000 - MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING FOR SEASON 1 OF DOLLHOUSE
Name: Alpha/Carl William Craft
Meaning: Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and represents "A" in the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. Carl means "free man" and is a diminutive of Charles, a name borne by several Holy Roman Emperors as well as generations of kings in most Western European countries. William means "protector" and was popularized by such warrior/hero figures as William the Conqueror, William Wallace, and William Tell. Craft means "strength" or "power" and probably originated as a Germanic occupational name for a soldier.
Nicknames/Aliases: Bobby, Steven Kepler
Age: mid-30's
Nationality: American
Family: none
Occupation: none
Sexual Orientation: Echo-sexual
Marital Status: Single, but he'll deny it.
Physical Appearance: Alpha is tall, relatively stocky, well-built, and a bit goofy-looking: wide blue eyes and scruffy blonde hair. Not the look of a serial killer. He dresses in soft, neat pajamas or dress clothes and generally has a concealed weapon or two on his person.
Canon Puncturing? You may mistake him for other Alan Tudyk characters, but please don't tell him he's fictional.
AT LAST VOYAGES
Warden: Integra Hellsing
Room: Level 6, Room 5
Room Description: Alpha lives in the loading dock/basement area of a defunct power plant. In the barge, a fourth wall has been put in where there used to be an open ramp for trucks, leaving a wide room with no ceilings. The walls and floor are concrete, with overhanging bits of ceiling and little nooks here and there. The main focus of the room is a raised platform in the center, on top of which is what looks like a dentist's chair covered in wires. These wires attach to a computer terminal against the nearest wall, with something like seven or eight monitors all with lines of equations and writing that would be nearly impossible for a layman to understand to understand. Upon immediately entering the room, there is a battered old armchair, a small end table, and a floor lamp tucked into a little nook. On the other side of the room is an old mattress in another nook covered in old throw pillows, with no sheets or blankets or anything. The walls are covered in equations written in chalk, and the base of the platform as the word "DANGER :)" (yup, with a smiley face) written upside-down on it. A door on the far side of the room leads to a tiny bathroom containing a toilet and sink.
POWERS & ABILTIES
Alpha has no superhuman powers, but he does possess a vast range of skills - some of which have been explored on the show, some of which haven't. On the barge, these will be the ONLY skills he’ll have access to:
- Martial arts. Alpha is kickass enough to take on a highly-trained security team and win. He's also a wizard with a blade and can carve up faces - and people - in just a few seconds. It’s estimated that he killed someone by cutting their tendons and arteries with surgical precision in approximately 8 seconds. While he could probably figure out how to wield other weapons in a pinch, the only weapons he has real proficiency with are knives/scalpels/razors/small blades, guns, and of course his bare hands.
- Computer skills. He's not advanced, but he can crack a basic firewall, build software, and do mechanical things like hook computers up together into a terminal. Beefed-up firewalls would be safe from him, and he cannot create viruses or do that fancy webcam thing that Tobias can do.
- Dollhouse technology. Alpha knows how to build a Chair (the device that wipes people), and perform wipes and upload personalities. However, he cannot do this without the hard drives on which personalities are stored, and he can’t create those because he’s not cool like Topher. So these skills would essentially be moot on the barge.
- Basic thuggery. One of his skill sets is implied to include punching and abducting people, driving really fast, and breaking things. This would probably include picking a lock.
- Knowledge. Alpha knows a lot. He seems to have a handle on philosophy, theology, the environment, and some basic chemical knowledge, specifically. He's also a genius, so he's probably picked up a lot of information. He may pull out a random fact here or there, but those areas would be his main focus.
HISTORY
Alpha was born Carl William Craft, and would have died a nobody in prison if the Rossum Corporation hadn’t gotten to him. He showed all the signs of a serial killer-to-be, and it’s postulated that he could have been the next Ted Bundy. But things went wrong when he kidnapped Anita Walsh. He held her in a defunct power plant in San Pedro, cut up her face - his signature - and then she escaped. The police picked Craft up and he was imprisoned for kidnapping and attempted murder.
Then he was offered a choice: he could serve out his lengthy prison sentence, or he could work for the Rossum Corporation for five years, after which he would be released. He went to work for Rossum.
Craft was essentially turned into a human guinea pig, a test subject of a new technology: wiping people clean of their memories and personalities, turning them into blank canvases, and then uploading new memories, personalities, and skills sets. Craft was designated Alpha and became the very first Active, or “doll.”
Living in the Dollhouse, an elaborate self-contained building beneath Los Angeles, Alpha seemed blissful enough when he wasn’t on assignment. But certain things began to tip people off that he was different than the others. He had a sense of identity that the other dolls didn’t: he would always sign drawings and paintings with the Greek symbol α. And when he and another doll, Whiskey, were imprinted as sexual sadists, they went off the assignment, abducted the client and held him captive in Carl Craft’s old lair in San Pedro. And to top it off, Alpha fell in love.
Theoretically, dolls should not feel emotions, but nonetheless Alpha was intensely drawn towards a doll called Echo. When he heard that Whiskey was the most popular doll, he attacked her with bonsai shears, cutting up her face so Echo could be “number one.” He was immediately brought to the programmer, Topher, to be diagnosed and wiped, but due to an “unfortunate technological anomaly,” all of Alpha’s previous imprints were uploaded into his mind, causing a “composite event” and him to go mad. He killed the security team, the physician Dr. Saunders, Echo’s handler, and every doll that got in his way. He also destroyed the hard drive (or “wedge,” as they’re called) on which his original personality, Carl Craft, was stored.
He vanished.
Then he heard about an FBI Agent, Paul Ballard, searching for the Dollhouse. He sent Ballard a photograph of Echo, along with her real name: Caroline, and urged Ballard not to give up. He knew he could use Ballard to get back into the Dollhouse and get Echo out.
He started playing mind games with Echo from afar - hiring a man to hire her from the Dollhouse and then “hunt” her, wiping her remotely in the middle of a tense situation - all to test her, to try and make her remember who she was, to get her to “ascend” to his level.
When Ballard's investigation got him close enough, Alpha murdered Steven Kepler, the man who had designed the Dollhouse, and assumed his identity. Posing as Kepler, he guided Ballard into the Dollhouse, and while a fight between Ballard and Head of Security Boyd Langton served as a distraction, Alpha both confronted Whiskey - now imprinted as a replacement Dr. Saunders - and absconded with Echo.
Alpha brought Echo and an abducted sales clerk to the power plant in San Pedro, and imprinted the sales clerk as Echo’s original self, Caroline. He hoped that Echo would kill Caroline after he had uploaded all her personality imprints into her mind and Echo had become “ascended.” Once Echo was imprinted, however, she attacked Alpha instead of Caroline. Alpha killed Caroline and ran off with the wedge containing Caroline’s personality and memories, and Echo chased him. Boyd, who had tracked them down with Ballard’s help, shot Alpha.
He woke up on the Barge.
PERSONALITY
Alpha is composed of a dominant personality (Alpha) controlling 48 other personalities. Because this is a technological mistake and not a mental disorder, they are real, full, complete personalities with their own memories and their own skills and areas of expertise. And since it’s not a mental disorder, and we’ve only met a couple of Alpha’s personalities, the Admiral could get rid of most of them the same way he’d limit superpowers, in order to a) give Alpha a more reasonable range of skills, and b) from an ooc standpoint… I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to have personalities that I know nothing about.
So the only personalities he’ll have on the barge are the two we’ve seen onscreen: Bobby and fake!Steven Kepler.
Alpha
The dominant personality is Alpha. He controls the other personalities - even when he has fully switched into another personality he can more or less dictate that personality’s overall objectives. He uses fake!Kepler to manipulate Ballard and Bobby to manipulate Echo. When Alpha’s driving, he can usually keep the others quiet. However, when he is agitated or nervous, he’ll lose some control, allowing other personalities to assert their views, and he’ll get in arguments with himself. There’s a lot of doubt in him because even if he’s convinced something’s right, there are other people living in his head that disagree.
The personalities in his head aren’t happy with their situation. At one point, Alpha notes, “They’re all screaming.” This implies that they don’t like being trapped inside Alpha and forced to work towards his ends.
Alpha doesn’t feel the need to treat the environment around him in the “normal” way. He uses tables as chairs, and in one episode hangs around a couple dead people he just killed watching a movie in the nude. His evil lair - in which he theoretically lives/spends most of his time - doesn’t even contain a bed.
He enjoys causing people distress and pain, asserting his dominance over them. His usual M.O. when killing is to disable the victim by severing their tendons, and then cutting them in exactly the right places to cause them the most pain before they bleed out. When he doesn’t intend to kill someone but would rather just disable them, he cuts up their face, leaving them permanently scarred. This isn’t about control issues or proving anything to himself or others. He thinks of himself as a god, and ritualizes his killing in much the same way certain ancient civilizations ritualized blood sacrifices.
Other people, to Alpha, are limited beings who he doesn’t believe have any more perception than animals. He is scornful to the point that he finds it surprising people can walk and talk. Because he has so many people living in his head, he thinks of himself as astronomically smarter and more perceptive than everyone else and has a great disdain for people. He thinks of himself as “ascended” and “superior.”
Alpha is incredibly focused and obsessive. Once he latches onto something, a person or a goal, he will be fixated and bend all his skills, intellect, and willpower into getting what he wants. After he fixates on Echo, he spends almost a full year dedicating his entire life to getting her out of the Dollhouse and turning her into someone “ascended” like him. Just the fact that he spent so long working towards that shows that he is incredibly patient. He thinks his moves out in advance - he’s a planner and a manipulator.
He harbors a great resentment towards Carl Craft, his original personality. He feels Craft “abandoned” him to the Dollhouse, leaving Alpha, the body, alone and vulnerable without Craft, the personality. His first deliberate action during his escape from the Dollhouse, once the security team was out of the way, was to destroy the hard drive on which Craft was stored.
Bobby
Bobby is both better and worse than Alpha. The primary characteristics that are noted about him are his pervasive sexual sadism and his paranoia. Quite simply, he gets off on causing other people pain. He is also always on the lookout, always watching over his shoulder, noticing little details and perhaps reading too much into them. But he says that after a lifetime on the run, he can tell when someone’s lying to him, and if he believes someone is lying to him he’ll intimidate and torture them into telling him the truth.
His moods are mercurial: he’s very quick to anger but he can also become calm again just as fast. With relatively little provocation, he’ll threaten or hurt someone. On the whole, he’s very emotional. While Alpha carefully considers everything in advance, Bobby is more about feeling and acting in the moment.
He may be more recklessly violent than the other personalities, but he’s also much more tender and romantic. He is very deeply in love with his girlfriend, Crystal, who he took from somewhere (perhaps on orphanage? In any case, it’s no place she liked) when she was thirteen. He believes himself to be a sort of Romeo figure, with a “doomed love.” He is very gentle with and protective of Crystal, and repeatedly tells her that she’s perfect and he loves her.
He romanticizes his crime-spree lifestyle and his relationship with Crystal, thinking of himself as a character out of melodramatic movie or play. He believes himself and Crystal to be “not afraid of anything” and idealizes that.
fake!Steven Kepler
This personality’s real name is unknown, but he poses as Steven Kepler. He is agoraphobic and deeply paranoid, though in a different way from Bobby. He doesn’t like to leave the small, confined space of his room, and indulges in bizarre, nightmarish fears. Specifically, he is terrified of stairs that don’t have risers, because a claw or tentacle (or even an ordinary hand) could reach up and grab his ankles.
He’s very environmentally conscious, to the point where he recycles his urine and aspires to building completely self-sufficient systems in which all waste products are recycled and used to power the facility with minimal need for outside electricity. He even says that he likes Mother Earth better than people.
He makes a couple strange statements and claims, and assumes that they’ll be taken easily in stride, such as asking someone if they want recycled urine or saying that humans will die out in a couple hundred years.
It’s implied that he’s a pothead, but since Alpha never seems to be under the influence of drugs, its unlikely that he ever smokes any of the marijuana he seems to be growing. Alternatively, the marijuana may belong to the real Steven Kepler.
He’s a terrible liar, easily distracted, and very absent-minded. When caught doing something bad, he’ll blabber excuse after excuse, and he does things like accidentally put the phone in the refrigerator. He also really likes watching women in minimal clothing getting massages, and mentions, “I heart my porn.” And he’s a coward. Because he’s agoraphobic, he doesn’t even like to leave his room, and at the faintest whiff of danger he’ll try to find any excuse to hide or turn back.
PATH TO REDEMPTION
The main issues that a warden would need to address are Alpha’s way of cutting faces, and the god complex which goes hand-in-hand with his multiple personalities. Since Alpha possesses the knowledge necessary to wipe personalities, a warden may be inclined to work towards him being willing to get rid of his extra personalities. Alternatively, a warden could work towards turning him into an Echo/Omega figure - someone whose personalities work more in harmony and who understands the importance of self and identity and the importance of the original, single personality over the many.
There are a couple ways a warden could go about accomplishing this. First, they’d need to make Alpha understand that he is not a god - that just because he’s smarter or more knowledgeable than someone else does not mean he has the right to kill that person. Second, they’d need to make him understand that killing anyone at all is bad. They could do this by using his feelings for Echo. Even when he threatens to destroy her original self, he doesn’t do it. He claims that he wants to imprint Caroline onto girl after girl so he can kill Caroline over and over again, but he lacks conviction when he says it. If a warden were to help him understand his feelings about Echo/Caroline in the context of how the people he’s so far “above” feel love, that might also bring him towards some form of empathy.
Integrating him into normal society would help - furnishing his room with a bed, a desk and chair, and other trappings of normality would get him to start living like a human being, at least. None of the three personalities he’d have on the barge appear to live in “normal” places: Alpha lives in a basement, Kepler lives in a veritable marijuana farm, and Bobby lives in his car. Giving him a basic routine to follow, a steady environment, and fairly normal interactions with others - without it turning into a mental facility type of environment - would make him a lot more human and less removed from people.
Finally, teaching him to apply his intellect and skills elsewhere - in, say, mathematics, computer science, chemistry, or some other non-killing-people field - would give him something to focus on besides ESCAPE KILL DOLLHOUSE ECHO ECHO ECHO. A warden would have to find a goal that Alpha would actually be interested in accomplishing, but given Alpha’s obsessive nature, finding something for him to do that couldn’t possibly involve killing people would be a step in the right direction.