Ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have been a huge Joss Whedon fan. Whedon’s witty dialogue got me hooked on Buffy and Angel, Firefly had space cowboys (enough said) and, well, now Dollhouse is just badass. Yet, throughout his entire corpus, Whedon is dealing with concrete philosophical and existential questions. Following a Sartrean line of existentialism, Whedon explores the themes of free radical choice, responsibility and meaning. In his previous works, these ideas were more subtle and implicit (in Buffy and Angel for example), yet in his newest television show, Dollhouse, Whedon deals with these issue explicitly, it stares you right in the face.

For those of you who don’t know about Dollhouse, it’s about this secret organization which rents out ‘dolls’ or ‘actives’, people who are programmed with different personalities to suit the needs of clients. The dolls are wiped after every job, having their imprints totally erased, leaving them with very limited consciousness. Right off the bat, the very notion that technology will develop in such a way as to be able to program people with imprinted fake personalities, memories and feelings is terrifying. It’s commonly thought that what makes each human individual unique is our subjective experiences which construct our identity. These experiences (i.e. memories of childhood, the people we meet, our friends, relatives, our first kiss, what we masturbate to, etc.) make up who we are. In Dollhouse, Whedon takes these authentic, subjective experiences away from the ‘dolls’ and imprints them with fake ones. The scary part of the show is that the dolls/actives, when imprinted with fake personalities, memories and feelings, are not able to tell that these experiences are computer generates and inauthentic. That is, for the dolls in Dollhouse, their imprints are as real as your childhood or my sense of humour. They are ‘fake’ but they do not know it. But then the question becomes: what distinguishes fake from real? Have you ever had a memory flashback only to be unable to decide whether it was an authentic memory or something you dreamed? I know I have. Who’s to say that our memories are real or not? We cannot empirically prove that they are/were real. For all we know, they could have been imprinted into our consciousness so that we think they are real. This is nothing new: the concept was explored in Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica (to list two of my other favourite science fictions).

What sets apart Whedon’s Dollhouse from Blade Runner or Battlestar is that Whedon takes the question of authenticity and inauthenticity to the next level by having the dolls attain self-consciousness when not imprinted with a computer generated personality. In Blade Runner, the replicants are androids with imprinted memories, unable to tell whether or not they are actually human or a replicant. In Dollhouse however, the actives start to piece together knowledge and experience when they are not imprinted with any personality. Echo (played by Eliza Dushku) starts to develop a more concrete awareness of the Dollhouse, its staff and the general issues. When the actives are imprinted with a personality, they take on a new name, history, experience, etc. However, when they are devoid of their imprint, the actives remain docile, almost childlike. The emergence of a dialectically developing self-consciousness in the character of Echo is Whedon’s brilliance, for it signifies that even though something as unique and authentic as our personalities can be imprinted and erased, there nevertheless remains some aspect of ‘us’ (human nature?) which is able to grow. This growing aspect in the character of Echo eventually leads to the creation of a fully developed consciousness and personality. In short, Echo becomes a person unto her own; she attains her own identity. This creation of identity, on Whedon’s part, is what sets him apart from Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep/Blade Runner), and Glen A. Larson and Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar).

Dollhouse is just starting its second season, and it will be interesting to see how these themes will develop and grow.