Dollhouse post-Season 2

[Christopher]

Sure, Harding and Ambrose were lords of their little feudal domain, but it was just one city. They basically succeeded in creating what Boyd wanted, an "ark" to protect themselves against the deluge, but instead of protecting their original selves from wiping, they simply kept copying themselves into new bodies. So they were exploiting the tech to the best of their ability, but in the same sort of way that Tony's crew was -- adapting it to their advantage in their own limited way, rather than really being in control of the whole thing.

 

[StarshipDefiant]

Your points are interesting though, that the tech did get out (If the NSA knows about it, Alpha is able to set up is own version of it in an old power plant, etc.. then surely it's out somehow), and it went viral somehow. I'd be interested to know how long that took, and what they did in the meantime. There were hints in the Epitaph episodes that it could go either way, being a few years to being somewhat recent, considering the lack of a large number of people at Safe Haven (compared with the number of people that departed the L.A. Dollhouse for Safe Haven), I'd almost hazzard a guess that the mass wiping didn't happen to overly recent. Of course, a lot can happen in a short time, particularly in a situation such as that. I have to wonder if they went 'business as usual' for a while? With the mainframe down, and the recent version of Clyde down, that is the one that knew who did what, the rest of Rossum/the other Dollhouses may not have known who had done it.

I'm thinking this somewhat happened, considering the flashbacks in Epitaph One, which clearly had to be set post destruction of Rossum mainframe (as we knew it) and the fall (Dominic's conversation with Adelle) and slightly onwards.

Of course...those flashbacks were memories, and may not have been to accurate...

 

[Christopher]

Well, there was no single mass wiping. Presumably the deterioration happened gradually and at an accelerating, exponential rate as more and more groups got their hands on the tech and the social order increasingly broke down.

 

[StarshipDefiant]

Not mass as in worldwide at once, I guess but I believe that there were references to a singular event that was a big cause to the current situation. I think they said something about people wiped were the ones that answered phones? I could be wrong, and might be remembering an offline/internet conversation. Bah.

 

[Christopher]

In "Epitaph One," the insane Topher described, in hypothetical terms, a scenario in which one could use robocalling to dial up an entire city and program everyone who answered the phone to become a mindless killing machine. He went on to say, "That's brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?" And then a moment of shocked realization: "Did I?" The implication is that he did come up with the technology that allowed that, and that it was a contributing factor to the downfall of civilization. It was never stated to be a single global event; on the contrary, Topher described it in terms of a city. He described it as a weapon of war, a means that any nation could use to destroy an enemy nation's major cities. That suggests that many countries, and possibly terrorist organizations, did in fact use the tech against their enemies in this way. Presumably the attacked nations would've retaliated in kind, and so on.

So we're not talking about a singular event -- or rather, the singular causal event was the invention of remote-wiping technology. Everything that spun off from that and caused the downfall of civilization would've unfolded more gradually.

 

[StarshipDefiant]

Wow...your knowledge on this stuff is impressing me, because I've watched some of these episodes, maybe to many times, :P But anyway, you make a good point, I forgotten he was speaking as a scenario (and often spoke in scenario terms after going nutty), as you said in this condition this must have happened one after another quite quickly, almost as in exchange of WMDs, one person/group/country did it, another did it in retaliation, and so forth. I wonder what the pre wiped states would bring.