do you trust me? dollhouse and the problematized protector
DOLLHOUSE SPOILERS. ALL OF THEM. buckle up, folks.
Although the authorial intent for Boyd’s character arc changed between S1 and S2, his characterization did not. Boyd’s character arc tracks directly onto the show’s thoughtful, layered, and absolutely merciless interrogation of masculinized protection as weapon and manifestation of the show’s big bad: patriarchy.
This is particularly clear in the comparison between Boyd and Ballard. Their character arcs are directly opposed to each other. Boyd, the Big Bad who tries to convince himself that he’s the Big Good, is revealed as a villain. Paul, who’s a traditional hero presented in a much bleaker way, becomes a hero through his own victimization.
In order for THM to have any resonance with us, we have to be attached to Boyd, and the bond is established almost as early for us as it is for Echo. The reveal has to be personal. Because as unfathomably huge as the oppression Dollhouse shows us is, it’s also always personal.
During The Target, the dangers of the protector-protectee relationship are shown as good-faith failures on the part of the protectors. Connell slips past the Dollhouse’s security screening, though at this point in the series we have no reason to doubt its rigor. The extra fee does no good to guarantee Echo’s safety. The toughness of Echo’s imprint can’t overcome the fragile but persistent development of Echo’s mind. Boyd, who does very much intend to protect her from harm at the hands of Connell, ends up shot and pinned to a tree. But even within this, there are hints of something darker. Boyd, somehow, already knows Echo is special for an Active; he’s nowhere near as concerned as he should be during the trip into the woods. Since we know this too, it’s not a huge question for us, but really, at the time, there’s no way he should have been able to know that.
Of course, with the later revelation, this leaves open the possibility for a retcon that Connell was not some random psychopath, or someone created by Alpha to test Echo, (and either of these possibilities remain equally valid on re-watch) but was actually Boyd himself shoving Echo’s shoulder to the wheel, once he felt he was in a position to make sure the whole thing didn’t go to shit. Under this interpretation, the episode becomes the Boyd-Echo relationship in a nutshell: he relies on her both for temporal safety and looks to her as the promise of eternal life. To that end, he’s playing a deadly, chaotic game to test her, just as Connell claims to be doing. And, of course, Boyd Langton is just as much of a fake name and cover identity as Connell ever was - if Clyde was the public face of Rossum, of course the names of his Science Club buddies wouldn’t have stayed a secret forever.
The intercuts into the Dollhouse with the Alpha flashbacks aren’t filling the time. They’re a reminder of the traditional male protector’s job, which is to protect form the scary, unhinged, violent Other man, to depend on that man’s violence to create the whole system of dependence and fear. He’s the rapist hiding in the bushes at night, the one who convinces people to accept a ride from a friend of a friend who seems like a perfect gentleman. Alpha certainly exists, and is absolutely a lethal threat to everyone, especially those in the Dollhouse. But he exists because of the Dollhouse, a danger not just incidental to the protectors, but created by them.
Though the early episodes such as The Target were enjoyable, with engaging characters and ethical/political/emotional issues in the margins, Man on the Street is the episode where Dollhouse throws down and makes crystal-clear its intention to examine the power dynamics not just between Active and client, but between Doll and handler, and to find the pimps exponentially more dangerous than the johns.
MotS explicitly showcases the trust created by the protector/protectee bond as an intolerable vulnerability. It’s subtly underlined throughout the series that Echo trusts Boyd even when she shouldn’t (particularly in Spy). But even this episode, ostensibly culminating in a demonstration of Boyd’s superiority to other handlers, distinctly shows us that Boyd cannot be trusted. As a protector, he’s not any different from Hearn. But for the grace of the script and the purple light, Hearn could have been Echo’s handler. What sets Boyd apart is his role as Echo’s handler, taken on only because of his role as her ultimate exploiter.
MotS is just as much the big Ballard episode as the big Boyd episode, if not more. Paul Ballard, at the beginning, isn’t any more of a character than the Actives are. He’s a deconstruction of an archetype: what does this person who has all the characteristics of a traditional white knight actually do in this dark gray world? What are the sources and effects of well-intentioned chivalry when patriarchy is the Big Bad? Ballard is a fascinating exploration of someone who wants to do the right thing but has to learn to think outside of his framework of traditional masculinity.
The bait-and-switch with Boyd and Ballard is just phenomenal. Because what Boyd is pretending to be here - the loyal knight, second in the partnership, loving but bewildered - that is where Ballard will actually end up in the Epitaph era. That’s Paul Ballard’s redemption, not to become some white-horse-riding motherfucker, but to accept that fighting with is better than speaking for.
Ballard is a deeply thoughtful deconstruction of the traditional male protagonist, not because he is flawed, but because Dollhouse consciously shows the darkness of his character traits which are nearly always considered strengths. Usually, the flawed male protector has darknesses unrelated to his work, for which his work is supposed to redeem him. He’s a good guy who protects people, BUT he’s a philanderer or an alcoholic or kind of a jerk. They’re impediments to his job as protector. Ballard’s darkness is inherently tied to his motives and actions concerning his self-appointment as male protector. That’s why Ballard’s story has to end the way it does, with him becoming an Active and self-actualizing from there. Paul Ballard doesn’t just learn his lesson. He is, quite literally, torn apart and rebuilt before he can be the hero he always wanted to be.
INTERTEXTUAL COMPARISON TIME BUT IT IS RELEVANT I SWEAR Very, very vague BSG spoilers. I forget where I found the tidbit that Whedon wrote the part of Ballard for Penikett after seeing BSG, but it is the kind of thing that makes me adore ME productions. Ballard is smarter and more complicated than Helo (I KNOW I KNOW that’s not saying much, but go with it) but in terms of his worldview at the beginning, and what he wants to be, and how he thinks, Ballard is really not a whole lot different from Helo. But in the conventional Liberal Dude philosophical framework of BSG, the Helo archetype is a straightforward white knight. His Captain Save-a-Ho complex (and the bonding he does with other afflicted men over it), his objectification of said saveable hos, his reliance on and love of His Team as well as his self-congratulatory relish of Issuing A Callout and Bucking The System - those are all shown directly and consistently as heroic traits in BSG. Dollhouse takes all that and, just by looking at the world once in a long damn while through the blank eyes of the object of his champ-ass shining armor fantasy, shows that those traits actually make him kind of a self-centered, paternalistic dick.
But Dollhouse doesn’t just take him and make him the villain. Ballard is, fundamentally, just as decent a guy as Helo; in fact, I’d argue he’s far better, as he does eventually figure it the fuck out. The goodness behind those impulses is genuine, even if it’s stunted by his individual human flaws which make him susceptible to the systemic oppression which makes possible everything from the horrors of the Dollhouse to the casual slut-shaming of Starbuck. He just does it wrong. Because Ballard is a common archetype seen more honestly from a slightly different angle, he does make perfect sense without knowledge of Helo (I did see Dollhouse first and this all was still clear on first watch) but the very deliberate choice of Penikett for the role is an as explicit as possible authorial statement on Ballard as commentary on the traditional - and thus, necessarily sexist - hero.
A Spy in the House of Love goes organization-wide with both the problems and goodness of handlers. Dom, who has been acting as a handler for Adelle and the DH at large, is replaced by Boyd, who has no interest in actual handling. The people we trust the most for protection, not in spite of but because of their unemotional, depersonalized dedication, are still people under their uniforms, and their loyalties can lie anywhere. Dominic’s loyalty is to the government - no different than Paul Ballard, beleaguered-knight-at-arms. But Adelle’s feelings of betrayal and our feelings of shock are completely at odds with the reality that Dominic, all this time, has been exactly what he seemed, just to a slightly more complicated purpose than he leads us to assume.
Looking at it again with the Boyd reveal in mind, holy shit, is it brilliant. Because it never quite added up that Dominic would play that game with Ballard. Dom would just shoot him. It’s more Adelle’s style, but we know it wasn’t her. He set up the Sierra gambit because he knew he was a mole; that doesn’t show anything about being the only one. Boyd, though, this is exactly his style. Play cat-and-mouse to test their defenses, watch how Echo interacted with Ballard, fuck with Ballard especially (who is what Boyd is pretending to be; Boyd isn’t threatened by Paul, he fucking hates Paul), and leave the chip in because it’s not like they’re going to catch him. The protection racket of everything but Echo is entirely expendable, which is how we know Echo herself is expendable to him as well.
For most of the first season, the critique of male protectors focuses on the exceptional cases, rather than a systemic view of the phenomenon of protection. The other handlers are nearly as appalled at Hearn as Adelle herself, Ballard is expelled by the FBI, and Dominic’s ruthlessness as necessitated by both his positions marked him as particularly dangerous. Briar Rose brings Ballard, Boyd, and Alpha, all the major players in the masculinity game, even with an enjoyable but not strictly necessary appearance by Dominic, in order to show us that their actions are indeed all pieces of the one game they’re playing. Alpha doesn’t just fulfill his role as the scary danger in the woods, but turns Ballard’s insistence on the script of the male protector to his own ends. Ballard and Boyd leap on the opportunity provided by Alpha to out-dude each other.
And it is very much a script, though not quite in the way we expect. If you’re working on the assumption that male protectors gone dangerous are a few bad apples in a generally unobjectionable system, the use of Sleeping Beauty is an odd one, as any direct character parallels would be messy at best. The show uses it to demonstrate that the idea of protection at all is a sham. As Susan explicitly tells us, the prince gets there when the hundred years were up anyway - he fought his way in for himself. He might have some exciting adventures, but he matters so little to the unconscious princess that he can be swapped out with anyone, even young Susan.
Echo-Susan: This time, imagine yourself as the prince.
Susan: But the prince is a boy!
Echo-Susan: Yeah, but that’s not his fault.
This particular role is always coded as masculine, not because it should be, but because it is in fact both exercise and facilitation of dominance. But Echo, the character who will challenge that by her innate inability to conform with the Dollhouse’s logical extension of feminine dependence, takes the story and turns it on its head. When she finally does get through to young Susan, it is to encourage the child to de-gender power in order to accept it as her own. The second half of the finale closes out the individual drama of the first season, but Briar Rose is necessary both to anchoring Echo’s individual journey in these large systemic issues, and to setting up the second season, which will deal directly (and more thoroughly than certainly any show I can think of) with those issues.
Vows might be the best episode of Dollhouse, it was good on first watch and is mind-blowing in retrospect. It is the bend in the curve of Dollhouse’s analysis of protective masculinity. It looks on first watch like a necessary, if basic, problematization of Ballard’s role in all this. Klar may be the abusive dick, but Ballard is the client who put Echo in harm’s way. But once we know what Boyd is, the relevant analogy becomes a lot clearer and a lot more interesting, with Boyd, Topher, and Claire paralleling Klar, Ballard, and Echo. The murderous criminal master of the universe, the bad-acting but not bad-intentioned maker/client, and the woman who doesn’t wanna die. (And if you don’t believe me that the character parallels are as intentional as it gets, check out the details of the end fight -the gun. That doesn’t work. UNSUBTLE PENIS METAPHORS. NEVER CHANGE, J-TRAIN. And then the bomb.)
Boyd, really, didn’t have a whole lot more to do with the making of Claire than Klar did of whatever Echo’s personality was. He’s responsible for the whole thing, sure, and benefiting from it, but he didn’t have any kind of direct involvement. It isn’t a Paul/Mellie (or, for that matter, Paul/Roma) thing. What draws Boyd and Klar to Echo/Roma is their very emptiness. I like what’s inside, Klar tells Roma, that’s why I loved you. But the piece he holds up is empty, to be filled with anything he wants.
Because, ew, why does Klar want to marry this girl he barely knows? Because he wants to have her, with the holding as a side benefit, because being married does give him both the protection of some level of psychological control and even legal protection (I can’t be bothered to look up the particulars of CA marital privilege, but there’s usually something) over what she can tell about him. That wedding is the squickiest thing in the world. And it should be. Mrs. Roma Klar. That’s the turn-on, that he’s sucked her into him, when he thinks she is a person who is genuinely all about him.
Similarly, what the fuck does Boyd care if Claire wants to stay in the Dollhouse forever? He hides it like regular old romantic interest - taken to its cultural end in the cut to the wedding with Klar - but pulling Claire out of the Dollhouse is a way to make her vulnerable to him. It’s made excruciatingly clear that it’s not Claire herself Boyd likes. He puts her in the chair and makes her a sleeper, then he wipes her completely to make room for Clyde when he had every Active in the world at his disposal. He likes her because he can empty her out like one of Klar’s shells.
They’re the embodiment of the patriarchy, bookended, the husband and the father, and they pet Echo and fawn over her as long as they’re getting what they want from her - the mind doesn’t matter, it’s the body we want, in fact, the mind is an impediment - and when their cover is blown, they go apeshit. Backlash is ugly.
Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?
I do.
Do you trust me?
With my life.
In the end, it’s not enough, in the micro or macro. Sure, they cuffed Klar, but stopping him wouldn’t even slow down arms trafficking, even if they did have enough to actually keep him in jail (what, his fake wife who doesn’t actually exist and a disgraced FBI agent playing cowboy saw him make an illegal u-turn? Victor could get that thrown out. Without an imprint). They’ll blow up Boyd, but too late to protect the tech, and without even assurance that there aren’t copies of whoever Boyd is, stashed away somewhere. Even when the individual patriarch is defeated, the patriarchy wins. In order to drive this point home as powerfully as possible, the personal patriarch must be absolutely culpable and absolutely destroyed. It must be Boyd, the trusted, beloved patriarch.
The DC Dollhouse sequence postulates that these exploitative bonds can take the form of actual love, and they lead to betrayal of the worst sort. The Boyd outcome, with Echo abandoning a wiped Boyd, is directly set up by Perrin’s killing of his handler - who he deeply loves.
The white knight/beautiful damsel bonding script is - like the events of The Target, or Adelle’s claim that Echo is protecting the Dollhouse - a particularly devious and manipulative way of making the protectee appear to be a party with power. It’s a brutal parody of the fairy tales the first season tried to spin to our advantage. For Perrin to be able to buy the lie that he’s a real boy, he must be convinced not just that he’s a person but that he’s a man, and the white knight/beautiful damsel script is part and parcel of this.
Cindy, like Boyd, uses language of parenting. “We made you a man,” she says, taking credit for who Perrin is. It’s unlikely that Cindy had anything to do with the creation of Perrin - Bennett seems wholly responsible for Perrin’s decent side - but at this point it’s not about Cindy’s or Bennett’s individual responsibility for Perrin, but about the corporation as a whole.
Perrin is an important character because he is the system. The government is in place ostensibly to protect us from the Boyds of the world, but instead, it ends up enabling them. Perrin is an immediate, and obvious, focal point for the suspicion of Adelle’s faction, even though he seems to be (and in fact, as far as he knows, genuinely is) an ally of theirs against the dangerous excesses of Rossum. For Perrin himself to be a victim - arguably the biggest victim of all, as his original self has been not just removed but contaminated to the point of oblivion - is a huge flashing signpost that the regular rules of suspicion and trust won’t apply here. The DC arc forces us to come to terms with the fact that the exploitation inherent to the protector/protectee dynamic is systemic. It does not exist as a failure in execution, the way the issues in The Target (seem to) arise. It’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s important that the blurring of lines between protected, victim, and victimizer occur within our main cast as well, as so not to Other the sliding hierarchy. In this case, it’s Madeleine and Ballard. Ballard “giving” Madeleine her freedom in Omega gets twisted here; Ballard is still completely at sea as to what his feelings for Mellie meant, and he thought cutting her loose was the way to make it all end. But nobody really leaves the Dollhouse. The first step in Ballard’s evolution to his eventual Active self is Madeleine, looking out at him from Mellie’s face, convincing Ballard that having successfully saved November does not give him ownership over any of them. She divorces protection from control, and with that, the house of cards begins to fall.
But it’ll take Echo’s whole world, and eventually ours, down with it.
Boyd’s “fatherly” attitude towards Echo has been noted openly throughout, and nobody seeks to question whether a fatherly alliance is something Echo needs. Except it’s the worst thing possible for her. The need for protection is the susceptibility to control. It’s terrible when it’s large and systemic - the overall corporatism of the Dollhouse - but it’s equally terrible when it’s so desperately personal.
Boyd’s desire to protect her has, all along, been the fostering and protection of his own interest in Echo’s body, to preserve himself for eternity. It’s unlikely to be an unintentional parallel with the way we sometimes see children as our own way to leave a mark on the world and pass ourselves forward - and the fact that there’s traditionally a woman’s body and a man’s name (and Echo literally doesn’t have her own name throughout) doesn’t make it any more subtle.
The reveal is strangely emotional for a corporate criminal mastermind, because it’s toying with another one of the deeper themes of protection in the series - protection, no matter how exploitative, changes the protectors. Some abuse their power and become worse people (Hearn), some learn the error of their ways and rise to fight that which they’ve supported (Adelle), and some find the cognitive dissonance too great to handle.
Boyd tries to resolve the cognitive dissonance for himself in the way that so many real-life exploiters do, which is to try to make the leash he holds into a human bond. I love you guys! We’re family. He rationalizes having sucked them into his web of misery as having been beneficial to them. His affection for them becomes yet another demonstration of his dominance over them, as he’s been making decisions about their minds as surely as they have done for the Dolls all this time. During his play to control the world, Boyd is openly positioning himself as the patriarch.
The Boyd-Ballard interplay gets one last moment in the spotlight. Ballard has become that which they protected, and as he still operates as his whole self, he completely crushes the hierarchal distinction between Actives and Actuals. If Ballard can be both Doll and real, both protector and protected, then the relevant distinction between people on this particular chessboard is whether they seek to help others, or to control others. Ballard’s very existence strips bare Boyd’s lie to himself. None of us is essentially an better than any others. Boyd’s move to co-opt everything Echo is, openly taking credit for her evolution, comes within moments of Paul’s recognition of Mellie as a person equal to himself. So am I…It doesn’t matter…We feel what we feel. In accepting himself as he is, and Mellie as a fellow fighter rather than an ingénue to be protected, Paul has refuted as deeply as possible the premises on which Boyd’s self-delusions about his grab for power rest.
This particular tension is the only reason Boyd’s eventual arc makes sense. Boyd got into the protection game - both in the broader sense of sending Caroline into the Dollhouse, and later to step in and take closer control when Alpha made it clear that the situation was more dangerous than he realized - solely to gain from Echo’s incapacitation. He wants her spinal fluid as insurance against the inevitable apocalypse. But there’s really no reason (other than the mid-season cancellation) for him to foster the apocalypse through the oddballs of the LA Dollhouse in the way he does. He wants to get as directly involved as possible, and solidify his control not just politically or financially, but as emotionally as possible.
I loved you!
She did. And in his twisted, selfish way, he loved her back. And that, in the end, is why it had to be Boyd.
Although the authorial intent for Boyd’s character arc changed between S1 and S2, his characterization did not. Boyd’s character arc tracks directly onto the show’s thoughtful, layered, and absolutely merciless interrogation of masculinized protection as weapon and manifestation of the show’s big bad: patriarchy.
This is particularly clear in the comparison between Boyd and Ballard. Their character arcs are directly opposed to each other. Boyd, the Big Bad who tries to convince himself that he’s the Big Good, is revealed as a villain. Paul, who’s a traditional hero presented in a much bleaker way, becomes a hero through his own victimization.
In order for THM to have any resonance with us, we have to be attached to Boyd, and the bond is established almost as early for us as it is for Echo. The reveal has to be personal. Because as unfathomably huge as the oppression Dollhouse shows us is, it’s also always personal.
During The Target, the dangers of the protector-protectee relationship are shown as good-faith failures on the part of the protectors. Connell slips past the Dollhouse’s security screening, though at this point in the series we have no reason to doubt its rigor. The extra fee does no good to guarantee Echo’s safety. The toughness of Echo’s imprint can’t overcome the fragile but persistent development of Echo’s mind. Boyd, who does very much intend to protect her from harm at the hands of Connell, ends up shot and pinned to a tree. But even within this, there are hints of something darker. Boyd, somehow, already knows Echo is special for an Active; he’s nowhere near as concerned as he should be during the trip into the woods. Since we know this too, it’s not a huge question for us, but really, at the time, there’s no way he should have been able to know that.
Of course, with the later revelation, this leaves open the possibility for a retcon that Connell was not some random psychopath, or someone created by Alpha to test Echo, (and either of these possibilities remain equally valid on re-watch) but was actually Boyd himself shoving Echo’s shoulder to the wheel, once he felt he was in a position to make sure the whole thing didn’t go to shit. Under this interpretation, the episode becomes the Boyd-Echo relationship in a nutshell: he relies on her both for temporal safety and looks to her as the promise of eternal life. To that end, he’s playing a deadly, chaotic game to test her, just as Connell claims to be doing. And, of course, Boyd Langton is just as much of a fake name and cover identity as Connell ever was - if Clyde was the public face of Rossum, of course the names of his Science Club buddies wouldn’t have stayed a secret forever.
The intercuts into the Dollhouse with the Alpha flashbacks aren’t filling the time. They’re a reminder of the traditional male protector’s job, which is to protect form the scary, unhinged, violent Other man, to depend on that man’s violence to create the whole system of dependence and fear. He’s the rapist hiding in the bushes at night, the one who convinces people to accept a ride from a friend of a friend who seems like a perfect gentleman. Alpha certainly exists, and is absolutely a lethal threat to everyone, especially those in the Dollhouse. But he exists because of the Dollhouse, a danger not just incidental to the protectors, but created by them.
Though the early episodes such as The Target were enjoyable, with engaging characters and ethical/political/emotional issues in the margins, Man on the Street is the episode where Dollhouse throws down and makes crystal-clear its intention to examine the power dynamics not just between Active and client, but between Doll and handler, and to find the pimps exponentially more dangerous than the johns.
MotS explicitly showcases the trust created by the protector/protectee bond as an intolerable vulnerability. It’s subtly underlined throughout the series that Echo trusts Boyd even when she shouldn’t (particularly in Spy). But even this episode, ostensibly culminating in a demonstration of Boyd’s superiority to other handlers, distinctly shows us that Boyd cannot be trusted. As a protector, he’s not any different from Hearn. But for the grace of the script and the purple light, Hearn could have been Echo’s handler. What sets Boyd apart is his role as Echo’s handler, taken on only because of his role as her ultimate exploiter.
MotS is just as much the big Ballard episode as the big Boyd episode, if not more. Paul Ballard, at the beginning, isn’t any more of a character than the Actives are. He’s a deconstruction of an archetype: what does this person who has all the characteristics of a traditional white knight actually do in this dark gray world? What are the sources and effects of well-intentioned chivalry when patriarchy is the Big Bad? Ballard is a fascinating exploration of someone who wants to do the right thing but has to learn to think outside of his framework of traditional masculinity.
The bait-and-switch with Boyd and Ballard is just phenomenal. Because what Boyd is pretending to be here - the loyal knight, second in the partnership, loving but bewildered - that is where Ballard will actually end up in the Epitaph era. That’s Paul Ballard’s redemption, not to become some white-horse-riding motherfucker, but to accept that fighting with is better than speaking for.
Ballard is a deeply thoughtful deconstruction of the traditional male protagonist, not because he is flawed, but because Dollhouse consciously shows the darkness of his character traits which are nearly always considered strengths. Usually, the flawed male protector has darknesses unrelated to his work, for which his work is supposed to redeem him. He’s a good guy who protects people, BUT he’s a philanderer or an alcoholic or kind of a jerk. They’re impediments to his job as protector. Ballard’s darkness is inherently tied to his motives and actions concerning his self-appointment as male protector. That’s why Ballard’s story has to end the way it does, with him becoming an Active and self-actualizing from there. Paul Ballard doesn’t just learn his lesson. He is, quite literally, torn apart and rebuilt before he can be the hero he always wanted to be.
INTERTEXTUAL COMPARISON TIME BUT IT IS RELEVANT I SWEAR Very, very vague BSG spoilers. I forget where I found the tidbit that Whedon wrote the part of Ballard for Penikett after seeing BSG, but it is the kind of thing that makes me adore ME productions. Ballard is smarter and more complicated than Helo (I KNOW I KNOW that’s not saying much, but go with it) but in terms of his worldview at the beginning, and what he wants to be, and how he thinks, Ballard is really not a whole lot different from Helo. But in the conventional Liberal Dude philosophical framework of BSG, the Helo archetype is a straightforward white knight. His Captain Save-a-Ho complex (and the bonding he does with other afflicted men over it), his objectification of said saveable hos, his reliance on and love of His Team as well as his self-congratulatory relish of Issuing A Callout and Bucking The System - those are all shown directly and consistently as heroic traits in BSG. Dollhouse takes all that and, just by looking at the world once in a long damn while through the blank eyes of the object of his champ-ass shining armor fantasy, shows that those traits actually make him kind of a self-centered, paternalistic dick.
But Dollhouse doesn’t just take him and make him the villain. Ballard is, fundamentally, just as decent a guy as Helo; in fact, I’d argue he’s far better, as he does eventually figure it the fuck out. The goodness behind those impulses is genuine, even if it’s stunted by his individual human flaws which make him susceptible to the systemic oppression which makes possible everything from the horrors of the Dollhouse to the casual slut-shaming of Starbuck. He just does it wrong. Because Ballard is a common archetype seen more honestly from a slightly different angle, he does make perfect sense without knowledge of Helo (I did see Dollhouse first and this all was still clear on first watch) but the very deliberate choice of Penikett for the role is an as explicit as possible authorial statement on Ballard as commentary on the traditional - and thus, necessarily sexist - hero.
A Spy in the House of Love goes organization-wide with both the problems and goodness of handlers. Dom, who has been acting as a handler for Adelle and the DH at large, is replaced by Boyd, who has no interest in actual handling. The people we trust the most for protection, not in spite of but because of their unemotional, depersonalized dedication, are still people under their uniforms, and their loyalties can lie anywhere. Dominic’s loyalty is to the government - no different than Paul Ballard, beleaguered-knight-at-arms. But Adelle’s feelings of betrayal and our feelings of shock are completely at odds with the reality that Dominic, all this time, has been exactly what he seemed, just to a slightly more complicated purpose than he leads us to assume.
Looking at it again with the Boyd reveal in mind, holy shit, is it brilliant. Because it never quite added up that Dominic would play that game with Ballard. Dom would just shoot him. It’s more Adelle’s style, but we know it wasn’t her. He set up the Sierra gambit because he knew he was a mole; that doesn’t show anything about being the only one. Boyd, though, this is exactly his style. Play cat-and-mouse to test their defenses, watch how Echo interacted with Ballard, fuck with Ballard especially (who is what Boyd is pretending to be; Boyd isn’t threatened by Paul, he fucking hates Paul), and leave the chip in because it’s not like they’re going to catch him. The protection racket of everything but Echo is entirely expendable, which is how we know Echo herself is expendable to him as well.
For most of the first season, the critique of male protectors focuses on the exceptional cases, rather than a systemic view of the phenomenon of protection. The other handlers are nearly as appalled at Hearn as Adelle herself, Ballard is expelled by the FBI, and Dominic’s ruthlessness as necessitated by both his positions marked him as particularly dangerous. Briar Rose brings Ballard, Boyd, and Alpha, all the major players in the masculinity game, even with an enjoyable but not strictly necessary appearance by Dominic, in order to show us that their actions are indeed all pieces of the one game they’re playing. Alpha doesn’t just fulfill his role as the scary danger in the woods, but turns Ballard’s insistence on the script of the male protector to his own ends. Ballard and Boyd leap on the opportunity provided by Alpha to out-dude each other.
And it is very much a script, though not quite in the way we expect. If you’re working on the assumption that male protectors gone dangerous are a few bad apples in a generally unobjectionable system, the use of Sleeping Beauty is an odd one, as any direct character parallels would be messy at best. The show uses it to demonstrate that the idea of protection at all is a sham. As Susan explicitly tells us, the prince gets there when the hundred years were up anyway - he fought his way in for himself. He might have some exciting adventures, but he matters so little to the unconscious princess that he can be swapped out with anyone, even young Susan.
Echo-Susan: This time, imagine yourself as the prince.
Susan: But the prince is a boy!
Echo-Susan: Yeah, but that’s not his fault.
This particular role is always coded as masculine, not because it should be, but because it is in fact both exercise and facilitation of dominance. But Echo, the character who will challenge that by her innate inability to conform with the Dollhouse’s logical extension of feminine dependence, takes the story and turns it on its head. When she finally does get through to young Susan, it is to encourage the child to de-gender power in order to accept it as her own. The second half of the finale closes out the individual drama of the first season, but Briar Rose is necessary both to anchoring Echo’s individual journey in these large systemic issues, and to setting up the second season, which will deal directly (and more thoroughly than certainly any show I can think of) with those issues.
Vows might be the best episode of Dollhouse, it was good on first watch and is mind-blowing in retrospect. It is the bend in the curve of Dollhouse’s analysis of protective masculinity. It looks on first watch like a necessary, if basic, problematization of Ballard’s role in all this. Klar may be the abusive dick, but Ballard is the client who put Echo in harm’s way. But once we know what Boyd is, the relevant analogy becomes a lot clearer and a lot more interesting, with Boyd, Topher, and Claire paralleling Klar, Ballard, and Echo. The murderous criminal master of the universe, the bad-acting but not bad-intentioned maker/client, and the woman who doesn’t wanna die. (And if you don’t believe me that the character parallels are as intentional as it gets, check out the details of the end fight -the gun. That doesn’t work. UNSUBTLE PENIS METAPHORS. NEVER CHANGE, J-TRAIN. And then the bomb.)
Boyd, really, didn’t have a whole lot more to do with the making of Claire than Klar did of whatever Echo’s personality was. He’s responsible for the whole thing, sure, and benefiting from it, but he didn’t have any kind of direct involvement. It isn’t a Paul/Mellie (or, for that matter, Paul/Roma) thing. What draws Boyd and Klar to Echo/Roma is their very emptiness. I like what’s inside, Klar tells Roma, that’s why I loved you. But the piece he holds up is empty, to be filled with anything he wants.
Because, ew, why does Klar want to marry this girl he barely knows? Because he wants to have her, with the holding as a side benefit, because being married does give him both the protection of some level of psychological control and even legal protection (I can’t be bothered to look up the particulars of CA marital privilege, but there’s usually something) over what she can tell about him. That wedding is the squickiest thing in the world. And it should be. Mrs. Roma Klar. That’s the turn-on, that he’s sucked her into him, when he thinks she is a person who is genuinely all about him.
Similarly, what the fuck does Boyd care if Claire wants to stay in the Dollhouse forever? He hides it like regular old romantic interest - taken to its cultural end in the cut to the wedding with Klar - but pulling Claire out of the Dollhouse is a way to make her vulnerable to him. It’s made excruciatingly clear that it’s not Claire herself Boyd likes. He puts her in the chair and makes her a sleeper, then he wipes her completely to make room for Clyde when he had every Active in the world at his disposal. He likes her because he can empty her out like one of Klar’s shells.
They’re the embodiment of the patriarchy, bookended, the husband and the father, and they pet Echo and fawn over her as long as they’re getting what they want from her - the mind doesn’t matter, it’s the body we want, in fact, the mind is an impediment - and when their cover is blown, they go apeshit. Backlash is ugly.
Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?
I do.
Do you trust me?
With my life.
In the end, it’s not enough, in the micro or macro. Sure, they cuffed Klar, but stopping him wouldn’t even slow down arms trafficking, even if they did have enough to actually keep him in jail (what, his fake wife who doesn’t actually exist and a disgraced FBI agent playing cowboy saw him make an illegal u-turn? Victor could get that thrown out. Without an imprint). They’ll blow up Boyd, but too late to protect the tech, and without even assurance that there aren’t copies of whoever Boyd is, stashed away somewhere. Even when the individual patriarch is defeated, the patriarchy wins. In order to drive this point home as powerfully as possible, the personal patriarch must be absolutely culpable and absolutely destroyed. It must be Boyd, the trusted, beloved patriarch.
The DC Dollhouse sequence postulates that these exploitative bonds can take the form of actual love, and they lead to betrayal of the worst sort. The Boyd outcome, with Echo abandoning a wiped Boyd, is directly set up by Perrin’s killing of his handler - who he deeply loves.
The white knight/beautiful damsel bonding script is - like the events of The Target, or Adelle’s claim that Echo is protecting the Dollhouse - a particularly devious and manipulative way of making the protectee appear to be a party with power. It’s a brutal parody of the fairy tales the first season tried to spin to our advantage. For Perrin to be able to buy the lie that he’s a real boy, he must be convinced not just that he’s a person but that he’s a man, and the white knight/beautiful damsel script is part and parcel of this.
Cindy, like Boyd, uses language of parenting. “We made you a man,” she says, taking credit for who Perrin is. It’s unlikely that Cindy had anything to do with the creation of Perrin - Bennett seems wholly responsible for Perrin’s decent side - but at this point it’s not about Cindy’s or Bennett’s individual responsibility for Perrin, but about the corporation as a whole.
Perrin is an important character because he is the system. The government is in place ostensibly to protect us from the Boyds of the world, but instead, it ends up enabling them. Perrin is an immediate, and obvious, focal point for the suspicion of Adelle’s faction, even though he seems to be (and in fact, as far as he knows, genuinely is) an ally of theirs against the dangerous excesses of Rossum. For Perrin himself to be a victim - arguably the biggest victim of all, as his original self has been not just removed but contaminated to the point of oblivion - is a huge flashing signpost that the regular rules of suspicion and trust won’t apply here. The DC arc forces us to come to terms with the fact that the exploitation inherent to the protector/protectee dynamic is systemic. It does not exist as a failure in execution, the way the issues in The Target (seem to) arise. It’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s important that the blurring of lines between protected, victim, and victimizer occur within our main cast as well, as so not to Other the sliding hierarchy. In this case, it’s Madeleine and Ballard. Ballard “giving” Madeleine her freedom in Omega gets twisted here; Ballard is still completely at sea as to what his feelings for Mellie meant, and he thought cutting her loose was the way to make it all end. But nobody really leaves the Dollhouse. The first step in Ballard’s evolution to his eventual Active self is Madeleine, looking out at him from Mellie’s face, convincing Ballard that having successfully saved November does not give him ownership over any of them. She divorces protection from control, and with that, the house of cards begins to fall.
But it’ll take Echo’s whole world, and eventually ours, down with it.
Boyd’s “fatherly” attitude towards Echo has been noted openly throughout, and nobody seeks to question whether a fatherly alliance is something Echo needs. Except it’s the worst thing possible for her. The need for protection is the susceptibility to control. It’s terrible when it’s large and systemic - the overall corporatism of the Dollhouse - but it’s equally terrible when it’s so desperately personal.
Boyd’s desire to protect her has, all along, been the fostering and protection of his own interest in Echo’s body, to preserve himself for eternity. It’s unlikely to be an unintentional parallel with the way we sometimes see children as our own way to leave a mark on the world and pass ourselves forward - and the fact that there’s traditionally a woman’s body and a man’s name (and Echo literally doesn’t have her own name throughout) doesn’t make it any more subtle.
The reveal is strangely emotional for a corporate criminal mastermind, because it’s toying with another one of the deeper themes of protection in the series - protection, no matter how exploitative, changes the protectors. Some abuse their power and become worse people (Hearn), some learn the error of their ways and rise to fight that which they’ve supported (Adelle), and some find the cognitive dissonance too great to handle.
Boyd tries to resolve the cognitive dissonance for himself in the way that so many real-life exploiters do, which is to try to make the leash he holds into a human bond. I love you guys! We’re family. He rationalizes having sucked them into his web of misery as having been beneficial to them. His affection for them becomes yet another demonstration of his dominance over them, as he’s been making decisions about their minds as surely as they have done for the Dolls all this time. During his play to control the world, Boyd is openly positioning himself as the patriarch.
The Boyd-Ballard interplay gets one last moment in the spotlight. Ballard has become that which they protected, and as he still operates as his whole self, he completely crushes the hierarchal distinction between Actives and Actuals. If Ballard can be both Doll and real, both protector and protected, then the relevant distinction between people on this particular chessboard is whether they seek to help others, or to control others. Ballard’s very existence strips bare Boyd’s lie to himself. None of us is essentially an better than any others. Boyd’s move to co-opt everything Echo is, openly taking credit for her evolution, comes within moments of Paul’s recognition of Mellie as a person equal to himself. So am I…It doesn’t matter…We feel what we feel. In accepting himself as he is, and Mellie as a fellow fighter rather than an ingénue to be protected, Paul has refuted as deeply as possible the premises on which Boyd’s self-delusions about his grab for power rest.
This particular tension is the only reason Boyd’s eventual arc makes sense. Boyd got into the protection game - both in the broader sense of sending Caroline into the Dollhouse, and later to step in and take closer control when Alpha made it clear that the situation was more dangerous than he realized - solely to gain from Echo’s incapacitation. He wants her spinal fluid as insurance against the inevitable apocalypse. But there’s really no reason (other than the mid-season cancellation) for him to foster the apocalypse through the oddballs of the LA Dollhouse in the way he does. He wants to get as directly involved as possible, and solidify his control not just politically or financially, but as emotionally as possible.
I loved you!
She did. And in his twisted, selfish way, he loved her back. And that, in the end, is why it had to be Boyd.