I agree that on the face of it, these plot points didn’t come off very well, but I’ll suggest a couple of possibilities that might explain them:
Ballard can be a pragmatic guy when he wants to be. He tried to hand the Dollhouse to the Bureau on a silver platter (they were standing directly over it, fer cryin’ out loud) and his former employer still wouldn’t bite. That tells him that, at the least, he’s got no remaining cred, and at worst the Bureau, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to know about it. OTOH, he’s got a position on the inside, he already managed to get at least one person out, and he can at least do something useful by maybe finding and stopping Alpha.
I believe there’s something darker at work here too. Ballard also has a habit of not being honest to himself about his own impulses. Now that he’s seen the place at work, he’s fascinated. Whether he admits it to himself of not, he’s fallen victim to the kind of attraction that brings in the paying customers.
One last thing on that score that I found interesting. Ballard spent the entire series chasing after Echo/Caroline, with the expressed intention of springing her from her slavery. At the end, when he presumably could negotiate the release of anyone in the place in return for staying on as ‘special agent’, who does he ask to be let go? NOT Caroline.
How Caroline ends up back in her pod without at least having badly damaged a few handlers seems much more difficult to explain, and I admit this will likely be excessively lame: she realized that her chances of getting away clean, even with the advantage of numerous imprints and their skills in her, were next to zero. I don’t think it works well, and the script could easily have got round the whole problem by, say, having her pass out from her wound, but other than that I got nothing.
Oh, wait, maybe one more thing: IIRC, none of the multiple imprints were her own, original personality, and unlike Alpha, it appeared she would prefer regaining that than going through the rest of her life as an Alpha-bet soup. So she reluctantly agreed to go back and be wiped because at least she migh have a chance to regain herself sometime before the five-year term was up.
Right obviously, they’ve been bashing us over the head with that idea the whole season. What I find more interesting about it is Craft’s notion of it being irrelevant, that he knows who he is without those memories. This is echo’d (pun intended) by Echo and Whiskey as well.
Yes, what would be interesting is experiencing the dolls in general. Which ones have a more sensitive touch etc… Like what kind of aspects of a persons persona are impacted by the makeup of the PNS and the neuromuscular system.
Yes, it’s also possible that he knows that Caroline is in play and that having her in the house gives him more leverage. He also knows that that there are dollhouses everywhere, that taking out that one single Dollhouse probably wouldn’t make a difference.
Yes the one thing I thought of at the time was that the only people who could restore, ‘Caroline’, to her body and would do it is Topher/DeWitt. She doesn’t know how to operate the machinery and she knows Alpha isn’t going to help her.
Whereas Ballard’s original mission was to find the Dollhouse and free Caroline, he may now have decided to take on the mission given him by the mole - to find out the larger purpose of the Dollhouse - which he can much better accomplish from the inside. I could see him being Echo’s handler as a natural fit.
I don’t think Ballard is up for watching Echo go out on a “whore” mission. I think he’ll have some other role to play.
As for why Composite Echo went back to the dollhouse to be wiped, and why Ballard didn’t ask for her release, I just assumed that Echo and he had a conversation at some point where the worked out a deal or plan. Composite Echo is smart enought to wait for the right moment in order to get her original personality back. Plus it seems like she’s starting to retain more even in her ‘wiped’ state.
I hope this gets renewed, or picked up by someone else.
I was thinking that Ballard’s motivation has primarily been an obsession with Caroline, so perhaps he decided to join up in order to protect her from Alpha. In his mind, it’s better to have her squirreled away in the Dollhouse while he hunts down Alpha - then when it’s safe he’ll see to getting her out. It fits with the discussion with Boyd - about how there’s always a girl to save. (Which also gives some insight into Boyd’s presence - maybe he signed on to buy out the contract of his daughter/sister/second cousin, the way Ballard bargained for November.)
I hate that this is probably doomed. It’s like as soon as it stopped sucking, it was immediately in danger of cancellation.
(BTW, the girl who played Wendy was the kid in the movie Nine Months who was into romance novels and slapped Hugh Grant upside the head. That’s all I could think of when she was on screen.)
What if one of her personalities was an agorophobe? or a Klutz? I’m not sure the skills can just be aggregated together to make you a superman - some are going to work against others. That could lead to some pretty messed up ‘composite’ people. In any event, with all those personalities tugging at her, it may not have been that simple to just walk out on a beam. I had no problem with that scene.
I think it’s a combination of, A) he gets to stay close to Caroline to protect her, B) the FBI has burned him repeatedly, and he may not have much loyalty to them, C) having seen the Dollhouse, he’s now as confused as we are as to its true mission and whether it’s ultimately a force for good or evil, and D) there’s now a mission that’s more important - tracking down a serial killer who’d got 48 personalities locked up inside him. The Dollhouse isn’t murdering people.
Also, Ballard may be holding himself responsible for letting that maniac into the Dollhouse in the first place, and he also sees a kindred spirit in the security chief, who appears to have morals like he does, but has found a way to live with his role in the dollhouse.
It appears to me that one of the arcs of this season was bringing Ballard in to become a member of the Dollhouse. If the show comes back, it may be a buddy-cop show with Ballard and Echo’s old handler, or Ballard may be the ‘outside’ contact for the Dollhouse who goes back into the FBI to try to uncover what the government plans to do with the Dollhouse. Something like that, anyway.
And she really couldn’t play Caroline. It just didn’t sound like her at all. Not a huge deal, except: I think the, “But I have a contract,” line was going to be hard to play without sounding out of character anyway, & she wasn’t up to it.
I know I’m late to the party, but I just watched the finale and wanted to babble a bit about Topher. My husband and I have debated nearly every episode about whether he is a doll or not, but after this episode I’m starting to think that he is the mole. But he knows he has to keep his hands clean, so he programs Whiskey to be the mole for him (thus the unnecessary computer skills). This lets him avoid doing the dirty work himself and getting sent to the attic if he gets caught. By making Whiskey hate him, he also avoids being associated with her if she gets caught. This is what makes him so scared at the end of the show. Whiskey, realizing that she is a doll, is starting to question why she has these certain traits, and she knows it leads back to him. If she guesses he programmed her to be the mole, he is in deep shit. Echo senses his fear and places her hand over his heart, presumably finding it racing. Now she knows something is up with him too. AND he could still be a doll on top of all this.
Having just watched the finale I’m very excited for this show to come back. And knowing it might (along with a lot of other borderline shows) gives me hope that TV executives are finally getting it.
Not to revive and old topic, but I finally watch the entire season and I’ve wanna talk about it!
First off, I love this show. I love how “gray” everything is. I’m simultaneously rooting for everyone even though they’re all against each other. I don’t know who I agree with! And the acting (except for Eliza) is amazing. Not that Eliza is horrible, but everyone else is great. Especially Victor and Sierra. I actually feel like they’re different people each time they engage. Echo’s composite bored me because it feels like all of those personalities are the same!
Also, I’m definitely on the “Topher is a doll” side. He could be completely aware of it. I know he’s got a huge ego, but I believe that the wiping system is ridiculously complex and an art form, and that it takes a genius to run it. It might be easy to find a few guys who can do it, but finding at least 20 for every Dollhouse? That’s a lot harder. So maybe they just copied the guy who invented it. There could be a “Topher” at every Dollhouse. And I was thinking about his “diagnostic tests.” We see him hang out with someone just like him, so the active could just be a modified version of his brain. Which would explain how Alpha knew everything about the chair system to build his own. He was a “diagnostic test” at one point and now has a modified version of Topher’s brain.
…damn. Forgot about that. At least we know for sure that DeWitt and Boyd aren’t actives either. Oh well. I stand by my “Alpha has Topher’s ‘friend’ personality” theory.
We also know that Laurence Dominic wasn’t an Active, either. Now he’s in the Attic. Maybe they’ll need to dust him off a couple of times next season?
Which will apparently be done on a reduced budget. Gosh–fewer car chases & explosions. More of the Dolls & their Keepers in the expensive-but-already-paid-for-Dollhouse set. Speaking dialog written by the Whedon Gang. In-depth character background, perhaps?
Alpha’s personae probably do include Topher’s “friend.” Sounds like there might be a story there…
