Topher Brink appreciation month
Episodes - Belonging (2x04)
Belonging is one of my favorite episodes of Dollhouse. Primarily because of Priya’s amazing storyline, but I also love Topher’s struggles over the course of the ep. When Adelle tells Topher to imprint Sierra permanently and then send her over to Nolan, he objects. Partly because of the permanency, but also because he’s just discovered that Priya was brought into the Dollhouse under false pretenses.
Topher asks Adelle how she can ask him to do this, he says it’s wrong, that Dr. Saunders never would have—and Adelle retorts, which Dr. Saunders is that? The original Dr. Saunders? Or Whiskey, the other “wounded flower” that Topher “restored” by giving her a permanent imprint? They’re getting indignant about Priya, but they’ve already crossed a line with the entire business of the Dollhouse. All the dolls are being coerced, exploited, victimized. So what’s one more?
What I love about this story is that this is a question that often comes up in fandom, and it’s what gets a lot of characters vilified. Character A says, no this is wrong, I object—and then fandom says, but you’ve done THIS and THIS and THIS that’s also immoral, so what right do you have to state any moral objections, you hypocrite? The implication being that either you have to be morally good “enough” to be able to protest, OR you have to be completely remorselessly flagrantly bad.
Topher has to come to grips with this dilemma. Does he even have a right to object in the first place, given that his work is essential to the entire machinery of the Dollhouse? In the end, he feels so strongly about Priya’s situation that his desire to help her overrides any theoretical considerations of hypocrisy and he does what he can within the constraints he himself is under, to try and help her. And he’s visited with consequences he didn’t foresee, and she ends up back in the Dollhouse anyway (and I love that Topher had to face up to those consequences in such a concrete way. The story didn’t just let him make this grand ~gesture for Priya and keep himself detached from it. He had to grit his teeth and literally grind through the messy, gory, SMELLY, disgusting fallout.)
Still, Topher’s stand isn’t worthless. It brings him to a place where he realizes that he hadn’t been thinking of the dolls as people, and makes him take the first step towards doing so for all of them, not just Priya (“Are we happy here?” “I…you…most of you…I have no idea.”) Because he’d declared that “Priya does not belong in the Dollhouse,” but Boyd points out that according to that logic, “She does now.” And yet Priya is still clearly a thinking, feeling person, who does not in any way deserve to be pushed back into that horror show. But if that’s true for her, then isn’t it true for all the Dolls? Topher starts to question just exactly what it is that he’s doing—not just in this special case, but in his work as a whole. The experience brings Topher one step closer to the person we see later on, trying to do the right thing and ready to be selfless in order to do it. It helped Priya, by giving her the opportunity to rid herself of her abuser and tormentor for good. It helped push Adelle further along her own redemptive journey. It was one step in the long slow process towards the optimistic ending of the series.
That, ultimately, is how I feel about a lot of these fandom discussions, too. I’ve been in a lot of conversations where people say, “I’ll take an unrepentantly evil character over a mealymouthed hypocrite any day”…and, you know what? I actually quite like the mealymouthed hypocrites, if I feel like they’re genuinely trying. Even if they’re trying and failing most of the time.
♥ TOPHER ♥
ginyia