The Trouble With Topher

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster argues that there are essentially two types of characters: flat and round. (I’m describing this from memory, since for some unfathomable reason I’m a novelist who doesn’t own the book, so correct me if I get anything wrong.) A round character is a fleshed-out character. A round character has a history and a fully developed personality. A round character has contradictions – they long to be the center of attention, say, but when they get their wish, they want to escape back to obscurity. A flat character, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to rise up off the page. Rather, they’re tagged with one or two traits, often recurring lines or verbal tics, and those define them. If they spend the novel talking about how they can’t wait for spring break, then they’re the character who can’t wait for spring break. Nothing they do will ever call that into question. Note that there’s nothing wrong with a flat character; fiction mimics real life, even when it claims not to, and real life contains people you meet only a few times and never learn a whole lot about. The only time a flat character becomes problematic is when their flatness starts to feel constrictive or artificial to the reader.

In Dollhouse, Echo, to some extent, is a round character. (Spoilers below!) She has a history which, even though before last Friday we could only guess at it, made itself present from the beginning. She has contradictions: she’s a doll, but she’s developing self-awareness. Same with Sierra and Victor – they’ve both undergone memory wipes, but Sierra is a rape survivor and Victor comes from the military. I would argue that none of them are really rounded out yet, but that’s because we’re only in the first season and the show’s off to a shaky start. They’re getting there.

The people running the dollhouse – Boyd, DeWitt, Topher, and Dr. Saunders – are flat.

Well, sort of. We get glimpses. Boyd isn’t a fan of human trafficking, but follows orders. He cares about Echo a great deal. We know he was a cop. We’ve just learned that DeWitt harbors a wee bit of resentment over her place in the dollhouse/Rossum hierarchy. We saw her express, for a few seconds, the shame she felt at having behaved like an “idiot child” while drugged. But overall, she and Boyd exist only in relation to the actives. It’s hard to imagine an episode centering on either of them.

Poor Topher doesn’t even get the scraps that the writers toss Boyd and DeWitt. What does he do other than brag about his genius, explain the technical stuff essential to the plot, and make obnoxious quips? We’ve seen him in stressful situations – seemingly being fired after the remote wipe, meeting the head of Rossum – but he reacts to every single situation, good or bad, the exact same way: with an interminable string of Whedonesque half-jokes. Next week, Echo will apparently hold him at gunpoint, and I almost want her to shoot him just to see if he’ll behave any differently. What does this guy do when he’s alone? Has he ever felt genuinely sad or angry? Does he have any friends? You could argue that his persona is covering up deeper insecurities, maybe even traumas, and you’d probably be right – but it’s not an interesting character trait unless we see it.

Not that he doesn’t have potential. Maia already mentioned Topher’s objectification of women and his indifference towards rape, and this week we saw him casually grab Mellie’s hair and rock her head back and forth while she was semi-conscious. His actions might border on pathological – but we’re still not seeing enough of that to make him an interesting person. It fits in too snugly with the overall power dynamic of the dollhouse.

The problem came to a head, I think, in the latest episode. First off, season 1, episode 6 is way too early for the standard issue All Characters Act Wacky episode (and I don’t care that Star Trek TNG did it like a million times), but even putting aside the question of whether the plot would have been better if we knew the characters more intimately, the memory drug put the limitations of Topher’s character into sharp relief. Boyd playing the piano was great, and even though the whole drug thing was a cheap plot device, I grudgingly admit that it was funny to see DeWitt jumping up and down like a five-year-old. But what did Topher do? Well, since he’s already artificially silly all the damn time, when it came time to get him high as a weather balloon, the writers found that they’d painted themselves into a corner. The most they could do was have him take his pants off. Wocka wocka.

(I know a lot of viewers probably saw that as the point of the joke. How will the drugs affect the guy who’s already kind of weird? Answer: he’s the only one who acts normally! But if that was the point, they didn’t take it far enough to make it effective.)

The whole thing is a funny reversal, really – here we were all worried that we’d never form any sort of attachment to the actives, but they’ve turned out to be the most interesting characters in the show. I’m impatient, though, for Whedon to make use of his talent for ensemble writing. In Firefly, you could have any character on the ship star in their own episode, and I’d be hooked. (Well, maybe not River. What’s with Whedon’s fascination with wide-eyed, spacey women?) Even the slightly annoying quippy guy was immensely likable (and my favorite character, as it so happens) because you got to see the human behind the quips. Wash felt jealous of Mal and Zoe for going off on adventures without him; he was near hysterical when Zoe was gravely injured. Wash talked about things like juggling geese, but he also cared about stuff. What does Topher care about? What could he do to make us feel any empathy for him at all? He and Wash belong to the same trope, but he has yet to climb out of it.

I just hope the show isn’t canceled before he gets a chance to.