Dollhouse
Episode One: Ghost
“Nothing is what it appears to be.”
Thus begins
the first episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, simply
entitled “Ghost.” Spoken by head honcho Adelle DeWitt to
“new volunteer” Caroline, it is also a fitting epitaph for
the series. With the basic premise of an illegal organization that can
program people to literally be anyone, with the intention of selling
their services to the rich and influential, it can appear on one level
as high-end prostitution. Add an FBI Agent intent on bringing down the
Dollhouse, and it’s a conspiracy thriller. In reality, however,
it is neither of these things, as Whedon has turned the obvious into
an opaque exploration of identity and the very essence of being.
The pilot
episode, although not the strongest hour of television Whedon has ever
written, still manages an effective job of introducing the basic elements,
as well as the many metaphors and allegories inherent in the premise.
The brief opening at the beginning is case in point, as Eliza Dushku’s
main character is recruited into the Dollhouse. Despite the seedy elements
of such an organization, Adelle DeWitt spends her time bypassing these
unsavory aspects and instead spouts the basic party-line to Caroline,
reciting how the services that the Dollhouse provides are actually a
good thing. “You’re only seeing part of it,” she says,
along with such statements as “I’m talking about a clean
slate,” “actions have consequences (but) what if they didn’t”
and “what we do helps people; if you become a part of that, it
can help you.”
The conversation
is filled with the ambiguity of the series, as well as the major driving
points. Caroline’s response to DeWitt, for instance, is foreshadowing:
“You ever try to clean an actual slate? You always see what was
on it before.” Although not evident in “Ghost,” the
doll that Caroline reluctantly agrees to become—the appropriately
named Echo—will indeed exhibit flashes of the various personas
she is later imprinted with by her new masters.
Although
a separate plotline, FBI Agent Paul Ballard is likewise introduced in
this episode, albeit briefly. He was assigned to investigate the Dollhouse
fourteen months earlier, but his progress has been “slow.”
It is obvious that while others see the assignment as a joke, Ballard
does not. Although never acquiring any substantive leads, he still follows
his gut by antagonizing those he considers rich and powerful enough
to be potential clients, and even disrupts a Russian human trafficking
ring investigation thinking it might lead him to the Dollhouse. But
despite getting nowhere, Paul Ballard unequivocally believes—actually
“knows”—the Dollhouse exists.
He also
displays a deep understanding of human nature. The discussion between
Ballard and his superiors—obviously inserted to deflect what many
critics initially considered to be a flaw in the premise of the series—underscores
this fact. “I’m a billionaire, I can hire anybody for anything,”
a skeptical agent offers. “And I’m going to go to an illegal
organization and have them build me, program me, what? The perfect date?
Confessor, assassin, dominatrix, omelet chef? I’m paying a million
dollars for that? I can get that. I have everything I want.”
“Nobody
has everything they want,” Ballard retorts. “It’s
a survival pattern. You get what you want, you want something else.
If you have everything, you want something else. Something more extreme,
something more specific. Something perfect.” While it is questionable
how “real” a Dollhouse active—the preferred term—may
be, it is not merely an act on their part. They have been programmed,
after all. An active is thus perfection in belief, while having one
imprinted is the power of control taken to a whole new level. For Paul
Ballard, however, it is something even more. “The only way to
imprint a human being with a new personality is to remove their own,”
he comments. “Completely. We’re talking about people walking
around who may as well been murdered. Which to me sounds pretty bad.”
Ballard
is thus morally committed to his investigation, even when his superiors
reprimand him for his intrusive methods. “You have to back off,”
he is told. “Do you understand?” Ballard simply responds,
“That won’t be a problem.” Throughout the conversation,
however, clips are interspersed of him in a boxing ring, squaring off
against a larger, stronger opponent. Once beaten down onto the mat and
at the point where another person would say enough—the point where
one would learn to back off—Ballard instead gets up and aggressively
attacks his opposition and ultimately defeats him. Despite acquiescing
to his superiors, Paul Ballard is obviously not the kind of man who
knows how to back off or be swayed by a more formable opponent.
Although
we see Echo’s first engagement as a wild, motorcycle-racing, rope-filled
weekend of sexual fun to celebrate a male client’s birthday, this
is not the driving storyline of “Ghost.” When a rich father
named Gabriel Crestejo has his twelve year-old daughter kidnapped by
some Mexican thugs, he turns to the Dollhouse, of which he is apparently
a regular customer, for assistance. “I don’t want Rambo,”
he tells them, “I want a negotiator. This goes like clockwork,
you understand, that’s what I need.” What he gets is Echo,
but just like Adelle DeWitt’s comment that “our actives
are not robots” suggests, it is not necessarily the Echo he was
expecting.
Her imprinted
identity is Eloise Penn. Despite a cold exterior, trained eye, lifetime
of experience and the ability to distinguish between the amateur and
the professional, Eloise Penn is far from the hostage negotiator one
would expect. For starters, she’s nearsighted and wears glasses,
giving her a meek librarian look. And she also has asthma.
“You
see someone running, incredibly fast, the first thing you’ve got
to ask is, are they running to something or are they running from something,”
resident technological genius Topher Brink explains to Echo’s
handler, Boyd Langton, in regards to Eloise Penn’s physical deficiencies.
“The answer is always both. These personality imprints, they come
from scans of real people. Now I can create amalgams of those personalities,
pieces from here or there, but it’s not a greatest hits. It’s
a whole person. Achievement is balanced by fault. By a lack. Can’t
have one without the other. Everyone who excels is overcompensating.
Running from something, hiding from something.”
This is
no truer than with Eloise Penn. While the impressive resume of degrees
in psychology, forensic science and profiling makes her qualified, the
fact that she herself was abducted as a child and held captive for three
months is what makes her uniquely qualified. She is thus truly running
both to and from something—trying to save others from suffering
the same fate she once endured while likewise trying to escape the very
past that makes her so good at what she does. It’s her flaws,
in other words, that make her a success.
“All
the terrible memories these men put in your head,” Crestejo at
one point asks Echo, in another double-meaning innuendo. “Why
would they do that?” Although the intent was to “make”
Echo the perfect hostage negotiator, the reality plays out differently
than expected. During the payoff, Eloise Penn recognizes one of the
kidnappers. More specifically, she recognizes him as the “one”
who tormented and held her captive. She also realizes, based on her
“personal” experience, that he will never release the kidnapped
child even after getting paid—it’s not what he truly wants,
after all—and warns her client. This only leads to tragedy, however,
when Crestejo is shot (though not critically), forcing Boyd Langton
to intervene and shoot one of the kidnappers while the other three escape
with both the money and the girl.
“He
said he was a ghost,” Echo, obviously shaken, tells her handler.
“You can’t fight a ghost.”
When Adelle
DeWitt is ready to shut down the engagement and cut the Dollhouse’s
losses, even with the kidnapped girl still in the hands of her captives,
Langton objects and plays to the boss lady’s misguided optimism.
“I’ve been here long enough to know that you like to tell
yourself that what we do helps people,” he says to her. “Let
Echo help this girl.” While Langton is referring to the current
victim, he might as well mean the amalgamation known as Eloise Penn.
“One of them was abused by the guy she ran into,” Topher
eventually discovers in regards to Echo’s imprint. “I looked
her up. She killed herself. Last year. She never got away from him.”
Eloise
Penn is thus a ghost as well. She no longer exists. She may once have,
but now she’s just a series of bad memories that have been put
into someone else’s brain. Thus although the real Eloise Penn
may be dead, part of her still lives in Echo. The active therefore knows
the kidnapper’s routine and his patterns. She goes alone to the
cabin where the three kidnappers are still holding their hostage and
tells the other two that the man she refers to as a “ghost”
plans on turning against them. But Echo also does something the real
Eloise Penn was never able to do: she confronts her abductor. When he
tells her to shut up or he’ll gag her, she replies, “I think
I’m a little too old for you.” She then goes further, telling
the other kidnappers, “I know everything. All the girls he kept,
till he was through with them, till he got bored, or just broke them
down. I even know about the one he dumped in the river before he was
sure she was dead.” She then turns and faces her tormentor. “It’s
over,” she tells him. “You can’t hurt me anymore.
You can’t fight a ghost.”
In the
end, the kidnappers are gunned down and the little girl is saved. “You’re
OK,” Echo says to her after she’s been rescued. “You’re
free.” But in the next frame Echo is back in the Dollhouse, wiped
clean. Eloise Penn is no more, but she did finally find some peace—even
freedom—at long last. Haunted her entire life by a ghost, in the
end she was able to escape the lingering mental prison of her captivity
by becoming a ghost herself.
Anthony
Letizia (January 4, 2010)
