In this most recent episode of Dollhouse, we witnessed a future stricken by evil tech. This technology takes away every aspect of humanity in the brain and literally turns people into walking killers. These people kill anyone who isn’t programmed to kill. Personalities are completely altered. No one is themselves. The world has been turned upside down. Only Echo, along with others from the Dollhouse, and her split personalities, can save the world. Looking into the past though, personalities were put into Echo one by one. These personalities weren’t created to lead a revolution. How did Echo succeed?
Alpha was the one who put all of Echo’s past personalities into her head at once. Alpha couldn’t handle the stress of multiple personalities, but Echo could. She is strong and now is able to access each personality separately. Although not created to lead a rebellion, Echo is able to use all of her past memories and experiences to give her an advantage. Once there are two Echos, one real and one in the little girl’s body, we know that they will prevail.
The show seems to want to show how she grows as a character. Echo can’t grow though. At the end of every episode she is wiped clean, forgetting almost everything from her assignments. I actually enjoy this show. I think that imprinting is actually a really cool idea, granted the show takes it too far sometimes. They turn imprinting into a form of slavery. I watched the season finales from both Season 1 and 2 and they take place in the years 2019 and 2020. The imprinting technology has taken over almost everyone’s minds and it is making them kill everyone in sight. Echo, Ballard, Dewitt, Sierra, and Victor are some of the Dollhouse members who figure out how to stop it. The failures on the part of the Dollhouse end up coming back to bite them in the butt. They have ended the world, so to speak, because of their advancing technology created by Topher. Only at the end of the world did people realize that imprinting was wrong.
In “Epitaph Two,” Topher invents a way to fix what he created. A sort of undo button. Everyone hit by this new imprint will regain their old memories, but will forget everything after they were first affected by the bad imprint. Basically, millions of people wake up years in the future with no clue what is going on. More chaos is obviously going to ensue. The series ends leaving things “better”. The world is no longer killing each other, but I wish the show had addressed how they were going to fix the world. Entire cities were burned to the ground. Will the Dollhouses around the world be blamed for stealing people’s identities? Is imprinting wrong? Not allowing people to be themselves, but rather other people’s slaves, is wrong. In the future, Echo is able to remain Echo and also be the other personality that is imprinted into her mind. This is the kind of imprinting I think is acceptable; one that does not alter your own self first.
What do you think the future episodes would have told us about imprinting? Do you think it is wrong? The probono work Dr. Saunders works on is good for the community? Is imprinting wrong in this instance?
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