Adstringendum Application
Name: Kikos
LJ: kikos_ai
Contact: AIM: littlkikos, email: kikos.chan@gmail.com
Other Characters Played: N/A
Are you 18 or over? Yes
Series: Dollhouse
Character: Topher Brink
Timeline: Season 2, at the end of episode 12, The Hollow Men (aka just before the ten year time jump)
Personality:
Christopher Brink is a complex young man. At some level Topher has the emotional development of a young child. He is immature, sarcastic, extremely self centered, amoral, disrespectful to just about anyone, not very trustworthy, entertaining and yet full of social fail. Physically he looks like your typical "geeky" teenager (even through he's about 26-28 years old) as he shows up to work in flannel, school boy sweater vests, ripped jeans and sneakers while everyone else around him is in business casual. His laboratory at the Dollhouse looks more like a play room than the office of one of the most powerful people in the world. His interactions are playful, always teasing and never serious, unless it is an emergency. Then he tends to yell and flail around like a scared little girl. He also gets incredibly embarrassed and worked up when talking about sexuality, particularly male sexuality. This is particularly ironic and full of fail since he is a doctor yet he cannot even bring himself to say the word erection--he calls them "man-reactions". His interactions with women are laughable and awkward and his taste is...questionable...at times. He loves science fiction and internet culture and quotes everything from obscure scifi classics to Star Wars to pop culture and internet memes.
Much of Topher's arrogance stems from the fact that he is a genius. Actually he's one of those types of geniuses that are so brilliant that they skate on the edge of insanity. Mad scientist is an appropriate adjective for him. He flew through medical school in one of the hardest fields, was hired by a clandestine organization and revolutionized his field with a new type of medical technology all by the time he was in his mid twenties. The richest and most powerful people in America pay exuberant amounts of money for the "product" Topher creates. This is because what Topher creates are humans--built to order people. He creates the living embodiment of a person's fantasy by erasing volunteers' memories and replacing them with fabricated personalities. But despite the horrifying nature of his job, Topher's actually a friendly guy- he has a good sense of humor and a quirky style of speech. He likes to argue that ultimately his job is to make people happy--the rest of it, the how and who and why, are subjective. He has been known to perform acts of charity, mostly because it gives him a sense of pride and accomplishment rather than out of some sense of obligation. He is also an incredibly hard worker and he has often spends the night working and sleeping on a cot instead of gong home. He is creative, does what he loves, is insightful and excellent at piecing together a mystery and will get something done fast if it interests him or he's threatened enough.
Yet Topher is also a man facing major existential crises and a rapidly evolving sense of morality. At the beginning of Dollhouse the audience is introduced to a Topher Brink that is blind to the ethical issues surrounding his job. He originally saw his work as "art" and he took great pride and joy in manipulating the people under his care. To Topher, everything came down to Science. Human beings are merely a collection of fired up neurons and chemicals bonded together--everything mysterious about the human condition can be explained by biology.
At first he seemed to consider morality to be a form of social conditioning, a product of an individuals upbringing plus societal norms. Because he saw it as subjective, he was able to dismiss it as irrelevant to him. The childish part of Topher even enjoyed the illegal aspects of what he did as the creator of people--the doll maker of the dollhouse. However as the show progressed he rapidly realized through consequences set up by his own actions that he was ruining lives and damaging real people. When faced with actual evidence, Topher was unable to justify using some people for the benefit of others. He thus became someone who seemed unable to reconcile the enormity of his actions with his own identity.
So because of this there are times when Topher comes off as mentally unstable. His incredible insights tend to blindside the limited common sense he has, causing him to leap before he looks. He will run experiments before testing them and has no problem with skipping most of the scientific method to get results like an impatient brat. He is so focused on his own little world that when something goes wrong he is completely blindsided and he reacts poorly as an result. He also has a tendency to talk to himself when stressed. When he's pushed too far emotionally he tends to shut down rather than face the situation head on. He also has multiple anxiety disorders including agoraphobia (fear of public spaces), murophobia (fear of rats) and Nyctophobia (fear of the dark). Based on canon evidence it is pretty much a given that in later life Topher will suffer from a mental disorder very similar to mania. However the severity of his mental illness will depend on if he is able to develop a support system of family and friends. But whatever happens, ultimately Topher is someone who comes off as tragic rather than deeply malicious because of his childish persona and his naiveté in believing he can escape facing the consequences of his actions.
Background:
Dollhouse is a scifi series that centers on the themes of memory loss, human identity, corporate/capitalist greed, consumer fetishism and both sexual and non sexual fantasies. It is set a slightly alternate universe Los Angeles. In this universe, medical technology is far more advanced, particularly in neuroscience. Doctors have developed technology that can remove a person's entire sum of memories without ever cutting into their scalp. Memories can also be implanted, overlaid atop a blank mind to create a completely different personality with a set of borrowed or fabricated memories. The memories can also be archived on hard drives, called "wedges". Altered or fabricated memories cannot be implanted in a normal brain. The person must be wiped of their memories and personalities first. All of this research and invocation is funded by the Rossum corporation, a shady drug conglomerate that holds a significant amount of power in America. They have several senators, congressmen and governors in their pockets and their influence is seen everywhere. In the public eye, Rossum appears to develop memory enhancing drugs and potential cures for crippling degenerative neurological diseases. In closed doors they run a lucrative side business: The Dollhouse. Rossum is such a vast corporation that there is said to be a Dollhouse in every major city in the world.
Using the memory erasure technology, the Dollhouse organization specializes in creating custom people, called Actives or Dolls, for extremely wealthy clients to use discretely for any purpose. Dolls (both male and female) are programmed to be the client's ultimate fantasy come true, and they are programmed to like it. If a client wishes for a beautiful woman to fall in love with him, she will--chemically, physically and emotionally. There is no acting here. Then when the "engagement" is finished, the Active's memory is wiped and all knowledge of the client is removed, ensuring ultimate privacy and zero accountability. In theory, each active in the Dollhouse is there voluntarily. The progress of erasing an Active is extremely painful and is said to feel a lot like being born. Therefore the person programming and erasing the dolls must carefully control their immediate environment, eliminating harsh external stimuli, loud noises or conflict. The programmer has ultimate control over the Actives--he or she is their God. When Topher Brink was hired by the Adelle DeWitt, he brought new technological innovations that shot the LA branch to one of the the top houses in the world. Prior to his hiring on, downloading personalities took several hours using analog cables. Within a few months, Topher created a wireless sound wave technology that reduces the upload/download time to a mere minutes. This was a critical technological advance because not only did it increase their productivity but it introduced a dangerous premise--the ability to use sound waves to erase a person's mind.
Yet the technology wasn't perfect. In 2008 a doll named Alpha began to display self awareness while in the blank state. Instead of being comfortably mindless, he was drawn to a new doll named Echo and repulsed by the most requested doll in the house, a petite girl named Whiskey. In his former life Alpha was a budding serial killer/convict and somehow his old murderous personality began to bleed through into Alpha's, up until one day he snapped and attacked Whiskey's face with a pair of sharp scissors. While Alpha was restrained in his lab, Topher struggled to figure out why the doll had "glitched" and gone off programing. Thinking that there was something wrong with the other personalities the Dollhouse has imprinted on him, Topher uploaded 48 artificial personalities into his computer to analyze. But right as he did so, Alpha snapped again and damaged the computers, causing all of the personalities to download into his brain. This created one "composite" personality; he was now a man with 48 personalities plus his own murderous soul. The now insane Alpha went on a murderous rampage, killing fellow dolls and multiple staff members, including the Dollhouse's main doctor, Dr. Saunders. Somehow, Topher managed to survive the event. Alpha escaped although the Dollhouse supervisors tried to cover this up by telling everyone, including Topher, that he was eliminated. In the aftermath, Adelle ordered Topher to create a new doctor for the house, giving him permission to use the facially disfigured Whiskey doll. In response to Alpha, Topher took that mandate and poured everything into the new Dr. "Claire" Saunders. He made her gentle, comforting and deeply committed to the actives. He also made her personality the opposite of his, making her 'everything he is not'--serious, empathetic and mature. In Topher's mind, the dollhouse needed someone who could argue with him, someone who could point out the things they might ordinarily miss. Dr. Saunders couldn't be a normal doll--she had to be a "whole person" with a free will. But alongside that, Topher also gave her a phobia of the outside world to keep her a virtual prisoner to her job--because after all she was still an active.
However, in striving to make Saunders everything he was not, Topher created someone who was his moral opposite, someone who couldn't stand his intellectual detachment, childishness and blatant disregard for human life. In fact her hatred for Topher was rather impressive--she called him a "loathsome swine" and detested even the smell of him. So while Saunders was openly hostile to Topher, the Dollhouse struggled to rebuild itself. They eventually hired a new handler for Echo, an ex cop named Boyd Langton. With Whiskey gone, Echo shot up to the most requested doll status, so Topher found himself interacting with her and her handler regularly. Despite being total opposites, Topher tried to befriend Langton through the use of sarcasm and humor. Eventually, they seemed to develop a budding respect for each other, something that Topher interpreted as close friendship.
As Echo rose in popularity, she too started to show disturbing signs of self-awareness. Luckily, unlike Alpha, Echo's former personality was of a sane college graduate named Caroline Farrell. Her behavior in the blank state was much more rational, showing an interest towards protecting her fellow dolls. Over time she also seemed capable of understanding what was happening to her and even retrained emotions and bits of memories from the fabricated personalities Topher imprinted her. But as Echo began to develop her own personality it soon became clear that she was being stalked by multiple people, one of which was Alpha. Among the multiple episodic attempts to kill Echo that make up this show, there was one that were highly significant to Topher. One day while on a highly secretive engagement to steal an Elgin Marble from a private collector's vault, Echo's imprinted bugler personality was remotely wiped using a cell phone and a sound wave frequency-in other words her mind was erased without Topher's fancy equipment. This was verrrry bad as it left Echo in her blank state while still engaged in the robbery. Although Boyd managed to save the day, Topher was left astonished. Someone had modified his own sound wave technology and enhanced it so it could be used through a cell phone instead of in a sterile lab with fancy machines. The technology was evolving--and Topher had no idea who was behind it.
In the first season finale, Alpha was able to sneak back into the Dollhouse with a plucky FBI investigator named Paul Ballard. Together the two of them tasered Topher and kidnapped Echo, along with all the personalities Topher ever created for her, plus her original one. Alpha also managed to track down Dr. Saunders and slyly reveal to her that she too was a doll--one created by the man she so loathed. In the aftermath of Alpha's second attack, Dr. Saunders was now burdened with the knowledge that everything she'd ever believed was real was a lie, a fabrication from the one thing in the world she could not abide. This knowledge began to twist her--she was no longer sure if she truly hated Topher or if he'd programmed her that way. For a while, she tried to pretend everything was all right. But after a while her hated for Topher grew and she began to pull childish pranks on him, things like releasing rats into his lab and messing with his computers. This mild form of retribution eventually escalated with her sneaking into Topher's bed and attempting to seduce him. She decided that the only reason why Topher had made her hate him was because he actually wanted her to love him. However, Topher firmly denied this stating that he had given her free will and with that free will she had chosen to hate him. She was becoming human. He then asked her if she wanted to learn her true identity but she rejected this idea. "I don't want to die," she told him. She had self awareness now and she didn't want to give her body back to her original personality. This left Topher utterly shocked.
Soon afterward Saunders ran away from the Dollhouse. But her confrontation with Topher was a major turning point for him. He began to question some of the house's practices--shocking everyone since he had the reputation of being amoral. But because Topher was so immature, his budding sense of morality was infantile in its operation. He had no idea what to do with the sense of guilt that was now tainting his wonderful world. Later episodes showed Topher looking haggard. He began talking to himself. The next major event for Topher occurred when he discovered that there was something one with one of the dolls, a young woman named Sierra. Sierra was somehow displaying signs of distress, even while she was wiped. Since he still felt guilty over what happened with Saunders and Alpha, Topher and Boyd eventually discovered that a man named Nolan Kinnard was responsible for Sierra being placed into the Dollhouse. Sierra used to be an Australian artist named Priya Tsetsang that Nolan, a doctor and powerful Rossum exec, fell in love with. Priya spurned his advances so in revenge Nolan kidnapped her, pumped her full of drugs that mimicked schizophrenia and sent the Dollhouse after her. Originally Adelle sent Topher to confirm Priya's schizophrenia diagnosis and because he failed to look closely at her scans he accidentally brought an innocent woman against her will into a life of prostitution.
To Topher, this was a cold, bitter revelation. Although he had always said he was 'beyond' moral choices, this was the first time he'd felt truly horrified by his own actions. Therefore he made a decision: when he was supposed to prepare Sierra for an assignment he chose to give back her real memories. He then told her everything he knew...and allowed her to be sent to Nolan's house alone. Once there Sierra/Priya confronted her rapist and in an ensuring struggle killed him. Afterward a reluctant Topher and Boyd helped her destroy the body. Both Topher and Priya were deeply traumatized by the act--being a doctor, Topher was forced by Boyd to cut up Nolan's body and disintegrate it with chemicals. The murder was kept a secret and since she was a murderer Priya had no choice but to rejoin the Dollhouse. Her last words to Topher were to beg him to make sure she never remembered that particular day again.
From there it only seemed to get worse for Topher. Right after Sierra was returned to the Dollhouse, a dashing young Senator named Daniel Perrin threatened to expose the LA Dollhouse to the entire world by using the testimony of a former active. The sudden flurry of investigations into the senator eventually led to another Dollhouse in Washington DC. So Adelle Dewitt and Topher flew over to investigate the Washington house and it is there that Topher met Bennett Halverson, a beautiful genius programmer. Although the two programmers knew of each other's existence in the highly closed and competitive world of the Rossum corporation, neither of them had the chance to meet before. It was love at first sight for Topher. Bennett appeared to be "almost perfect"--his ideal vision of a woman. She was brilliant--possibly even smarter than him--creative, an expert in their field and beautiful to boot. Topher even admitted that he had held a crush on Bennett before he even knew she was a woman because of her theories. What made it even better was that Bennett appeared to be attracted to Topher as well, as the two made several fumbling, awkward attempts at flirting with each other while they refined one of Topher's newest technological gadgets.
There was only one problem--Bennett had a murderous desire for revenge against Caroline, aka Echo. In a complicated twist of events, Bennett attempted to murder Echo through a type of technology Topher had created. To save her, Topher was forced to knock Bennett out and by doing so allowed Echo to escape the Dollhouse clutches. This ultimately led to Adelle Dewitt being demoted as the head of the LA Dollhouse and replaced with a man named Matthew Harding. Harding ran the LA Dollhouse for three months, during which time Topher greatly benefited from an influx of funds and state of the art technology. Topher pretended to be fully committed to Harding, while in reality he was suspicious by the orders he was receiving from his new boss. Topher was tasked to create a remote wiping technology, a gun that could reset a doll to a blank state instantly. But he suspected that what Rossum was really after was a weapon that could erase anybody, creating an army of dolls waiting to be imprinted. It wasn't enough for Topher to figure this plot out on his own--he had to create the technology himself just to see if it could be done. This was the beginning of Topher's own undoing. Of course the plans eventually ended up in Rossum's hands--handed over by Adelle Dewitt no less--and this started off a chain of events that would eventually lead to the end of the world through the technology Topher created.
Knowing that Rossum now held the plans that could erase every human mind on the planet, Topher, Echo and the rest of the dollhouse--including Boyd, Sierra and ironically Adelle Dewitt--formed a resistance. They took over the LA Dollhouse once more and released all the dolls. They also gained another member--Dr. Saunders, who returned to the Dollhouse on the arms of Boyd. The key to their resistance turned out to be Echo because in another complex turn of events it's revealed that she once knew the founder of Rossum, a man that had been kept anonymous from everyone in the corporation. However Caroline's original personality was badly damaged in a previous battle that their only recourse is to turn to Bennett Halverson once more. At first the duo were quite awkward with each other but in the course of events it became clear that despite being slightly...insane...Bennett and Topher had clearly fallen in love. But at the very moment when the two consummated their shared feelings with a kiss, Bennett was killed in front of Topher by Saunders--who turned out to be a sleeper agent that was somehow meddled with during her time away from the Dollhouse.
Bennett's murder broke Topher in the most ironic way possible--the woman he loved was killed by the women he created. Despite this, Topher chose to continue to fight to bring down Rossum. A shaken Topher traveled with Dewitt, Echo and Boyd to the Rossum headquarters in Tuszon, Arizona. Their plan was to destroy the mind-wipe technology and bring down the corporation once and for all. Once inside Rossum Topher and Boyd discovered that the corporation is already working on mass producing the tech--although it wasn't yet complete. Although Topher wanted to completely destroy his work, Boyd convinced him to complete one prototype so they could use it to break their way out of the building without violence. He agreed and finished the device in ten minutes. It was only when he was finished that Topher discovered that Boyd had been playing him. It turned out that Boyd was the true founder of Rossum and had been guiding the young man to his fate the entire time. The man Topher viewed as his best man-friend was a lie.
Luckily for Topher, Sierra and another doll Victor were able to rescue the trapped resistance fighters at the last possible moment. Once freed Echo and Boyd had a final showdown that resulted in Topher using his finished prototype to erase his betrayer. The group then used the blank body of Boyd to blow up Rossum, thus saving the world from Topher's tech.
Or so they thought.
Abilities/Additional Notes:
Topher was trained to be a doctor, my best guess is as a neurosurgeon or more likely something in computational neuroscience or neuropsychology. He is excellent at theoretical medical mysteries and anything that involves, in his words 'machines that go ping!' He should be able to diagnose with any sort of affliction of the nervous system (that of course includes amnesia and drain bramage) and he takes particular glee in tweaking the human body in strange and usual ways. Although socially inept himself, Topher shows extensive knowledge of psychology and human behavior as he is said to be one of the best doll programmers in the country. He is brilliant with computers and all forms of programming, and he plays a mean game of battleship and laser tag. He is definitely capable of hacking a PCD and creating other strange and wonderful technological advances with dubious applications.
Sample Journal Post:
[The PCD snaps on and immediately begins to create an accidental video recording of a man's thumb]
-Woah woah! This isn't mine! Who are--WAIT!
[There's a pause as he notices the bright red recording light on. The image jerks around and whirls until a suspicious blue eye is staring at everyone]
Great! Kidnapped and taken to who knows where, some type of war zone or Gaza or Baghdad for all I know and the first thing the terrorists do is give me a recoding device! What do you people want me to record a message to my government? Cause I have to warn you, me and Uncle Sam? Not on such good terms. I haven't paid my taxes since undergrad--not that the IRS is even aware of that. I'm just that good of a hacker. Which is ...ha. Probably why you kidnapped me. So you know that.
[He pulls the camera away till his entire face is visible.]
Look is this about how I kinda sorta helped Echo--I mean Caroline--whatever--blow up Rossum in Tucson? Because it was totally for a good cause! They were going to end the world! We're heroes...just....tell me where I am alright? Cause this is totally creeping me out!
Sample RP:
So this is what the end of the world looked like--a mishmash of skyscrapers and urban landscape, with obligatory 'safe zones' and man-eating monsters...funny how it was somehow more cliché and banal than anything Topher could have imagined. This place was a lot less "Mad Max" and a lot more like "Cloverfield" or "Escape From New York"--and apparently the end of the world also gave out free Crackberries. Who knew?
This wasn't right. The end of the world wasn't supposed to give second chances. It wasn't supposed to be for guys like him--he knew cause he was a sci-fi fan and this was not how the apocalypse movies started! They weren't supposed to begin with the lead man meeting his very much dead crush/tragic love interest and yet supposedly Bennett was alive?! HERE? He'd seen her face on the PCD but--alive? Bennett? With Whiskey--no she was Claire right now. How was this even possible?! Was any of this real? Or was he...trapped in the Attic....Or this was a zombie movie...in which case, ew! Although Bennett made such a lovely zombie...
Oh right. He needed a plan! And some juice boxes. Possibly even a gun. Heck, he'd even settle for having Dominic with him. Hey if this was the attic, wasn't Dominic supposed to be here?
So ok. Maybe he was in the attic. In which case...an eternity being used as a computer CPU, spent with Saunders, Dominic and Bennett? Only 1/3 of this scenario was full of DO WANT. Bad ratio. So maybe it was in his best interests to accept the local's explanation that this was a science experiment gone wrong and it really was multiple universes colliding into one place. He'd heard and seen stranger things. Disturbing...sexual...yeah MOVING ON-
Hmm, maybe Adelle was here? For some reason he couldn't imagine the apocalypse starting without Adelle Dewitt. 2/5 wouldn't be that bad...except then he'd had to watch Adelle and Dominic tip toe around each other for eternity. Could be worse though--it could be Paul and Echo trapped with him.
On second thought no. He was very happy that he was with the girls in the End of the World. All he really needed was some potato chips and a lab space to call his own so he could just DENY THE HECK out of his current situation.
...He really wanted to go home now.