Don't Flatter Yourself
When Claire starts slipping, when she starts questioning who she is and her existence, that’s the moment that makes me miss Angel the most.
Amy Acker plays it so well, I really would have liked to see her play Illyria during the After the Fall comics, or some other version of the series continuing in a sixth season, so we’d see when she keeps going back and forth between Fred and Illyria and can’t keep straight who she is. I think it would have been amazing to see her do that and I think she would have been able to portray it very successfully.
Ultimately, I feel like it’s Amy with Whiskey and Claire that make(s) Dollhouse as dark and creepy a series as it is. (Grammar is difficult when a person is three people.)
It’s strange that it’s Oz who manages to best sum up the premise of Dollhouse, even though it was ten years before the show existed.
“I am my thoughts. If they exist in her, Buffy contains everything that is me, and she becomes me. I cease to exist.”
The point being, a person is nothing but their own thoughts.
Up until Claire’s discovery of her past, I was pretty content to let myself sit there in the mentality of, say, Adele or Topher, and accept that the actives were toys and what was put in their heads was not real. The bodies were being borrowed and would be returned to their rightful owners eventually. Then we find out that someone we’ve cared about for a year is actually fake.
But is she? What constitutes fakeness? If she is her thoughts, then she is a real person, for all intents and purposes. But her thoughts were created by “a sociopath in a sweater vest” and her body is borrowed from someone else.
By choosing to stay alive, by not returning her body, Claire is essentially killing some other woman. The woman who donated her body for Whiskey is killed because Claire does not want to die. Since we’ve gotten to know Claire and since we care about her, we begin to see that the imprints are people too. Claire mucks up whatever since of wrong and right we had before. It’s murder, but I don’t want to lose her either. She’s nice.
Murder is the only option. But who to kill?
It stops being a morality issue (people are born, imprints are created) and becomes an issue of ‘who do I like better?’
Can we say we should give the body back to the original inhabitant? She did sign it away, even if temporarily. We’ve never met the woman that lived in Whiskey’s body before Whiskey did. We don’t know a single thing about her, other than she looks like Amy Acker. What we do know that Claire is a likeable, interesting, caring person. How can we not be biased? One was there first, one was there when we were. How do we choose?
Who really owns Amy’s body?
(That’s rhetorical.)
Of course there’s no answer. There isn’t really supposed to be. It’s supposed to be fucked up and confusing. Neither side is right, neither side is wrong. The world doesn’t work in blacks and whites. God bless Joss Whedon for knowing this.
Amy Acker plays it so well, I really would have liked to see her play Illyria during the After the Fall comics, or some other version of the series continuing in a sixth season, so we’d see when she keeps going back and forth between Fred and Illyria and can’t keep straight who she is. I think it would have been amazing to see her do that and I think she would have been able to portray it very successfully.
Ultimately, I feel like it’s Amy with Whiskey and Claire that make(s) Dollhouse as dark and creepy a series as it is. (Grammar is difficult when a person is three people.)
It’s strange that it’s Oz who manages to best sum up the premise of Dollhouse, even though it was ten years before the show existed.
“I am my thoughts. If they exist in her, Buffy contains everything that is me, and she becomes me. I cease to exist.”
The point being, a person is nothing but their own thoughts.
Up until Claire’s discovery of her past, I was pretty content to let myself sit there in the mentality of, say, Adele or Topher, and accept that the actives were toys and what was put in their heads was not real. The bodies were being borrowed and would be returned to their rightful owners eventually. Then we find out that someone we’ve cared about for a year is actually fake.
But is she? What constitutes fakeness? If she is her thoughts, then she is a real person, for all intents and purposes. But her thoughts were created by “a sociopath in a sweater vest” and her body is borrowed from someone else.
By choosing to stay alive, by not returning her body, Claire is essentially killing some other woman. The woman who donated her body for Whiskey is killed because Claire does not want to die. Since we’ve gotten to know Claire and since we care about her, we begin to see that the imprints are people too. Claire mucks up whatever since of wrong and right we had before. It’s murder, but I don’t want to lose her either. She’s nice.
Murder is the only option. But who to kill?
It stops being a morality issue (people are born, imprints are created) and becomes an issue of ‘who do I like better?’
Can we say we should give the body back to the original inhabitant? She did sign it away, even if temporarily. We’ve never met the woman that lived in Whiskey’s body before Whiskey did. We don’t know a single thing about her, other than she looks like Amy Acker. What we do know that Claire is a likeable, interesting, caring person. How can we not be biased? One was there first, one was there when we were. How do we choose?
Who really owns Amy’s body?
(That’s rhetorical.)
Of course there’s no answer. There isn’t really supposed to be. It’s supposed to be fucked up and confusing. Neither side is right, neither side is wrong. The world doesn’t work in blacks and whites. God bless Joss Whedon for knowing this.