Boom, Bust and Echo

Fire bad. Tree pretty.

I finished Omega ten minutes ago. I am tabula rasa. I am on the verge of tears. This is a state of mind I know, one I cherish but have only experienced on three previous occasions. At the conclusions of The End of Evangelion, Promethea, and... The Invisibles. Let that last one linger in your mouth a little. Swirl it around and get it's flavour like a fine wine. Anyone who knows my engagement with pop culture even a little knows what The Invisibles is to me. I need to go put on Porcelain by Moby, before I continue. I lied. Extreme Ways.

I'm not really sure where to start this, and how. I suppose I'll start with Nietzsche, even though Omega was sheer Neo-Platonic Transcendent Gnosticism. Nietzsche posited- as have many other philosophers and critics and well everyone- that it's all been done, yet he was somewhat unique by saying that the Greeks had done it all. They were the alpha and the omega of cultural output. Alpha and omega. The Beginning and The End. The best we could do, according to him, was to shuffle things around in new ways. One could then- if one were to be able to quantify a unit of cultural output- mathematically determine how many permutations of Nietzsche's finite cultural elements are possible. This would not be the upper limit of how long it could take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, it's how long it would take them to produce Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel.

That doesn't really take quality into account though. How many of those permutations are going to be worthwhile? If you have cable television, you already know the answer to that question. If you've watched Twilight you know the answer to that question. The ratio of shit to gold once the sum total of possible configurations of cultural units has been completed is going to be absolutely fucking abysmal. Perhaps then, the question is why the massive indefatigable engines of contemporary culture across all mediums are relevant, worthwhile, or necessary as anything other than a near futile intellectual exercise in figuring out how long it will take before the human species has quite literally produced a word for word perfect duplicate of Plato's The Republic because there's literally nothing else possible that has not been done.

Is that it, then? Is all human culture locked in an evil, grim joke? Is all our culture the eventual answer to the question of how long it would take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards to produce the complete works of Shakespeare twice? If your answer is yes, stop reading now and shoot yourself. There's nothing left for you in this life. High five Nietzsche when you get there. Otherwise, we have to reject Nietzsche and continue searching for understanding why pop could possibly mean anything and how we can surpass not only the Greeks, but anyone and everyone who has come before us. No, I'm not implying exactly what you're probably thinking, but you're on the right track.

Perhaps culture is something more. Perhaps the sum total of the canon of human culture is an essentially collaborative Gematria, perhaps the monkeys on typewriters- the ghoulish zero sum game that they are- miss the mark entirely. Perhaps we have the potential as a species to be six billion rabbis attempting to decode existence in both the act of creation and consumption. Perhaps pop is a constantly mutating, evolving entity that expands to grow new organs as each medium changes and adapts to the times and in response to political, social, and technological changes (especially the much vaunted "flattening" of the post-Internet global cultural and economic exchange).

That might be even more tragic given how intellectually disengaged the general masses are these days. Sure, as a species, we're more educated than a hundred or so years ago, but that doesn't mean that we necessarily have any fucking clue of how to put that education in use or that we have any reason to. Hence Twilight. Reading Jane Austen and thieving certain set pieces and broad strokes does not make you her contemporary any more than shooting a tiger makes you George Orwell.

The tragedy of our times is not that people are shooting tigers. The tragedy is that much of both the critical establishment and general audience has lost the ability to tell a poacher from a hunter. A fraudulent hack from a genuine talent. Stephanie Meyer from Joss Whedon. I see a hemisphere of gullible, essentially exploited individuals singing the praises of a regressive misogynist fairy tale to my right and the most daring, provocative, and ontologically progressive tv show in the history of the medium becoming most notable for being the lowest rated show to ever be picked up for a second season (ostensibly because for the first time in history Fox was actively seeking to avoid a hundred million angry emails).

I'm not going to pretend that from the first episode I knew that Dollhouse was going to pancake me. I will say that I knew I was going to have a shitload of fun and that I saw all I needed in the pilot to guarantee my ass in the chair straight through to the finale, however. Bringing in Eliza Dushku to star, casting Battlestar Galactica alumni, and playing both Lady Gaga and Frontline Assembly within the first ten minutes of the pilot was essentially Whedon dedicating the series to me, and me alone. Yes, that's right. Joss Whedon created Dollhouse for me. He was so glad that I finally came around and started worshipping at the altar of The Slayer that he rewarded me just as any benevolent pagan god worth his salt would. Not that I had any idea to what depths that would feel true until Omega.

It's interesting to note that Dollhouse drew cast from the two productions that Whedon and every member of the writing staff and production team must have known the show would attract the most comparisons to given the themes, plot, and even set design of the show. It's especially interesting given that Tahmoh Penikett essentially reprises his Battlestar Galactica role. At first I was somewhat taken aback at how ridiculous the similarities were, and then my jaw hit the fucking floor with the words "There is a vase on the table with three flowers in it."

The brilliant thing about it though is how much more ultimately devious the Mellie imprint turned out to be than anything Battlestar Galactica achieved before it crumbled into a shambling fucking mess. Jumping the shark at the five yard line is unforgivable in that the identity of the final cylon was the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life. It isn't simply the shock factor and pathos of Ballard unknowingly sleeping with a doll, but what the twin deceptions of Dewitt and Dominic's manipulations of the Millie imprint changed Ballard and triggered the endgame scenario.

An important thing to note is that the basic conceit and plot devices shared by Dollhouse and Battlestar Galactica originate with Phillip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The producers of BSG acknowledged it in their appropriation of the phrase "skinjob" and the casting of Edward James Olmos, who played a supporting role in Blade Runner as the guy who made the paper cranes. Of course an argument could be made for Ballard being just as informed by Deckard as he is Helo with November as Rachael and Alpha as Roy. Pop, as I said before, is a team effort. From Dick's original story straight through to Dollhouse we see not simply several appropriations but successive incubations and advancements of the same basic concepts towards largely different conclusions.

Case in point is that Ballard's character arc closely resembles a personal favourite template of Clive Barker's in which the protagonist begins investigating some form of fringe behaviour or criminal activity, becomes enthralled with it- utterly obsessed- until they integrate into the originally opposing force. In discussing this on the commentary track to The Midnight Meat Train, Barker quoted The Marquis de Sade ("The greatest pleasure is an aversion overcome,") as the philosophical vindication for his frequent usage of the character arc, especially in the Hellraiser franchise. Incidentally, De Sade appears in The Invisibles working alongside the eponymous subversives to fully explore the furthest fringes of humanity- especially in sexuality- in a way that offers itself up as a potential answer for the taunting riddle of just what the true purpose of the Dollhouse is.

Grant Morrison also used a similar arc in The Filth that resulted in more of a synthesis of the two opposing forces rather than a complete integration. At this point in the series- while it's indisputable that Ballard has to a certain extent integrated into the Dollhouse both as a "customer" and "employee"- it is far too early to close the book on his development considering that if we can expect Ballard (and Dollhouse) to survive Whedon's five year plan, we've only seen a fifth of his overall character arc, which is a microscopic amount for any Whedon character.

Everything Dollhouse borrows, it surpasses. Yes. I did just call one single season of Dollhouse superior to the entirety of Battlestar Galactica. I'm fine with series that unfold over a few seasons and take their time with where they're going. Whedon's done a couple of those that were quite good. However, Dollhouse Daft Punked every mark that Battlestar Galactica aimed for. (Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.)

As for The Matrix? Well fuck The Matrix. No one is clever for making the dentist chair correlation, which is incidental. You score a few points if you noticed that Echo is (a) Buddha though. The imperfection of Topher's tabula rasa and imprinting process have crystal clear parallels with a broad interpretation of Buddhist cosmology and the phenomenon of "past life regression" that several of the Actives- Echo most notably- undergo throughout the series. It's thematically most important in the episode where DeWitt runs a test allowing Echo, Victor, Sierra, and November to escape the Dollhouse essentially unmolested, which functions best as a metaphor for achieving enlightenment or nirvana in the sense of it being equivalent to escaping the constant cycle of reincarnation, the state of duḥkha (suffering) inherent in life in the material realm.

In some interpretations of Buddhism, there is essentially a choice to be made once you reach Nirvana; stay there, or go back and free everyone else. That's why the Dalai Llama- according to dogma- keeps coming back. Or in the Platonic interpretation alluded to earlier, she left the cave and came back to show the other dolls that there is more than shadows and dust. But there's a great deal more to Echo than being what is fast becoming a cliche.

There's Omega.

It's fair to say that Echo and Caroline are still essentially the same person, that the residual bits of Caroline that survived Topher's wipes still inform her actions as Echo in both Tabula Rasa and Active modes to the point where in Needs, Adelle is able to easily make the correlation between Echo's actions during the drill and when she broke into the Rossum lab prior to joining the Dollhouse. "That's Caroline," Adelle says with something bordering on maternal pride. In that sense, Needs foreshadowed Omega and gave us all we'd need to know about why Alpha and Omega are so fundamentally different. The use of the term Tabula Rasa in Dollhouse is mostly ironic, but still critical to any interpretation of the series. The most common usage of the term is in reference to the philosophical position that we are born into life with a blank slate. From a biological perspective it's on the extreme side of the nature versus nurture debate, but is most useful in contemporary discussion in taking a non deterministic view of life, that we are open to write our own destinies. In Dollhouse, Tabula Rasa is less to do with beginnings than it does second chances, as the dolls have all signed contracts with the intent of escaping their previous lives and transgressions with the promise of starting over fresh- Tabula Rasa- at the end of their five years at the Dollhouse. But over the course of the first season, a point most clearly made in Omega, there is a certain irrepressibility about the dolls' personalities. Alpha- for instance- is not an insane criminal because he experienced a composite event and had all of the imprints designed for him loaded at once, but because he was a flawed vessel and thus the result was literal cognitive dissonance. Topher couldn't change the basic nature of Alpha or any of the other dolls, only interrupt and inhibit it. Alpha's character arc is essentially the same as that of Alex in A Clockwork Orange; he is a violent offender who volunteers to be rehabilitated through science, through attempts to alter his behaviour at a physical level with disastrous results. The point of A Clockwork Orange was not that violence is glamorous or that man should be free to indulge the whims of the id, but that to seek to limit that which makes us human- both the positive and the potentially negative (as we see that Alex's treatment robs him of the ability to defend himself or engage in consensual sex)- is to rob us of our humanity. That, and that science can never fully prevail over nature. Of course there are also shades of Phillip K Dick's We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, which is better known as the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. While Alpha is the more obvious analog to Alex, Echo's character arc functions much in the same way but predicated on very different instincts. I'm sure that many viewers saw the last line in the episode (Omega) as being a subtle reference to Citizen Kane, it also evokes A Clockwork Orange, which ends with a smirking Alex daydreaming a sex scene, implying that the attempts to control him through behavioral modification had failed, much the same as "Caroline," implies that Omega persists in Echo's head. Alpha and Omega are more than simply experiments gone wrong, they represent the point at which Dollhouse begins to explore the concept of identity the deepest and overlaps with The Invisibles (as well as Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol. For nearly his entire career, Grant Morrison has been writing about the mutability of identity and the interpretation of Tabula Rasa that suggests not only is there infinite potential for society to shape identity and human psychology, but that the individual can modify their own identity, which is a re-ocurring theme most notably employed in The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, as well Batman. While identity modification has many sources and implementations across his writing, the inspiration and philosophy behind it is heavily informed by post modern magic and the occult, most notably in the chaos magic approach to invocation, in which the practitioner seeks to take on the desirable personality aspects of a godform. The "Kali in the Disco" chapter of Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos describes methods and means for ritually taking on aspects of the personality of a given mythological figure, the eponymous example being a female acquaintance of his who invoked the goddess Kali in order to be more confident and seductive while clubbing. Morrison himself, in his Pop Magic essay, takes the concept one step further by suggesting invoking pop culture figures such as James Bond or Metron. In many ways the imprints that Topher creates for the dolls are based on the same underlying principle. In the final issue of The Invisibles Dane and his protege infiltrate a corporation about to release a video game based on the training and doctrine of the Invisibles a decade after the end of the main plot of the series, only to find that the corporation is being run by King Mob, who was involved in developing the video game, which takes the form of a virtual reality simulator in which the player lives out several randomized lifetimes. The five year contract of the dolls is very similar in premise to the Invisibles game, given the range of identities and situations that the dolls can be expected to take on over the course of their five years. Which brings us back to Alpha and Omega. While the intent of the imprints is that they are to be used one at a time and forgotten, both the accident that "created" Alpha and the procedure he used to duplicate it and thus create Omega brought them all into interaction. This of course drove Alpha even further insane than the man he was before joining the Dollhouse was, while Echo's strength of character and empathy allowed her to become not a cacophony of competing voices, but a confident and high functioning gestalt, several individual personalities working in tandem. Taken together Alpha and Omega mirror the beginning and eventual end of Doom Patrol member "Crazy Jane's" character arc whose many personalities each had a separate super power. While officially unable to add it into the narrative for copyright reasons, Morrison has suggested that Crazy Jane of his Doom Patrol is the same individual as Ragged Robin of The Invisibles, who creates The Invisibles in the future, travels to the past in order to join them, and then travels into the future through the supercontext (another metaphor for leaving Plato's cave), ending her journey at the apocalypse in 2012 where she provides King Mob with what he needs to defeat the King of All Tears, which frees them to evolve into their next stage of existence. Which brings me to my conclusion. I'm not going to say that it was necessarily written with this intent, but my personal interpretation of Omega is that she's Crazy Jane/Ragged Robin downloaded into Echo's body (slash the Dollhouse world). Hence; Fire bad, tree pretty.