Well, in a capitalist society we have this thing called “currency” that one exchanges for goods and services.
So you’re suggesting that in the current premise they kidnap experts in everything from around the world, hook them up to their brain copy machine, and then dump them back on the streets? That’s just going to make them more noticeable. They’re not killing them since the hostage negotiator they used committed suicide after they used her. If they’re public all they have to do is offer a fifty thousand dollars for a few minutes of people’s time (which presumably is what they do now anyway except not tell the expert what they’re doing which of course only introduces needless complications).
I’ll add one other possible objection to the others that have already been raised - it seems likely to me, though it hasn’t been said so outright, that maybe one person in ten million has the right brain structure/chemistry for the brain wipe/implantation gear to work. (Or maybe not quite that rare, but something along those lines.) How they find and test these people isn’t clear.
That’s why they went after Caroline to become ‘Echo’ - though clearly wholesome good looks don’t hurt either.
Did you miss the first few minutes of the episode? She signed on for a five year contract. And while imprinting obviously makes the new mind dominant they don’t completely blank out afterward; she was aware of where she was and what she had done before they had given her the party girl persona.
So, not slavery, they would get to use the money, and definitely not suicide. Yeah there may not be people lining up around the block to take part in the program but the flexibility offered (remember that this isn’t a 1:1 copy; the implanted personality is a composite as they stated in the show) means that the company could offer quite a bit of money to their potential employees.
Caroline talked about not having a choice, Olivia was talking about ‘taking care of the consequences.’ This doesn’t sound like a perfectly above-board contract - it might be something relatively benign, like the company helping her out of legal trouble of her own making to sweeten the deal, or it might be that they framed her or blackmailed her on purpose. Not sure yet.
In terms of the ‘party girl persona’ - again, we don’t have all the information, so conclusions could be drawn in a number of directions. I was assuming that whatever she remembered at that point, it wasn’t her own past. What she was doing with Matt I really don’t know - it doesn’t seem like he was a paying client, (I doubt his friends would have raised the money for him,) and I’m not sure if it makes sense to give the Actives time off outside of the Dollhouse, in character, when they wouldn’t remember it. Maybe this was just tying up the strings of another assignment… was the Company hired to find out something about the guy??
You know, I’m starting to think that one could program a bot to do a random crawl over interlinked pages on TVtropes, and come up with an entire script as a result.
Yes, I couldn’t really buy the central conceit, either. If you’ve got that technology, there’s got to be a more profitable and less high-risk way of utilizing it, like letting people go on holiday as another person or something like that. Plus, there’s one thing I never quite could figure out about those ‘secret shadowy agency’ kinda deals, and that’s how their clients find them – if they can, one should think that assorted government agencies could, too.
Also, for a secret shadowy agency, they were seriously light on security and stunningly amateurish in their operations.
Isn’t that pretty much what it comes down to? They already have people who can pretend to be other people for you. They are called “actors”. You can also hire escort services, mercenaries, negotiators, lawyers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers for much cheaper than the millions or billions it must cost to implement some experimental mind transfer technology.
And not to mention that it doesn’t change their physical body. IOW, you can implant Michael Jordan’s brain into Eliza Dushku’s body, but she isn’t going to be able to dunk like him.
Clearly you’ve never seen Total Recall
Exactly. Everyone in the world can find these people on Craigs List, except the FBI guy from Battlestar Galactica.
This is exactly the point I was thinking about wrt the posts about the unlikelihood of a shadowy organization using human beings in this way. There are white slavery operations all around the world, apparently operating with impunity in places like Russia, Central Europe, Mexico, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. It seems credible, given this fact, that a much smaller, more focussed organization, which uses much subtler tactics, could operate with impunity. (Note: I wonder about these widespread reports of white slavery, they remind me strongly of the white slavery panic at the turn of the 20th Century which turned out to be a chimera.)
Anybody find a creepy similarity between the Dolllhouse plot and the plot of Hostel 2? The only difference is, in the case of the Dollhouse the people being vended by a shadowy organization are presumably not being put to uses that render them un-reusable.
