Hope you enjoyed the mid-session break. This week at SpockSoc, we’re showing Dollhouse, right from the very start. Dollhouse is the new series by Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly fame). I haven’t seen any of it before, but it’s apparently good.
Eliza Dushku plays a young woman called Echo, a member of a group of people known as “Actives” or “Dolls”. The Dolls are people whose personalities and existence in the world have been wiped clean to be imprinted with any number of new personas. Contents of an imprint may include semantic memory, muscle memory, skills, and language, as appropriate for different assignments (referred to as “engagements”).
A new persona can be an amalgam of several real people, and the end result necessarily incorporates both strengths and flaws from the template personalities. The Actives are then hired out for particular jobs, which can be anything from committing a crime to enacting a fantasy to performing the occasional good deed. On engagements, Actives are monitored internally (and remotely) by Handlers. In between engagements they are mind-wiped into a child-like state and live in a futuristic dorm/laboratory, a hidden facility nicknamed “The Dollhouse”.
The Dollhouse is located somewhere in Los Angeles and is a subsidiary of a mysterious research group known as the Rossum Corporation. The story follows Echo, who begins, in her mind-wiped state, to become self-aware.
I’ll be away this week, so James will be running the screening. 5pm in Goldstein G06, pizza run as usual.
On a side note, our AGM will be coming up in the next few weeks – we’d really like people to turn up to that so we can be re-affiliated, so some indication of a Friday that most people have free would be helpful.
