Star Wars on Trial: Charge #9

First there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer; then its spin-off Angel; then the cult hit Firefly; and its follow-up film, Serenity. They all had two things in common: their creator, Joss
Whedon … and their surprising psychological depth.
Revisit the
worlds of Joss Whedon … with trained psychologists at your side. What
are the psychological effects of constantly fighting for your life? Why
is neuroscience the Whedonverse’s most terrifying villain? How can
watching Joss’s shows help you take on your own psychological issues?
All we want for Christmas is for our favorite Joss Whedon shows to stop getting cancelled.
Clearly Santa isn’t listening. Here are our suggestions for consoling all of your still-broken-hearted Browncoats.
When we posted Ed Connor’s essay “Psychology Bad” (from The Psychology of Joss Whedon) last week, I couldn’t help being impressed how prescient Ed’s essay was. He labeled neuroscience as the bad guy in Firefly and Serenity, and identified it as a major theme in Joss Whedon’s work–before Dollhouse was even a glimmer in Joss’s or Eliza Duskhu’s eye.
Here’s Ed extending the ideas in his essay to Dollhouse:
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My major thesis in this essay was that River dramatizes what it means for us to be simultaneously neural and human. Neural,...