dollhouse goes to college

Tonight's episode of Dollhouse read like page freaking 33 of Slaughter and Leslie's Academic Capitalism, "congealed intellectual labor" and all. As in Buffy Season 4 academic technoscience is sinister, but here the demons are us dude, (which was ultimately the point of Buffy as well, i suppose.) Unlike in Buffy we're not (yet) talking about the state - although the Dollhouse has infiltrated state agencies up the wazoo. Instead we get the relationship between the university, the shady biotech/pharma corporation, and the global conglomerate that erases animal rights' activists' brains and turns them into sex robot amnesiac rewriteable palimpsests. Instead of the military demonic academic complex it's an only slightly paranoid look at the nefarious entanglements of university patent offices and the politics of tech transfer and industrial espionage. Three Joss Whedon shows and three abused grad students - Buffy had Riley, so damaged by drug withdrawal and emasculation he pays vampires to bite him. Angel had Fred, thrown into a hell dimension by an advisor jealous of his student's superior command of theoretical physics, and dollhouse has the kid who beats his own skull to a pulp against the lab window tripping out on outsourced Dollhouse brain juice.I'm writing this directly after the episode aired. I was not going to post about television again for a while, much less about a show i wrote quite a bit about last week, but the subject of this week's episode demanded otherwise. I may have more to say later or tomorrow or whenever I get the chance to rewatch the episode. In the meantime, it's back to the writing

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