at work but doesn't know what it is.
Paul Ballard is placed in charge of the investigation of the Dollhouse and proves hard to shake. Dewitt places two undercover spies into his life -- Mellie to watch him and ask questions and Lubov to feed him disinformation and try to convince him that the Dollhouse doesn't exist.
Alpha kills two people, sends Caroline's picture (and the video, it looks like) to Ballard, and sets up Echo's engagement in "Target" (from what Topher guesses and he has more reason than most to know what he's talking about).
We know that he doesn't want Echo dead (per "Briar Rose"). Therefore, he wanted Echo to kill his agent. My roommate,
jic speculated that the real purpose was to get Echo to drink the drugged water, which seemed to encourage compositing."He's right about you. You really are special."
"What are you talking about?"
"Shoulder to the wheel, baby."
And she remembers that gesture, the hand to shoulder, even as her 'blank slate' self ("Ever tried to clean a slate? You can always see what was on it before.").
In this episode, Echo saves Boyd and saves herself, creating a two-way trust bond whereas before there had only been the one-way from Echo to Boyd. He's invested in her now.
In "Stage Fright", we see Echo and Sierra both remember a connection to each other. We also see Echo wary of showing that bond in front of Dominic, who she doesn't trust. Again, Echo is the one who saves the day in "Stage Fright", going beyond the limits of programming to actually solve the problem of Rayna wanting to die. It's revealed to the audience that Victor is an Active.
In "Gray Hour", Alpha (again, Topher's speculation) remote-wipes Echo in the middle of a dangerous engagement. She survives (with some help from Sierra), saves herself and the better of the criminals and declares to Boyd that she isn't broken. He appears to agree, but we also know that he says later that "they're all broken", which is more in line with his general actions toward her. She's not broken. Again, she kills to save herself. The second time Alpha's actions have led her in that direction.
In "True Believer", we have Echo sent in undercover -- Dominic tries to kill her at the end of the episode, Ballard sees her on tv and knows that Caroline really is a doll, and Saunders and Topher find out that Victor is sexually attracted to Sierra, even in his doll state.
During all this, whenever Victor is sent out on a 'Miss Lonelyhearts' engagement, he's really sleeping with Adelle Dewitt, who has him call her 'Catherine' while she calls him 'Roger'.
In "Man on the Street", Ballard comes face-to-face with two separate imprints of Echo, and also learns of the spy inside the dollhouse. Boyd discovers that Sierra's handler has been abusing her, and so Adelle sends the handler to be killed by Mellie, in her reveal as a Sleeper Active. Ballard sleeps with Mellie (not knowing she's an Active) because he doesn't want to be the kind of guy who lusts after people who are brainwashed. It's kinda funny, in a twisted way.
A virus from Rossum that affects memory leaks out onto the college campus. We discover that, deep down, Dominic actually feels like crap for attacking Echo back in "True Believer". The man who released the virus is picked up by the Dollhouse and 'offered' a job as an Active.
In "Needs", the Dollhouse sets up an experiment meant to stop their Actives from being miserable with their lives and compositing and whatnot, by giving them bits of their original imprint back to try to work it out of their systems. Sierra confronts the man who sold her to the Dollhouse (lending further taint to it, as she obviously was no volunteer), November appears to have joined up because her child died (I'm guessing in a way that she feels responsibility for), and Victor wanted to help Sierra.
Caroline wanted to free all the Actives (again, she had no issues with severely hurting/possibly killing the handler that got in her way). Before she gets wiped again, she calls Ballard.
And he gets his hope that he can save Caroline (which is echoed in his dream in the beginning).
In "A Spy in the House of Love", Ballard's world crashes down when he finds out that Mellie is a doll. She's not real, she never loved him, etc. Which means that he's going to cling even more to the notion of saving the one 'real' person that he has met through the Dollhouse.
Echo volunteers to help root out the spy, uncovers Dominic, also helpfully eliminating the man who had tried to kill her. Adelle stops her visits with 'Roger'. Dominic is placed in the attic. Boyd becomes head of security.
In "Haunted", Ballard tries to discover who Mellie/November might really be, only to uncover a list of identities as long as his arm. He doesn't know who she is. We discover that Topher has no friends and that Adelle does.
In "Briar Rose" both Ballard and Alpha set their plans to save the girl into motion (and Boyd is placed directly opposite, as the man who wants to keep her there so that she'll be 'safe'). Ballard breaks Mellie's heart, which triggers her to get picked up by her handler. He finds out where the Dollhouse is.
Alpha kills Keppler and takes his body to Tucson, distracting the Dollhouse to think that he's there. They send Sierra to investigate. Ballard finds 'Keppler' and they break into the Dollhouse together, handily providing Alpha with distraction #2 -- they're so busy taking care of Ballard that Alpha has the chance to get Echo and imprint her, and the two of them escape the Dollhouse.