Whedon and the Tabula Rasa: Thoughts on the "Needs" Episode of Dollhouse

Caution: Minor spoilers ahead

Many people have expressed variations on the same thought when it comes to Joss Whedon's new series Dollhouse. While his fans are happy to have Whedon back on the small screen, the show's premise creeps them out a bit, and on several levels.

And no wonder. Whedon presents his audience a world where a shadowy organization can erase the personality of a person and imprint a new one drawn to the specifications of a client for a specific task. Once the task is complete, the new personality, along with any memory of the "task," is itself erased, with no consequences to the client (apart from the fee) or the organization. We are assured, of course, that the "actives" (as the victims of the process are called) volunteer for the duty, and that one day they will have their original identities restored. Of course.

There's a lot of layers to this, many aspects that one could discuss, most of them very unsettling. So why did Whedon decide to explore this sort of territory? Perhaps the eigth episode, "Needs" offers a clue.

When not out on assignment, the actives are normally kept in a sub-childlike state where they spend their time eating healthy, exercising and resting. In "Needs," however, five actives wake up as themselves. While they have no memories of their previous lives, they apparently are who they were before joining the Dollhouse. The remainder of the episode spins off of this change, as the newly aware actives take steps to reconnect with their identities.

What is telling about "Needs" is that Whedon has used this trope before -- specifically, in "Tabula Rasa" from the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ; and "Spin the Bottle" from the fourth season of Angel (not to mention a significant chunk of that series' fifth season). Both contrive situations where the main characters forget who they are so they can interact unencumbered by the residue of their experienences. But the audience willingly overlooks the contrivance because of the sheer joy of watching characters they love freed from their pasts. And let's face it: if you live in Whedon's universe, you're going to have a nasty past.

Whedon has always been at pains to make sure that the actions his characters take have consequences. In his shows, characters do not wind up where they were at the beginning of the episode. Perhaps, as the son and grandson of television writers, he has a better grasp of the double edged nature of serial character development. The television series format, just like radio before it, allows -- demands, really -- for a writer to create characters that evolve over time. The best shows sustain themselves by focusing on this potential.

For a good discussion of this, one should seek out Melvin Patrick Ely's landmark work on popular culture, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy:A Social History of an American Phenomenon (University of Virginia Press, 1991). Amos 'n' Andy spent forty years on the air in part* because it let some of its characters change into different people. Amos, especially, moved on from his original characterization as the good-natured but weak-willed second banana to the comically scheming Andy. By series end, he had asserted independence from Andy, established a successful business, married the love of his life and became a doting, loving father.

But as Calvin's dad once remarked, "We all know how funny good role models are." By the time Amos had turned into such a shining citizen, the Kingfish had supplanted his role as Andy's comic foil, shunting Amos into the background. That, of course, is another way long running series sustain themselves: by developing new characters without the emotional baggage of the original ones. But audiences will only accept so many new characters; in the end, a show can survive as long as the audience still reacts to the factors that drew them in the first place.

I often think of Ely's description of Amos 'n' Andy when I think of Buffy's seventh season. For one thing, Xander Harris' path closely parallelled the path that Amos had tred sixty years before. But even for the other surviving Scoobies, contending with life on the Hellmouth had taken its toll. Buffy and Giles both allowed the burdens of their responsibilities to suck all the joy out of their lives. Willow, meanwhile, spent the bulk of the seventh season recovering from her actions in the sixth; only in the final episode did she show any of her old spark. In short, the main characters were used up. Whedon could not remain true to his characters' integrity and continue to produce an entertaining show.

It should, then be obvious why Whedon would be attracted to the Dollhouse premise. Here is a show where the main characters will always remain true to who they are because they can't remember the consequences of their actions. The major problem with this approach is that it asks the audience to care about characters who have no apparent emotional core. And it is precisely this problem that "Needs" addresses.

*Yeah, I know. But this is not the place to talk about that.