Basic Instinct

[chani]

I've just watched "Instinct", an episode I was ready not to like, given that it was Echo-centric, but actually I enjoyed it.

Looks like that after all those years of letting us pondering the soul issue, Joss has finally given an answer: the soul lies in the milk !!!!

I enjoyed the episode even though it looked like a "Echo'sengagement of the week" type of episode, because, unlike the first episodes of last season, it was daring and deeper. It twisted clichés(playing with the codes of the thriller involving a crazy nanny, a knife, a dark house, a storm) in the Jossian fashion, and it revisited an earlier type of engagement (the one from "Man in the Street
") in which a wealthy widower hires a doll, and Echo takes the place of the dead wife except that this time it wasn't about romance and fantasy at all.
I loved the idea of Topher changing the body on a glandular level and triggering lactating, and the fact that the Dollhouse clients are a sort of new aristocracy, hiring a wet nurse to take care of their children. Wet nurses didn't only feed the children with the milk in their breasts, they usually cared for the kids too, often loving them more than their biological parents.

In other words, Topher's super advanced technology allowed old ways to be followed again.

I also liked the conversation at the police station between Emilie and the female police officer, and how things were deliciously twisted when she said that she couldn't recognise her husband, that it was like he was a stranger who took the place of her husband!

Miracle Laurie was gorgeous and I think that Madeline wouldn't mind coming back to the Dollhouse again if she kept running into that tall dark haired hunk. Basic instinct again? 

Also besides the obvious parallels between oblivious Madeline and awakening Echo(the loss of a child, the distress and its apparent cure), I saw a very interesting parallel between Echo and Adelle. When Mrs DeWitt pays a visit to the former doll seh has released, she clearly says that the bond between them isn't cut off, even though  Madeline's contract is complete. Adelle still cares about her, just as Echo still cared about baby Jack even after her treatment. Echo's assignment actually echoed Adelle's situation. She's the "Mère Maquerelle" of the Dollhouse but she also has maternal instinct when it comes to her Actives; she must think that she wasn't enough of a mother for Alpha hence his becoming a sociopath! He was her first born and she couldn't love him, he lacked that feeling of being love that must be "imprinted" in infants!

There was also a parallel between the widower and Paul Ballard, and it isn't the first time that Paul's situation echoes a client's. Both thought that the goal justified the means, but in the end they felt guilty and responsible for putting Echo through Hell, they made amends. Paul said he could deal with the situation alone, and we can reckon that the father will deal with his infant on his own from now on.

In the end Echo states that she doesn't want to go to sleep again, and that feeling pain is better than not feeling anything at all. It echoed Claire Saunders' choice (keeping her scars, her pain, her life). Looks like that Echo may be following a similar journey, not wanting to lose herself into oblivion. Is it Caroline bleeding out or Echo turning into a new person (not a doll, not Omega but someone else)? By the way I couldn't help noticing that Paul called her Echo and not Caroline, in the end, in a way that sounded like he was aware that Echo might be becoming a person.

Afterall, anyone can happen.

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I felt much the same way. The writers of this episode by the way are the female writing team that wrote, created and produced the tv show "Reaper" for two years. They were huge Buffy and Angel fans and that inspired their writing. Apparently Joss got wind of this and hired them after Reaper was cancelled?

On your last point - it hit me that Echo is not Caroline anymore. Caroline wanted to hide from pain.
To go to sleep and not feel. Echo is the opposite.
She wants to feel, even if it is painful. Caroline put herself to sleep when her boyfriend got killed as the result of something she orchestrated - breaking in Rossum lab to see what they were up to. Here, what happens is to a degree far more difficult to deal with - she has to lose a child. She loses a family.
One she felt love for.

In Omega - Echo and Caroline confront each other - Alpha forces them to come face to face, thinking Echo will want Caroline dead. Blame Caroline for who she is. But Caroline's reasons where different than Alpha's. So it doesn't quite work. Echo point-blank asks Caroline why she did it? Why go to sleep? And Caroline says she couldn't handle the guilt and pain, she didn't want to feel. I think Echo, who is an echo of Caroline, and everyone else that has been imprinted upon her, is learning becoming someone new.

What Whedon seems to be talking about here, just as he did in Buffy and Angel is not so much souls, but those without the soul or "essence" of the original person.
Echo does not have the "soul of Caroline" but she has an echo of how Caroline felt about things. Her body retains those memories. She says as much - no it is not mental memories not pictures not words but feelings, how her body felt, how I feel. The emotions.
Sort of like Illyria and Fred - Illyria does not have Fred's "word" memories so much as her "physical" ones or the memories of the body. It's emotional scars. Just as Spike and Angelus retained the emotional scars of their human bodies. They change when the essence or the mental/moral structure of the previous host returns, but they do not revert to who they were before either. They can't. Their bodies retain the memory of who they were without that essence. If that makes sense.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I was joking about the soul of course.

I agree her name does suit her now for Echo is filled with echoes now, Caroline being one of them. I like your compariosn with Ilyria and the idea of "emotional scars". It's a beautiful phrase.

They change when the essence or the mental/moral structure of the previous host returns, but they do not revert to who they were before either.

Isn't our common fate after all? Life changes us, experiences mark us leaving echoes in our that cavern that is our body. We can never revert to what we once were.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I liked the ep, too, and I feel there is still lots to explore thematically. It made me think.

And being a lactating female, it hit close to home - and I'm still pondering what it had to say about parenthood - though I'd have to nitpick Emily's choice of nightwear, much too impractical.

When Emily/Echo said she couldn't remember her husband, he'd been replaced by a stranger, it made me think of The Echomaker.

As to pain and loss: the real humans try to find ways to avoid dealing with it; it's the Active who embraces it, because she knows the alternative - it's better to feel pain than nothing at all. Madeline was really creepy in that respect.

Someone was unhappy with the ep, because we'd seen no mention of Epitaph One, but there's Topher continuing on his narcissistic downward spiral, now messing with bodies as well as with minds, there's the relationship between Echo and Ballard, there's Adelle caring too much for her actives.

I'd be sad to see this cancelled - I hope we get the promised 13 eps at least.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about your reaction given that you're indeed a lactating female! ;- )

I didn't think of the Echo Maker but now that you said it, it's true and there's the echo connection too...:- )

I found Madeline creepy too. And I agree, I too would be sad to see the show cancelled. It's good to have something different that tries different from the successful tv narrative formula.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what Instinct says about motherhood - on the surface you can read it as portraying motherhood in a stereotyped/glamourising way and there's already been criticism (http://fan-static.blogspot.com/2009/10/open-letter-to-joss-whedon.html) of this: The ep is described as having Ridiculous Hand-That-Rocks-The-Cradle storylines that make mothers out to be somehow better and worse than all other women, but definitely some kind of crazy lactating love mutant.

Yes, the mothering instinct is played up, but for me it works as a plot device and I can buy it on the level that Topher overdid the programming. And I didn't see Emily as a "a shrill, demanding wife who doesn't think twice about breaking into her husband's office as soon as he leaves for work", but bought that sleep-deprivation/hormones caused her paranoia about her husband having an affair. And she was right that something was off in the relationship - her feelings, though programmed, were genuine, while the husband had to fake his feelings for her.

I also liked how a physical change triggers awareness in Echo, that the body informs the mind.