Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
36 Fall 2009 The show, whose first season was released on DVD this summer and which has been renewed for its second season despite mediocre ratings, centers on an illegal and quasi-mythical organization in Los Angeles that uses a fantastic neurological technology to provide programmable human "dolls" to wealthy clients for any number of tasks: sex, companionship, criminal deeds. Between assignments, the dolls — whose original selves have contractually agreed to offload their personalities and serve five-year terms of servitude before getting their selves back — live like contented lobotomy patients in the "dollhouse," an underground facility that resembles an Ayurvedic spa, Santa Monica-style. A rogue cop is hunting the organization, which is also experiencing its own technical difficulties — most notably the pesky tendency of some dolls to grow towards self-awareness and occasionally explode with festivals of batshit mayhem. On one level, Dollhouse is just the sort of goofy, cleavage-baring thriller you might expect to see on Fox on a Friday night. Hotties and motorcycles abound, edits are slick and fast, and the requisite chase scenes and bone-crunching ninja brawls are often executed in high heels, for which the show has a considerable fetish. Despite the intelligence and wit of many episodes, the narrative flow often feels more like a roller-coaster than an organic story, with abrupt and needless twists and turns that derive less from plot or character needs than the compulsion to yank the audience around. The acting is so-so throughout, with few of the actors rising to the challenge of embodying characters that are not really "characters" at all, but flesh-bots who oscillate between innocuous zombiedom and a revolving door of one-shot personalities. Still, in spite of the show's glaze of artificial popcorn butter — or perhaps, given the loop-de-loop logic of sensationalist popular culture, precisely because of its disarming layer of cheese — Dollhouse takes a reasonably meaty bite out of one of the more ominous and potentially liberating conundrums of 21 st century life: the thoroughly constructed nature of human identity. The show frames this conundrum in terms of neuroscience and the pervasive pop metaphor of the mind as a programmable input-output device. Original personalities are "wiped" and stored on cartridges that resemble old 8-track tapes; other "imprints" are not only shuffled between the dolls but remixed into the perfect blend of characteristics for any given job. The show's ambivalence about such "posthuman" technologies is captured by the character who does all the wiping and remixing: a smug, immature, and charmingly nerdish wetware genius named Topher Brink, whose simultaneously dopey and snarky incarnation by the actor Fran Kranz reflects the weird mix of arrogance and creative exuberance that inform so much manipulative neuroscience. For a science-fiction thriller, there is not much emphasis on gadgetry. In one episode, the doll Echo, played by Buffy vet Eliza Dushku, is implanted with a "brain camera" that turns her into a remote surveillance device that allows the ATF to spy on the creepy religious cult she has been programmed to infiltrate (paradoxically — or perhaps allegorically — the device temporarily blinds her). But overall, Dollhouse is much less concerned about posthuman technology than it is about current social reality, or at least about how the late capitalist media culture that saturates our lives will transform through posthuman technology into a dizzying scramble of identity and desire. That's why Dollhouse can be read most basically as an ironic reflection of Hollywood itself, and especially