Sporadically speaking

I’d seen mention of an official psychological profile for Topher earlier but since I’d started writing my analysis based entirely on the TV episodes I decided to leave it alone until I’d finished.


So, looking at the official profile now at a general skim it presents a far darker character that the one that seems to appear in the series. This may tie in with the fact that the pilot episode was re-shot since the original was deemed too dark and confusing by the test audience, thus it can be presumed that if the story itself was darker then so were the characters. Because this profile version of Topher certainly seems like he belongs in a somewhat more twisted story, he’s a bit of a proto-Dietrich even to use a Trinity Blood example.

Straight away though what does strike me as a little trite in a certain respect is his Working Memory Index skills tied in with his mentat joke later on. I know it reinforces the point but a genuine, functional, fully trained mentat wouldn’t read as dysfunctional to anybody else bar possibly a Bene Gesserit or the Kwisatz Haderach. Thufir Hawat is an example of a good mentat: Topher on the other hand comes off as Piter de Vries without the endearing neuroses. But general Dune outrage aside, Topher isn’t Piter de Vries anyway and doesn’t seem to have any reason to be. Piter’s reason is pretty simple: he’s a Harkonnen mentat. Besides, a real mentat would have been able to manipulate the test results and receive the desired verdict without the interviewer ever suspecting them of it.

An interesting aspect is his issue with authority which seems to feed into his uncertainty in certain situations, which then causes him to rely on the opinions of peers. And it’s not so great a leap then to suggest that those he deliberately views as peers might to an outside observer be perceived as his superiors. It’s an odd situation and combined with issues like his irreverence for anything other than expanding his own experiences/knowledge and his attachment to material things as significators of an experience/memory it speaks of some larger background issue.

The comment about his sense of fashion on the other hand completely escapes me because as far as I recall he’s never worn anything particularly outlandish in any of the episodes. Besides, there’s nothing wrong at all with tank tops, I wear them to work too.

Roughly then, from the loose framework given in the profile Topher appears to be all about the genius precisely because he’s somewhat insecure in that position. And if that was the case then the driving force behind his expertise would be to constantly maintain his position, at the top of the geek ranking, amongst his ‘peers’, in the stable situation he’s created. Therefore being quite aware of the rapidity of scientific progress it’s no wonder that he seems to live in the dollhouse permanently: he has to, if he allows any other distractions to intrude then he’ll lose valuable time in enhancing his skills. It would be a very paranoid existence where he’d be constantly attempting to keep on top of his game even if nobody else was in actuality competing against him, which of course is the life of anybody who’s ever been told that their value stems solely from their success. If that’s the case, and it certainly seems like it is, then it’s quite understandable that Topher drives himself to surpass all his other prior achievements, dislikes authority and views people as mere components of life in general. He’s been taught though lifelong conditioning that worth is measured in superiority which would be why he dislikes the idea of somebody else having surpassed him thus ranking higher in the chain of command and why everybody else who wasn’t achieved that status of peer is merely a component in the machine. Even his peers are mere things not out of some malevolent callousness on his part but simply because he hasn’t ever learnt to value anything beyond the concept of success.

Thus overall while the profile gives a somewhat different reason for his isolation than the one I’d hypnotised it still comes back to the same conclusion, that while Topher’s instability in the social arena is what drives him, it still leaves him in a vulnerable enough position that it could prove his undoing though the introduction of an external factor or more likely due to Topher himself.



And having written that, apparently non-Caucasian fans of sci-fi and fantasy don’t exist. Courtesy of kintail.