Waking 'Verse Celebration: The Original Characters
Whoops! Running a few days behind by my own schedule. Well, I won't tell anyone if you won't ;)
Original Character Meta
In which I ramble, a bit (ha!) about the characters I created for this story, their roles in it, where they came from and, in the end, how successful as characters I think they were.
Nicole Dominic
Origin
“Trust me, Ballard.” Dominic’s face is set, his voice making it clear that the conversation is over. “She can take care of herself.”
Nicole Dominic was born out of an interest I had in Dominic’s character and trying to expand his back story. Even before the first part of the Waking Verse was written, even before I had committed myself to a longer storyline, there were already a couple versions of Nicole Dominic popping around in my head.
The first really well-developed version I had was a lot different than the one I ended up going with. She was kind of a flake, a drifter sort of hippie that made a living as an artist and had a tendency to show up, unannounced, on her brother’s doorstep wanting to catch up and say hi. Their sibling relationship was no less loving or close, though Dominic was slightly exasperated by this Nicole and her responsibility-avoiding ways. This particular back story also featured a dead father (he’d been in the NSA, but was killed when Laurence was still in college) and a stepmother, Nicole’s biological mother, who had Alzheimer’s and was in a home. Laurence felt a sort of bitter relief over the fact her memory loss made it unlikely she would miss him while he was undercover, and Nicole’s wandering ways were implied to part of how she avoided dealing with it. (There was also a brief point where this Nicole was much younger, even in her teens, but that idea got dropped pretty quickly once I did the math and realized it was completely ridiculous.)
The idea was for this Nicole to come looking for her brother after he’d been sent to the Attic, and then cause a lot of trouble when she started poking around trying to find him. The set-up for this story, however, was a little problematic, and I didn’t really know what direction to take it in. So, obviously, that didn’t happen.
Then I had the idea to make Nicole an NSA agent herself, in which her sniffing around the Dollhouse trying to find her brother made a lot more sense and had more credibility. Her breaking in looking for Laurence would have been her introduction in this case. Her personality was different at this point, more straightforward, serious and reserved. The plot I ended up going with for the series, with Dominic starting to work for the House more willingly right from the get go and not necessarily being a prisoner, while the NSA sort of became the bad guys, meant I then had to take Nicole’s thread in a different direction.
There was yet a third version of Nicole, although this one wasn’t related to Dominic or the NSA at all. This one was a Dollhouse employee, a caretaker, who was there through nepotism on the part of some Rossum head. As a result she was prone to inappropriate and immature behavior towards the rest of the staff, trying to play mind games with them or just being insulting, that she shouldn’t have gotten away with otherwise; no one liked her and she eventually came to a bad end when she went way too far in one of her “pranks”.
The role of this last Nicole as an extra cast member, a caretaker, got eventually absorbed by Madeline, and most of the plot threads involving this character were scrubbed. However, some of her personality traits ended up making it into the final version of Nicole Dominic, who was also a NSA agent like the second version was, and the first idea of Nicole - the carefree artist - ended up becoming kind of a character back story.
Nicole was always a stepsister when I was creating her, never a full-blood or even half sibling. I think this is partially because I always imagined her as a younger woman in her twenties, and to my mind the age gap was more easily explained away by the idea of remarriage. I also always pictured her as a brunette (a blonde superspy just seemed too femme fatale, Charlie’s Angels to me) and while we all know siblings with different hair colors are far from impossible, in TV land it seems different locks reads as automatic shorthand for “not blood relation”.
Nicole also has a little bit of what I call the Inverse Pepperjack Principle going on, where I deliberately was trying to avoid making a Mary Sue by giving her different likes and dislikes than myself. Her taste in music being a particularly blaring (oh look, a pun) example of that. I also made her average height instead of tall, gave her blue eyes instead of brown, and tried to do what I could to give her a different outlook and sense of humor.
Of course her personality was determined more by her role in the story and simply her own unique sense of character than it was a straight up attempt to avoid writing myself; a character as significant as her needed a lot of fleshing out. Considering how much of the plot rested on her, I wasn’t taking any chances.
Role
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ivy remarks, a little dry, “but your sister’s a real bitch.”
So here I had Nicole Dominic: a driven, badass, slightly scary NSA field agent who had a strong connection to her stepbrother but a deeper devotion to her job. I knew the most sensible road to go with these two was conflict. Lots and lots of conflict.
Nicole ended up becoming kind of the ‘face’ of the NSA in the story as the bad guys. Whenever they were up to something the Dollhouse had to contend with, Nicole was there. She was not only a strong opponent and obstacle to face, every encounter with her gave Dominic this whole new layer of complexity and internal struggle as a character.
The direction I ended up taking Nicole in the long-running plotline was one where, if Dominic was the story’s Buffy, then Nicole was his Faith. The darker mirror double, the “there but for the grace of God go I” girl. They had a very similar back story and history. As field agents, they were very similar characters. But Laurence got lucky: he stumbled onto an out, he found a life outside of the job and the NSA. Nicole never had that chance. There was also something about her that implied she was doomed from the start - Dominic chose to work the NSA, but Nicole never did. She just grew up assuming it was an inevitability. There’s meant to be something kind of darkly tragic about her.
Nicole’s sort of purpose as a character was to cast a different light on her brother, to explore a different side of him a little more, the way only a foil can.
By the time I started writing the Waking Verse as an actual series, I knew Nicole was going to die. It was the only satisfactory, sensible conclusion I could arrive at for her character. It wasn’t long, either, before I had figured out the manner of her death and at least the basic circumstances.
Nicole was going to get caught by the Dollhouse. She was going to commit suicide rather than surrender. Her brother was going to be there to watch it happen. And it was going to fuck him up emotionally.
Nicole’s planned death ended up becoming this major part of the story I was working up to. It was an event, one that other parts of the story had to drive towards, that interactions and characterizations had to set up. I wanted it to be this big, dramatic thing, climatic. It had to flow in right and it couldn’t come out of nowhere. It was a lot of effort and it was hard, sometimes, writing about Nicole and her doings knowing what lay in wait for her, but I like to think I pulled it off.
Overall
She straightens her shoulders. “I’m not a traitor. I’m no coward. I know who I work for, and unlike some people I’m never gonna forget that.”
Looking back on it, I think I’m pretty pleased with what I managed to pull off with Nicole. It always seemed like the reaction to her was good, that she was capable and impressive and even a little bit intimidating without being over the top.
Having such a major character arc in my head, her eventual gruesome demise, for so long and actually being able to build to it and execute it successfully and exactly in the manner I wanted felt like such a major accomplishment for me as a writer. After wanting to reach that milestone for so long, I kind of had to pat myself on the back for when it finally happened.
As far as what Nicole was supposed to do for the story, I think I was able to make her do it with at least decent success. The comments always expressed a lot of sympathy for Dominic out of dealing with her, though many also had sympathy for Nicole too and were able to see her side of it. She was never a flat-out enemy to the audience, which is what I wanted. I think people were able to feel the complicated and painful relationship between them for what I’d hoped they would.
After Nicole shot DeWitt, though, there was a lot of backlash against her, which both horrified and scared me. After all the effort I had gone to building to this dramatic conclusion, would no one care at all now, once she was gone? That would completely undermine everything I was hoping for. And there was a lack of response to Nicole’s actual death which only frightened me further. I felt a little disappointed, that I wasn’t about to make her exit pack as much of an emotional punch as I’d hoped. But once we got into the aftermath, and how their life together and then losing her affected Dominic and all his relationships in the present, there was a lot more empathy and sympathy, which came as a big relief.
In the end I think Nicole was able to leave her mark on the world of the story and the other characters in it, the way that I always hoped she would. Out of all the original characters I’ve ever written I don’t know if I’d call her my favorite, but for all the twists and turns I was able to put her through and please myself with, I definitely count her as one of my greatest personal successes.
Charity Brigade
Origin
“Of course you and your people are more than welcome, Mr. Langton. After all, we all work for the same hand. We should be only too happy to give assistance wherever it is required.”
Who doesn’t like a good villain? More than that: who doesn’t like a good, scary villain?
I think if I stacked all my original character creations I’ve ever had up, toe to toe, in the end I’d have far more nasties than I did good. I just love bad guys. I love writing them, I love coming up with them.
Back in the first season it was implied that there were other Dollhouses, which meant other Dollhouse heads. At some point I tried to come up with a couple; the only one that ever really stuck and became fully developed was the woman who eventually became known as Charity Brigade.
As a writer I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the dominatrix or the female sadist. A male villain who gets off on pain is almost textbook; there’s something still mostly unexplored about a female villain who delights in the perversities usually reserved for her masculine counterparts. Bloodlust. Domination. Mad experiments. Torture. Mutilation. Rape. One of these days, I’d like to see someone birth a slasher/monster movie franchise out of a main female villain. I think that’d be pretty interesting. (And no, Jason’s mother doesn’t count.)
Charity was always supposed to be cold. Controlled and controlling. Drawn to dark colors, composed with a sort of unnatural stillness, and refined with a dangerous face hidden underneath. The kind of woman who was made to be pictured in stiletto heels and a bustier with an unfurled whip in her hand.
I wasn’t entirely sure a character like her really had a place in the longer story of the Waking Verse. But the creepier and scarier and more twisted she got, the more it really became that I just had to use her. I like her too much not to. So I sort of ended making a place for her in the series’ plot.
Believe it or not she wasn’t developed to be a ‘darker version of DeWitt’: she was created and then I noticed that aspect to her, and chose to comment on it in the story as it unfolded. She was never meant to be a DeWitt foil, or even specifically to have much of a connection to that character. There was supposed to be a natural rivalry between them and they weren’t supposed to like each other, but it became much more personal to the point of almost obsessive as the actual storyline got put together.
Charity Brigade is one of a set of many female villains I have in my head that start with a similar mold then get more fleshed out as they go along. To this one in particular I added a more damaged than usual psyche, masochism as a strong but still mostly concealed attribute, and a more subtly manipulative edge. There was also that weird thing with her and the Dolls: Charity is not, strictly speaking, a pedophile. She’s not attracted to children…just physical adults with that childlike mindset. Which is disgusting and creepy in a whole other way, but I’m not exactly sure what you would call that.
Her character was always connected to Rossum and the Dollhouse somehow in the developmental phase (in some cases she was some sort of ‘overseer’ or agent sent in when things went wrong to conduct an investigation) but she wasn’t always a Dollhouse head. The decision to make her one made for this nice storyline on abuse of power and selfish corruption.
I knew I wanted her to have a nice name with that dark ironic echo to it; ‘Charity’ suited my needs nicely. Originally I just called her ‘Charity Brigade’ in my head as a placeholder until I could come up with a better last name, but in the end I got a little too fond of the admittedly corny if sadistic joke.
Role
“It’s nothing short of astonishing, that things that people will throw away.”
Charity and her House were always supposed to be representative of the darker side to the Dollhouse. Adelle we saw in season one cared about her Actives and the other people under her, even if she couldn’t or wouldn’t stop the world to tend to their needs. But it was easy to assume not every branch of the Dollhouse would get so lucky. Or imagine how bad things would get if someone more interested in power than gifted in compassion was in control.
I made the Dollhouse staff the good guys in my series, but I never really wanted to whitewash the evils attached to Rossum completely. In this case I sort of transferred them, to both corrupt bureaucracy but more directly the Washington House.
And by the way - no, I had no idea Joss Whedon was planning on featuring a DC Dollhouse branch in the second season. But it made sense to me that the Dollhouses would all be in major cities, and setting her in Washington gave Charity this nice sense of sneaky political intrigue. When the second season came out and we heard we were getting a glimpse of a Washington Dollhouse I freaked a bit…but in the end, I figured it just proved that I was a good guesser.
While the NSA was intended to be the major threat the characters faced again and again in the Waking Verse, Charity was meant to just be scary. That’s part of the reason why she only appeared a few times; I didn’t want to wear her out. But I didn’t want the NSA to be the only foes the House in LA had to face, so Charity existed to throw in a little bit of variety.
Charity didn’t have so much a long running plot line as I envisioned it as more a set of encounters. There were certain things I wanted her to do, ending with her ‘nightmare machine’. While that was always intended to be her major exit from the story I realized at some early point that it threw in a nice twist if she had supposedly died even before that, and so I brought in the scenario with her House being taken over by Alpha. I had also wanted to do some kind of threat collision story where several of the major enemies ended up showing up at once, so that was how the tale got written with both Alpha and the NSA being involved.
Like with Nicole I had Charity’s plot threads mapped out fairly extensively in advance, so with her I got to foreshadow a little bit. And then play around some more with her ‘reveal’.
Charity was always a good mind-games villain. Bringing her up was always an opportunity to mess with the other characters’ heads and give them some fun psychological scarring. I tried not to make her too much of a flat character, but I always wanted her to be entirely unsympathetic. A true black-hearted villain through and through.
Overall
“Yes; take yourself, for example,” Adelle says bitingly. “You’re obviously driven by little more than your petty cowardice and consuming repulsive desires.”
Exactly how successful I’d say Charity Brigade was as a character is kind of a mixed bag. In the story itself she did everything I wanted her to do, and I got to accomplish all the ideas I wanted to write. The entire adventure with her ‘nightmare machine’ in particular was something of a great personal achievement, since I’d always wanted to do a good dreamscape/worst fears type scenario in that vein. There are certainly plot elements I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten to without her, and for the most part she left a strong mark on the series but without ever getting obnoxious or in the way.
The actual execution of her character, however, is something of a personal disappointment. I always pictured Charity as first and foremost being cold. The kind of character who is frightening in a subdued way, just by standing there. Obviously Charity had a much more violent and unsubtle part to her personality too, but I always had planned for that to be the ugly face you only saw after the cool and creepy outer mask had chipped away and shattered. The kind of character who rarely gets mad and is still terrifying, and then when they do get mad you know you’re really in trouble.
The problem is a villain who is scary in an atmospheric way is a lot harder to pull off in narrative than they are in visual. More and more in the story, I found myself making Charity more blatant, nasty and even over the top in order to get my point across. I don’t know, it’s possible I may be overestimating the problem, but I have the feeling the sense of Charity Brigade that the readers ended up getting is a much different one than how I had intended or what I was picturing and planning for.
It also didn’t help that for some reason it always seemed I was writing specifically her parts of the series in a hurry and at wee hours of the morning, not exercising a lot of patience or editing in my frustrated need to get things done. Maybe I could have made her more subtle and quietly menacing if I’d time to build on it, but it always seemed like it would never come together in a short enough amount of time and I would always give up on it.
Regardless of what they thought of her as a character or if it was the same thing I had wanted her to be though, it did seem like the comments reacted well to her in the sense that she was successfully scary and disturbing, and I know it seemed like people liked what elements of the universe she brought up. So while I have my complaints and things I would have done differently or at least liked to with Charity, in the terms of the story I think she was still something of a success. If nothing else, she got her job as a device and a character done.
Mitchell Dominic
He has a feeling that this is a dangerous man to be the enemy of.
Because in drama, everybody’s always got to have daddy issues.
In my envisioning of Laurence Dominic’s back story, he always ended up becoming an NSA agent because of his father. That was how he got brought into that world, that was why he wanted to join it.
As previously mentioned, in an earlier version of the back story Laurence’s father was already dead. But when I decided to create this much longer running involved plotline I thought having a living father to play off of was a much more interesting and compelling thread, especially if it threw it that conflicting relationship of being both father and boss. (Mitchell Dominic was Deputy Director of the NSA and not the actual head, by the way, because doing some research I found out the head of the NSA is always a Navy Admiral, and Laurence Dominic didn’t strike me as having been raised a military brat. I wanted to keep the whole family civilian.)
I made Mitchell Dominic what he was in order to explain both his children’s personalities and dedication to their jobs. What kind of a man had to have raised Laurence and Nicole Dominic? Mitchell was a hard man, but he was one that had to instill that deep sense of duty and dedication.
Once I had this entire family of spies crafted, I knew I wanted to do some kind of story where one of them faked their death and then later came back. It couldn’t be Laurence, obviously, because I wanted it to be a surprise for the audience. Having Nicole be not really dead I felt would have undermined the value of the tragedy of how she went in the first place. (And there was a whole other storyline I had a thought on but didn’t go with for time reasons of Nicole being brought back from the dead via cloning and recorded memories only to die again, but never mind that now.) Which left Mitchell as our only good choice. I saved that storyline for near the end, though, because I thought any earlier would have just complicated it.
Like with Nicole there were a lot of dark and complicated matters in the relationship between Dominic and his father. Though it was never quite as big a focus as the one with Nicole, I had a lot of fun and interesting times exploring that throughout the series and overall I very much like what I accomplished. I thought the two men had been brought to a decent conclusion at the end of the series, with them going their separate ways and Mitchell if not understanding or approving his son’s choices at least respecting his strength in standing by them.
Warren Wallace
Wallace’s voice is crackling; there’s little doubt he’s probably got his mouth right next to the phone, hands cupped over it.
There was an entirely different story I never wrote where an imprint version of Dominic escaped from the House in Sierra’s body and then went to his NSA partner for help. For comedy’s sake, that partner in my mind was not at all the hardboiled agent Dominic was but a much more easily flustered, weirded out and overwhelmed specimen. That was Agent Warren Wallace.
When I was putting together the long running plot line of the series, and I knew the NSA was going to be a major recurring foe, I wanted there to be at least one significant NSA character we saw repeatedly who was not a member of the Dominic family. I also quickly decided I wanted someone more sympathetic and much less driven than the Dominics. And so I decided to just reuse Warren Wallace.
This turned out to be something of a godsend, as there are certain plot points I don’t know if I ever could’ve achieved without Laurence having had that NSA inside man. So if nothing else Wallace was a bit of accidental genius from a narrative construction standpoint. I also like him because it seemed like the readers enjoyed him a lot, too.
Clark Gibson
“You know, it’s funny. Your father was probably the best partner I ever had, but I didn’t really come down here for him.”
If Mitchell Dominic was going to be this cold un-approving father, eventually I needed to insert a more forgiving paternal figure, or Dominic was probably going to have to have a mental breakdown.
Gibson gave me a chance to explain some things, both about Dominic’s past and what happened to his father, without relying too much on pure contrivance. He was also a much nice softer note to escape to right after I had just written a lot of drama.
Morgan Dawcey
“But she does like pain, my Morgan. She’s a connoisseur of it. I so love watching her work.”
Morgan was Charity Brigade’s number two from pretty much the moment I had created the other woman. (There was also a faintly related version of Morgan who was more of a thug for a terrorist organization, but she didn’t last very long.)
Interestingly there was initially more of a blend between them. At first, Charity was just cold, sinister and callous. Morgan was the actually abusive and sadistic one. She was the one who used the whip, liked torturing and originally it was her I envisioned threatening Sierra and being attracted to Actives in their Doll state, not Charity.
When Charity’s role became a long-running thing in the series, it didn’t make sense for her to be more quiet while she had this nastier sidekick. So all of Morgan’s really sinister tendencies got transferred to her boss. Morgan remained sadistic and twisted, though, in her loyalty to Charity and also that unnerving tendency to always have that slasher smile. Both Charity and Morgan are axe crazy; the one in charge is just more sneakily subtle about it.
If Charity had appeared in more stories before her eventual demise, Morgan would have gotten more of a role, as an interrogator and agent if nothing else. It didn’t really work out that way with the timing and what I had envisioned and went with though.
Gunter Wilkinson
“Gunter works at the Washington House, y’know. The only reason he works so fast is ‘cus he’s gotta. The Head there is a total psychopath.”
In developing the Washington Dollhouse I had to come up with their entire central staff. If there was going to be a head and a head of security, there also had to be a programmer.
I decided it would be pushing the laws of believability and also good taste to have the entire core of the DC staff made up of sadists. So Gunter was developed as a fairly normal if amoral individual. He may not have ever liked or enjoyed what was going on, but he was entirely concerned with his own survival and never tried to stop anything.
Like Morgan, Gunter would’ve showed up more if Charity’s story line had gone differently. He was characterized as constantly nervous, unfailingly obedient to Charity, and concerning himself only with the programming and making it work and being willfully oblivious and indifferent to anything else. (And no, any comparisons you may want to draw to that description and an incomplete impression of Topher would not be completely accidental.)
Madras Dominic
But her eyes are deep blue, like sapphires. Her mother’s eyes. Adelle would recognize them anywhere.
Even though she was dead, I decided I wanted Nicole Dominic to throw her brother one last major curveball. The idea of her having had this daughter in secret was a nice punch to his stomach, emotionally speaking, and only left him with even more conflictions about her in the end. It gives not just him but also the general sense that we never really knew her, at least not all the way.
Introducing Madras however also let me write this sweet ending of Laurence and Adelle going off together and getting to have a family. And after everything I had put them through, especially him, I felt like they deserved something really happy.
Original Character Meta
In which I ramble, a bit (ha!) about the characters I created for this story, their roles in it, where they came from and, in the end, how successful as characters I think they were.
Nicole Dominic
Origin
“Trust me, Ballard.” Dominic’s face is set, his voice making it clear that the conversation is over. “She can take care of herself.”
Nicole Dominic was born out of an interest I had in Dominic’s character and trying to expand his back story. Even before the first part of the Waking Verse was written, even before I had committed myself to a longer storyline, there were already a couple versions of Nicole Dominic popping around in my head.
The first really well-developed version I had was a lot different than the one I ended up going with. She was kind of a flake, a drifter sort of hippie that made a living as an artist and had a tendency to show up, unannounced, on her brother’s doorstep wanting to catch up and say hi. Their sibling relationship was no less loving or close, though Dominic was slightly exasperated by this Nicole and her responsibility-avoiding ways. This particular back story also featured a dead father (he’d been in the NSA, but was killed when Laurence was still in college) and a stepmother, Nicole’s biological mother, who had Alzheimer’s and was in a home. Laurence felt a sort of bitter relief over the fact her memory loss made it unlikely she would miss him while he was undercover, and Nicole’s wandering ways were implied to part of how she avoided dealing with it. (There was also a brief point where this Nicole was much younger, even in her teens, but that idea got dropped pretty quickly once I did the math and realized it was completely ridiculous.)
The idea was for this Nicole to come looking for her brother after he’d been sent to the Attic, and then cause a lot of trouble when she started poking around trying to find him. The set-up for this story, however, was a little problematic, and I didn’t really know what direction to take it in. So, obviously, that didn’t happen.
Then I had the idea to make Nicole an NSA agent herself, in which her sniffing around the Dollhouse trying to find her brother made a lot more sense and had more credibility. Her breaking in looking for Laurence would have been her introduction in this case. Her personality was different at this point, more straightforward, serious and reserved. The plot I ended up going with for the series, with Dominic starting to work for the House more willingly right from the get go and not necessarily being a prisoner, while the NSA sort of became the bad guys, meant I then had to take Nicole’s thread in a different direction.
There was yet a third version of Nicole, although this one wasn’t related to Dominic or the NSA at all. This one was a Dollhouse employee, a caretaker, who was there through nepotism on the part of some Rossum head. As a result she was prone to inappropriate and immature behavior towards the rest of the staff, trying to play mind games with them or just being insulting, that she shouldn’t have gotten away with otherwise; no one liked her and she eventually came to a bad end when she went way too far in one of her “pranks”.
The role of this last Nicole as an extra cast member, a caretaker, got eventually absorbed by Madeline, and most of the plot threads involving this character were scrubbed. However, some of her personality traits ended up making it into the final version of Nicole Dominic, who was also a NSA agent like the second version was, and the first idea of Nicole - the carefree artist - ended up becoming kind of a character back story.
Nicole was always a stepsister when I was creating her, never a full-blood or even half sibling. I think this is partially because I always imagined her as a younger woman in her twenties, and to my mind the age gap was more easily explained away by the idea of remarriage. I also always pictured her as a brunette (a blonde superspy just seemed too femme fatale, Charlie’s Angels to me) and while we all know siblings with different hair colors are far from impossible, in TV land it seems different locks reads as automatic shorthand for “not blood relation”.
Nicole also has a little bit of what I call the Inverse Pepperjack Principle going on, where I deliberately was trying to avoid making a Mary Sue by giving her different likes and dislikes than myself. Her taste in music being a particularly blaring (oh look, a pun) example of that. I also made her average height instead of tall, gave her blue eyes instead of brown, and tried to do what I could to give her a different outlook and sense of humor.
Of course her personality was determined more by her role in the story and simply her own unique sense of character than it was a straight up attempt to avoid writing myself; a character as significant as her needed a lot of fleshing out. Considering how much of the plot rested on her, I wasn’t taking any chances.
Role
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ivy remarks, a little dry, “but your sister’s a real bitch.”
So here I had Nicole Dominic: a driven, badass, slightly scary NSA field agent who had a strong connection to her stepbrother but a deeper devotion to her job. I knew the most sensible road to go with these two was conflict. Lots and lots of conflict.
Nicole ended up becoming kind of the ‘face’ of the NSA in the story as the bad guys. Whenever they were up to something the Dollhouse had to contend with, Nicole was there. She was not only a strong opponent and obstacle to face, every encounter with her gave Dominic this whole new layer of complexity and internal struggle as a character.
The direction I ended up taking Nicole in the long-running plotline was one where, if Dominic was the story’s Buffy, then Nicole was his Faith. The darker mirror double, the “there but for the grace of God go I” girl. They had a very similar back story and history. As field agents, they were very similar characters. But Laurence got lucky: he stumbled onto an out, he found a life outside of the job and the NSA. Nicole never had that chance. There was also something about her that implied she was doomed from the start - Dominic chose to work the NSA, but Nicole never did. She just grew up assuming it was an inevitability. There’s meant to be something kind of darkly tragic about her.
Nicole’s sort of purpose as a character was to cast a different light on her brother, to explore a different side of him a little more, the way only a foil can.
By the time I started writing the Waking Verse as an actual series, I knew Nicole was going to die. It was the only satisfactory, sensible conclusion I could arrive at for her character. It wasn’t long, either, before I had figured out the manner of her death and at least the basic circumstances.
Nicole was going to get caught by the Dollhouse. She was going to commit suicide rather than surrender. Her brother was going to be there to watch it happen. And it was going to fuck him up emotionally.
Nicole’s planned death ended up becoming this major part of the story I was working up to. It was an event, one that other parts of the story had to drive towards, that interactions and characterizations had to set up. I wanted it to be this big, dramatic thing, climatic. It had to flow in right and it couldn’t come out of nowhere. It was a lot of effort and it was hard, sometimes, writing about Nicole and her doings knowing what lay in wait for her, but I like to think I pulled it off.
Overall
She straightens her shoulders. “I’m not a traitor. I’m no coward. I know who I work for, and unlike some people I’m never gonna forget that.”
Looking back on it, I think I’m pretty pleased with what I managed to pull off with Nicole. It always seemed like the reaction to her was good, that she was capable and impressive and even a little bit intimidating without being over the top.
Having such a major character arc in my head, her eventual gruesome demise, for so long and actually being able to build to it and execute it successfully and exactly in the manner I wanted felt like such a major accomplishment for me as a writer. After wanting to reach that milestone for so long, I kind of had to pat myself on the back for when it finally happened.
As far as what Nicole was supposed to do for the story, I think I was able to make her do it with at least decent success. The comments always expressed a lot of sympathy for Dominic out of dealing with her, though many also had sympathy for Nicole too and were able to see her side of it. She was never a flat-out enemy to the audience, which is what I wanted. I think people were able to feel the complicated and painful relationship between them for what I’d hoped they would.
After Nicole shot DeWitt, though, there was a lot of backlash against her, which both horrified and scared me. After all the effort I had gone to building to this dramatic conclusion, would no one care at all now, once she was gone? That would completely undermine everything I was hoping for. And there was a lack of response to Nicole’s actual death which only frightened me further. I felt a little disappointed, that I wasn’t about to make her exit pack as much of an emotional punch as I’d hoped. But once we got into the aftermath, and how their life together and then losing her affected Dominic and all his relationships in the present, there was a lot more empathy and sympathy, which came as a big relief.
In the end I think Nicole was able to leave her mark on the world of the story and the other characters in it, the way that I always hoped she would. Out of all the original characters I’ve ever written I don’t know if I’d call her my favorite, but for all the twists and turns I was able to put her through and please myself with, I definitely count her as one of my greatest personal successes.
Charity Brigade
Origin
“Of course you and your people are more than welcome, Mr. Langton. After all, we all work for the same hand. We should be only too happy to give assistance wherever it is required.”
Who doesn’t like a good villain? More than that: who doesn’t like a good, scary villain?
I think if I stacked all my original character creations I’ve ever had up, toe to toe, in the end I’d have far more nasties than I did good. I just love bad guys. I love writing them, I love coming up with them.
Back in the first season it was implied that there were other Dollhouses, which meant other Dollhouse heads. At some point I tried to come up with a couple; the only one that ever really stuck and became fully developed was the woman who eventually became known as Charity Brigade.
As a writer I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the dominatrix or the female sadist. A male villain who gets off on pain is almost textbook; there’s something still mostly unexplored about a female villain who delights in the perversities usually reserved for her masculine counterparts. Bloodlust. Domination. Mad experiments. Torture. Mutilation. Rape. One of these days, I’d like to see someone birth a slasher/monster movie franchise out of a main female villain. I think that’d be pretty interesting. (And no, Jason’s mother doesn’t count.)
Charity was always supposed to be cold. Controlled and controlling. Drawn to dark colors, composed with a sort of unnatural stillness, and refined with a dangerous face hidden underneath. The kind of woman who was made to be pictured in stiletto heels and a bustier with an unfurled whip in her hand.
I wasn’t entirely sure a character like her really had a place in the longer story of the Waking Verse. But the creepier and scarier and more twisted she got, the more it really became that I just had to use her. I like her too much not to. So I sort of ended making a place for her in the series’ plot.
Believe it or not she wasn’t developed to be a ‘darker version of DeWitt’: she was created and then I noticed that aspect to her, and chose to comment on it in the story as it unfolded. She was never meant to be a DeWitt foil, or even specifically to have much of a connection to that character. There was supposed to be a natural rivalry between them and they weren’t supposed to like each other, but it became much more personal to the point of almost obsessive as the actual storyline got put together.
Charity Brigade is one of a set of many female villains I have in my head that start with a similar mold then get more fleshed out as they go along. To this one in particular I added a more damaged than usual psyche, masochism as a strong but still mostly concealed attribute, and a more subtly manipulative edge. There was also that weird thing with her and the Dolls: Charity is not, strictly speaking, a pedophile. She’s not attracted to children…just physical adults with that childlike mindset. Which is disgusting and creepy in a whole other way, but I’m not exactly sure what you would call that.
Her character was always connected to Rossum and the Dollhouse somehow in the developmental phase (in some cases she was some sort of ‘overseer’ or agent sent in when things went wrong to conduct an investigation) but she wasn’t always a Dollhouse head. The decision to make her one made for this nice storyline on abuse of power and selfish corruption.
I knew I wanted her to have a nice name with that dark ironic echo to it; ‘Charity’ suited my needs nicely. Originally I just called her ‘Charity Brigade’ in my head as a placeholder until I could come up with a better last name, but in the end I got a little too fond of the admittedly corny if sadistic joke.
Role
“It’s nothing short of astonishing, that things that people will throw away.”
Charity and her House were always supposed to be representative of the darker side to the Dollhouse. Adelle we saw in season one cared about her Actives and the other people under her, even if she couldn’t or wouldn’t stop the world to tend to their needs. But it was easy to assume not every branch of the Dollhouse would get so lucky. Or imagine how bad things would get if someone more interested in power than gifted in compassion was in control.
I made the Dollhouse staff the good guys in my series, but I never really wanted to whitewash the evils attached to Rossum completely. In this case I sort of transferred them, to both corrupt bureaucracy but more directly the Washington House.
And by the way - no, I had no idea Joss Whedon was planning on featuring a DC Dollhouse branch in the second season. But it made sense to me that the Dollhouses would all be in major cities, and setting her in Washington gave Charity this nice sense of sneaky political intrigue. When the second season came out and we heard we were getting a glimpse of a Washington Dollhouse I freaked a bit…but in the end, I figured it just proved that I was a good guesser.
While the NSA was intended to be the major threat the characters faced again and again in the Waking Verse, Charity was meant to just be scary. That’s part of the reason why she only appeared a few times; I didn’t want to wear her out. But I didn’t want the NSA to be the only foes the House in LA had to face, so Charity existed to throw in a little bit of variety.
Charity didn’t have so much a long running plot line as I envisioned it as more a set of encounters. There were certain things I wanted her to do, ending with her ‘nightmare machine’. While that was always intended to be her major exit from the story I realized at some early point that it threw in a nice twist if she had supposedly died even before that, and so I brought in the scenario with her House being taken over by Alpha. I had also wanted to do some kind of threat collision story where several of the major enemies ended up showing up at once, so that was how the tale got written with both Alpha and the NSA being involved.
Like with Nicole I had Charity’s plot threads mapped out fairly extensively in advance, so with her I got to foreshadow a little bit. And then play around some more with her ‘reveal’.
Charity was always a good mind-games villain. Bringing her up was always an opportunity to mess with the other characters’ heads and give them some fun psychological scarring. I tried not to make her too much of a flat character, but I always wanted her to be entirely unsympathetic. A true black-hearted villain through and through.
Overall
“Yes; take yourself, for example,” Adelle says bitingly. “You’re obviously driven by little more than your petty cowardice and consuming repulsive desires.”
Exactly how successful I’d say Charity Brigade was as a character is kind of a mixed bag. In the story itself she did everything I wanted her to do, and I got to accomplish all the ideas I wanted to write. The entire adventure with her ‘nightmare machine’ in particular was something of a great personal achievement, since I’d always wanted to do a good dreamscape/worst fears type scenario in that vein. There are certainly plot elements I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten to without her, and for the most part she left a strong mark on the series but without ever getting obnoxious or in the way.
The actual execution of her character, however, is something of a personal disappointment. I always pictured Charity as first and foremost being cold. The kind of character who is frightening in a subdued way, just by standing there. Obviously Charity had a much more violent and unsubtle part to her personality too, but I always had planned for that to be the ugly face you only saw after the cool and creepy outer mask had chipped away and shattered. The kind of character who rarely gets mad and is still terrifying, and then when they do get mad you know you’re really in trouble.
The problem is a villain who is scary in an atmospheric way is a lot harder to pull off in narrative than they are in visual. More and more in the story, I found myself making Charity more blatant, nasty and even over the top in order to get my point across. I don’t know, it’s possible I may be overestimating the problem, but I have the feeling the sense of Charity Brigade that the readers ended up getting is a much different one than how I had intended or what I was picturing and planning for.
It also didn’t help that for some reason it always seemed I was writing specifically her parts of the series in a hurry and at wee hours of the morning, not exercising a lot of patience or editing in my frustrated need to get things done. Maybe I could have made her more subtle and quietly menacing if I’d time to build on it, but it always seemed like it would never come together in a short enough amount of time and I would always give up on it.
Regardless of what they thought of her as a character or if it was the same thing I had wanted her to be though, it did seem like the comments reacted well to her in the sense that she was successfully scary and disturbing, and I know it seemed like people liked what elements of the universe she brought up. So while I have my complaints and things I would have done differently or at least liked to with Charity, in the terms of the story I think she was still something of a success. If nothing else, she got her job as a device and a character done.
Mitchell Dominic
He has a feeling that this is a dangerous man to be the enemy of.
Because in drama, everybody’s always got to have daddy issues.
In my envisioning of Laurence Dominic’s back story, he always ended up becoming an NSA agent because of his father. That was how he got brought into that world, that was why he wanted to join it.
As previously mentioned, in an earlier version of the back story Laurence’s father was already dead. But when I decided to create this much longer running involved plotline I thought having a living father to play off of was a much more interesting and compelling thread, especially if it threw it that conflicting relationship of being both father and boss. (Mitchell Dominic was Deputy Director of the NSA and not the actual head, by the way, because doing some research I found out the head of the NSA is always a Navy Admiral, and Laurence Dominic didn’t strike me as having been raised a military brat. I wanted to keep the whole family civilian.)
I made Mitchell Dominic what he was in order to explain both his children’s personalities and dedication to their jobs. What kind of a man had to have raised Laurence and Nicole Dominic? Mitchell was a hard man, but he was one that had to instill that deep sense of duty and dedication.
Once I had this entire family of spies crafted, I knew I wanted to do some kind of story where one of them faked their death and then later came back. It couldn’t be Laurence, obviously, because I wanted it to be a surprise for the audience. Having Nicole be not really dead I felt would have undermined the value of the tragedy of how she went in the first place. (And there was a whole other storyline I had a thought on but didn’t go with for time reasons of Nicole being brought back from the dead via cloning and recorded memories only to die again, but never mind that now.) Which left Mitchell as our only good choice. I saved that storyline for near the end, though, because I thought any earlier would have just complicated it.
Like with Nicole there were a lot of dark and complicated matters in the relationship between Dominic and his father. Though it was never quite as big a focus as the one with Nicole, I had a lot of fun and interesting times exploring that throughout the series and overall I very much like what I accomplished. I thought the two men had been brought to a decent conclusion at the end of the series, with them going their separate ways and Mitchell if not understanding or approving his son’s choices at least respecting his strength in standing by them.
Warren Wallace
Wallace’s voice is crackling; there’s little doubt he’s probably got his mouth right next to the phone, hands cupped over it.
There was an entirely different story I never wrote where an imprint version of Dominic escaped from the House in Sierra’s body and then went to his NSA partner for help. For comedy’s sake, that partner in my mind was not at all the hardboiled agent Dominic was but a much more easily flustered, weirded out and overwhelmed specimen. That was Agent Warren Wallace.
When I was putting together the long running plot line of the series, and I knew the NSA was going to be a major recurring foe, I wanted there to be at least one significant NSA character we saw repeatedly who was not a member of the Dominic family. I also quickly decided I wanted someone more sympathetic and much less driven than the Dominics. And so I decided to just reuse Warren Wallace.
This turned out to be something of a godsend, as there are certain plot points I don’t know if I ever could’ve achieved without Laurence having had that NSA inside man. So if nothing else Wallace was a bit of accidental genius from a narrative construction standpoint. I also like him because it seemed like the readers enjoyed him a lot, too.
Clark Gibson
“You know, it’s funny. Your father was probably the best partner I ever had, but I didn’t really come down here for him.”
If Mitchell Dominic was going to be this cold un-approving father, eventually I needed to insert a more forgiving paternal figure, or Dominic was probably going to have to have a mental breakdown.
Gibson gave me a chance to explain some things, both about Dominic’s past and what happened to his father, without relying too much on pure contrivance. He was also a much nice softer note to escape to right after I had just written a lot of drama.
Morgan Dawcey
“But she does like pain, my Morgan. She’s a connoisseur of it. I so love watching her work.”
Morgan was Charity Brigade’s number two from pretty much the moment I had created the other woman. (There was also a faintly related version of Morgan who was more of a thug for a terrorist organization, but she didn’t last very long.)
Interestingly there was initially more of a blend between them. At first, Charity was just cold, sinister and callous. Morgan was the actually abusive and sadistic one. She was the one who used the whip, liked torturing and originally it was her I envisioned threatening Sierra and being attracted to Actives in their Doll state, not Charity.
When Charity’s role became a long-running thing in the series, it didn’t make sense for her to be more quiet while she had this nastier sidekick. So all of Morgan’s really sinister tendencies got transferred to her boss. Morgan remained sadistic and twisted, though, in her loyalty to Charity and also that unnerving tendency to always have that slasher smile. Both Charity and Morgan are axe crazy; the one in charge is just more sneakily subtle about it.
If Charity had appeared in more stories before her eventual demise, Morgan would have gotten more of a role, as an interrogator and agent if nothing else. It didn’t really work out that way with the timing and what I had envisioned and went with though.
Gunter Wilkinson
“Gunter works at the Washington House, y’know. The only reason he works so fast is ‘cus he’s gotta. The Head there is a total psychopath.”
In developing the Washington Dollhouse I had to come up with their entire central staff. If there was going to be a head and a head of security, there also had to be a programmer.
I decided it would be pushing the laws of believability and also good taste to have the entire core of the DC staff made up of sadists. So Gunter was developed as a fairly normal if amoral individual. He may not have ever liked or enjoyed what was going on, but he was entirely concerned with his own survival and never tried to stop anything.
Like Morgan, Gunter would’ve showed up more if Charity’s story line had gone differently. He was characterized as constantly nervous, unfailingly obedient to Charity, and concerning himself only with the programming and making it work and being willfully oblivious and indifferent to anything else. (And no, any comparisons you may want to draw to that description and an incomplete impression of Topher would not be completely accidental.)
Madras Dominic
But her eyes are deep blue, like sapphires. Her mother’s eyes. Adelle would recognize them anywhere.
Even though she was dead, I decided I wanted Nicole Dominic to throw her brother one last major curveball. The idea of her having had this daughter in secret was a nice punch to his stomach, emotionally speaking, and only left him with even more conflictions about her in the end. It gives not just him but also the general sense that we never really knew her, at least not all the way.
Introducing Madras however also let me write this sweet ending of Laurence and Adelle going off together and getting to have a family. And after everything I had put them through, especially him, I felt like they deserved something really happy.