I watched Epitaph One directly before I watched Epitaph Two and even in that case I didn’t think it worked very well.
Dr. Saunders/Whiskey is just gone with no explanation. No was there an explanation of how Dr. Saunders/Whiskey got her body back from Clyde 2.0
Alpha is a good guy with no explanation.
Rossum lives on with seemingly no resources and no plan other than “Let’s eat!”
Safe Haven was a farm in Arizona with a string of barbed wire around it. Come on.
Most of the recovered memories from Epitaph One were rendered null and void by the previous episode.
The “We have to stay underground for a year” thing was poorly explained and doesn’t really make any sense.
I’m sure it would have been a fine end to the series if we had gotten a season three that filled in all the gaps between “The Hollow Men” and “Epitaph One”. As it was, it just felt kind of anti-climatic.
Agree. This was bugging me too. If you die, you’re still dead. There’s just someone else running around with your memories. I’m not sure how that would be considered desirable.
Agree here too. Even if you take it on faith that actives have to stay underground for a year after the explosion to avoid the effects of the wipe, that doesn’t really explain why everyone was down there. Okay, Priya doesn’t want to forget her son, I can see that. You might be able to say the same thing for Victor, but it didn’t seem like he had that many memories of him to begin with. But okay. But why the others? Echo wants to remain Echo? And what was the point of keeping Asian girl and wheelchair woman (who was an ACTUAL) down there? Are we supposed to believe she fell completely in love with this woman who she barely had a conversation with that she wants to sequester herself for a year?
I’m done griping. On balance, I enjoyed it. Are we still spoilering?
Topher sacrificing himself was sweet and poignant.
Echo definitely wants to remain echo - that was made clear a few times during season 2. Caroline is alive in her head, but she has no desire to go back to being just her.
With all due respect to anyone who watched broadcast and was displeased because seeing Epitaph One was necessary to the finale: I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy Epitaph Two, but honestly, there’s no reason for Joss & Co. to care much about pleasing casual viewers. They knew it was the end - there was no call for keeping an audience or appealing to less hard-core fans. Joss had a story he wanted to tell, and the rabid fans had seen E1 and wanted to see a resolution to that plot.
I agree, the whole arc since they knew they were canceled has been a bit rushed, but considering the circumstances, I found the whole resolution to be satisfying.
IIRC, there is a reference to Alpha working with Echo’s crew in E1. But I agree, I’d have liked to see the evolution from evil to good. I also wonder why the hell he would want to be wiped back to a serial killer (or risk it).
They did take a stab at explaining why they had to stay underground for a year - something about the bomb creating a chain reaction in the atmosphere that would take some time to dissipate. Victor wanted to be with Priya and Tony - no big mystery there. Echo wanted to keep her identit(ies), which doesn’t seem that strange. Maybe Mag had to stay because she physically couldn’t get out after being shot?
I think the Rossum executives’ actions ring true. Their stance from the beginning was “someone will use this - better be a wiper than a wipee.” Once the shit hit the fan, they created a place they would be relatively safe and comfortable, and continued to use the tech for their own venal purposes. People are often unimaginative, selfish assholes.
I too would like to see the in-between story in some medium. All in all, an interesting and entertaining tale.
But it’s not just your memories, is it? It’s your whole mental and emotional being–memories and knowledge and skills and opinions and feelings and shortcomings and everything. Basically, everything that makes you you. If you dump all of that into a different body, you’re still you, the same way that in Quantum Leap Sam was always Sam no matter what body he was inhabiting. You don’t see how someone would think being able to jump bodies–to stay eternally young and beautiful–while still remaining completely themselves would be desirable?
No, it’s not you. Think of it this way: Sit down in my chair and I’ll make a copy of you. Depending on your sci-fi story, I can either imprint that copy on another body or teleport it somewhere else ala Star Trek transporters. So far so good?
Okay, so here’s how the process works: You sit down in the chair, I run the machine. Once the machine is finished running, you stand up, I point a gun at your head and blow your brains out. Are you still you? Does it matter if I’ve sent your digital copy to coalesce somewhere else as a transporter or if I imprint it into a clone of your body?
Let’s say I send the copy out before I shoot you in the head. In what way are you still around?
This is philosophically how teleportation works in all science fiction. It’s just that instead of something so gauche as a bullet to the head, your body gets disintegrated. Being reintegrated somewhere else doesn’t mean you weren’t killed when you were disintegrated in the first place. Just like in the above example, where imprinting the copy of you on another body doesn’t mean you didn’t die when I shot you in the head.
It depends on your definition of “you.” Of course if one believes that the self is composed of something more than the mind, such as a soul, teleportation or transhumanistic immortality doesn’t really avoid death. But if all the products of my brain are preserved, I believe that “I” will still exist in the most important way.
Now, as a materialist, it is a little hard to swallow the idea that personalities can be imprinted on other brains. But if I accept the conceit, I would certainly consider myself to be preserved if I could be imprinted on a doll. If the original me went on living, there would be two of me, who would instantly begin to evolve into different people, because we would have different experiences. And if I had a periodic backup done and got killed like the lady in that one episode, the “me” that lived on in a doll wouldn’t quite be the me that got killed, because some experiences would be left out. But if it’s that or oblivion, I’d take me-minus-last-week!
Just briefly, didn’t love this episode, it felt muddled and rushed. I did not yet see Epitaph 1, so may change my tune afterward. But it felt to me as if Joss was trying to squeeze a whole season into this one episode.
Side notes: I think that one of the “Techheads” is Whedon’s fiancee - the one the other woman in the chair had the crush on.
I am a hardline atheist; I don’t believe in a soul or spirit or anything like that. However, I do believe that my self is defined as my consciousness.
You say you’d feel preserved by an imprinting / teleportation. I’m guessing the logic is that there’d be a “you” representative still in existance. But that’s just a representative; it isn’t actually you.
If you really would feel like you were preserved, you’d have no qualms about eating a bullet right after a copy of you was successfully imprinted. Would you be able to pull the trigger without reservation?
Incidentally, materialists can believe in a “self” that is more than their constituent parts without invoking the supernatural. Consciousness can simply be viewed as an emergent property of the brain. If that is the case, you cannot be reproduced by any technological means even without a soul.
I think this is the best part of the Dollhouse, is all the different views on who “you” are. Pretty much every doll had a different point to cover. Like Whiskey/Saunders, who didn’t want to even go back to being her original self, because doing so would basically be death. And Paul’s, who basically made the point that once you’re a doll, are you ever really yourself again? Or are you a copy of yourself? And Bennett’s final point, that it’s not your memories, it’s what you do in the present that defines you.
I think the whole point behind the finale wasn’t to settle the plot. There’s still plenty we don’t know about what happened, or what will happened. It was to settle the story of all these characters. Which I think it did a really good job.
“Damn you, Joss!” Indeed. During the gun battle with the Butchers I knew someone we cared about was going to bite it. I was gnawing my fingernails the entire time waiting to see which one. Just like Joss, too; it just happened, no warning, and that was it.
And I agree that there’s no way to digitally preserve the “real you” and put it into another body. (As with anything digital, digitizing a mind makes a copy, and isn’t actually a transfer – so now there are either two “yous”, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if you believe in “yous” as individuals, or the copy is just a copy, like a photocopy is similar to, but not the same as, the original. Perhaps the copy is also an individual, but it’s not the same individual as the original; it’s a new one.) However I’ve known people IRL who believe in transhuman immortality (and actually look forward to it, hoping they’ll see it within our lifetime); so it’s easy for me to buy that the Rossum execs believe in it too. I just think they’re wrong.
I think Topher is officially my favorite character. I loved watching him move through his entire arc and seeing how he went from delightfully amoral to tragic hero; and I believed every step of it. Sooner or later your deeds catch up to you. I loved his last moment, too.
I wasn’t sure why Alpha felt a need to leave; but maybe being a composite person was emotionally/mentally exhausting for him? They made several allusions to the fact that Echo has a unique physiology that made her composite nature possible; Kilo explains that they can’t just endlessly upload new skills into themselves and remain sane, only Echo can.
I actually didn’t care for Topher’s last moment as it seemed like an artificial artifice. Why did his bomb have to be manually triggered? Or was he just sacrificing himself to prevent others from reinforcing him to reinvent the tech?
Oh, also, loved this little laugh-out-loud moment:
Zone: She’s a tech-head, Mag.
blinkblink
Zone: She’s a girl, Mag!
ETA: Re: the bomb – that sat kind of weird for me also, but I fanwanked it to figure that maybe they didn’t have the necessary parts to build a timer. People had been destroying tech of all kinds, out of self-preservation, for 10 years by then, after all. Why exactly would the Dollhouse parts stockpile need a timer?
Oh, and, I don’t think Mag stayed behind just for Kilo. She couldn’t walk, and the work left to do on the outside was going to be rough and arduous. She’s safer down below until she heals; there wasn’t much up above she could do from a wheelchair anyway.
I thought it was a bit :dubious: that she got shot twice in the legs and they threw her in a wheelchair (which was there, why?) and she was fine. Loved the lesbian less-than-subtext though.
I thought about this too, and decided if they’d had more time, there would have been lots of argument, attempts to come up with a workaround, failures, dawning realization that time was running out and it just had to get done, etc., as there is in most such fictional set pieces. But they were trying to cram a lot of plot into a limited time, so they just skipped to the end.
As for whether a copy is you, I was always struck by the scene in Multiplicity when the first “clone” wakes up and assumes it’s the original. A close enough copy, with the same memories and personality, is in most ways “you,” to the point that if it weren’t for waking up in a different body, the person waking up wouldn’t know the difference. Granted, I wouldn’t shoot myself in the head upon completion of an imprint, but at the same time, it is quite an attractive alternative to across-the-board oblivion.
Not sure what you mean by this. Why wouldn’t the Dollhouse have a wheelchair? They had full medical facilities when it was an active House – Actives could and did get hurt during assignments, and bringing a Doll into a hospital instead of being outfitted to handle it themselves would have raised their profile a bit more than they wanted. Mag wasn’t fine, either – she couldn’t walk, at least not well enough to go running around outside. Were you expecting her to be worse, or better, after being shot in the legs?
The show made itself pretty clear that as far as it was concerned, the imprint was the person, and as far as individuals were concerned, a copy felt as real as the original. Even Topher felt this way when he copied himself into Victor to defeat Bennett.
My wife asked why Topher’s bomb had to be manually set too – I said “would you want to live with yourself knowing you’d wrecked the world, even if you’d fixed the world, if you knew how easy it would be to be manipulated into wrecking the world again.”
The ending with Ballard (and it was Ballard – either from his 2010 backup, or extracted from Alpha) joining the 40 other people in Echo’s head reminded me of the end of Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil. Joss likes to kill off characters, but at least in this story, dead doesn’t necessarily mean dead.
In all it was an ending. Not fabulous – we didn’t get nearly enough time to play in the Dollhouse, but it had to end, and it was satisfying enough to make me come back for more.
Now if only Joss will give up on Fox and move to pay networks with regular 12- or 13-episode seasons, I’d be a happy man.
