Writers: Jed Wheon and Maurissa Tancharoen
Grade: A+
Wow. Jed Wheon and Maurissa Tancharoen knocked this one out of the park. Definitely their best work to date—they’ve come a long way since “Stage Fright” and “Haunted.” Jonathan Frakes also did a truly lovely job of directing the episode, getting wonderful performances out of everyone. (And that shot of Priya’s silhouette rising up into her own painting, becoming the dark blot, the “bad man,” was just beautiful.)
I ended up having more to say about Topher, but this was Priya’s origin story, and it was handled well by all involved. Victor-as-Luca’s description of Priya’s art as “organic and effortless” also applied to Priya herself (pre-Nolan, of course). She was warm and un-self-conscious. She felt like a real person rather than a fictional character, and I don’t know if that’s because Dichen Lachman was acting her ass off or not acting at all, but either way, it worked.
I found myself deeply saddened at the loss of Priya’s innocence—I wasn’t cheering her on when she stabbed Nolan, I was crying for her. No matter how much he deserved death, she didn’t deserve to have his murder on her conscience.
Echo may have been right that Topher never “looks hard enough,” but at least it’s to his credit that he listened to her, both in terms of the information she provided and in taking her diss seriously and trying to find the truth. It’s interesting that he doesn’t seem willing to tattle to Adelle about Echo’s self-awareness and desire to help the people around her, and I think his reasons for not doing so are twofold. First of all, she’s helping him out personally and showing concern for him, which probably feels nice, and second of all, she’s actually doing exactly what he programmed Saunders to do—catching things he misses and helping him keep people safe. He may be a douche at times, but he doesn’t want people to be hurt, so Echo playing mommy may be more positive than harmful from his perspective.
Though obviously the true victim of this story is Priya, I also feel an incredible amount of empathy for Topher, because he had no option that wasn’t in some way horrific. As far as I can see, he could do as he was told and send this poor woman off to be a perpetual rape victim, or he could do exactly what he did. He could have tried to go kill Nolan himself, but that would have given Priya no closure at all, and Topher is no one’s knight. Giving her ninja skills may have been an option, but I think he decided that the most “right” thing he could possibly do was restore her pure, original self, inform her, and allow her the confrontation with her tormentor that she should have had a year ago. If that was his reasoning, I agree with it, because it had to be all Priya, not mostly Priya with a little extra help from Topher’s grrrlpower imprinting skills.
Besides, it’s doubtful the outcome would have been any better, on an emotional level, even if he had given her fighting skills. She might have had a few less bruises, but she may still have killed him and felt tainted by it, and neither she nor Topher would feel any better about what happened.
I can’t think of anything Toper could have done that wouldn’t have ended tragically in one way or another. What he did may truly have been the lesser evil, and it was devastating. Even knowing that the show has already been cancelled, I’m very curious as to how he’s going move on from this—will he take Boyd’s words about his first moral crisis not going well to heart, or will he try to bury that side of himself again?
I think it’s important to remember that they used Topher’s brain as a positive comparison to serial killer Terry’s in the previous episode. This let us know that Topher’s empathy and disinclination to disembowel puppies do exist, he just has to figure out how to use them properly. He tried to bury his morality for the sake of science and pride, and now it’s clawing its way back out. And sadly, it looks like the internal struggle is going to tear him apart.
Getting such an intimate look at his burgeoning madness was heartbreaking, but at the same time, how can he not go mad? To do what he does, you either have to be insane already (ala Terry, with his unused portions of the brain), or the internal pressure will eventually drive you mad anyway. There’s no escaping the crazy.
As a last note on Topher, one of my favorite minor moments in the episode was Topher reading Dr. Saunders’ notes about Sierra, which attributed Sierra’s inner darkness to a hatred of Topher Brink. Sheesh, talk about projecting… Claire was pretty obsessive and vindictive about Topher around the beginning of the season, so I could see loopy, delusional Claire thinking that Sierra must hate Topher as much as she does, because how can anyone not hate Topher? Even his scent is disgusting! It’s also possible that Sierra really was anxious before seeing Topher because some part of her was afraid she’d be sent to Nolan afterward—Claire’s hatred may have blinded her a bit and caused her reasoning to stop at Topher when she should have kept going.
Of course, it’s also possible that the notes didn’t actually have his name there, and it was just another example of Topher’s increasing loopiness/guilty conscience. Or on an even simpler level, perhaps she unintentionally wrote Topher’s name there as a mistake, a sort of Freudian slip that she didn’t catch. That moment works really well with any of those interpretations, and it was a nice nod to the complex relationship between Topher and Claire as well as a good way to keep Claire in viewers’ minds while she’s away.
As for Adelle, it’s intriguing that she came to (drunkenly) ask Topher if he’d sent Sierra and even attempted to comfort him with a hand on the shoulder. I’m sure she had other ways of obtaining that information, but she wanted to hear it from him and see how he was handling it. (And I know some viewers ‘ship them, but I saw it as a maternal/caretaker level of interest—otherwise, between Victor and Topher, Adelle’s a bit of a cougar!)
I also got the impression that her quietly brutal assessment of Topher’s amorality was a deliberate test of his character, even a provocation to prove her wrong. She goaded Topher into doing what was best for both of them, i.e. relieving his guilty conscience and keeping her own hands clean. Even if she didn’t purposefully engineer Topher’s actions, she seemed to at least figure out that someone under her employ had done something to get rid of the guy and was perfectly willing to let it go.
I don’t think the audience was supposed to approve of a single thing that went down in this episode. It was a horrible situation with no non-horrible solution, just bad, worse, and worst. Topher tried to empower Priya, and that ended with a bone saw and vat of acid. The Dollhouse is toxic and ruins everything it touches, and the only good thing that came out of this episode was Topher flexing his moral muscles. We already know the man is going to wind up a babbling lunatic in a few years, so even that is a small comfort.
Miscellaneous Stuff
-Awwww, Priya was attracted to Victor the first time they met, before she became Sierra.
-When Topher begs Adelle not to send Sierra to Nolan, he begins the argument with righteous indignation, but after Adelle slaps him in the face with Claire’s departure, his entire demeanor changes. He’s a sad little boy by the time he whines, “How can you expect me to do this?”, right down to the awkward, childlike slurring of the words.
-Is it just me, or does Boyd have ties to organized crime? It seems that perhaps he was on their “cleanup crew.”
-There was a callback to Topher’s birthday shared with imprinted Sierra when Priya asks if she’s allowed to have beer, and Topher looks devastated and tells her it’s allowed on special occasions. Very sad, but also a nice little piece of continuity.
-A couple of aspects of this episode have the whiff of retcon. First of all, Priya did not seem even remotely schizophrenic in “Needs.” Did Topher restore her completely (sans memories) and no one even noticed that she wasn’t nuts? Or can we fanwank that Topher thought he deliberately restored Priya without her mental illness? We know she was never schizophrenic, but Topher believed she was, so perhaps he restored her with anti-schizo programming, and thus wouldn’t know the difference between schizo-suppressed Priya and normal, non-crazy-in-the-first-place Priya.
Secondly, there was no implication in “Needs” that Adelle was unaware of how Priya came to the Dollhouse or of the nature of Priya’s engagements with Nolan, and yet in this episode she’s completely stunned and horrified. There’s nothing in “Needs” that absolutely contradicts this episode, but they could have laid the groundwork a little better back then, at least in terms of establishing what Adelle did or didn’t know about Priya. As is, it comes off like an attempt to whitewash Adelle.
Quotes
Topher (reading Caire’s notes): “Dark shape always present. Must be something from her past? I can only conclude that if the dark shapes don’t symbolize Sierra state of mind before intake, they must represent an extreme sense of anxiety and rage associated with Topher Brink.”
Adelle: “I would no sooner allow you neat one of our other Actives than I would a mad dog near a child.”
Nolan: “I beg your pardon?”
Adelle: “ Given that you’re a raping scumbag one tick shy of a murderer. I can’t recall, do you take sugar?”
Adelle: “The cold reality is that everyone here was chosen because their morals have been compromised in some way. Everyone… except you. You, Topher, were chosen because you have no morals. You have always thought of people as playthings. This is not a judgment: you always take very good care of your toys. But you’re simply going to have to let this one go.”
Sierra: “They even programmed me to think it was endearing how quick you were.”
Sierra: “I love him… so much more than I hate you.”
Topher: “I was just trying to help her… now she’s ruined.”
Boyd: “You had a moral dilemma, your first, and it didn’t go well.”
Topher: “Priya does not belong in the Dollhouse.”
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