favorite awesome lady arc
Spoilers for all of Dollhouse, including Epitaph era.
Dollhouse is all about the endless twisting of reality and illusion, and though she’s better at hiding it and holding herself above it all, in the end Adelle herself is no different. I mean, Adelle DeWitt, that cannot possibly be her name. It’s like her presentation of herself, impeccable, so completely of her constructed adult setting that it feels as deliberately chosen as her Manolos and pencil skirts. This goes to the extreme in Spy, where Miss Lonelyhearts is a parody of a client name, flouting its very unreality; Katherine, however, is exactly the practicable English rose kind of name that she should have. Adelle DeWitt is a persona she lives every moment of the day, one that she’s made out of her own very real desires, skills, and fantasies, burned in more powerfully and deeply than the false Active personalities, but it is a persona nonetheless. She’s her own imprint.
Adelle, moreso even than Topher, deals with some intense cognitive dissonance regarding her work at the Dollhouse and her principles. Topher really hasn’t explored any moral issues or ethical implications of his work, or, really, anything ever. It’s not even the arrogance of thinking such things are for lesser mortals, he’s just never put his massive mind to his instinctive aversion to suffering. Adelle convinces herself she’s doing a good thing just to cover the reality that what she’s doing is, as Paul Ballard says, an abomination. In one of the most bizarre twists even of Dollhouse, which if you are reading this you know is saying something, is when “Katherine” bemoans to Roger!Victor her qualms about her job, couched in fear of social disapproval, so Victor can give her the reassurance she has had him programmed to give. It’s fairly commonly hypothesized that Adelle herself is a survivor of sexual violence, capable of rationalizing and minimizing the things she does in large part because of her massive crackdowns on the transgressors who cross what she sees as the line of consent.
MotS sees Adelle’s concept of consent challenged by Hearn’s sexual abuse of Sierra. Hearn is an employee, completely under her control, and Adelle perhaps takes this opportunity to remove Hearn from the Dollhouse as an opportunity to any exorcixe any personal demons along with the removal of Hearn. She doesn’t just shoot him, oh no, she makes sure he’s curb-stomped in the act and on camera for her vicarious thrills as she makes sure November fights back. She also displays a touching, if sad, belief in systems when she insists that the incident be reported to the other Dollhouses. When this faith is shattered, she’ll become the boldest of insurgent generals; for now, she’s clinging to it for dear life.
Belonging forces Adelle to confront the things she does. She’s been telling herself all this time that she’s doing something good, keeping a pure clean house and mind for any lost soul who wants to sleep for a little while, but really, nobody could possibly consent to this, and the utter horror of the first stealing of Priya’s mind makes her face all of it. The line between Priya and pod!Priya is just too close for even Adelle, and the potential for permanent engagements just a bit too far beyond her own tolerance. Claire under her own watchful eye - Adelle could tell herself that she was keeping poor Whiskey safe, that waking up whoever she was would make her deal with the trauma of Alpha, even that if it got too intolerable she could always set Whiskey free - that was one thing. Sending a pale imitation to Priya off to this man she loathes, though, this went a step too far.
The Perrin storyline jolts Adelle (and us!) into realizing that, far from being a power player in her world, she’s a game piece the same as her Actives, only just far enough above the pawns to be in major jeopardy when anyone makes a move. Dollhouse isn’t a story about individual evil, it’s about massive, and maybe insurmountable, systemic exploitation, and this is where Adelle finds that out. At first, she straightforwardly uses the power she’s used to wielding as the head of the LA Dollhouse, but that only accomplishes a fraction of her objective, and for her trouble she’s dropped to the bottom of the ladder, the illusion of power and agency remaining in place but wearing ever thinner, Adelle herself a symbol of Rossum’s predatory encroachment on reality itself through the government in general and in the Doll evolution of Perrin himself. Things are not as they appear, no, but if you take off your glasses and look from the side, you may start to catch the reality behind the façade. Adelle realizes here that she is as blissfully ignorant as the Dolls in her way, thinking herself safe and free when in actuality she is trapped, and she lashes out like the most dangerous of cornered animals.
From Belonging through the Attic gambit, Adelle moves from playing bad hands very well to frantically going all in whatever her cards. It’s unclear if she was playing Topher in order to get him to restore Priya whole, and even less clear if she was doing so consciously; sending Echo, Sierra, and Victor into the Attic is perhaps the wildest risk she ever takes. While it does nothing to prevent Rossum’s next big move, it does reveal Boyd for what he is, which allows them to at least stave off and prepare for the inevitable thoughtpocalypse. The Boyd reveal, the single best retcon ever in the history of ever, turns everything Adelle thought she knew about her job and her judgment and herself inside out, and what does she do? For the first time, she can’t fight back in any way; all of her fighting back itself has been an illusion. Adelle has been her own client all this time.
Though it’s the Dolls who are imprinted with many roles, it is Adelle who consciously chooses and lives them (which may be why the lie that the Actives can do so is particularly easy for her to buy). She is the discreet, competent madam, until she needs to come up for air from under that persona, when she becomes “Katherine,” the woman who throws her phone into the water and dreams of opening a bar on a tiny island, and “Katherine” is more and less real than Adelle DeWitt. Once she must give up “Katherine,” she doubles down on being the power-striding Dollhouse manager, keeper of the secrets of LA’s elite. This is as much a front as any, though, and she experiences the sad powerlessness of this position when Worse Bad Guy Tim Wise takes over the LA Dollhouse and her job becomes kissing clients’ asses without the added compensation of commanding a small mercenary brigade. Selling Topher’s prototype - the world’s minds - gives her only the smallest of pawns to play in their game, but in the end, it’s enough to eventually accomplish her goal. By the Epitaph era, the façade is entirely gone, but the trials through which she used it as a crutch have turned her into a brave, able, and deeply compassionate leader of the resistance. She, no less than Echo, takes the false pieces of her life and makes herself real.
Adelle’s story ends with her walking up into the sunlight so she can start the terrible task of pulling the world back together. (In a lot of ways, her story ends where Laura Roslin’s begins. ALL MY LADIES! SAVIN THE WORLD! HEEEEEEEEEEEEEY) And Topher is right, her job is way harder, her job would be way harder regardless. But in order to do her impossible job, she has to walk up into the wipe-wave and give up her own memories and lessons learned; in a very real way, she ends up once again as one of her own Actives, stripped down to her barest core of self. And yet, if we the viewers have learned anything from Dollhouse - from Adelle’s own best efforts to the contrary - it’s that you can’t take someone’s self away from them. She’s still Adelle DeWitt, and it doesn’t matter that she’s holding the worst hand in the world, we can know she’ll play it well. She has become, irrevocably, what she always told herself she was.
AND THEN SHE AND DOMINIC MADE EVERYTHING BETTER AND MOVED TO SICILY AND WERE ALL SNARKY AND HAPPY FOREVER WITH ONLY MINIMAL GUNPLAY THE END.
Dollhouse is all about the endless twisting of reality and illusion, and though she’s better at hiding it and holding herself above it all, in the end Adelle herself is no different. I mean, Adelle DeWitt, that cannot possibly be her name. It’s like her presentation of herself, impeccable, so completely of her constructed adult setting that it feels as deliberately chosen as her Manolos and pencil skirts. This goes to the extreme in Spy, where Miss Lonelyhearts is a parody of a client name, flouting its very unreality; Katherine, however, is exactly the practicable English rose kind of name that she should have. Adelle DeWitt is a persona she lives every moment of the day, one that she’s made out of her own very real desires, skills, and fantasies, burned in more powerfully and deeply than the false Active personalities, but it is a persona nonetheless. She’s her own imprint.
Adelle, moreso even than Topher, deals with some intense cognitive dissonance regarding her work at the Dollhouse and her principles. Topher really hasn’t explored any moral issues or ethical implications of his work, or, really, anything ever. It’s not even the arrogance of thinking such things are for lesser mortals, he’s just never put his massive mind to his instinctive aversion to suffering. Adelle convinces herself she’s doing a good thing just to cover the reality that what she’s doing is, as Paul Ballard says, an abomination. In one of the most bizarre twists even of Dollhouse, which if you are reading this you know is saying something, is when “Katherine” bemoans to Roger!Victor her qualms about her job, couched in fear of social disapproval, so Victor can give her the reassurance she has had him programmed to give. It’s fairly commonly hypothesized that Adelle herself is a survivor of sexual violence, capable of rationalizing and minimizing the things she does in large part because of her massive crackdowns on the transgressors who cross what she sees as the line of consent.
MotS sees Adelle’s concept of consent challenged by Hearn’s sexual abuse of Sierra. Hearn is an employee, completely under her control, and Adelle perhaps takes this opportunity to remove Hearn from the Dollhouse as an opportunity to any exorcixe any personal demons along with the removal of Hearn. She doesn’t just shoot him, oh no, she makes sure he’s curb-stomped in the act and on camera for her vicarious thrills as she makes sure November fights back. She also displays a touching, if sad, belief in systems when she insists that the incident be reported to the other Dollhouses. When this faith is shattered, she’ll become the boldest of insurgent generals; for now, she’s clinging to it for dear life.
Belonging forces Adelle to confront the things she does. She’s been telling herself all this time that she’s doing something good, keeping a pure clean house and mind for any lost soul who wants to sleep for a little while, but really, nobody could possibly consent to this, and the utter horror of the first stealing of Priya’s mind makes her face all of it. The line between Priya and pod!Priya is just too close for even Adelle, and the potential for permanent engagements just a bit too far beyond her own tolerance. Claire under her own watchful eye - Adelle could tell herself that she was keeping poor Whiskey safe, that waking up whoever she was would make her deal with the trauma of Alpha, even that if it got too intolerable she could always set Whiskey free - that was one thing. Sending a pale imitation to Priya off to this man she loathes, though, this went a step too far.
The Perrin storyline jolts Adelle (and us!) into realizing that, far from being a power player in her world, she’s a game piece the same as her Actives, only just far enough above the pawns to be in major jeopardy when anyone makes a move. Dollhouse isn’t a story about individual evil, it’s about massive, and maybe insurmountable, systemic exploitation, and this is where Adelle finds that out. At first, she straightforwardly uses the power she’s used to wielding as the head of the LA Dollhouse, but that only accomplishes a fraction of her objective, and for her trouble she’s dropped to the bottom of the ladder, the illusion of power and agency remaining in place but wearing ever thinner, Adelle herself a symbol of Rossum’s predatory encroachment on reality itself through the government in general and in the Doll evolution of Perrin himself. Things are not as they appear, no, but if you take off your glasses and look from the side, you may start to catch the reality behind the façade. Adelle realizes here that she is as blissfully ignorant as the Dolls in her way, thinking herself safe and free when in actuality she is trapped, and she lashes out like the most dangerous of cornered animals.
From Belonging through the Attic gambit, Adelle moves from playing bad hands very well to frantically going all in whatever her cards. It’s unclear if she was playing Topher in order to get him to restore Priya whole, and even less clear if she was doing so consciously; sending Echo, Sierra, and Victor into the Attic is perhaps the wildest risk she ever takes. While it does nothing to prevent Rossum’s next big move, it does reveal Boyd for what he is, which allows them to at least stave off and prepare for the inevitable thoughtpocalypse. The Boyd reveal, the single best retcon ever in the history of ever, turns everything Adelle thought she knew about her job and her judgment and herself inside out, and what does she do? For the first time, she can’t fight back in any way; all of her fighting back itself has been an illusion. Adelle has been her own client all this time.
Though it’s the Dolls who are imprinted with many roles, it is Adelle who consciously chooses and lives them (which may be why the lie that the Actives can do so is particularly easy for her to buy). She is the discreet, competent madam, until she needs to come up for air from under that persona, when she becomes “Katherine,” the woman who throws her phone into the water and dreams of opening a bar on a tiny island, and “Katherine” is more and less real than Adelle DeWitt. Once she must give up “Katherine,” she doubles down on being the power-striding Dollhouse manager, keeper of the secrets of LA’s elite. This is as much a front as any, though, and she experiences the sad powerlessness of this position when Worse Bad Guy Tim Wise takes over the LA Dollhouse and her job becomes kissing clients’ asses without the added compensation of commanding a small mercenary brigade. Selling Topher’s prototype - the world’s minds - gives her only the smallest of pawns to play in their game, but in the end, it’s enough to eventually accomplish her goal. By the Epitaph era, the façade is entirely gone, but the trials through which she used it as a crutch have turned her into a brave, able, and deeply compassionate leader of the resistance. She, no less than Echo, takes the false pieces of her life and makes herself real.
Adelle’s story ends with her walking up into the sunlight so she can start the terrible task of pulling the world back together. (In a lot of ways, her story ends where Laura Roslin’s begins. ALL MY LADIES! SAVIN THE WORLD! HEEEEEEEEEEEEEY) And Topher is right, her job is way harder, her job would be way harder regardless. But in order to do her impossible job, she has to walk up into the wipe-wave and give up her own memories and lessons learned; in a very real way, she ends up once again as one of her own Actives, stripped down to her barest core of self. And yet, if we the viewers have learned anything from Dollhouse - from Adelle’s own best efforts to the contrary - it’s that you can’t take someone’s self away from them. She’s still Adelle DeWitt, and it doesn’t matter that she’s holding the worst hand in the world, we can know she’ll play it well. She has become, irrevocably, what she always told herself she was.
AND THEN SHE AND DOMINIC MADE EVERYTHING BETTER AND MOVED TO SICILY AND WERE ALL SNARKY AND HAPPY FOREVER WITH ONLY MINIMAL GUNPLAY THE END.