Since I was on vacation recently, I just watched the Dollhouse finale. The good news is that the Joss Whedon series ended up being far better toward the end than it did in the beginning. The better news is that the DVD release will contain two of the episodes not aired — including the unaired “Echo” pilot and a post-script episode. The best news is that, against all odds (and maybe because FOX didn’t want more Firefly-esque bad PR over canceling a critical darling by a beloved creator) Dollhouse will be back for 13 more episodes next year.
The series started out rocky, no doubt. Apparently a fair amount of network meddling kept the show plodding along for about 5 episodes — the most frustrating being an episode where Echo was sent out to be a backup dancer for a pop singer/bodyguard against a crazed fan. However the show picked up as the focus went to Agent Ballard — a lone FBI agent who cannot convince anyone in his field that the Dollhouse is real, and Alpha, a doll who went berserk and is on the loose.
The overarching theme of the show — the exploration of self — is just as strong in the last few minutes of the show as it is in the first few. People’s personalities are tossed onto hard drives before they are wiped to a childlike state and then reloaded with other composite personalities. These personalities are sometimes backed up on other hard drives or combined with others — and every person who joins the program is assured they will be brought back to normal after only a few years of service.
While we’ve mentioned Whedon’s beliefs before, it’s still amazing how often he is willing to go right up to the big questions: “If I am not ‘acting like myself,’ am I still myself?” Every once in a while you hear of someone who experiences a terrible head trauma and spends the rest of their life with a totally different personality: A stroke patient who begins to swear uncontrollably after never doing so for the previous 85 years, a person survives a gunshot to the head only to be distant and cruel to his family, and on and on.
As a Christian, I kept watching this show and thinking “Where is my identity?” If I’m one of those people who grows old with demenita, will I still be me? Will God still own me me even after my memories are gone? Can my identity be in Christ even if I’m unaware of it? Isn’t it mostly a gnostic construct to assume that people are just their thoughts and reactions and that all of the other things, such as their bodies and relationships, are simply needless baggage? Sure, it’s a TV show where people are reduced to unaware slaves doing whatever is asked of them, but few other TV shows get those kinds of questions going in my mind.
If you’ve missed out, the show is still on Hulu on the FOX Website. If you miss the first episode or two don’t worry. Like Buffy and Angel before it the real story in Dollhouse seemed to pick up after a false start.
