Queering the Dollhouse: Thoughts on Kilo
I really enjoyed and highly recommend meloukhia’s post on the portrayal of Mag and her (queer) sexuality in E1 & E2. I think an interesting counterpart to this discussion is one on Kilo, who also appears in two episodes.
I think it might be a little too simplistic to portray the Mag/Kilo hinted relationship as solely about Mag’s attraction (though of course we all focus on Mag because of the Felicia Day love, which, well, <3), because Kilo is given a similar throwaway line in E2, if I remember correctly, expressing an attraction to Echo. The two characters have similar, deeply casual, comings-out to the audience. (After being disarmed by Echo, Kilo looks up and slurs, “oh, God, she’s so cool [cute?]” in a winded yet amorous fashion.) Kilo’s is clearly slightly less questionable than Mag’s because of course we don’t actually meet the character as anything other than a blank slate until E2, so her queerness can’t be read as a retcon or last-minute add-on.
Kilo, though, is a more complex story than Mag, even if we don’t know her as well, because of course she’s been a Doll. It’s fairly well accepted within the Dh universe that because men hae more social and economic power, and so they’re far more likely to be clients of the Dollhouse. The violation of body isn’t really quite enough to explain Kilo’s story. The Dollhouse has spent years literally forcing her into heterosexuality. It’s a violation of her identity, just one more way the Dollhouse robs its denizens of who they really are. This particular facet of the Dollhouse is a bit sharper than the others because it’s not the same as removing a taste for carrots or fear of bunnies - Kilo is a member of a marginalized group living in a society where too many people actually wish she would disappear and re-emerge as a silent sex object.
Taking a queer woman and brainwashing her hetero is a dehumanizing stripping of identity which is all too popular in our world, and as always in the world of Dollhouse, story and metaphor are a tangled web indeed. I don’t think it’s reaching too far into the realms of fanfic to postulate that one potential background story for Kilo is in fact that she’s been chased into the Dollhouse by the particular dangers posed to her by a homophobic society.
Moreover, when we take the series of scenes we’ve seen Kilo in Doll-state in stride with her sexuality, there’s kind of a payoff. It’s fairly clear that the use of Kilo as guinea pig for not one but two different DH devices is simply meant to showcase MT’s comedic timing (which is an excellent choice, as she’s very funny in both scenes), but it also plays nicely with the Dollhouse themes that you just can’t wipe some things away, no matter which way you try (not by laws, not by religion, not by fake psychology), and by this point in the show most viewers and characters are beginning to see the wipes as things that shouldn’t happen. This is playing out over Kilo, over her ability to self-express, as the way modern America is working out its identiy crisis in part over the realities of queer folks.
The Kilo we do eventually meet is one of Victor’s soldiers, who has harnessed the tech used so violently against her to turn herself into a weapon - not just overcoming adversity, but incorporating its power into her very self. She fights in a fight she’s chosen, not one she was forced or brainwashed into, and ends up behind the curtain with Mag. Kilo, unlike Mag, is a morally ambiguous character. She and a couple of other supersolders attempt to stall Echo’s plan to fix the world. She’s clearly following Romeo’s plan, however, and easily acquiesces to the new plan of saving the world.
It’s tough to believe that this is anything other than a fortunate outcome of the quick wrap-up of the series, but the choice to allow an Active the opportunity to reclaim her queer identity (with Felicia Day!) is a hopeful one, which incorporates positive experiences of homosexuality into the DH universe (where before, after all, we have only heard of same-sex engagements).
Kilo is overall a very minor character, but I would argue that her presentation is as positive as Mag’s, and it enriches the show by inviting watchers to consider questions of sexuality, identity, and control.