An unlikely depiction of multichannel data processing is found in the low-budget action film, The Doll Squad (1973). With The Doll Squad, director Ted V. Mikels, known for his horror fantasy titles such as The Astro Zombies (1969), The Corpse Grinders (1972), and Blood Orgy of the She Devils (1972), significantly expanded both his generic range and narrative coherence. The resulting film, which features an all-female team of CIA operatives, was reputed to have inspired Aaron Spelling to create Charlie's Angels (1976-81) for television just three years later. As with the Spelling series, the female agents of the Doll Squad, led by Sabrina Kincaid (Francine York), trustingly take their orders from an unseen intelligence, in this case, a supercomputer named BERTHA, which is capable of making analytical, even intuitive, decisions based on fragments of evidence. This scene depicts the initial stages of a counterterrorism mission in which an otherwise dormant CIA data processing system ingests and processes data from a variety of sources and then makes a recommendation on how to proceed, in this case, by enlisting the help of "experienced women" to foil a terrorist plot.

I realize there is no small irony in the "good object" of this project's critique of computer surveillance being a low-budget exploitation film, but the role of computers in The Doll Squad is almost unique in its exemplary use of the computation for multichannel information processing and data synthesis. I don't mean this in the sense of the "realism" of BERTHA, which is dubious at best, but in the circumscribed instrumentality of the machines in response to a specific act of sabotage against a NASA rocket launch. BERTHA, in other words, does not represent the paranoid vision of an out-of-control AI that threatens humanity by overstepping its capacity for surveillance or control. Its recommendation to handle the counter-terrorism operation is based on a psychological profile of the suspected criminal "madman" Eamon O'Reilly (Michael Ansara), who the computer's analysis concludes, is prone to impotence stemming from an acute Oedipal complex. The computer thus functions as a selectively deployed extension of anti-crime psychological profiling for which the experienced women of The Doll Squad are ideally suited.

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