've just seen Epitaph One (unaired episode of Dollhouse, on the DVD, and available by bittorrent). Excellent acting, excellent scripting, brilliant all round, oh man, oh my oh my. And terrifying too; dystopian in the extreme, bleak bleak bleak. One thing that worries me is that I don't see, if this is "the future", how he can get out of this now; how he can give us another ending. The old dream ending? Alternate universe? This is what COULD happen if we all don't make GOOD CHOICES, kids?
Are we watching an Angelverse - all go down fighting, evil triumphs, it's night, it's raining, we're in an alleyway, Wes is dead, Gunn is dying, only the demons can survive in this universe - or a Buffyverse - we destroyed the town in order to save it, but we DID save it, only - and all - the demons are dead, now we can all patch ourselves up and get on with our lives, sun shines, we're on the road away from the Hellmouth and we've even got a bus? ON the basis of Epitaph One, we're definitely in an Angelverse. If that's how it's going to go, though, not sure how much I want to keep watching - except I'm riveted. of course. But one thing that does keep us riveted is hoping that there is a way the characters can escape their almost certain fates; if we knew for sure they were all doomed we wouldn't be so spellbound. So I'll be interested to see how Joss springs us out of Epitaph One, or makes us question it as the Only Possible Future, Because otherwise it's going to be difficult to carry on with the series; we need suspense.
But what I wanted to talk about mostly was Whedon's idea of evil, which is beginning to become steadily clearer and I think it's always the same sort of thing.
In Sunnydale, we have vampires and demons; in Angelverse, we have demons and a few vampires and Wolfram and Hart;
in Serenity we have Reavers, created by the establishment in an effort to make everything better;
in Dollhouse we have an evil establishment with tenttacles everywhere, absolute power producing absolute evil, a slave economy, and - in Epitaph One - vampires, demons, humans, and a new category, blank slates.
The "butchers" of Epitaph One are the Reavers of Serenity or the demons - some demons; the full-blood demons especially - in the Buffy/Angelverse. All the butcher/reaver humanity has been completely destroyed by the actions of an Establishment that used them for its own purposes without much caring about the effect on the individual - or even realising this would be the effect; children, playing with matches, as "Caroline" says in Epitaph One. Their behavioural characteristics - wanton violence, cruelty, vandalism, etc - is like demons in Sunnydale, and many demons in Angel. I think Joss Whedon has never really wanted us to think of demons as good; attractive, possessing many appealing human characteristics, but in the end, they're bad.
The "actuals" in Epitaph One - humans who have not had their souls erased, are still the people they were born as - are human beings.
Then we have the "imprints", who are vampires, kinda (original soul is destroyed, imprinted with someone else's personality)
And finally we have the new category, the "dumbshows", who are the dolls, in Dollhouse; the original personality has been erased, and basic functions still exist, but they're blank slates. They don't exist in Buffy or Angel.
So I think Joss Whedon is meditating on evil, or showing us the faces of evil, but the mechanisms used to produce it are changing. In Buffy/Angel, it was supernatural - demons were demonic, and some demons can take over your body and make you demonic, and you can get away with it because there is a structure of powerful demonic beings in places of power who will use agencies like Wolfram and Hart to protect you if you're useful enough to them.
In Serenity, an evil - control-freak - military industrial government complex tries to pacify an entire world and has unintentional side effects of creating demons by putting stuff in the drinking water (or the air, or whatever it was). The consequences were not intended but the mechanism was entirely human and certainly intentional. They just didn't realise what it would do. And they hid it, lied about it to everyone "for their own good", and were generally secretive; always a bad idea, in the Jossverse; and marks you as a bad guy.
And in Epitaph One, an entirely self-serving for-profit organization comes up with a cool new technology with some highly exploitable ramifications; but like the stuff in the water supply in Serenity, the technology gets out of control with disastrous results. But these results actually were foreseeable. So more and more, the responsibility for evil is becoming human, in the Jossverse; it's becoming our fault. We can't blame the demons or the side effects. We can blame people in positions of power, for sure; but they are people, not demons.
Which makes his new take on evil spectacularly scary because it is so much likelier to happen. It's so much closer to the real world.
I think the Buffy and Angelverse were metaphorical, and cautionary tales. But I'm not so sure the Dollhouse is a metaphor. I think he's saying, this is REAL, folks; this is HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU. Maybe not this specific thing, but somewhere, right now, is the technology that's going to destroy us, and it's not even going to be very long from now.
No comments:
Post a Comment