The finale of this first season — SyFy has already ordered a second season — aired on Monday and it delivered on the promise of so many previous superhero shows with a finale that is explosive not for its action but for its words. Leigh Rosen, played by an inexplicable David Strathairn¹, ends the season with a dramatic action that will spin the story off into exciting and unknown territory that I trust the writers can follow through on. My one fear with the show’s direction is that it might hew to the path of The 4400, whose creator is working in the writer’s room on Alphas, because that show had similar stories to tell, but I think the creative team here is smart enough to resonate with that world without echoing it.

The second thought I wanted to get across here is that the existence of Alphas proves just how ridiculous the people who mock SyFy, or refuse to pronounce the name the way they want, or say the channel’s more interested in putting wrestling on the air than putting out good sci-fi are. This is the sort of show they want to make — technically they want to make this show and have it be a wildly popular and critical hit but let’s not split hairs in this moment of triumph — and when there are people out there who explicitly refuse to watch a show simply because it’s on SyFy, it infuriates me. It infuriated me even before this show was put on the air, but it’s now obviously a stubbornly ignorant position.

Footnotes

1. I’m so glad he’s doing this show, and I hope that the events of this finale aren’t a way of writing him out of the series barring the occasional guest appearance, but I never would’ve guessed his next move to be a jump to a SyFy series.

With that out of the way, I guess it’s time to talk about Pan Am, the new period drama about a flight crew aboard a Pan Am plane in the 60′s. I’ll be talking obliquely about certain plot points that aren’t obvious based on the short description above, so if you’re wary of spoilers and have yet to watch the premiere, this is where you stop reading.

I really enjoyed the pilot, a lot more than I ever expected to, even when early summaries started talking about the spy subplots, something that would normally guarantee a positive reaction from me². The flashbacks were a clever way of moving the action outside the frame of the plane, and continue to prove that flashbacks are awesome sauce. All the characters felt unique in a way that often doesn’t happen this early in a series run.

And from a purely aesthetic perspective, I loved the look of it. Even if Mad Men weren’t well written, acted, and directed the look and feel of the 60′s would make the show enjoyable, and that is if anything more true of Pan Am. The old school stewardess look is fantastic³, and the sheer pleasure the show exudes when showing a plane boarding is escapism in its own right given the current depressing state of air flight. This was a time when flight was a fancy, and the show excels when it’s selling you on the glamour of it all.

Of course, everything is glamourous at this point. The show is selling itself, so its best foot has been put forward. You’ve got sexy women wearing a fetishistic uniform, the intrigue of cold war espionage, and the hints of intrigue in the characters’ pasts. It all comes together to make a show that is incredibly enjoyable. The question that remains is whether or not the show will follow through on its promise, which is what next week will be all about. I know I’ll be there.

Footnotes

1. A related reason is that posting those smaller thoughts on this blog wouldn’t look right in its current incarnation, something I’m looking into fixing but it ultimately a fair way away
2. To be fair, when I did ultimately get to those parts of the story, they were immensely exciting to me.
3. Maybe it’s for the best that flight attendants can be of any gender, and they no longer have to wear girdles and fit into specific weight to height ratios, but it made for a very pleasant flight.

As Lost was winding toward its conclusion and it became more and more apparent that not all of the series’ big questions were going to be answered, it touched off a bit of fan discussion about just how much needs to be tied up to make a satisfying ending. I realize that my position on these things is a bit unlike most other people who watch this sort of stuff for fun or a living, but, officially, I don’t care. If the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more nebulous, fine. Pile mysteries on top of mysteries until the groaning weight of the artifice topples in on itself. So long as the character stuff and the plotting are generally tight on an episode-by-episode level, I kind of LIKE it when things get so big that they seem to encompass all of human existence.

Exactly.

Footnotes

1. New job, new projects, blah blah blah, I need to stop being lazy.
2. Well, as I’ve said before, I think Lost gave us a lot more answers than most of the fans give it credit for, but the sentiment of this quote is dead on.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer¹, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers², or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways³. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

Footnotes

1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent.
2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series.
3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker.

Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an actor who gave up on his career after giving it his all for as long as he thought he could last. Each episode centers around a party or event being catered by Henry’s new employer, a catering company whose employees are mostly people struggling for their first big break in Hollywood.

Along with Henry¹ are: Casey, a potential up-and-coming comic; Roman, a hard science fiction writer who feels above anyone and everyone; and Kyle, a pretty-boy actor. In the first season Henry is portrayed as the end result of Hollywood, someone who’s given up on their dreams. But despite this seemingly grim theme, season one is about Henry finding a place for himself without that all-encompassing passion. He finds someone to care for with Casey and finds himself more and more comfortable with being a caterer for the rest of his life, so long as there’s someone there to share it with.

But season one ended with Casey leaving him to follow her dream, to look for that big break somewhere else, him being promoted to manager of a team of caterers, and essentially no passion left in him. It was funny to see, but also tragic. We all look for some meaning in our life, and just as Henry had adjusted to a new meaning, it left to be a stand-up comic on a six-month long Alaskan cruise.

Season two brings us back around six months later and Henry is still recovering from the hurt Casey gave him and the sadness of his humdrum existence. In this episode, Steve “The Gute” Guttenberg happens to have a movie in his DVD collection that Henry had a small role in, which perks Casey’s curiosity. At the same time, The Gute encourages the crew to perform a reading of Roman’s recently rejected script, in the hopes of giving Roman ideas for improvement. These two plots manage to pack in a lot of really great themes and character growth into a few short scenes.

By Casey sneaking off to see Henry’s early work as an actor she realizes that he’s actually a really great actor, one who probably shouldn’t have given up on his dream. Casey’s desire to see Henry follow that dream is probably related to her recent success via a small role in an Apatow movie, but it nonetheless points to that larger idea.

And when Henry performs the improved version of Roman’s script — earnestly performing the material due to Casey goading him into it in order to, in my opinion, see if he can still act as well as he once did — we also learn that he’s actually a great actor. More than that, we see that he obviously misses it.

The question you have to ask now — well, this is a half-hour comedy so I guess you don’t have to do any of this analysis but this is what I live for — is what it is that gives us meaning. In the first season, Henry was looking for it in the people around him, and in love. Now, it’s not so clear that that’s enough.

I know that Adam Scott will have, at best, a limited role in any potential third season of the show, which has probably driven some of my thoughts and speculation about the direction of the season, but it seems to me that a really smart way to end this season would be to have Henry reaffirm his desire to be an actor and go off to pursue that dream. Or if they push that earlier in the season, maybe ending the season with his new big break, the one that will catapult him to real fame (and maybe next season he’ll host a few parties so he can hang with his old catering buddies). But whatever they do, I hope the show continues to explore these sorts of interesting themes in a new season, even without Henry there — though, at the moment, I can’t imagine the show being anywhere near as compelling without him there.

Party Down is a light-comedy centred around real characters and that juxtaposition makes it, like Parks and Recreation, one of those subdued comedies that manages to make you laugh at the same time as they explore romance and life in really important ways.

Footnotes

1. There are other regular cast members but these particular characters exemplify the themes I’m exploring in this post.

Tonally, this movie took a lot of the more cynical moments of the comic and softened them. I don’t know if the movie needed to remove all of those little touches, but there are some that probably had to be made. For example, in the comic Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s mob crusade is a total sham; Hit Girl’s mother is not dead, Big Daddy wasn’t a cop or a hit man or anything like that, Big Daddy was an accountant-by-day comic nerd-by-night who used his comic collection to fund his crusade and essentially brainwashed his kid into becoming a ruthless assassin in order to have fun. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the superhero mythos, but a tad depressing and almost anti-comics in sentiment for a comic book movie.

Another thing the movie brightened up was Dave’s romance. In the movie, as in the comic, Dave pretends to be gay to get close to this girl, Katie, who wants a gay best friend. The movie differs broadly here as well. In the comic, Katie is more explicitly using Dave and never demonstrates much interest in him; when he reveals that he’s not gay and in fact is basically in love with her, she beats the shit out of him and then gets her boyfriend to beat more shit out of him.

The movie fleshes Katie out more, she becomes interested in Dave over time expressing regret that he’s gay, and even becomes a comic book fan; when he reveals to her that he’s not gay — he also reveals that he’s Kick-Ass to her, which makes the way she takes it somewhat more realistic, and also heightens the drama during the later action pieces — she’s briefly pissed but quickly warms to him, both emotionally and physically. Basically, they fuck a lot², and though the ease with which she takes his confession doesn’t read as believably as I’d like, the relationship works in the big picture.

Basically, what Matthew Vaughn did when writing the screenplay was extract large chunks of Mark Millar’s misogyny, nihilism, and misanthropy. Obviously, there’s a degree to which this was done to make the movie more marketable, but I think even more than that the plot changes were done because the original comic lacked heart. The movie, much more than the comic, wants to be about more than just being a super-hero because it’s cool. Maybe it should’ve been uncompromising and brutal and accused the audience of being sociopaths for ever dreaming about being a super-hero but that movie almost certainly would’ve sucked.

Beyond the changes that occurred in the general plot, one thing that changed pretty drastically in terms of the way the story was told was the lack of flashbacks. Comic books operate similar to serialized television in most ways, and one aspect in particular is the cliffhanger ending; when a comic ends on a cliffhanger — like, say, Hit Girl and Big Daddy demolishing a bunch of drug dealers and running off into the night — the next issue can be devoted to explaining these new characters, their back story, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. The big reveal of the new amazing character, emerging complete from the shadows, it’s one of the cornerstones of comics and so it’s not surprising that Kick-Ass used it a couple times.

In Kick-Ass, it’s used first to fill in the back story of Hit Girl and Big Daddy³ and then later on to reveal that Red Mist was working with the Mob to set a trap for Hit Girl and Big Daddy. This style is great because it lets certain events come at you unexpectedly; in the film both of these things are integrated into the linear plot⁴ and so they feel slightly deflated. Granted, a good story should stay a good story regardless of any storytelling temporal tricks you plan, but that doesn’t mean those tricks can’t enhance the story.

The compressed story lines required for film are at times a crucible from which a tighter story is extracted, but in the process it’s easy to lose something.

Seeing as I’m here, I’ll write a brief paragraph about the fight scenes in Kick-Ass⁵. Hit Girl killing countless mob goons was a sight to behold, but I think that the best fight scene in the movie, hands down, is the one where Big Daddy destroys that group of goons at the lumber factory and then sets it all on fire. Every movement in that scene feels so visceral, the way Big Daddy trundles relentlessly through the gunfire felt so much more genuine than the highly choreographed (albeit impressive) fights with Hit Girl.

Ultimately, I think the film is stronger than the comic, both because of the changes to the basic plot and in spite of the loss of certain comic book storytelling traits. You should go see it if you haven’t already, though if you’ve read this entire post but haven’t seen the movie, well I kinda fucked that plan up for you, didn’t I?

Footnotes

1. It was also a very entertaining movie, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to resort to that lame pun everyone seems to be bandying about. And no, the title of this post is not an example of said pun it’s— oh look over there, a squirrel!
2. And I’m totally willing to admit I giggled with glee when she said she wanted to fuck Kick-Ass and then promptly made up an excuse to go fuck Dave.
3. Well, the first version of the back story, the ending reveals that the first version was a fiction thought up by Big Daddy.
4. Aside from a comic book animation sequence that gives a little more history to Big Daddy.
5. I’m still not going to use that pun, though

So far, at least, the show seems quite content to let Chuck and Sarah just be happy while being spies. And rightly so! It seems odd to me that no show that I can recall aside from the American version of The Office has had the long-term romance solidify and continue telling stories. Emotional connections are perhaps harder to establish with fictional characters when a romance isn’t one of the balls in the air, but conversely, storytelling is not merely the act of introducing sadness to people’s lives.

This isn’t to say that they need to be a perfect couple forever from here on out, but at the very least they have avoided for the time being the trap of the quick and implausible relationship collapse. I can’t wait to see how the rest of this season plays out¹.

Footnotes

1. Oh, also, the season’s winding down, the ratings are still unremarkable, and the show continues to be one of the best shows on right now. In conclusion… Start Watching Chuck, Dammit!

But I think it’s safe to say that Spartacus snuck up on people with its quality; it’s left me interested in the second season, and pondering where the characters will go before their preordained end. On a related note, it seems as though the show’s name has been retconned as Spartacus, with a season subtitle of Blood and Sand, to allow for the second season to shift out of the gladiatorial ring with the new subtitle Vengeance. So I look forward to Spartacus: Vengeance, though I do hope the show is more willing to forgo the over-the-top violence and sexuality¹ now that it’s found strong characters to base the show around.

Footnotes

1. The more recent episodes have come with a disclaimer telling viewers the violence and sexuality is there to portray a realistic representation of Ancient Rome, but HBO’s Rome didn’t whitewash the dingier parts of Ancient Rome without having such profuse and omnipresent nudity and violence, so some of it is clearly there for the sake of grabbing attention, and it’s that aspect of the show that I think could go away fairly easily.

How to Make it in America sort of stumbles through its first episode, meekly establishing character relationships and not doing much in terms of plot. Another recent HBO show to behave this way for the first half of its season was Bored to Death, which eventually made its way toward an interesting story, so I don’t doubt that How to Make it in America could become interesting before the season is out, but the problem is that these shows aren’t using the guaranteed full season to heighten the drama, but instead as an excuse to not start strong.

Network television has many flaws, but pilot episodes are not among them. Grabbing the audience quickly was never the problem, it was maintaining that audience, and the show’s quality, as the season progressed.

Now, obviously, not every story leaps from the gate, but I also think it’s reasonable to expect a television show to produce compelling episodes that service the overall arc while retaining value when viewed independently. I guess what I’m trying to get across here is that there’s a difference between a slow burn and wasting time, and an increasing number of shows on HBO and its ilk are relying on the confusion between the two to evade tight storytelling.

30 Rock was the weakest half-hour of NBC’s two hour comedy block. That’s less a knock on 30 Rock than it is praising the other shows. In fact, this was also one of the best episodes of 30 Rock this year, which also means it’s one of the best of the last two years.

The addition of Elizabeth Banks went over much better than the addition of Julianne Moore. The fact that she didn’t have to do a bad Boston accent helped with that, but Banks seems a better fit to the show, with a stronger history in comedy. I hope she’s back for a few more episodes before the inevitably send her packing.

Jenna’s subplot is slightly more entertaining than usual, but only slightly. It’s surprisingly hard to lampoon an absurd celebrity self-centered actor without it getting dull and repetitive fairly quickly.

Liz’s search for someone to pick her up from oral surgery was a fun way of exploring Valentine’s Day, though they went a little too on the nose with the multiple explicit comparisons to the search for a Valentine’s Day date.

But I’m willing to ignore any and all issues I have with that particular plot because of the closing scene with all of Liz’s ex-boyfriends as Jamaican nurses. I think I could watch that forever.

Good cap to the night, and a sign that maybe the writer’s have found their groove again.

Some nice things in this episode:

• Despite their overuse of the card, Liz’s complete obliviousness to existence of front clasp bras was pretty great.
• ‘My stepson is my cyber-husband’
• What was up with that weird pause over the Julia Roberts line? Was that a jab at side-swipe comedy?
• http://jdlutz.com/karen/proof/
• ‘Prime Minister Wen wants a weak Yuan, do we?’
• ‘We’ll be right back after this ad aimed at the elderly.’
• ‘It’s one of those kids from Glee isn’t it?!’
• ‘One time, I ran over an old lady in Arizona and just kept driving!’
• ‘She was on Maxim’s ‘I’d Rape That’ 100′
• ‘Otherwise known as Jane Sadwoman.’
• ‘Don Cheadle on a bed of rice!’

As I just said in my post about tonight’s episode of Parks and Recreation, The Office lives through the eccentricities of their characters. They keep the characters well-grounded but everyone’s a little… more than you’d expect in real life.

Tonight’s episode was more grounded than usual in that its main plot was about a real world eventuality of acquisitions like the one the office experienced recently. Specifically, the redundancy that is the co-manager position. Basically, one of them needs to go back to Sales. Luckily for whoever that is, Sabre has no cap on commissions. Jim and Michael are both famously good salesmen either of whom could make more money in Sales so we end up with a fun situation where they’re both fighting to be demoted.

It’s great though how quickly Michael falls out of love with the idea of doing the actual work of becoming a salesman again. It took less than a day without an assistant and a big desk and the snacks for Michael to stop caring about the boost in his paycheque.

That storyline is fun, but most of the comedy actually comes from the more extreme absurdities of the office’s staff. And really, that mostly comes down to Erin and Andy, both of whom are so strange that you a) can’t wait to see them as a couple and b) can’t help but think they’re more real than any of the other people on the show. That said, as bizarre as those two are, I can’t help but root for them.

The Office is past its prime, but thanks to the time the writers invested into the characters early on it’s still one of the best comedies on television right now.

Some nice things in this episode:

• The Olympics cold-open was great.
• Words to live by: ‘I have this thing about men cutting or threatening to cut my throat. Don’t try to cut my throat.’
• Erin and Andy’s traffic jam riff was an example of one of those great moments the show does that are so much like something you would do but seem so bizarre when someone else does it.
• Dwight and Ryan’s evil cabal is great. As are the Lord of the Rings references.
• I was almost certain that Dwight hadn’t actually seen Saw until he mentioned legs getting cut off.
• Erin’s smile of pride over Andy’s crotch getting thoroughly sniffed by those massive dogs.
• Erin doesn’t know Peanuts? Again, so weird it has to be real.
• ‘I can’t even go near a cigarette now without thinking of a penis. And vice versa.’
• Oscar’s reading an old issue of The Atlantic, I think the December issue.
• Apparently, The Office has an unspoken rule of not casting known faces for guest spots until this Kathy Bates guest spot, but I think it works since she’s playing a larger than life character.
• ‘It’s not because of the smell, I’m just expecting a nosebleed.’
• I feel like Pam’s reaction to Andy saying his office-mates are his closest friends, is a little much. It’s not like she’s got a bustling social life outside of the office.

Parks and Recreation has been so much better this year on every level that it’s not surprising it’s not a rating winner, but if this season gets any word of mouth at all, those ratings should start shooting up.

Since this episode was all about Valentine’s Day, it makes sense that it was all about romances.

Ann and Mark’s relationship was a bit of a shock at first but it’s grown on me, primarily because it’s never been the main story of any episode. And it makes it a lot easier to like Mark, who was a bit of a cad and a bunch of a douche last season. It doesn’t seem like this relationship is destined to be long-lived, though. Ann’s comments during her talking head scene sharply demonstrated that a really normal relationship can also mean a really uninteresting relationship. Nonetheless, this little relationship has done quite a bit of heavy lifting by making Mark more likable and by bringing Ann closer to the office environment.

Leslie and Justin’s relationship had a great path and the way it ended, while keeping Justin totally likable, was kind of scary for its intelligence. From the first time we saw Justin he’d been a storyteller, and making that the key thing that makes Leslie realize they’re not right for each other is one of those story touches that less capable shows would screw up.

Tom’s awkward attempts to woo his ex-wife are sweet and very fitting a person as bizarre as Tom Haverford. They didn’t end well, but they continued the work of making Tom empathetic after a season of him mostly being the weirdo. What makes this show interesting is that they’re putting the work in to make all their characters relatable and realistic. Not that The Office is a grab-bag of slapstick tomfoolery but its main comic sources are drawn a bit broader than real life; Parks and Recreation hopes to mine the world of humour and pathos that exists on the other edge of the line, skirting realism in a way that you would think would make the comedy harder to come by, but this show makes it look easy.

One of the most impressive developments of this season is the stealth romance of April and Andy. The undefined age difference aside, their flirtations — and Andy’s obliviousness to it all — are one of the more romantic story lines they’ve weaved into this season while still remaining wildly funny. And of course, it’s led to whole new avenues for April. She’s still basically that deadpan sardonic ironic apathetic chick, but the glimmer in her eye when she dotes on Andy is opening her up to the world beyond the ’15 layers of irony’ her boyfriend (and his boyfriend) revel in.

Some nice things in this episode:

• ‘It makes The Notebook look like Saw 5.’
• ‘I’m gonna call him poo-pa.’
• Leslie: ‘Think of it this way: these songs are exactly like the songs you usually except instead of modern rock, they’re old jazzy standards from the 40′s.’
  Andy: ‘OK, yeah, you got a point.’
• ‘I never had a chance to get a girl a cliched Valentine’s Day gift before so… I got you all of them.’
• Mark in a tuxedo and red bow tie. Adorbs.
• A timely joke: ‘Stay away from John Mayer.’
• ‘I’m gonna throw up real quick and then we can leave!’
• The people on the show seem to be acknowledging the camera a little more in the recent episodes, I like it so far I just hope they don’t over-do it.
• ‘Uhh… I mean, that sucked, didn’t it?’
• Guitarist: ‘Maybe if you sang it like Louis Armstrong.’
  Andy: ‘Maybe yeah, I mean here’s the thing though… who is that?’
• ‘If I’m not mistaken, that was the old lady version of flashing.’
• Andy is too quotable.

Community explored the politics of the drunk dial tonight. Britta’s slick veneer of disinterest in Jeff was shattered by the power of alcohol. As easy as it would be for the show to use a moment like this to ruin Jeff’s existing relationship, with his hot former statistics professor¹, while advancing the Will-They-Won’t-They narrative, maybe even getting another kiss out of the potential couple, Community doesn’t hit those sorts of lobs.

Community has shown itself to be a shrewd observer of the classic tropes of television. Even when it follows these tropes, it subverts them as it did expertly in this episode. With some sharp writing, it managed to strengthen Jeff’s current relationship and deepen Jeff and Britta’s friendship while keeping the door open for a genuine romance further down the road. Also, they got Britta into this dress.

Chevy Chase in a pantsuit was nice too I guess.

So far this year, Community’s been remarkably consistent for a new series. I can’t think of a demonstrably weak episode and none of the characters feel like the unwanted step-children of the writers. Earlier this week Dan Harmon, creator of Community, tweeted:

I’d start phoning it in if it weren’t for the fear that nobody would know the difference.

To which I say, if he were phoning it in we’d know. Oh, how we’d know.

Some nice things in this episode:

• Annie clapping along with Senor Chang’s Spanish chicken dance.
• Abed’s inability to recall television minutiae while hungover.
• Britta in that dress. I mean, wow.
• ‘Wassup’
• BCI
• ‘I’m Abed, I never watch TV.’
• Cupid Being. Not only blind, but dizzy and belligerent.
• ‘He’s a young The Asian Guy from Lost’
• ‘One Papa John’s commercial, and he thinks he’s Christian Bale.’
• The Breakfast Club montage homage would have gone completely over my head if I hadn’t watch this video earlier this week.
• Troy’s got mad Booty Quake skills.

Footnotes

1. It has to be said that the women on this show are, quite possibly, too hot.

This was the biggest disappointment I’ve ever experienced I think — OK that’s a little harsh, but it’s definitely a weak ending to a show that was deserving of better. This show had its flaws but throughout its run I managed to find points of enjoyment. I found none of those things in this completely uncompelling hour of television.

Topher saved the world. Well sort of. I mean there’s still a massive gap¹ in the memory of everyone who was imprinted, and the few people who managed to avoid being turned into a dumb-show or a butcher and have struggled through the years unaware of what caused this apocalyptic period to either occur or to cease.

And just like any Whedon show, it needlessly killed off main characters. The problem with Whedon is he always kills these characters off in such a glib manner that it loses any emotional resonance. He tried to make Paul’s death have a greater meaning by using it to make Echo realize that she should have been nicer to him, so she imprints herself with a Paul wedge that was luckily on hand. And they can be together forever. Whatever. Their romantic relationship was always weekly and meekly defined, and ending it in this way only would have worked if the audience cared, which they didn’t.

And Topher killed himself with his de-Dolling bomb. Not really much to say about any of that. Topher was crazy, then I guess he wasn’t, and then he built the magical device that can undo everything in like five minutes. Oh, and then he blew himself up. He has a saddish goodbye with DeWitt who really doesn’t try very hard at all to stop him from his kamikaze mission. And he reminds the audience that he liked Bennett, but aside from that he was pretty much just a mess all episode. The one nice touch was blowing up his mind-bomb in DeWitt’s old office, destroying the “To Remember” collage on the wall as he erased the last ten years² from the world.

Granted, all of this might have been better handled if the post-apocalyptic storyline were spread over several episodes. Some of this might feel more natural, but a lot of it would remain arbitrary and flawed in many ways.

Now that it’s over, I sincerely think anyone looking into Dollhouse as a show shouldn’t even waste their time with the ‘Epitaph’ episodes. They provide very little to the actual substance of the show, a show that was much better at exploring questions of identity than it was at questions about abusing technology.

Goodbye Dollhouse. I’m sorry to see you go. Especially in this way.

Footnotes

1. The timeline’s a little vague on when the apocalypse happened. The earlier implication was that it happened not long after last week’s episode. And this episode bears that out in some ways — Harding has burned through numerous bodies through sloth and gluttony — but it seems unlikely that Felicia Day’s character was in university when the apocalypse started and could still be so youthful a decade later. Or that the small child Caroline inhabited would have been imprinted so recently that she has basically her age’s level of development and intelligence when her original personality is restored.
2. Again, the timeline’s vague, but I’m going from how I see it, and that’s at most one year after the events of Dollhouse’s penultimate episode

I think that some of that is Christian moralizing¹, but there’s something to be said for certain levels of decency and morality keeping a group of people from collapsing into an anarchic wasteland. And when you get to the point that thousands are gathering to watch people murder each other, it’s safe to say your society probably isn’t on the upswing.

So when I sat down to watch the pilot episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the new drama from Starz set in ancient Rome and centred around a Thracian gladiator slave named Spartacus, I was a little confused as to the message it wanted to send.

The show’s battle scenes are filmed in a very stylized manner, with blood spewing everywhere and slow motion used to freeze it in the air. It’s basically the style 300 used but, if at all possible, brought to an even crazier extreme.

As the final battle of the pilot plays out, Spartacus battles four other gladiators, the crowd cheers on his murderous spree practically salivating over the blood spilled on the sand of the battlefield, and I couldn’t help but think this was a commentary on the audience itself, people who sit back and cheer on these sorts of gore-infused battles. But at the same time, I think I’m giving the show too much credit. Maybe the show is just very brazenly targeting a known audience through explicit and extreme ultra-violent television.

I think I’ll give it a few episodes before I make a final decision on that, though. The pilot was written by Steven S DeKnight, a writer whose work is usually smarter than that, so depending on how it plays out in subsequent episodes, the show could be using the violence purely to draw male demographics, or to cast aspersions on society for being drawn to this sort of violence, or maybe even a bit of both.

Footnotes

1. Similar arguments have been cast at atheists for being the cause for the glorification of violence that is seen in modern society. I tend to think that the moral brigade over at the MPAA which blocks many excellent films from a broader audience for the use of bland curse words or exhibiting human romance — tell me how the hell Once got an R rating — but letting what some would call extreme violence make its way into PG and PG-13 films on a regular basis is more of a culprit than the growing secular movement of people who manage to live with a moral code not dictated to them via existential threats of eternal damnation.

Quick plot summary: Boyd drugged Echo/Caroline so she wouldn’t be able to tell everyone that he was Rossum’s founder. Then they went straight to Tucson and got arrested by Rossum goons. Boyd ‘broke out’ with Topher and led him to the lab where they were building the remote imprinting device. It wasn’t working and Topher fixed it, at which point Boyd reveals that as part of his plan and reveals he’s Rossum’s founder. Ballard and Mellie went off to destroy Rossum’s supercomputer and as they were doing it Boyd forced DeWitt to activate Mellie’s sleeper mode. Ballard managed to get Mellie to ignore her assassin orders but not for long so she killed herself. Boyd holds Ballard hostage to stop Echo from killing him, but she shoots Ballard in the leg to get him out of the way. She gets into a tussle with Boyd and when Boyd gets the upper hand, Topher appears from behind and Dollifies Boyd with the remote imprinting device he fixed earlier. Echo tells the Doll Boyd to wear a vest of C4 and carry a grenade into Rossum’s supercomputer and pull the pin. They destroy the supercomputer, Topher has the only working prototype of the remote imprinting device and Rossum’s two founders appear to be dead. The world is saved. Cut to ten years later, the world is in turmoil, Ballard and Echo are fighting their way through the streets of LA, now an apocalyptic battleground.

As all of that was happening, Anthony and Priya headed to Tucson to help out and they did, and Dr Saunders is now a new version of Clyde, wears a suit and is still outrageously hot.

OK, so let’s talk about Boyd’s master vision. Years ago he saw Clyde’s tech, presumably before anyone else since it was pretty wildly revolutionary, and decided that because it existed it would be used, abused, and eventually lead to the downfall of man through weaponized imprinting. So, rather than destroying the technology, he decided to neuter Clyde, take the technology far beyond Clyde’s initial goals, abuse it to become one of the most powerful men in the world so he could find a vaccine for imprinting, use that vaccine on the precious few he wanted to save, and then create the apocalypse himself so that he and his followers could be the few sane people in a world of madmen.

I guess it works, but I think it would have made more sense if Boyd didn’t think he was being the good guy. He’s fomenting an apocalypse, he developed and distributed the technology he’s supposedly trying to stop. He’s not the good guy. Buffy villains always knew they were the villain, it’s what made them interesting. The Mayor of Sunnydale is the best example out there of an affable villain, and that seems like a better mold to make Boyd from. Nonetheless, it worked well enough. The one thing I particularly like about villain-Boyd was his dislike of Ballard, since Boyd and Ballard apparently have the same fundamental belief — that the technology will be abused if it exists — though one of them is obviously thinking bigger and the ways they react to that fundamental belief are diametrically opposed.

The ending was also interesting but at the same time uninteresting. Either the technology got reinvented and the world still ended, someone else took over at Rossum and finished the job, or Boyd and/or Clyde had other copies of themselves, along with the schematics for the remote imprinting device, and continued their work until they brought about the apocalypse. One of those things happened, and it might be fleshed out and explained in the series finale, but there’s a question of it really matters what particular finger pushed the button on the apocalypse. Besides, the promo for the finale made me think the show has something else planned.

And since we’re on the topic, I thought I’d pooh-pooh the finale as it is sold in that promo. It seems like they’re planning on having Topher invent a new magic that can restore people to their original personalities. And I can only assume also make imprinting either impossible or closer to the way Echo experiences it, thus making the tech mostly harmless. The world will still have collapsed into horror for ten years meaning that rebuilding the world as we know it is a long-term project unlikely to be finished in their life time. And it’s also just more magic. I know that the show is sci-fi, but inventing a new technology that fixes everything each time things get worse is not a good system. It’s what Voyager did for years and we all know how I feel about Voyager.

Still, I hold out hope that the finale will be better than that. And I guess we’ll know for sure in a couple weeks.

The best part about this episode to me, though, wasn’t the big reveal, which I’ll get to in a minute, at the end but the way the story was told. Using flashbacks to Caroline’s past life that were tied thematically and emotionally to the modern day events was a great way of telling this story; the flashbacks let you give some emotional resonance and depth to the characters by tying current events to the character’s past, while also revealing long-standing mysteries, and to top it all off you can let the main storyline barrel forward without getting bogged down in explicit character building. It’s one of the smartest storytelling techniques out there for long-term serialized shows, and I think was one of the reasons Lost was such a hit right out of the gate. Granted, Dollhouse isn’t telling a story that’s particularly well-suited to this device most of the time but the improvements in the dramatic thrust of the episode brought by it are obvious and substantial.

On to the story. Caroline three years ago broke into the Dollhouse and found out about Bennett so she befriended her, ultimately giving up on using her because they grow close. But Bennett wants to help her so they go through with her plan to bomb Rossum. But things go awry and to make things worse DeWitt is headed there and so they’re screwed. So the memories of Caroline that Echo received from Bennett a few episodes ago aren’t exactly how it played out; rather than Caroline abandoning her to evade capture, she was running away so no one would suspect Bennett of helping her when she was captured. At which point she is brought to meet the top guy, the man behind the curtain as it were. And it’s…. well, like I said, I’ll get to that in a minute.

Meanwhile, in the present day, they’re trying to imprint Echo with Caroline so they can discover who is running Rossum but her wedge — the harddrive containing her personality to everyone else — is missing, luckily Topher kept the backup that Alpha destroyed last year in the hopes of restoring it and it just so happens that Bennett has previously restored a damaged wedge. So, while DeWitt clears out the Dollhouse telling all the Dolls their contracts are up, Topher and Ballard kidnap Bennett to help them restore Caroline. As all of this is happening, Boyd brings Dr Saunders, who he’s been banging and sexting on a regular basis ever since she disappeared, back into the Dollhouse.

Dominic finds his way out of the Attic, DeWitt is ordered to relinquish command of the Dollhouse by Rossum for letting people get out of the Attic, and Boyd killed all the Rossum minions sent to take over the Dollhouse, getting shot in the process. To avoid drawing attention, she said Boyd was behind it all and sent him on the run so the Dollhouse had more time to get ready.

Topher and Bennett work to repair the wedge — Bennett also stops working on it for a while because she hates Caroline, but eventually Echo promises to let Bennett do whatever she wants to Caroline afterward, and because of what happened next it’s a pretty pointless diversion so I really probably shouldn’t have included it all but there you go — all the while flirting voraciously. Because they are so adorable together, and in fact they share a few smooches, and because of that I knew that something would go wrong. Which is why when Dr Saunders started talking to Bennett about how much Topher loves her my heart didn’t go pitter-patter so much as my brain started saying goodbye to Bennett. And, right on cue, a bullet races through Bennett’s skull.

As a sidebar, I’m getting really tired of Joss Whedon’s relentless nihilism with respect to healthy relationships. Not only is it lazy — it’s much easier to write the beginnings of a relationship than it is to keep a healthy relationship going long-term — but it’s also really boring and it detracts from pretty much any long-term character involvement. I mean, I loved the Topher-Bennett pairing, it made me squee in delight, but the second it was consummated it’s like my brain flipped a switch and I stopped caring. Precisely because I know that Joss Whedon will end these things. Always.

So Bennett is dead but Topher continues the work and repairs the wedge. Rossum soldiers storm the Dollhouse just as Topher begins to imprint Echo. A soldier approaches Echo mid-imprint but before he can do anything his neck is snapped from behind by a returned Boyd. Yay Boyd! Except that whole thing about Caroline meeting the man behind Rossum? It was Boyd. And he had plans for her. Um…. WTF?

OK, so the elephant in the room is Boyd. I think it’s a great twist, and if the reveal was properly scheduled — I think it probably wouldn’t have happened until maybe season three or four, maybe a cliffhanger twist at the end of season two, if the show were a success and Whedon could play out his plan over the full five years he originally envisioned — it would have been one of those epic moments in television that would be talked about for years.

That said, it’s still potentially great. I’m not going to presume brilliance or stupendous failure  for the follow through on this, but I’m also not making my final decision about the Boyd twist until I see next week’s episode; depending how they play out present day Boyd-as-villain this could be brilliant or terrible.

The rest is a bit of a wash. We got a little more info about Caroline’s past and got to see more of Echo wishing Caroline wasn’t around to have a claim on the body she considers hers. Topher is deepened once again; in fact he’s been given so much focus this season it’s almost overkill. But it’s all still pretty damn good but as the season comes to an end and the mythological arcs start to climax the little character moments start to taper off.

This episode really solidified Dollhouse as one of the more tragic tales of the past decade. Not on a story level, though a pending apocalypse is hardly cheery, but on an administrative level.

Dollhouse suffered for many reasons. The show’s high concept sci-fi concept, Fox’s early meddling, and Joss Whedon’s notorious series beginning jitters, something he only escaped once with Firefly.

If the show had managed to gain a strong audience and last long enough for Whedon to stretch out this story properly, it would’ve been a thing of beauty even with the occasional weak episodes. But that didn’t happen and next week we get the penultimate episode which will probably condense a season’s worth of storyline into an hour. Should be fun.

Ryan Bingham looks like a happy man. He spends a large majority of the year flying around the country firing employees of people too scared to do it themselves. He enjoys this life immensely, relishing the artificial hospitality he receives, the connections he imagines between him and his airline.

We all hope the connections in our lives are real, but we don’t know what other people think, the facades people put up. Ryan does it everyday, meeting perfect strangers and helping them find solace in the unemployment he brings to them and he is very good at that job as scene after scene demonstrates; he always manages to bring people back from the brink, they leave the room comforted if not sated. Bingham’s job is giving false comfort, so he’s surrounded his life with a world of the same.

But then he meets Alex. They bond over which car services are shitty, what hotels offer what perks, and whose flown more in what is, to my eyes, a laughably — and intentionally — superficial meet cute through which they form a simulacrum of a relationship. It never goes beyond that for Alex, but Ryan cares more than he knows. And the movie follows through on that slow burning realization.

The movie works on basically every level, with great performances from all the cast. Clooney played the lead role brilliantly, using his natural charm to convince us of the wisdom of his baggage-free life, up until the final cracks appear, though I think the real surprise is Anna Kendrick. A full third of her film credits right now are from Twilight which doesn’t bode well, but she brings a really great performance.

I’d go see this one. I think it operates mostly as an empty vessel for each viewer, but that doesn’t mean its impact is without value.

I know, I know, it seems like every time I talk about season two of Dollhouse, I end up complaining about Epitaph One, but that’s because Epitaph One just doesn’t fit.

This season has been expertly layering in the depths of Rossum’s evils, and hinting at a dark future ahead if Rossum’s plans go forward. We’ve seen remote wiping, presidential Dolls, and they’ve hinted at remote imprinting, and the first episode of the night was about the dehumanizing aspects of shared thought. These are all harbingers of a vague yet looming threat, except that it’s not vague at all because an unaired episode fleshed all this out before. Epitaph One hasn’t been working for me. Rather than intensifying the experience of watching this universe march toward oblivion, it serves as a spoiler.

All of the things that would ultimately lead to the apocalypse of Epitaph One were not there in the first season, or if they were it was in such a minimal form that it’s not worth discussing. And so season two’s task was to unveil that possibility, piece by piece. Which it has been doing. But it all feels empty because Epitaph One brought us there already along with a cliff notes recap of what led to it.

There’s no doubt that this season is doing what Epitaph One did but better. Which is why no one watching this show should watch Epitaph One before the second season. It just shouldn’t be done.

On to the main story for this episode. DeWitt continues to be evil¹ in the real world and Echo, Victor, and Sierra are fighting for their lives in the Attic.

The Attic it turns out is a semi-shared dream state where you’re constantly amped on adrenaline facing your worst fears. Dominic, who was sent there last season, has been jumping through minds of other people stuck in the Attic trying to stop a large black monster running through the Attic killing people. And when you die in the Attic you’re dead in real life.

Eventually, Dominic meets up with Echo and the others and they catch the killer, who morphs into a diminutive nerd named Clyde when caught. Clyde is one of the founders of Rossum, the one who discovered the tech. His co-founder encouraged him to create the first Doll as a copy of himself (Clyde) but without any ambitions of his own. Shortly after Clyde 2.0, now working exclusively for the other co-founder, sticks Clyde in the Attic, the first of many, and begins to build Rossum’s evil empire.

Clyde also became the foundation of that empire because the Attic, rather than being a place you put people you don’t want to deal with anymore, is actually a massive multi-processor computer that runs all of Rossum, and the processors are the people in the Attic. He’s been killing them basically in the hope of screwing up Rossum’s mainframe.

Clyde can’t remember who the other founder of Rossum is or what Clyde 2.0 looks like, though it’s not clear if that’s a side-effect of being in the Attic since 1993 or that they took it from his brain, but apparently there was a girl that has seen both of them and was caught by Rossum, a girl named Caroline. This is a cool twist and it finally answers the question of why Caroline was on the run from the Dollhouse. So they’ll need to imprint Echo with Caroline and use her knowledge of Rossum’s lead people to try and stop them.

And what they need to stop is basically what we saw in Epitaph One, which is also the backdrop for a bunch of this episode as its Clyde’s worst nightmare as well, an apocalypse that arises from Rossum’s evil doings. Presumably, Rossum is aware of this and would like the world not to end, since that would be bad for business and for profit margins, but we’re supposed to accept that a self-serving corporation would gleefully head into an apocalypse, so I will accept that; there was a time when I would have thought that was a completely outrageous concept but seeing how vociferously the health care industry is fighting reform, despite the absolute certainty of the total desolation of the American economy if growth progresses the way it has for the past few decades, I’m more sympathetic to the self-destructive corporation conceit.

Eventually, Echo figures out a way out of the Attic and she and Victor and Sierra all escape — the way out is dying and then magically coming back to life, but because Echo is Echo it works — and it’s revealed that DeWitt put Echo in the Attic to find out about Rossum’s weaknesses. And now everyone in the Dollhouse is in on the conspiracy and they all want to stop Rossum. So that’s a pretty cool direction for the final episodes to follow, even if it seems like the apocalypse is going to happen regardless of what they do.

This episode has little in terms of theme. The main Dolls experienced their worst nightmares ad infinitum but that didn’t really offer much new to work with. The apocalypse was brought to the forefront, and the Dollhouse hardened against Rossum, but all of this is basically plot. The idea of humans being used for their processing power is not a new one, but I think it’s done better here than anywhere else I’ve seen it; comparisons to The Matrix are misplaced, however, as that was about the body heat of a living person generating power, not about brain’s being used for computing power.

And, despite the tonal dissonance, I really liked the line about not knowing what year it is because they don’t know how long they’ve been off the air. Though if this weren’t a Joss Whedon show, I probably would have chided the writer’s for shoving a cheap meta-joke into a tense scene.

This episode was powerful for sheer narrative thrust. Not a lot happened to the characters, but the story shot forward toward what I hope is a thrilling conclusion. We’ll see in the next year.

Footnotes

1. Completely contrary to the flashbacks from Epitaph One so any viewer who’s seen it knows this is all a ruse or temporary at the very least.

I think one of the reasons I initially disliked this episode was because it introduced a new realm of mind-fuckery beyond what the Dollhouse was doing. This is something the show probably should be doing half-way through their second season: building the world, growing it out but keeping the core there, is what smart shows do but given the context of knowing that Dollhouse ends in a few episodes and that this particular Group Think technology will likely not be explored again — not saying it won’t be, but this has the feel of a one-off when compared to the other mythology based stories we’ve been inundated with recently — in the time the show has left.

But it was still a very cool idea, and even more it was a very sci-fi idea, and while Dollhouse is certainly one of the shows on the air right now that’s mostly open about its sci-fi basis it still tends to hide that aspect of itself whenever possible.

So Victor, who maybe I have to start calling Anthony (or maybe Tony), is released from his contract, dropped into the real world, and is quickly scooped up by a group of ex-soldiers looking for new recruits. Turns out they work for Rossum in a private army and are all connected neurally so they share thoughts and eventually lose their own identities to the Group Think.

Boyd and Topher get Echo to help them find Victor, and when they find out about Rossum’s private army they imprint echo with a few more minds with useless skills and imprint Sierra with her original mind, Priya, in the hopes of using her connection with Victor to save him from losing his identity.

Cutting all the interesting but not particularly exciting action sequences out, Echo is driving Tony and Priya away from the super soldiers and decides to let them go because they have their original minds back so they should be free. But before they can get away Topher’s disruptor is used on the three of them. Echo wakes up and DeWitt tells her she’s going to the Attic, along with Victor and Sierra. And that’s where the episode ends.

So despite the initial reaction, there are a few really great things about this episode. I especially appreciated the explication on what happens to released Dolls. We’d already seen Madeline living a fairly pain-free life post-Dollhouse despite her child still having died. It’s made more clear here that these sorts of traumatic events are either erased by Topher or molded to have less of an impact when he re-imprints the ‘original’ personalities back into the Dolls.

That little detail is another sign of the writer’s filling in the blanks while introducing more mysteries, something a second season should always do, but here it’s a little depressing because you can see in the scripts that the writer’s were hoping the show would get picked up. This isn’t the sort of episode you would get from a writer’s room waiting for the axe to drop¹.

Another small note that got played repeatedly in the first season, best exemplified by the first episode Ghost, was that Dolls can atone for the failings and weaknesses of their imprints, that that somehow heals the original. But here, those threads come together in a much more practical manner.

Eleanor Penn is still rattling around in Echo’s head, and she received catharsis thanks to Echo so she is capable and functional as a subset of Echo’s mind. In the case of Eleanor Penn she was already functional though broken, but there could have been worse cases that Echo ‘fixed’ in her weekly missions that lead to useful skills being easily accessible. This is all long-term thinking on the part of the writers, which is great to see but also sad because we know the impending fate of the show.

I like the speed at which the show is pushing forward the narrative this season, but it certainly feels rushed when compared to the first season; Rossum becoming out-and-out evil seems like a third season reveal, maybe even fourth season, which makes me wonder what sorts of things they had planned for the show had it been renewed. The continual re-scoping of the show’s core each season worked wonders for Lost, so it may have been equally successful for Dollhouse, but I guess we’ll never find out now.

I can’t think of much else to say about this episode. It was an above average episode and set up the next one quite nicely. See you then.

Footnotes

1. Unlike Epitaph One which I’ll talk about in my review of the second episode of the night The Attic.

Alpha has been going around killing off all of Echo’s previous romantic engagement clients, while Echo has remained in confinement as DeWitt searches for what happened in the three months she was away. After venturing down a failed psychotherapeutic avenue, Topher tells her that Echo seems fine to him, which is a bald lie as the next scene he’s screaming at Ballard and Boyd about Echo’s crazy brain scans, who reveal to him that Echo remembers all of her past imprints and can recall them as needed. This was made clear in the last episode, but repeated here I suppose for people who didn’t understand that she was doing it on purpose.

When Echo goes out for an engagement, with the man Alpha killed in the opening scene, she returns with a note from Alpha. Shortly afterward, Sierra returns from an engagement with a message from Alpha, who ordered both of those engagements. The Dollhouse catches on to Alpha’s mission of killing all the loves of Echo’s life, and DeWitt orders all the Dolls re-wiped in case he’s tampered with them. The message Alpha gave to Sierra, meanwhile, has led Ballard and Boyd to his next target, the birthday boy from the very first episode of Dollhouse, who Alpha has on the roof of a building ensconced in explosives, with a dead-man’s switch in his (Alpha’s) hand. An explosion ensues.

Unable to protect her clients in the real world, they start collecting them all and putting them under guard until they can track down Alpha. The only one they can’t get hold of is Joel Mynor, from last year’s stellar mid-season episode Man on the Street, who is on a secret vacation and no-one knows where it is. Except maybe, his wife, who Echo can recall as needed. So they use Echo to find him and bring him in. But it doesn’t matter because Alpha broke in and he was only killing clients to scare the Dollhouse into re-wiping their Dolls — turns out he put a virus into Sierra’s brain (somehow) that made all the Dolls sleepers in wait — so he could cause havoc and use that as a diversion to get at Ballard, the only person Echo truly loves, the one she’s not programmed to love.

Alpha tries mapping Ballard’s brain to find out what makes him so special to Echo, though if he’d watched Dark City he’d know he was looking in the wrong place, and in the act of it, Ballard goes brain-dead. Echo beats the shit out of Echo when she finds Ballard’s brain-dead body, but stops short of killing him because Alpha has imprinted himself with Ballard’s mind. The episode ends with Ballard in a coma, and everyone aware of Echo’s special skills, including DeWitt who looks none to pleased.

So this episode had a couple interesting ideas, but nothing as rich as the past three had. Mynor’s statement that ‘You can’t ever really delete a program, once it exists it’s alive’ was another way of evoking fear about science. Once something has been discovered it’s already too late. I still think that Dollhouse’s position on scientific progress is too Manichean but the show is layering it into unexpected places very subtly, so I have to comment on it, and comment positively I have.

The show also continued to push the idea that Dolls are people, or at least special ones like Echo are. It seems like the show is heading towards a world of Echo-like Dolls, all composite and guarded against imprints taking over their minds. It’s interesting that the show seems to, in turns, push Luddist and Transhumanist views. I suppose here it’s a little of both. Many of the characters fear that the Dollhouse will destroy humanity, and in some ways it will, but through that change a new humanity could rise, one more like Echo, able to switch between personae and skill sets as needed but retaining a core sense of self. I certainly hope that’s where it goes, because I can’t find another version of this story that leads to the events of Epitaph One but is imbued with the messages of these past few episodes that doesn’t make me dislike the message of the show.

One of the more surprising turns of this season has been Boyd. While not mercurial, this season as head of security, he’s certainly been a very different creature when compared to season one. And, speaking of character shifts, as much as DeWitt’s current bitch persona seems tacked on to surprise viewers who saw her fighting Rossum in Epitaph One, I have to admit I really liked her line “‘Not tonight honey, I have a headache’ really isn’t one of the excuses we allow our Actives.”

So Ballard’s in a coma, presumably he’ll get out of it before the season ends, you never know with this show, though it would be interesting if they turn him into a Doll so they can imprint him with his original mind, now mapped thanks to Alpha. Stay tuned for my review of next week’s pair of episodes when DeWitt’s knowledge of Ballard and Echo’s three month escapade will likely cause a fan-excrement meeting in one form or another.

When I reviewed Epitaph One, one of my critiques was that the remote imprinting was impossible given the current system of the Dollhouse; putting Active architecture in place was a complex process, as we saw in the first episode of the show, and if it were to happen something had to change, something beyond a mere remote wipe, and in this episode it did.

It was interesting how it played out, and the twist with DeWitt made the event more than merely going through the motions, but it still felt mostly empty to me.

I don’t think I’ve brought this up except in my tweets but the biggest problem with the jump into the future is that Dollhouse hadn’t earned it yet. When Battlestar Galactica jumped forward, it was daring and ballsy, but it would’ve been a cop-out if they’d done it too early. Similarly, Lost’s flashforward set up a future to be fulfilled in the upcoming season, but it worked because the story was dense enough, the history rich enough, to make those future events significant.

Dollhouse didn’t have the strength of its character’s histories to make the vision of the future impact the viewer, so they took the other route: story. But while Jack’s flashforward was exciting because we saw that people got off the island, it was stronger still because Jack wanted to go back. Character trumps story. Always.

Anyways, I don’t want to overwhelm this review with even more railing against the almost unanimous love of Epitaph One, because the episode was still a great one on its own merits.

Echo is rummaging around the real world, still AWOL from last week’s episodes, when she happens to screw up an already screwed up (possibly illegal though that’s not really clear) immigrant’s life. Meanwhile, at the Dollhouse, DeWitt is getting pressured to find Echo.

Jumping ahead three months, DeWitt is no longer head of her Dollhouse, with her Rossum boss Harding taking over the day-to-day. Other things have changed at the Dollhouse. Topher has been given a mandate to develop a remote wipe technology, under the guise of simplifying the Handler’s life, and Harding seems more open to sending a Doll out on a recklessly dangerous mission, as the sadist client in the first act makes more than clear. After Topher unveils the remote wipe gun he’s developed he secrets DeWitt away to his hideaway room where he reveals he’s been done the remote wipe tech for months but feared what Rossum would do with it.

He saw Bennett working on a similar small project for Rossum when he was in DC in the last episode, and figured out that each Dollhouse is building a component for a larger system: a remote imprinting device. A technique that doesn’t require the Active architecture in the person’s brain before imprinting. In fact, Topher built it. Shortly afterward, DeWitt brings Topher’s designs to Harding, despite Topher’s desire that Rossum never get their hands on such a terrifying power. And so, in a vain attempt to regain good graces with Rossum, DeWitt has assured the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Echo has been living a strange sort of domestic life with Ballard, who she sought out after screwing up her attempt to help that immigrant, Galena. She’s been working as a nurse, thanks to her ability to recall previous imprints on demand, and eating mac and cheese — none of her clients ever seemed to want a woman who could cook — as Ballard teaches her to use her imprints to their fullest. Echo plans on going back to the Dollhouse when she’s ready, and she thinks she’ll be ready when she can free Galena from prison.

Thanks to her nurse position, she goes to the jail and sets up a fake death for Galena, but the plan goes awry when she wakes from her death a little too quickly. After that, Echo uses her ‘Blue Skies’ persona from early last season, to break herself and Galena out of the jail. Now that Galena is free, Echo and Paul have constructed a new life for her, as Lisa, and then come back to the Dollhouse where DeWitt, drunk on her restored power, banishes her to solitary confinement until she can find out what happened to Echo for those three months. And then the episode is over.

Thematically, this episode had a few nice touches. The idea of Echo and Paul giving Galena a new identity, to escape her sordid past, is an excellent parallel to the idea of the Dollhouse. Also, Echo’s love for Ballard is another in a long line of developments in Echo’s personal life, one they emphasized this episode when she talked to him about how she’s not Caroline, she’s Echo, and what if Echo shouldn’t be waiting for Caroline to talk her body back. What if Caroline isn’t all she’s cracked up to be? The most interesting development of this episode was that we now have a love triangle between two bodies: Echo loves Paul, but Paul loves Caroline.

Similarly, Topher is continuing his growth, becoming one of the more reliable dramatic pivots the show has. And at the same time, his inventive mind couldn’t help but build the remote imprinting device. He loathed the very idea of that technology, but he built it nonetheless. Topher works as a rough analog of human scientific progress as seen through the eyes of someone afraid of scientific progress. The fact that it mostly works for someone like me who believes in scientific progress, and that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” is a testament to the writers’ ability to create a compelling story.

Overall, Meet Jane Doe was a great episode, only slightly hampered by the ever-looming shadow of Epitaph One. I’ll publish my review of episode 2×08, A Love Supreme, shortly.

Senator Perrin has taken his month off-air to build up the nerve to call out Rossum Corporation for running Dollhouses, and he’s going to prove it through the testimony of Madeline/Mellie/November². Rossum tells her not to do anything as they have a plan in place, but she doesn’t seem too prickled by that suggestion. DeWitt thinks November is being manipulated into doing this because she was happy with the way things worked out last time they spoke, she also infers that this manipulation is a manoeuvre against her Dollhouse, so she wants to take November away from the Senator to solve her disclosure problems, ‘help’ November, and most importantly discover who is trying to make a play against the LA Dollhouse and why.

As Boyd starts the exposition train, Topher has a tragically myopic rant about Perrin ‘shutting down all research’ and reverting society’s scientific achievements. I’m not one to argue that science should be reined in by politics, but Topher is basically saying science shouldn’t be reined in by anything, morality included. Of course, that makes perfect sense as something Topher would say; in a previous episode he is noted by DeWitt as being someone without a moral compass. Still, you’d think even someone as amoral as Topher would realize the difference between ‘shutting down all research’ and Perrin’s more realistic goals of stopping heinous human rights violations.

During the expositional powwow, Echo does her little sidle and reminds everyone that this is a world where Dollhouses are real by telling them that Perrin’s wife ‘isn’t right.’ On the monitor, Perrin and his wife are having one of those puff piece television interviews all senators must get on occasion and, having seen that the point isn’t quite hammered into everyone’s brain yet, decides to make a very peculiar statement: ‘She’s perfect. It’s like they made her just for me.’ An odd statement for anyone to make, but certainly even odder coming from someone who has been actively investigating Dollhouses, someone who seems fairly confident that the ‘they’ in that statement could be someone other than God or her parents, who he likely hasn’t met since she’s not a real person. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s time for the credits.

So, compressing the rest of the story for the sake of not writing another 5000 word blow-by-blow, the Dollhouse starts to think Mrs. Perrin is a Doll. Topher builds a disruptor that knocks out Dolls and Ballard goes on a mission to get November from the Perrin’s, knocking our the Mrs. if necessary. When Ballard leaves, Echo is sent on a hooking mission to blackmail the Senator but he’s figured out she’s a doll and he’s not having any of that so he brings Echo to his wife. The two stories collide and Ballard flips the switch on the disruptor but Mrs Perrin is unaffected; Mr Perrin, walking up to the front door of the house, on the other hand suddenly has a searing pain in his head. The wife is the handler, the Senator is the doll.

Echo takes Perrin on the run because she thinks they’re both Dolls, but they’re quickly caught and brought into the DC Dollhouse by Perrin’s handler. At the DC Dollhouse, a crazy Summer Glau — is there any other kind? — is the head head programmer and also knows Echo from her life as Caroline. Apparently, the dead arm she’s slinging around is Caroline’s fault, so she’s got a little baggage.

With Echo in the custody of the DC Dollhouse, DeWitt and Topher go there to get her back, and also to do a little surreptitious reconnaissance on the Dollhouse that seems to be plotting against theirs. While away from the House, Topher has left… Topher in charge. Specifically, Victor imprinted with Topher’s mind, another stellar use of Enver Gjokaj’s phenomenal mimicry skills and all-around astounding acting chops.

Real Life Topher and Summer Glau have a fantastically nerdy and awkwardly flirtatious encounter, but since they’re in the process backstabbing each other amid the flirtation this relationship seems tragically unlikely. Also, Topher’s attempt at stunning her for thinking she’s a Doll, à la Whiskey, probably didn’t go over well, despite his intimation that she was beautiful enough to be a Doll.

DeWitt and her DC counterpart, played by the always reliable Ray Wise, hammer out an arrangement to release Echo to DeWitt’s custody. Said arrangement involves DeWitt not hammering Wise’s testes slowly and painfully. Turns out Echo is free to go.

Topher gushes to Topher about the fineness of Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau) as they hack into the Dollhouse, but Bennett has already released Perrin and Echo to wreak havoc. To get them back, Topher and Bennett are trying to use the disruptor inside the neural feedback network that all Dolls have. This works in both their favours since it gives Topher access to Perrin’s brain map, something he needs in order to find out what Perrin’s ultimate goal is, and gives Bennett an opportunity to remotely program Perrin to kill Echo, well anyone really but Echo’s there, because that baggage of hers is heavy stuff.

Eventually, Perrin’s assassin programming gets deactivated, but not before he kills his wife. Rossum, however, knows how to roll with the punches. Perrin rushes into his Senate hearing and denounces the evil cartel of companies trying to frame Rossum, claiming that they killed his wife with a car bomb, and manipulated November into thinking she was a Doll when she had actually spent the last three years in a mental institution. ‘There is no dollhouse.’ He declaims. Everything works out, if you want to call it that, in the end.

So now Perrin has absolved Rossum of any sins, denounced the Dollhouse’s existence, and is calling for a new regulatory body he would head essentially giving Rossum their own foothold in the government. The two Tophers, before Victor is returned to his Doll state, imply that Perrin’s programmed ambition goes much larger than that, that perhaps the ultimate goal is to have a President under their thumb.

The Dollhouse has more to deal with than that though. Ballard has gone AWOL, and so has Echo. I guess we’ll find out where they are next week.

So that’s my brief summary, but there’s a lot I left out. For example…

November’s desire to testify all of a sudden was explained away in this episode as her realizing the things she’s done as a Doll — the example they give is her fucking Tahmoh Penikett, so it’s already kind of questionable how troubling that would be for her — but this seems weak to me. She had hinted at knowing the sorts of things she would be programmed to do as a Doll before; maybe seeing photographic evidence of those actions is what shocked her into coming forward but it still seems a little convenient. It also seems really really sad because she basically got fucked from every direction on this one. She was urged by the guy who freed her, the guy who wants to take the Dollhouse down more than maybe anyone else, not to reveal the Dollhouse. And when she did, it only worked to improve the Dollhouse’s camouflage, and she was subsequently remanded to the caring arm of Bennett Halverson, who seems excited to continue who torturing ways on someone other than Caroline.

Perrin’s whole psychological trauma of dealing with realizing he’s a Doll — and not just any Doll but a Doll version of himself programmed to be smarter, better, more ambitious than the person he’d been before — was played really well. The variations on Dolldom that the show is exploring are all fascinating and challenge the audience with new vagaries to the Dollhouse that will inevitably force the viewer to rethink their stance on the Dollhouse. What is right? Is reprogramming yourself to be better a bad thing? If not, where is the line drawn? There are so many little nuances to this idea that Whedon and his team are delving in to. I saw this immediately, so when people started trashing the concept of Dollhouse a couple years ago, I didn’t know what to say, because anyone that derides the font of variations screaming for explication that is the technology behind the Dollhouse must not want to ask those questions; either that of they’re unable to see the broader strokes waiting to be painted. Dollhouse is one of the most thought provoking shows on television right now, and the broadness of the questions it asks all branching from that single conceit is astounding. I just wish the national audience were more interested in exploring those sorts of ideas themselves.

One final big picture idea that I really loved about this episode, one that ran through the episode but didn’t really fit into the core plot more than marginally, was the re-exploration of Caroline’s past. The first season had so many small discoveries about the kind of person Caroline was, but there are so many gaps remaining. I’m glad the show took a moment away from their ‘foreshadowing’³ of the events of Epitaph One to take a look back into the past. Aside from the brief flash we saw being very evocative — Caroline abandoning Bennett under a fallen beam to avoid capture, presumably by Rossum — it also brought back to the forefront, and dovetailed with Perrin’s crises nicely, the conflict between Caroline and Echo. Which one is the hero of this show? Which one do we want to win out? We watch this show and all the growth we see in Eliza Dushku’s character is seen as the growth of Echo. She’s become aware of her circumstances, aware of her imprintings, she’s developed into something more than a mere Doll. But can we morally want to see that progression to its ultimate conclusion? Or should we be hoping for that personality to be killed, replaced by the return of the real Caroline? And if so, are we ‘killing’ that person now? This is heady stuff, and I’m so glad the show is asking even if it isn’t something they’ll likely resolve in these final episodes.

I was going to end off this post with a collection of quotations from the episode, but that seems a little tawdry. Instead, since anyone reading this has (hopefully) already seen the episode, I simply suggest you go back and enjoy pretty much every moment of the Two Tophers and also the scenes between Topher and Bennett which are so wracked with a weird nerdy sort of sexual tension I almost can’t handle it. And I’ll make special note of the synchronicity they shared in both naming the disrupting device a ‘disruptor.’ As Bennett said, ‘What else would you call it?’ A great moment of geekiness that also demonstrated a real connection between the two characters.

So, with all that said, I’ll see you all next week when the show continues its death spiral, and unlike Heroes’ death spiral, this one is spiralling towards greatness. A greatness too few people will experience.

Footnotes

1. Because these were aired back-to-back I’m considering the two episodes that aired as one.
2. November henceforth for the sake of clarity and because no one ever really leaves the Dollhouse
3. See my reservations regarding that term with respect to the events of Epitaph One in my review of episode three of this season, Belle Chose.

To cap off this month of reading Dracula, I’m writing up this post to talk about a few of the interesting things I found about Dracula, as well as try to find some connection between it and Infinite Jest.

Vampire Lore

In truth, I’ve never seen a Dracula story in all my years of Vampire stories, so I wasn’t sure how much of the traditional Vampire lore we are familiar with came from Dracula. It turns out that it was a surprising amount. I look to Whedon lore before others so they are the standard against which I compare and the comparison is mostly favorable.

Vampire’s require an invitation to enter buildings; killing a vampire does turn them to dust, though only if they are so old as their natural bodies would be dust by then; to become a vampire you have to be drained of blood and then drink the Vampire’s blood, though you do not have to be drained to death and the effect is permanent: once this procedure occurs, no matter when you die you will become a vampire, provided your sire remains among the undead; a vampire, or someone on the way to vampirism, also has a special psychic link with their sire, something not made explicit with Whedon but the master/sire relationship is strong there as well; you lose your soul when you become a vampire; and finally, vampires show no reflection in mirrors.

However there are a few notable differences: vampire’s also cast no shadow; they can turn to mist or creatures of the night; from my reading of the book, their fangs are not retractable; their physical powers seem to be limited to strength, with no enhancement to vision of hearing; vampires must rest on holy land, that of a church or a graveyard; to be immersed in water is death for a Stoker vampire, and while on the sea a vampire can control the weather; and most importantly, they can walk the streets by day, though their powers are linked to the night and they are unusable in the day.

Novel Structure

The novel is structured as a collection of diaries, memos, letters, and news articles. There are two interesting side-effects of this. The first is that all the characters correspond with each other but with varying levels of delay. So while Lucy has already died, we read Mina’s letters of joy to her, and later on experience her sorrow at learning of Lucy’s death, undeath, and destruction. These delayed emotions play to the reader well, I thought, giving a level of sympathy to the characters, and also establishing a world of hidden truths that can only be noticed when seeing the story in its entirety, something the writers of these individual pieces cannot enjoy — well actually they do, which brings me to the second point.

Around half-way through the novel, the two main stories collide with Mina and Van Helsing discussing her husband’s strange story out of Transylvania and Van Helsing telling of Lucy’s sordid end. At this point, Mina begins to collect the various diaries and articles, essentially creating all the previous sections of the novel for the group of Vampire hunters to use as a tool for finding and killing Dracula. From this point on in the novel, the diaries continue and they are all shaped by the open sharing of all the diaries in uncaptured scenes. This is a very meta-y type of storytelling, almost post-modern in construction, something that perhaps inspired the Infinite Summer people to read Dracula.

Gayness

This isn’t actually a real thing, but rather a construction of modern minds, I think. Still, as I read this book, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if everybody was banging everybody else, regardless of gender, with the heaps of praise and love they throw on each other. I mean, some of the early letters between Mina and Lucy are almost lascivious, they talk about sleeping together, dressing each other, long walks on the beach, it’s kind of ridiculous. The man on man action isn’t quite as explicit, but I found more than a few moments in the novel where it seems like the men were moments away from a gay-ass tongue bath.

Feminism

Mina Harker is a really bad-ass woman. She’s the one who first puts all the diaries together, she’s the one who figures out where Dracula is living, what some of his motives are. She determines that the psychic link between her and Dracula, one created when she is forced to drink his blood in a siring ceremony, can be exploited to find Dracula’s location. She’s basically the smartest one of the bunch. She’s also pretty tough:

When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a fainting disposition.

That sounds like a line from a fucking superhero. Later on, when she’s done all the Batman-esque super-sleuthing for the men, and it is time to go to Dracula’s lair and kill him, the men tell her to go to bed because ‘we are men, and we are able to bear’ and she quietly accepts it, but only because she fears they will remove her entirely from the venture if she protests on this; she isn’t some pussy glad to be away from all the danger, she’s afraid they’ll put her further away from it.

Dracula has a weird sort of feminism to it. Throughout the novel, Mina is praised by Van Helsing for her bravery, her wit, her sharp detective skills, pretty much everything. But he still says things like ‘she has a man’s brain’ as though it were a compliment. It’s struggling to establish a female lead as at least close to an equal, but falls slightly short. Still, I’m impressed that the novel was so willing to have even a remotely powerful female lead.

Horror

This is not the scariest novel I’ve ever read — there are moments in Stephen King’s Misery that almost made we sweat with horror — but it still managed to evoke real terror at times. In particular, the section which recounts the face-off against the vampire Lucy is great: so far as I can tell, it has the very first instance of the phrase ‘if looks could kill,’ a cliche now perhaps, but surely a terrifying description, and one that struck me with the instant I read it as well.

Infinite Jest Connections

The connections to Infinite Jest are mostly tangential or internal fabrications, but there are some interesting ones. There are a few explicit references to Hamlet early on, but those seem purely incidental. And I’ve already mentioned the self-referential writing which seems a very modern conceit for a novel written over a century ago, and one reminiscent of the Infinite Jest film inside Wallace’s novel.

Another particularly compelling connection comes from the closing chapters of Dracula. In them, Mina Harker is racing toward Dracula’s castle with Van Helsing hoping to consecrate his resting place in order to refuse him safe harbor from their hunt. In the superstitious Carpathian mountains, the scar upon Mina’s forehead — a burn from the placing of Holy Water on her flesh — causes their journey ill will from the villagers; in order to avoid these hassles, she takes to wearing a veil to hide her deformity. If that’s not an Infinite Jest connection, I don’t know what is.

Actual closing thoughts

Overall, I’m glad I read Dracula. I’ve always liked Vampire stories, so it seemed like I had to read it eventually and the month deadline really helped with that — I read over 140 pages yesterday to ensure I would finish it according to the schedule. Beyond that though, it opened me up to a very different writing style. I’ve mostly avoided classical novels for fear of being bogged down by archaic language, but I found Dracula to be fairly readable, which makes me more willing to read other classic novels I’ve put off for too long. So go read a classic or something.

This episode marked the return (and demise) of Nolan Kinnard, the man who created Sierra’s prison, played by Vincent Ventresca who fills out the rapist douchebag role perfectly though I still tend to see him as he was on The Invisible Man, a long lost show that was better than its budget, so I see him as more likable than he should be. Ever since Needs, when Nolan first appeared, the show has largely ignored Sierra’s forceful placement in the Dollhouse, and given the long standing claim of dolls being volunteers, there had to be a good reason for her exception. In a smart move, the show laid the cognizance — or willful ignorance — on the higher-ups in the Dollhouse, represented in this episode by Keith Carradine, whose character early on in the episode is shown very clearly willing to mix business and pleasure. So as the story goes…

Priya was a bohemian-in-spirit-Australian-in-nationality artist selling her wares on the Venice Beach until Kinnard makes his move. He tries everything, up to and including setting up a lavish art showing for her work, filled with Dollhouse Actives ready to encourage Priya to sleep with this most especial man. In a nice moment, we see Victor playing an Italian art dealer who quickly woos Priya despite his programmed mission to drive Priya to Nolan; this show really loves to push Sierra and Victor as star crossed lovers destined to be together no matter what the current configuration of their synapses which, to me as a Joss Whedon fan, means I try not to get invested in their long-term well-being and happiness. Nonetheless, that nice moment ends, Nolan drugs Priya to high hell, and convinces the Dollhouse to take her in as a new Active, something Topher finds appealing since her then-current madness makes her someone he can fix by making a Doll.

From there, Nolan becomes a repeat customer of the Sierra model, creating a new lover each time and capturing them with the very camera Priya used in her past life, each time casting aside the photo which, given Nolan’s earlier displeasure at the thought of using a Doll, can only be disdain. Ultimately though, Echo brings Sierra’s tortured artwork — a remnant of Priya’s work, filled with birds and bright colors, spare the large splotches of dark ink spilling out on the canvas — to Topher’s attention which brings about all the revelations about how Sierra came to be in the Dollhouse. And when Adelle confronts Nolan about his abuses, he fights back, demanding that the Dollhouse give him Sierra permanently. Adelle has always operated as a believer in the lie of the Dollhouse, and when her superordinate orders her to do as Nolan demands, there is a very real shift in her persona. It’s hard to tell if it will be permanent, but for the moment she has glimpsed the seedy underbelly of vicious implications that festoon the very idea of a Dollhouse.

Topher is even less pleased about the demand than DeWitt and he fights back by returning to Nolan Original Recipe Priya ready to seek revenge. But during the initial confrontation, the writers offer us a taste of what Nolan had hoped would happen. When she begins to declaim her love for a total stranger, Nolan begins to offer himself up telling her that he’d made her say ‘I Love you’ so many times that now she really does love him. This says a lot about Nolan, but even more about the show’s thoughts about Dolldom. Joss Whedon has said frequently in interviews that he doesn’t want the show to become all about ‘Who’s a secret Doll?’ claiming that it would make everyone lose their investments in characters.

Clearly, he doesn’t believe this in the writer’s room because the show continues to develop these sorts of stories. This year we’ve already seen Madeline’s sorrow over her lost child healed thanks to, based on the request Priya makes in this episode, some artful modification of her ‘original’ mind. We’ve seen Dr Saunders, a whole cloth fabrication of a person, move beyond her limitations, and become a cipher for much of the Dollhouse’s core messages. And now in this episode we get to see another person ‘helped’ by the Dollhouse. Put simply, being a Doll isn’t the end of your story in the Dollhouse, something the show I think downplayed in the first season, perhaps to allow these sophomore stories a greater impact.

Getting back to the story, only to veer off once again very shortly, after the ensuing melee and Nolan’s death, Priya rises and casts a shadow on the artwork, one of the many interesting directorial choices made this week, in an episode directed by Jonathan ‘Riker’ Frakes. I’ve not followed his directing work per se, but I’ve seen a good chunk of it simply by virtue of watching a lot of television, and this is absolutely his most accomplished work. There are interesting shots, well placed transitions, and a lot of effort put into the background continuity¹, all while retaining a certain understatedness. Kudos to you, Mr Frakes: continue being awesome.

Getting back to the story yet again, Boyd and Topher discover his body and a shattered Priya. Boyd being Boyd, that is to say a total mystery, calls up a friend capable of disappearing people, marshals Topher in the dismembering and dissolving of the corpse, and establishes a lie that obviates further examination of the fate of Nolan Kinnard. When Priya returns to the Dollhouse, she and Topher share a beer — hearkening back to the episode Sierra and Topher shared last season as friends — and discuss her fate. Priya ultimately asks Topher to erase these events from her, to ‘fix’ her when — though the phrasing of her request quite clearly leaves the possibility of this being an if — she’s ultimately released from her contract.

Throughout this main storyline, Echo works in the background. She brings the painting to Topher, encourages Victor to ‘take charge,’ and even takes up long-term reading thanks to a leafy bookmark. The growth she’s had this season is already vastly improving on what she experienced last year.

I wrote in the first review of this season that I wanted to avoid the blow-by-blow recaps I’d resorted to last year, but this episode was just so good, so filled with moments I was unable to ignore, that I had to write about it all in this fashion. The episodic story for this episode is one of the strongest yet, quite probably the best, and it also managed to integrate many of the show’s ongoing arcs and themes: Victor’s and Sierra’s romance; Topher’s growth, regrets, and ongoing work on creating remote mind-wiping technology; Echo’s increasing awareness; the Dollhouse’s depths. I could go on, but I swore myself I wouldn’t overwrite these reviews this year.

Put simply, this episode was the best the show has offered to date. There wasn’t a single weak moment. I’m fairly certain that Dollhouse will get neither a back nine pickup nor a third season, but this season has been undoubtedly stronger than the first so it’s not for a drop in quality. Unfortunately, this uptick in quality won’t translate to an uptick in ratings. Such is the life of an avid television watcher. For now though, Dollhouse returns in December with weekly double doses. I’ll be there, writing about it, till the very end.

Footnotes

1. Seriously, just watch that opening sequence with the art showing scene, so much great background work is going on there.

I finished it a couple days ago and coincidentally the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumour had just started popping up online, so I thought I’d talk about both in one post. First off, because it dovetails nicely into the discussion of the rumours and subsequent refutations by Braff, is my reevaluation of the show.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll know I’ve been expressing my disapproval of Scrubs there for a few weeks so you might think my final decision on Scrubs is going to be decidedly negative, but in the end I still love the show. Growing up with Scrubs was a fantastic experience for me, I related to JD like no other character on television at the time; he was funny, quirky, romantic, and was a whole bunch of me wrapped up in a grown-up (but not too grown-up) shell. Still, going back to the show, the biggest problem I had with it was the seemingly nonexistent growth for JD over the first six seasons.

Every episode had at its core a lesson for JD to learn, whether it was being more accepting of people’s flaws, more attentive to your friends, less selfish, more professional, or even being willing to relax and have fun on occasion, the show always had a message. Those consistent messages were what made Scrubs something more than just a screwball medical comedy — an interesting enough subgenre as it is — those morals gave the show real gravitas, a weight against which the antics on-screen were contrasted making the ultimate message that much more stark and demanding of attention.

But there are exactly two problems at the core of Scrubs, problems the show couldn’t eliminate until the seventh and eighth seasons when the show was coming to an end. If you want the show to last, and you want the message of the week style that made the show something special, you need to essentially hit the reboot button at the end of every episode. Some plot might carry through, and JD will be ostensibly ‘improved’ for as much as a few episodes; but ultimately that lesson needs to be recycled and he’s right back in the thick of his previously conquered faults.

While the middle (and middling) seasons of Scrubs are often criticised by fans they are usually criticised for the increasingly screwball antics the show resorted to for laughs, so finding this shocking lack of character growth during my re-watch impacted me with great force at first. In retrospect, it seems like that flaw is only noticed in these sorts of high frequency viewing spurts, something someone watching as the seasons aired wouldn’t notice easily.

Still, characters relapsing into their old habits despite a struggle to grow, is not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it’s ripe for drama and a very human reaction. Just because you know what’s wrong with you doesn’t mean you’ll be able to magically fix it. Being better means vigilance, it means never forgetting where you are and who you want to be. So it’s easy for complacency to lead to backsliding. But this leads us to the show’s second core problem: it’s a comedy.

What I described above is more akin to a drama and while Scrubs incorporated dramatic elements it was fundamentally a comedy. What’s more, it was a comedy with frequent fantasy sequences, many which seemed to leak into the ‘real world’ resulting in an increasingly screwball ‘real world’ and therefore greater abuses of original character quirks. Now, being a comedy isn’t a flaw in the show per se, but it develops into a flaw when the show becomes long-running and maintains its desire to deftly interweave comedic and dramatic elements. So the relapses in behaviour were frequently either ignored, because the relapse was necessary to make a joke work, or referenced in a humourous way, belying the drama of the relapse. Both of these approaches led to funny scenes but made the characters, JD especially, seem like aloof douches who never tried to improve themselves.

Which brings me to the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumours. I heard about the rumours and found debunkings of them less than a minute later so it didn’t prey on my mind for long. What I have thought about in some detail were the videos Zach Braff posted online responding to the hoax. In those videos he’s an affable guy, clearly very funny, but on the edge of all that there’s an tinge of douchery. It comes as no surprise to me that Zach Braff is a douche, I’ve been hearing reports from all around of his douchiness for years. Still, he can clearly be a friendly and overall ‘nice guy’ when he wants to as evidenced by those videos. In this respect, he reminds me of JD. They’re both, at a very low level, arrogant douches but they can put on the mask of friendliness and quirky appeal when they need to. Not really a critique, just an observation.

But, you know, even with this reevaluation, I still hold Scrubs and JD and even Zach Braff to something resembling high regard. Sure they’ve got their flaws, but who doesn’t? Scrubs is still a very funny show with a talented cast and funny writers and I certainly don’t regret the first viewing or the recent re-watch. I might not consider the show as weighty as I once did, but the laughs are still there, and the memories from the years of watching it remain.

So is Scrubs worth it? Well, I don’t know. It’s certainly funny enough to be worth watching, but I can’t promise you the stasis the characters suffer through over the years won’t bother those of you looking for some life lessons thrown into the mix. So here’s a cop out if there ever was one: is it worth it? Watch it and find out for yourself.

But with Dollhouse, every episode this season has me coming back to Epitaph One and finding ways it weakens this season. The remote wipe foreshadowing would have been more powerful if on first viewing this wipe was an innocuous plot device. It still has a power in this form, but it seems at this point a necessary event. There’s a certainty to it. We can’t not have foreshadowing. It feels mechanical now. Admittedly, it was mechanical with shows like Lost and Babylon 5 by virtue of their pre-planned stories, but that mechanism was masked.

Still, even without that masking, the foreshadowing packs a punch: Topher developing the remote wipe technology — though, to be pedantic, this remote wipe technology seems the same as the form used by Alpha last season which, as I stated in my initial review of Epitaph One, only worked on Dolls as the Dollification process was considerably more complex than your standard imprint — ultimately ends the world and breaks his mind. But I still don’t feel it as much as I think I should, because of that mechanic necessity. I get the feeling Epitaph One is going to be a thorn in my side the entire season (or whatever else airs of this season before Fox kills it for atrociously bad ratings, though it’s a good sign that this week’s episode recovered from last week’s all-time ratings low for the show).

I tend to focus on arc discussions in these reviews, but aside from that incredibly oblique unspoken reference to Topher’s future tragedy this episode was virtually entirely self-contained. The only additional ongoing idea was Echo’s ability to repeat catch phrases her clients and/or imprints always seem to have handy. Does every person in the Dollhouse universe have a unique identifiable catch phrase or something? It’s getting a little conspicuous at this point. Perhaps a future essay on the show can explore that avenue.

So that leaves us with a very interesting, but also very self-enclosed, one-off episode. The opening sequence was one of the more effectively chilling the show has managed to pull off, though the psycho-paralyser getting hit by a car seemed like an obvious end to that scene, I was hoping for something more inventive. That said, the events following that were all great. We got a chance to see Ballard use his FBI training, something he rarely used even when he was an FBI agent and reminds us that he’s more than just a weird pseudo-pervert. Echo’s B-plot professorial misconduct fantasy was interesting in a morbid sort of way, which I suppose is the way you should enjoy most Dollhouse episodes seeing as the protagonists of the show are glorified human traffickers. And the main storyline crossed with the B story nicely both on a story level and thematically.

And, once again, Enver Gjokaj cements himself as the most versatile actor in the cast, which is saying something given how talented this cast is. Every actor has had one or two outstanding moments, but Enver keeps delivering like no other. As creepy as he was as the serial doll maker — an interesting role for the antagonist in an episode that foreshadows the wireless doll making technology in the coming apocalypse — when he switched into Kiki he completely transformed. Odd name aside, that guy deserves more than anyone on this show a breakout career once Dollhouse comes to an end.

People have been worrying about Dollhouse’s fate quite a bit recently because of the terrible ratings, and some are wondering if the season shouldn’t have started with more stand-alone expository episodes, but looking at the season so far, it’s been doing stand-alone episodes, and they’ve done it better than they did during the first season’s early block of episodes but they’re not being hindered in the way other shows are by a blind adherence to strict episodic storytelling. It’s not afraid to let some moments of the episode impact the future. It should be braver in this respect, I think, with much more serialization and investment in the long running characters, but I feel like it will get there if given the time. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be given the time. I think both the network and the writers are to blame in this respect; the network, for trying to simplify an inherently complex intellectually rich story, and the writers for accepting the task of trying to oversimplify the show rather than fighting with the network.

That said, this season has been very good so far but what little long-term stories they’ve built in these first three episodes has been insufficient to me. They tried the best of both worlds last year and got dwindling ratings as a result. At this point, the show should be taking advantage of the second season pickup and just going wild with all the crazy five-year-plan things Joss Whedon has imagined. When the show got a second season pickup, I didn’t really expect a third. The more I look at it, the more it seems like Fox simply didn’t kill off Dollhouse after the first season so they wouldn’t burn bridges with Joss Whedon or his fanatic followers. So with the likelihood of a third season increasingly dire, the show shoud just go for broke. Let’s hope it tries that in the coming weeks.

What little there was from the Dollhouse perspective focused on November, now reverted to Madeline. On the surface, she seemed to be a ringing endorsement for the Dollhouse. Disappear into a void for five years and come out better. But is she better? She has a distanced aloofness when she discusses her daughter, a calmness that strikes me not as recovery but something more sinister. Did she go into the Dollhouse with a mental trauma so great, she accepted the terms with the understanding that she would be returned to her body without those pangs? Is she even the same person? And is that what she wanted?

I kind of dropped the ball this week and slacked on Dollhouse, so that’s all I’ve really put into words regarding my thoughts on the second episode of the season. It was good, and episodic half of the episode — as opposed to the serialized half — was mostly interesting which is a rare event for this show. This week’s episode will probably be even better, and if I’m not totally fucking lazy, I might actually put some real effort into my thoughts on it. And maybe even publish them earlier than an hour before the next episode is scheduled to air.

That photo’s not the best shot I’ve ever taken, but it gives you a good idea of what a Louis CK show will be. He doesn’t like the showy things that other comedians do, his stage will have him, a microphone, and not much else. I first learned about Louis CK through his short lived HBO multi-camera sitcom Lucky Louis, a show inspired like all his stand up material by his own life. After that show was cancelled, he returned to the stand up tour circuit.

When Seinfeld did his I’m Telling You for the Last Time tour, the last time he would ever use any of the material he’d developed over the preceding two decades, it was a big deal. The documentary, Comedian, followed Seinfeld as he rebuilt a set from scratch relying on none of his old material. The ultimate test of the stand up comic. Louis CK has done this three times in the last three years.

Every year he tours, building a set, culminating with a recorded special of the material after which he drops it all and starts anew. I went to see Louis CK perform the other night — hence the photo I took above, which might have been better framed had I not been on the mezzanine level; he didn’t seem used to delivering he material to multi-level audiences so most of his attention was cast on the lower level — and I had heard none of the jokes he delivered in his hour-plus set. His material always comes from the same basic world; he’s still a middle-aged divorced comic and he’s still the same essential person, but each year he manages to find a new perspective. Often his jokes are tantalizingly close to old ones, and hearing the set up you’ll find yourself convinced of the punch line only to be redirected into a new avenue of unexpected hilarity.

If you ever get the chance to see Louis CK live, take it. He’s one of the sharpest comics out there right now.

Getting rid of his limp a few seasons ago only to have it return because he can’t be a good doctor without it was one of the stupidest decisions the show ever made. The limp, House’s acerbic misanthropic personality, the dangerous risks he takes on a regular basis, all of these things are crutches. It was an interesting set-up for the show, but to play the audience with the appearance of growth for House but failing to follow through and soften his character over time is basically the writers being afraid to mess with their formula. I understand that to a degree, but that doesn’t mean I accept it. The writers should be able to do better. They should be able to keep the show interesting and compelling without keeping their characters essentially stagnant.

An excellent counterexample to House is Numb3rs, a show that seems to me to be consistently underrated. It’s your basic procedural on the surface, but the characters are always growing and changing. Sometimes, a character goes away, other times they’ll return, relationships will be born, the aftermaths of their orders are reflected on, and they’re not afraid to tell a story where the FBI is the bad guy, or the villain we knew wasn’t the villain at all. It’s all around a great show, and for the geek in me it’s much more interesting than House because each week mathematics is used in some way to analyse the crime and help solve the case.

The point I’m trying to make here, something I didn’t in my previous attack on House, is that despite my dislike of House’s faux-serialized format, there are procedural shows I enjoy and Numb3rs is one of them.

In the episode that marks his brother’s first appearance on the show, the moral of the story is that his brother is a pathetic person and JD’s being ashamed of him is a good thing.

He treats women like shit — the most egregious case being his treatment of Elliot at the end of the third season, when he fought to get her back from Sean only to cast her aside literally the second she comes back to him.

He’s incredibly selfish. I mean, that’s obvious given that the premise of the show has JD narrating his own life. But even still, everything about the show is him him him. People will be going through real problems while his petty bullshit that has no real significance is exaggerated. Sometimes that contrast is used to make a point. But really, you can only make that point so many times before your character should just grow the fuck up.

Here’s the thing. I like the show. Scrubs is very funny. And on occasion it has a serious story that isn’t offensive and/or shockingly obvious. But most of the dramatic conflicts come from characters overreacting or some other contrived mechanism. Oh and JD is a dick.

I know some of you are going to be scoff at my remarks and tell me that Scrubs is only a comedy. But when I watched this show as it aired, I loved it for its realistic characterizations, romantic subplots, comedic wit, and the way the show brought that all together like no other show at the time. But going through the series again with a more mature eye, I see most of that falling apart.

And another group of you will surely reply telling me that its JD’s flaws that make him a realistic character. That’s true to a point. But it’s only true to the point at which any realistic person would start to look at these flaws and grow beyond them (for more than an episode), something JD never does, at least not until the last season when he magically grew the hell up. Its JD’s inability to grow and change that make him not a character but a caricature. And a dickish one at that.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Overly aggressive attacks on my sexuality? Bueller?

P.S. In case you need something else to hate about me, I thought the Musical episode was lame (even though I love musicals and was very excited about a Scrubs musical) and I remember thinking at the time that the Princess Bride parody episode was possibly the worst episode the show ever did.

P.P.S. This was originally written on the IMDB forums, but I’ve been meaning to write something about Scrubs here for a while so here it is. I also changed some sentences from the IMDB version for clarity. And I de-beeped the curse words. WTF IMDB?

Being human is not an easy thing. It seems easy because we’re born ready. But to teach something to be a human, to construct a mind that offers even a simulacrum of the complexity of the human experience, for a true “blank slate” to grow to be a person is riddled with trials we can’t imagine.

The Dollhouse doesn’t create from a blank slate, they cobble together minds from a vast and growing collection, and still they suffer the consequences of ignoring the risks involved in such a construction. Creating an inviolate mind from an aggregation of violations tends to result in some failures.

Dr Saunders is a creation of ‘sociopath in a sweater vest’ but she stumbles to a sense of identity, after suffering through a noted numbness during the first season. She sees her flaws — some with which she was imbued, others she generated as a consequence of being alive — as a curse inflicted on her by her ‘creator,’ she fails to understand that in many ways we are all broken, that we are little more than a collection of flaws.

All the Dolls we care about are broken in important ways. In some ways it’s a commentary on the conceit of drama itself. We rarely watch stories with truly normal people living their lives. Conflict, drama, and extraordinary events are all essential to compelling storytelling, so we end up seeing troubled people more often than not. But that conceit comes from the essential truth that we each react to the world in a wholly unique manner. The integration of external stimuli and internal processes is what people see when they look at you, so exposing people to the unexpected, bringing out their internal strengths and weaknesses, is a method of examination.

So Dollhouse continues to watch the Dolls fall (or get picked) apart, breaking down their identities only to have them self-coalesce. The mind, whether innate or implanted, is more robust than we know. But at the same time, the veneer of the Dollhouse staff also cracks, though with more subtlety. Victor’s scars are a painful reminder of the damages the Dollhouse can inflict, one that DeWitt can’t stand to see on someone she’s come to love.

We’re seeing the continuation of themes about what it is to be a person. And the show seems to be settling in on the idea that the Dolls can be people too — Saunders is the best current example of this, though the other Dolls are all exhibiting symptoms of personality. And the idea that Dolls can be people is to me very comforting but also striking and perhaps terrifying.

The ideas brought up in the unaired episode Epitaph One of mindless slaves to violence are more akin to tech-savvy zombies than to questions of identity, and so less interesting to me. That we could be supplanted by entirely different people is much grander in scope; it’s a subtler debasement, in fact it can even be argued that it is not a debasement because the replacement is equal to you. The personalities Dolls get imprinted with may be constructed but that doesn’t imply they are somehow lesser than natural minds. And that’s a terrifying non-implication.

This premiere did such an excellent job of giving me everything I want from a show, along with a few things I didn’t know I wanted, all without leaving the Dollhouse. The real world events were nice, but mostly unneeded. I like the direction the show is taking — I sort of hope they quietly ignore Epitaph One for a good long while — though I still hold out hope that the real world stories will improve at the same rate the in-house ones are.

Some of the storylines are terrible, of course. Hiro and his kin continue to squander in the arrested development of the comedic subplot limited by the writers’ inability and/or unwillingness to grow them beyond mere punchlines. Tracy continues to be a complete waste of a character and of airtime. The only saving grace of Claire’s storyline is the inevitable lesbianic adventures. Nathan Petrelli still sucks as much as ever. HRG continues to… do whatever it is he does when he’s not on screen, because he does nothing of consequence when he’s visible.

I know what you’re thinking. There aren’t really any characters left. Well, you’re either thinking that or you’re thinking the only remaining substantial characters are Matt Parkman and Peter Petrelli, both of whom are shitty shitty characters. Well you’re mostly right.

Matt Parkman is in many ways the epitome of Heroes. He is the barometer for the rest of the show. He started off as one of the most appealing characters, but has degraded apace with the show. He’s easily the most disappointing character right now. And I’m certainly not saying he’s a good character, but he’s no longer a bad character; there are moments now when Parkman is almost a realistic character.

And Peter Petrelli, though I’ve found his story for the past two seasons to be terrible, had a pretty good first season. In fact, rethinking the ending of the first season, it makes sense that Peter’s emotional empathy, not his supernatural empathy, would be the final factor in who would win between him and Sylar. Of course, that’s a minor adjustment, because the tone of the build-up of the season was counter to that, and in the end it wasn’t Peter’s empathy that beat Sylar but his punch. So, really, all my complaints about season one of Heroes remain valid, but in retrospect I think I was overly hard on the emotional empathy angle the writers attempted for unrelated reasons.

So while Peter has been middling at best as of late, he was pretty good this most recent episode. Unlike Parkman’s idiotic aversion to his powers, he’s using his to actually help people. Almost as if he were a hero or something. And the plot this week with him being sued for his overzealous rescuing of people in danger was a great shout out to the comic world and the reason superheroes maintain a secret identity: so they can’t get sued.

And finally, the reason I decided to write this post in the first place, the influx of new characters managed to work this time. The carnival folk, led by Robert Knepper, are interesting in a way no villain has since early-first season Sylar, and what’s more they manage to make these characters interesting and mysterious without the crutch of anonymity. I attribute much of this to Robert Knepper, who as far as I can tell can do no wrong.

In addition, the deaf woman introduced in this episode reminded me of early Heroes, when the characters first experienced their powers. Seeing sound isn’t a particularly awesome power, but the moments we spent with that character were interesting to me. It makes we wonder how much better the show might have been at this point had the writers stuck with their initial plan to rotate out the cast every season, introducing new characters, new conflicts while retaining the same basic structure.

All that said, Heroes is still not a very good show. The last couple episodes were more watchable than last year but the show remains subpar with miles of room for improvement. But, at this point, if you’re like me and still watching Heroes despite the slow crawl towards increasing inadequacy and certainty of cancellation, me telling you the show has improved marginally isn’t really shifting your view. And anybody who gave up watching long ago shouldn’t take this post as an endorsement that you pick up the habit again. It’s not. I just thought I should acknowledge that it improved, if only for a little while, if only by a little bit.

Flashforward got a lot of hype as the next Lost — a laughable prospect to anyone aware of how brilliant Lost is — and while it certainly was one of the more promising pilots of the last few years, it is with equal certainty not the next Lost.

The one advantage it has over Lost is that it wears its science fiction on its sleeve; unlike Lost, which cloaked its science fiction with mystery, intrigue, and vague fantasy, Flashforward is from the outset delving into the implications of time travel and discussions of free will vs predestination. Unfortunately, that’s also Flashforward’s greatest weakness.

The first two acts which detail the initial cataclysm — in case you were wondering what the fuck Flashforward is, the essential premise is that for 137 seconds everyone in the world blacked out and during that time they all saw a vision of their future, specifically April 29, 2010 10PM — are great stuff. The carnage of the aftermath is visceral and jarring with lots of great short shots of people suffering through the fog of war slowly lifting over them allowing a clearer picture to form.

But once that fog lifts the show devolved into a series of conversations pondering the implications of what they’ve experienced. Because of this, there’s not nearly enough time devoted to giving the characters some much needed depth. Joseph Fiennes’ Mark Benford is given some level of history, and somewhat necessarily his wife as well though not with the same depth. I find Benford’s AA sponsor one of the more fulfilling of the characters right now so I take that as a sign that the show knows how to develop characters well, it just opted to utilize the pilot to explore directly some of the headier concepts the show’s dealing with. Not the choice I’d make but it doesn’t ruin the show, unless it becomes a running pattern.

Though the geek in me appreciated the explicit geeky discussions of free will vs predestination, I’ve come to appreciate the character driven exploration of these sorts of ideas that Lost does so well, and so the lack of character development bothered me. Of course, the show managed to make me almost forget about my issues with the show’s characters by ending off on the excellent cliffhanger with the lone person walking amongst the blacked out masses during those fateful 137 seconds. All told, I’m excited for more, though I’m also hoping for more from the show as it finds its way.

That niggle aside, I loved the second episode. The songs were mostly great — with Gold Digger being the obvious stand-out, though ‘Push It’ was hilarious and ‘Take a Bow’ was arguably the most accomplished musically of the songs this week — and the two songs I disliked I think the show wanted the audience to dislike. I mean, everyone knew the repeat of ‘Le Freak’ was a massive blunder on Mr Shue’s part, so it was supposed to suck. And the version of ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ I didn’t like, mostly because the actors lip-synced rather than mime-sang the song so their mouths seemed empty during the bombastic singing and that discontinuity was annoying for me.  Plus the singer of that song was the ‘bad guy’ of the show, so I’m not supposed to like it right? Finnchel¹ FTW!

Speaking of the eponymous plotline, the Finn/Rachel ‘showmance’ was really great this episode. Rather than make it one of those inexplicably unrequited relationships that dramedies whip out faster than Paul Reubens in a movie theatre — two people who are both attractive and have numerous things in common for some reason never see each other² In That Way for reasons unknown³ never made much sense to me — they consummated their relationship very quickly. It’s not permanent, but the relationship has been established as existing and reciprocal, which is the sensible thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll jump in the sack, though Rachel certainly seems hot to trot based on her safe sex declamations at the celibacy club and Finn’s dead postman vision is equally evocative, as relationships don’t always work out just because both people are interested.

Which brings me to the other theme of the episode, the one that played out through the Shue/Emma relationship. They’re both clearly interested in each other, and if there wasn’t a baby in between them, Shue would probably leave his wife for her. But there is a baby between them. Well the idea of a baby anyways. Some have criticised the show for too easily villainising Shue’s wife’s with her deceit regarding her hysterical pregnancy⁴ but I think it was a great way to a) establish more audience unease with Shue’s current relationship after the initial pregnancy announcement likely made the audience feel bad about cheering on the Shue/Emma relationship and b) bring some depth to her character. In the pilot Shue’s wife is shown as mostly a shrew, but this episode softened her and showed that she really does love her husband even if she’s a little fucked up and has trouble expressing it. It was a smart move on the show’s part.

My only remaining complaint, and this is a general critique of the show and it’s not even really one of those either, is that Jane Lynch is playing too much to her type. In recent years she’s become the go to gal for the type of character she’s playing on Glee. With good cause — she does an amazing job with it — but we’ve seen it before. That said, the character was written and then she was cast for it not the other way around, and if you want anyone in that role, it’s Jane Lynch. Really, I just wish she could still be on Party Down. But it’s not meant to be, so now I’ll have to enjoy her here⁵.

Lots of blogs that review TV shows like to list favourite quotations⁶ at the end of their reviews, so I figure I’ll list a few here in an attempt to pander.

• Mr Shue, being very very wrong: ‘Everybody loves disco!’
• Celibacy Club summing up their philosophy: ‘It’s all about the teasing, not about the pleasing!’
• On the lack of a gag reflex: ‘One day when you’re older, that’ll turn out to be a gift’
• On ‘erupting’ early: ‘Actually, it’s a big problem for me.’

Footnotes

1. My dislike for these sorts of name portmanteaus (Finn + Rachel in this instance) is well known, but we all need to let loose and/or ironically employ annoying memes every once in a while
2. Though they’ll often vacillate in a bout of hilariously bad timing for a few seasons on who secretly pines for who.
3. In fact, the ongoing insults to Rachel’s appearance are slightly baffling to me. I think she’s pretty, but she’s constantly insulted for her uncomely appearance. I guess it’s just an attempt to demonize the cheerleaders et. al. but it’s a weird way to do it I think.
4. though with the etymology of the word hysterical, arguably all pregnancies are hysterical
5. And hope that Megan Mullally doesn’t ruin Party Down for me
6. You quote something and the thing you quote is a quotation, though this is a pedantic nuance I normally don’t give a shit about, to be honest.

At a fundamental level, what is Grey’s Anatomy? It’s a character drama set primarily in a workplace. Is it overwrought at times? From what I’ve seen of it, absolutely. But I don’t think anybody that’s watched all of Battlestar Galactica could say they never crossed the line into soapy goodness.

But even ignoring that, this show is not Grey’s Anatomy in Space. Even if being a simple character drama set in space made it nothing more than Grey’s Anatomy in Space, it’s not a simple character drama. Already, the show’s established an ongoing arc and a greater power watching over the mission.

And for those not enamoured with weirdo rooms with God complexes, there’s the characters and their lives onboard a long-term space journey. They’re not just going through the motions here. They’ve got the men left behind learning to cope with their less stellar lives, people on board dealing with the problems of space travel and navigating their histories together while functioning as a crew.

This show isn’t the Best Thing Ever. Virtuality would have been a better show, I think. But that doesn’t invalidate what this show is doing. And so far, it’s been mostly interesting.

I may be slightly biased because the two ostensible leads (the Meredith and Derek, as it were), Ron Livingston and Laura Harris, are among my favourite actors and I’d watch almost anything they’re in. But I genuinely think this show isn’t some trifle; it might become one as the show develops, but everything I’ve seen so far has been a pretty decent melding of romantic character drama and science fiction drama. Watch before you judge.

But the unaired episode, while being an excellent hour, seems to me to be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Spoilers ahead.

The year is 2019, and the world has fallen. The episode begins with Felicia Day and her cohort of “actuals,” people who have retained their original personalities following the mind-rewriting apocalypse, seeking save harbour from “butchers,” “wielders,” and “dumbshows.”

While the ridiculous jargon they spew in the episode fades away after the initial scenes, it’s still incredulous that such mutations of syntax could occur over a course of only ten years. Firefly could pull off weird syntax and colourful language constructions because it was a decent amount into the future, but despite the fluid organic nature of language it doesn’t change that fast.

Some of it makes sense, of course; in a world where there are people imprinted with the minds of dangerous psychopaths, it would make sense that there would be a simple term which can be said plainly in harrowing circumstances. It’s the twists in grammar and other eccentricities that bother me. Again though, they fade rather quickly and I suspect they were mostly put in place to inform the audience that this episode of Dollhouse isn’t your standard fare, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t ill chosen.

The chronology of the episode is fairly simple, despite the flashback structure the episode employ to tell its story. Topher, prior to the first season, joins the Dollhouse and revolutionizes the imprinting process reducing it from two hours to less than five minutes. At some point, the men behind the Dollhouses decide that a new service provided by the Dollhouses will be body replacement¹. Later on, beyond the first season’s finale, Topher develops yet another breakthrough allowing an imprint to transmit via audio sources. Pick up the wrong phone call and you’ve been turned into a Doll or maybe even given the mind of a soldier ready to wreak havoc in an urban war zone.

And so, naturally, somebody weaponizes the Dollhouse technology and exactly that scenario happens. Ballard spoke about atomic energy and the nuclear bomb earlier in the season and it’s obvious now that that was foreshadowing to what the ultimate fate for the Dollhouse universe (Dollverse?) would be. But is it realistic?

Ignoring the rather nihilistic ending the show has now promised us, is the imprinting process possible over phone lines? If you recall the very first episode of the season, Echo walks in on Sierra being turned into a Doll. She is being set up to be a Doll by a very painful and wired process. While Topher simplified the individual imprints, the process for creating someone who can be imprinted remained laborious. Maybe we’re missing something here that will be explained as the series progresses but as is, the scenario they’ve painted feels false to me.

And now, I’d like for a moment to not ignore the nihilistic ending the show has promised us. The people that watch the Terminator films don’t watch them because they hope that SkyNet takes over the world. They watch because the characters in the film are fighting against that future. The idea that they can change that future is what the audience cheers. The audience didn’t like the third film precisely because it fulfilled that prophecy²; it’s a downer ending — though if John Connor makes it long enough to send a reprogrammed robot back to save himself in the past, I think we can assume the human race isn’t done for — but at least there was the initial hope; the twist of fate leading to a tragic end is one excellent way to progress a story.

And unlike other shows, Dollhouse doesn’t portray its harrowing future as bad for the characters, rather it’s bad for the world. An apocalypse has occurred. Even if the show lasts long enough to morph into a show about a group of survivors of a technology-created apocalypse, the world has still fundamentally changed for everybody. And it’s not clear that the show is willing to do that to itself. By placing the future event in 2019, they’ve basically promised the show will never go down that route. So you get to “enjoy” the rest of the series knowing that it will all end with the world irrevocably destroyed and maybe a few groups being herded to a simpler life away from the chaos caused by the Dollhouse technology. I know the show was hinting at the destructive power of the Dollhouse technology, but hinting and promising are two different things.

This bugs the fuck out of me. This episode demolishes everything I liked about the show. I don’t want to watch a show that is slouching toward an inevitable apocalypse. I want a clever smart sci-fi show that explores identity, purpose, memory, and all the interesting things that define who we are. But now, looming over that show is the spectre of this unchangeable future.

I’m not trying to bash this episode; it was excellent. It had drama, comedy, pathos, and it was probably one of the best hours of television Dollhouse has provided thus far. But once you examine the implications for the broader Dollhouse universe, the episode leaves you with an awful taste in your mouth.

So while, like the other reviewers out there, I enjoyed the episode in and of itself, when viewed in the broader context of the series, I felt it was bad. But I’m not a particularly talented writer, so maybe I’m missing something that everyone else is picking up on. We’ll see when Dollhouse comes back for season two.

Footnotes

1. How that fits into the supposed five year contract that every Doll signs is left unexplained
2. I, on the other hand, thought the ending to Terminator 3 was excellent because it twisted the initial hope of the original films. The future they fought came about if not because of their protestations then at least in spite of them.

That said, I usually hear about the movies I need to see through the internet or my real world friends, but sometimes those networks fail me and in this case it led me to watching Ghost Town without any preconceptions or prejudgement.

I’ve seen Ghost Town twice now and the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais’ character, Bertram Pincus, remains as entertaining and the romantic arc of the story — pairing Tea Leoni with Gervais in an odd yet effective combination — still feel far more natural than most romantic comedies. Having only seen it twice, I hesitate to place it into my much-vaunted collection of so-called “perfect films,” a collection containing Groundhog Day among others¹, but I think it’s nonetheless one of the finest films I’ve seen in recent memory².

Truthfully, Gervais is barely playing a character here. He is playing Ricky Gervais, for the most part, but that works to the movie’s benefit. The character Bertram Pincus is supposed to be unlikeable but not really; any other actor wouldn’t have been able to walk that delicate line between protagonist and prick.

Of course any romantic comedy wouldn’t work if the relationship didn’t mesh, but in this movie it works perfectly. Both Gervais’ and Leoni’s characters have the appearance of incompatibility but grow together in a very natural method. Despite the initial conceit of the dead husband (Greg Kinnear) playing Cyrano to Pincus’ Christian, almost all of the scenes that play out between the two leads are unencumbered by Kinnear’s shtick, leaving the relationship to come together naturally.

I often deride romantic comedies for leaving out the mundane moments that solidify relationships, the beautiful banality of love, and this movie gets it perfect. From Leoni’s character spotting the price tag on the back of Gervais’ newly bought shirt as they share some hard candies, to the jokes they crack with each other as they confide sadnesses from their past, this movie gets the little things just right. There’s a particularly poignant line from Leoni, responding to Gervais’ confession of what he considers his ‘boring and ordinary’ breakup, that gets my point across:

It’s not boring and ordinary, by the way. We just get the one life, you know. Just one. We can’t life someone else’s or think it’s more important just because it’s more dramatic. What happens matter. Maybe only to us, but it matters.

Unlike other romantic comedies that emphasize the grandiose nature of their story, this one revels in the ordinary. Yes, the trappings of the romantic comedy are all there: the initial deceit, the subsequent relationship, the truth revealed, and the final redemption. It’s all there in fairly formulaic structure, but romantic comedies have this structure for a reason, and in this case it’s, in my opinion, a necessary structure to connect the audience to the story which is playing out in such a subversively naturalistic manner.

What it comes down to though — ignoring all the little nuances, ignoring the growth Pincus undergoes, ignoring the side stories that emphasize the main premise³, ignoring even the path the two leads take to their ultimate relationship — I think the movie is made brilliant by the closing lines “It hurts when I smile,” followed by “I can fix that for you.” So subdued, yet perfectly aligned with the characters and the bond they’ve formed. If more romantic comedies were like this, the world would be a better place.

Footnotes

1. Though they’re certainly not all romantic comedies despite the example given
2. I’m not claiming that it’s better than all the other movies I’ve seen recently, but for a romantic comedy it is moving without being (too) heavyhanded, romantic without being saccharine, and has sincerity without cloying sentimentality. In other words, it does its job remarkably well.
3. The ghost stories are mostly filler, but I still found them moving and they certainly emphasized the idea that the simplest acts can mean so much.

Yesterday, I downloaded a few of the Babylon 5 movies and began downloading the series proper — I already own them on DVD but AVI files are less hassle most of the time and I don’t want to rip them myself — but once I had some downloaded I made a crucial mistake: I watched one.

And another. And another.

You see, Babylon 5 is one of the best television shows I’ve ever watched. And it is unequivocally the best science fiction I’ve ever seen. So once I watched one of the movies, I couldn’t stop. The story is too good, the characters too rich, the morals too strong. And in the meantime, Voyager was busy pumping out generic episodes with generic characters and little to no character development. So, quite frankly, I can’t stand to watch that shit with the beauty that is Babylon 5 fresh in my mind.

I still plan to write up a few subsequent posts about the first half of the first season — I originally planned to write only one post for this chunk of episodes, but there’s so much wrong in there I think it deserves more than one post (I’m still not sure though) — but I’m not going to continue on my torturous little mission. I might return to it at some point — there’s too much Voyager love out there for me to just let it stand — but, for now, I’m just going to enjoy Babylon 5 all over again.

Glee is one of those shows that comes along and bites me in the ass. I hadn’t heard of it until the day before the pilot was broadcast, and the idea of a drama/musical centred around a high school glee club seemed terrible. But it wasn’t. It was touching, brave, smart, edgy, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed I liked it a lot.

There are a lot of things to like: the members of the glee club can all carry a tune, and the songs they choose are pretty fun to listen to in and of themselves; the peripheral players of the show all have interesting, but not cloying, quirks; and it’s hard to knock a show for telling an underdog story. But above all that, the message the show shouts from the rafters in its pilot is one that most people should learn: we’re all losers.

Jocks and cheerleaders, to me, are losers; they’re generally unimaginative and their ambitions seem childish and ultimately insubstantial. But I’m a loser to those people because I spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer, watching obscure 70′s sci-fi shows and writing a blog. And I’m a loser to a whole other subset of society for completely different reasons. So yeah, we’re all losers. But our victories are our own. So fuck the naysayers and do what you like.

But even without that theme, which runs through the pilot, the show has so much going for it. Lea Michele, who plays the overly talented self-labeled ingenue Rachel, has an amazing singing voice and she manages to make a character reminiscent of the satirical stereotype Reese Witherspoon played in Election not only genuine but incredibly likable and empathetic. Cory Monteith’s Finn is another stereotype turned on its head: he plays the Jock who secretly loves singing to wonderful effect. Cory’s voice is often overpowered by Lea’s Broadway honed one, but it fits the character and presumably he will improve as the show progresses.

The inevitable romantic storylines have already been set into place, as well. Matthew Morrison’s Mr. Shue has an unlikeable wife and an obvious romantic interest in the school germophobe guidance counselor, played by the always amazing Jayma Mays. And Finn and Rachel have already discussed the likelihood that they will end up together, subverting expectations while hanging a lantern in one fell swoop. I don’t think either of these threads will pay off for some time, but you never know.

I like all the characters. Or more accurately, I like the way all the characters are played. From minor roles like Stephen Tobolowsky’s brief appearance as the glee club director turn drug dealer up to the sundry members of the glee club, each role felt well cast and well written. I can’t wait to see how they all progress as the stories continue.

I’m trying to contain my enthusiasm in this discussion, primarily because otherwise the entire thing would devolve into a series of squees and me dancing around my room while singing along (despite my completely tone deaf singing voice) with the musical numbers, but I really am very excited by this show. I lamented the lack of good teen and high school oriented stories on TV a few months ago when Kyle XY was cancelled, and this show looks to fill that void. (Also, I’m totally in love with Lea Michele already. That girl’s got a voice on her.)

This pilot introduced a lot of awesome, and given the pedigree of the man behind the show — he did create Nip/Tuck after all — I’m confident the show will continue to impress me when it finally gets to air its full season in the fall. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch the “Don’t Stop Believing” sequence another 5,000 times.

After Alpha and Echo headed off into the sunset, it all seemed very blasé as an explanation for the byzantine plans Alpha has concocted to test Echo. This was initially justified by the many personalities of Alpha; rather than Alpha’s goal being the imprinting of Echo with a Bonnie to his Clyde, it was simply the goal of one of his many minds. But that didn’t hold out for long. Alpha’s personalities start to break down and intermingle and the megalomaniac personality that embodies the Alpha mythos starts to once again take hold.

But even then, as revealed through flashback, Alpha is doing all of this because he “saw something” in Echo. Basically he had a crush on her and the psychopathic killer that grew up in his body had many bizarre ways of expressing that. As I was watching those scenes, I was reminded of the obsession that Ballard has with Caroline, and how little of it is based on anything he actually knows about her.

So, for the first half of this finale I was feeling a little let down by it all. First Ballard, and now Alpha; all the men in Echo’s life keep getting killed by candarian demons keep ending up being these cliches of male messiah-complexism. But then the second half won me over; once Alpha had imprinted Echo with all of her past personalities at once, thus creating an Omega to his Alpha, she didn’t follow his path to megalomania.

And all of that was basically getting around to the idea that an Active is more than an object. They’re more than a container. Alpha is not Alpha because he was overloaded by 48 personalities. And Echo did not become Omega because of what Alpha did to her. There’s a fundamental base to each person. You can call it a soul if you like, but it’s there no matter what Topher does. So Alpha was always broken, the composite event merely allowed him to express that brokenness. But as Echo has said before, she’s not broken.

The show is mixing its messages here though, because as the audience is seeing that Alpha went evil because Carl William Kraft was always evil, and Echo stayed sane because Caroline was, new Echo is saying just the opposite. “There’s no me, I’m just a container,” which I think belies the message the show’s trying to put across. And before she can further articulate her thoughts on the subject Alpha gets aggressive again, so it’s hard to see if she’d eventually realise that she is more than a container. Regardless, even if Caroline was hollowed out, little bits remained. So Boo-urns for sending mixed messages, but I suppose it would’ve been a less exciting hour if Echo spent the next five minutes examining the meaning of selfness and the permanence of the soul.

I also enjoyed the Boyd/Ballard hook up, and now that Ballard is working with the Dollhouse, I really hope the second season is greenlit so we can see more of them hanging together and hating on the evils of the Dollhouse while working for it. And speaking of Ballard, what he did in this episode also redeemed a lot of my annoyances regarding him. First off, he awesomely got the FBI to cancel their terrorist alert by telling Tanaka exactly what was going on in that building, and knowing it was just nuts enough to get Tanaka to call off the alert. And then, as the episode ended and he accepted his new position at the Dollhouse — which, by the way, it would be really awesome if he became Echo’s handler next year — under the condition that a certain special Active was given back her old self and her five-year debt paid in full: November.

Yes, Ballard finally realised that the Doll he needed to rescue wasn’t the one once called Caroline, but the one once called Madeline; the one he knew and genuinely cared for. I was really proud of Ballard in that moment. Even if it turns out in the second season (come on FOX, do it for me) that he chose November rather than Echo because he wanted Echo at the Dollhouse with him, he still made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

This episode also let Ballard be an awesome investigator since he was the one that figured out that who Alpha was before he was Alpha was the missing part of the equation.

One of the most interesting things in this episode was the reveal of Dr Saunders’ past. I’ve always imagined it was a possibility that she was a Doll, and it was broadly hinted at when it was mentioned earlier that she never leaves the Dollhouse, so the reveal wasn’t mind-blowing but it certainly put a twist on all her past interactions. As Whiskey, she was the number one Doll, and it was that popularity that led to Alpha slicing her face, in the hopes of making Echo number one, and in turn led to Alpha going in for a diagnostic and the accidental composite event.

Dr Saunders’ acceptance of her past is intriguing though. Since her first appearance, I’ve found her to be one of the most interesting characters and the way she’s dealt with what should be a soul-shattering experience only adds to that. Seriously, Amy Acker can do no wrong. She needs to have her own show.

The finale was great in ways I didn’t expect. I was disappointed by Alpha, though the problem was that the rest of the season built him up too well; it’s very hard to build up a character to those epic proportions and then successfully reveal them to the audience without disappointing in some way. Luckily, a lot of other directions the show took delighted me. Saunders’ revelation, Ballard’s new employer, and Echo’s awakening (and its persistence based on the closing shot of the season) all elevated Dollhouse to a new level and set up a drastically different, yet reminiscent, world for the second season. Which probably won’t happen.

But liking television comes with that risk. A movie has a set goal to tell the story it wants to tell. They can from time to time establish things that can be explored further in sequels but, for the most part, movies are self-enclosed, much like the Dollhouse. Television has to plan for more. Television has to tell an interesting and self-enclosed story while constantly writing a superstory above it all. If the larger story is flawed or uninteresting, you’ll get very little connection with the audience, but if the individual stories aren’t strong enough the audience won’t come back and get caught up in your universe. It’s a delicate tightrope that television writers have to constantly walk, and it’s something that I thought Dollhouse did very well. And even if the show doesn’t come back, we’ll still have that.

As much as Alan Tudyk’s manic portrayal of Alpha pleased me, when he imprinted Echo with a new personality — who? we don’t yet know — and headed off with a kiss it left me worried about how the season will end. I never saw Alpha’s grand plan as being so petty; playing hero for one of the personalities stored in the Dollhouse’s archives is neither nefarious nor lofty. That said, this is a Joss Whedon show we’re talking about so it’s almost guaranteed that it will end up wowing me. So, in the meantime, let’s talk about what I liked.

First off, the Echo-imprint story of the week, which provides the show with its title, with Echo as a teacher trying to touch a troubled student (not like that) was cool. Fixing a person’s emotional problems in software and then fixing the original person in the real world is an interesting extension of the Dollhouse’s technology, but I was way too enthralled by all the intrigue going on in the Dollhouse this episode to really give a damn. So I’m going to completely ignore it; it might be great, but there’s no closure to the thread and I’m not entirely sure that it’ll be picked up in subsequent episodes. So fuck it.

The episode kicks off² with Ballard breaking up with Mellie and packing up his apartment. Which I, for one, am glad to see. Ever since Mellie’s outing as a Doll, I see her pining for Paul as degrading and calculating rather than heartwarming and quixotic. Last week’s episode, when Ballard broke down and used Mellie like an object, finally broke his resolve and so he’s leaving her. Of course, he’s also leaving her in the hopes that she will be taken back to the Dollhouse. Which then happens, thus proving that Ballard actually is a capable investigator; being spoonfed information for the first half of the season was beginning to wear on me so it’s good that he’s discovered the Dollhouse at least partially on his own.

I say partially because he still hasn’t found the Dollhouse, only the door. To get past the door he needs the man that built it. Seeing as his corpse is rotting in Tucson, Alpha playing the role of the builder of the Dollhouse will have to do. Paul’s journey through the Dollhouse is tense, and exciting, but when he finally got to the pod room and he started getting all doe-eyed over Caroline I start zoning out. Hopefully, that thread is abandoned soon, because the more opportunities Ballard has to be in contact with Echo, the more annoying it gets.

A lot of stuff happened, and it mostly seems very meh in light of the revelations stacked into the last few minutes, but one moment that took me by surprise in more ways than one was Enver Gjokaj’s absolutely dead-on impersonation of Laurence Dominic. I mean, it’s so good it’s like they cast one or both of those guys (Reed Diamond and Enver Gjokaj) for this explicit purpose. I will cherish those moments for the rest of my life. OK, not really, but it was really great.

So, I know it feels like I’m giving this episode’s review the short shrift, and in a lot of ways I am. There are a lot of really nice touches in this episode, but that final scene left me with a lot of trepidation about what will happen in the finale. I hope it turns out well, given the likelihood of there being a second season, so I’m just gonna wait it out.

Footnotes

1. There are 13 episodes this season, but the 13th is a standalone that likely won’t even air.
2. Again, I’m ignoring the school teacher stuff, so Ballard’s stuff happened “first” from that perspective.

This week, the main story was that of a dead Dollhouse client. She planned regular brain scans with the Dollhouse and a plan to revive her in a Doll for a brief period of time after her death. To solve her own murder. Talk about paranoid.

Well, I guess not in this instance.

Echo takes on the role, and while the murder mystery is relatively interesting, it’s not too hard to unravel the clues, and the best part about that entire story thread is the idea that the Dollhouse can offer eternal life, as Topher says, “if they really like you.”

This eternal life troubles Boyd greatly, who seems to be playing the role that the professorial dude from Man on the Street played. As he said then, if the Dollhouse’s technology existed, “as a species, we will cease to matter.” Boyd, not having caught on to the ultimate implications of the Dollhouse until now, says of the eternal life he’s discovered the Dollhouse can offer that it’s “the beginning of the end,” and while his claim that morality doesn’t exist without the fear of death seems a little juvenile to be coming from a Joss Whedon show, the idea that humanity would be altered at a fundamental level if immortality, in any form, was invented remains true.

Heady issues were being tossed around right and left this week, with all three plots examining the Dollhouse in a new and exciting way. First, the just discussed immortality. Second, Topher loads Sierra up with a friend personality. Because Topher has no friends. Which is sad, really. But all of the scenes of Topher and Sierra geeking out are all so fun and airy, that the implication doesn’t hit you until Adelle’s monologue about the need to feel connected, to have friends, to evade loneliness however you can.

Finally, we get Paul Ballard’s sad little tale. He’s fucked, both literally and figuratively, by the Dollhouse this week. He’s unable to break it off with Mellie lest he reignite the Dollhouse’s investigations, but unwilling to invest in a relationship with her. Ultimately, Mellie offers herself up to Paul with no expectations. She doesn’t care that he doesn’t like her, so long as he continues to let he be in his presence. It’s incredibly debasing, and emphasizes that Mellie’s so called love for Paul is nothing more than a programmed parameter. After this monologue, a switch seems to click in Paul’s mind, and he no longer sees Mellie as a person, but as an object. And in that moment, he sinks to his baser instincts and fucks her. The next morning in the shower, as the water fails to clean the filth from his body he tells Mellie that he’s found a new Dollhouse client, but he doesn’t say that it’s him. Paul’s scenes were the shortest and the least frequent but I thought they packed the biggest punch, despite the discussion of immortality in the A plot.

This week’s Dollhouse was all over the place in the best sort of way; none of the stories really had anything to do with each other, and the ideas they were exploring were all mostly independent, but they were all beautifully explored while servicing the growth of the characters along the way. Which is the way good television works.

Judgement day¹ in Gilboa — like the Presidential pardons of today, but with the occasional split baby — and the episode that spawned from the idea was OK. Prince Jack’s finally starting to develop beyond a mere pawn of others, and his plot to divide Michelle and David was great; it also gave us a chance to see why he’s so troubled by David. He’s younger than Michelle so if she married David, a certifiable war hero, it would be pretty easy to establish them as the new monarchy, preemptively ousting Jack.

That said, this episode had too little conflict. Michelle got her new health care system, David’s brother is getting a cake walk sentence, David’s mother is back on speaking terms with him, the Doctor that knows Silas has an illegitimate son did nothing to take advantage of that. Yes, David and Michelle have been separated rather solidly, and the exiled nephew’s return certainly ruffled some feathers (some from his own closet it seems, given the implication of the high heel his father found in his room), but nothing of real import happened. Even ignoring the lack of real progression of plot — because I’m quite comfortable with a show that explores characters with little plot — the characters didn’t really get a lot of growth either.

I hate to criticise the show, because it really is still way better than most of everything else on TV, but it’s not as good as it could be right now, even accepting the limitations of network television. There were good things, but the less good things were more noticeable. That’s really all I’ve got to say this week. I’m sure the ratings were terrible, but it really doesn’t matter at this point. Kings is deader than Dollhouse.

Footnotes

1. I’m Canadian so I spell it Judgement. However, the proper title of the episode is “Judgment Day” hence the disparity.

In one of my first rants against Heroes, I pointed out a glaring flaw in the writing of the show: Angela Petrelli is introduced as a distraught widow stealing socks just to feel alive, and yet this year it was revealed that she had coldly assassinated her husband. It was one of the most scathing and unassailable criticisms of the show I had. Well tonight they retconned the hell out of that. Apparently, she stole (or bought, I really was barely paying attention) socks when she needed to see a small action make a big difference or some bullshit (again, barely paying attention). Well, I call shenanigans.

In general, I’m OK with retcons in comics. Not necessarily when Spider-man #220 retcons Spider-man #108, though and here’s why. The stories are far enough apart to know for certain that it wasn’t a planned reveal. Ten issues apart, I’d accept it. But that far apart, it’s just breaking continuity because you’re lazy. The instances I approve of retcons are when a new story is being told from the beginning. So the origin story of Iron Man in Incredible Iron Man can be different, even drastically so, than the one in Iron Man because they’re two separate instances of that character with new stories being told. To allow yourself to tell new stories and explore new ideas, sometimes the details of a character’s past must be adjusted. But in any other instance, I don’t like retcons.

The worst part about this is that I sympathize with the writers in this instance. Bryan Fuller came back to a plodding mess with a bunch of inconsistent continuity hacked together, and he had to at least attempt to reconcile it all. So he had Matt Parkman find out about his child and according to spoilers I’ve read, he’ll get back together with the wife he left for no reason at all but plot expediency. And now he’s tried to change Angela Petrelli’s origin to have a connection to this event at Coyote Hills. Of course, there’s still no reason for everybody going back.

She said it was crucial to fix their current problems to go to Coyote Hills and face the past. But what did it really accomplish? We got that one salient point out of it. Which, I’m still not sure makes any sense. We didn’t really get much else from the episode. Sure there was a bit of backstory filled in; we learned Charles Deveaux actually had a power, though how it connects to his post-mortem conversation with Peter is still unclear; we got a little bit more of Nathan and Peter’s brotherly bickering; we were also told that Claire is actually really awesome and brave, despite her continued idiocy and short-sightednesss. And when it all came down to it, none of those revelations led to their fractured relationships being healed. At least not in any rational way. Instead, it was Sylar posing as Nathan Petrelli that seemed to push them together and let them forget their troubled past.

What I’m trying to say here is, it didn’t work for me. It all seems hamfisted. Admittedly, it almost has to be hamfisted because of what came before it, but that doesn’t make the experience any less distasteful.

First things first: the inside man. This episode leads you to believe that the climax will reveal who has been feeding Ballard information via Actives, but when it’s revealed that Dominic was the inside man — not only that, but he was on a mission from the NSA to ensure that the Dollhouse doesn’t fail — we’re left with the initial question. Here’s who I think it is: DeWitt. My theory relies on one thing: Topher didn’t know that DeWitt was Ms Lonely Hearts. Which, to me, means that DeWitt added a secondary protocol to the Roger Imprint that redefined who he was in love with.

In some instances, I’d be willing to accept Topher not knowing what the engagement is in detail, but to define an imprint which professes to the Dollhouse staff love for an octogenarian while secretly loving DeWitt without knowing some of the details seems unlikely. So, the logical conclusion is that the imprint-overrider that Topher found this episode was being used by DeWitt to adjust the Roger imprint, while also sending messages to Ballard. The only other alternative is that there are a bunch of imprint adjusters hooked into the system that Topher failed to notice. Some of you might say that Ivy, Topher’s assistant is still a suspect but Echo’s spy-catcher imprint would’ve detected that because she interrogated her. Of course, if the messages to Ballard continue, we’ll know I was wrong.

Now that I’ve recorded my idiocy so that others can point to it and laugh later on, I’ll talk about some other things. Echo’s growth this episode was great. The idea of a Doll asking to be imprinted is an awesome stepping stone towards full-on self-awareness. That said, I have to wonder how much the early scene where Ivy gives a lackluster opening script greeting to Echo was a part of that. Immediately afterward, Topher begins talking about the effect it can have on a freshly wiped Doll. Later on, she sees Sierra taken to the chair and then leaving the room a hardened spy. Before then, she sees November go into the chair and return as someone who looks at Echo waving at her with confusion. The glimpses of Echo observing and seemingly understanding these conversations and events going on around her were excellent. And the non-chronological storytelling of the episode enhanced this by letting us see Echo at different points in this arc.

Even the first scene, where Echo says that “she made a mistake and now she’s sad” about Dominic’s Attic-ing, which could be missed one first viewing reveals more of Echo’s growth. Echo has looked beyond the obvious and found the hidden answer: DeWitt’s faith in Dominic was misplaced, and that hurt her. And if you subscribe to my theory, she’s hurt in more than one way because she has to give up her Roger imprint because her surreptitious imprint rewriter is now gone.

Sierra’s Alias-esque foray at the NSA was great for the sheer sci-fi spy-action-ness of it. But what was even better was Ballard’s brief appearance this episode. First off, he’s clearly become increasingly paranoid since he discovered the bugs. Which apparently helps when you’re investigating massive conspiracies, because he’s unspooled more about the Dollhouse and its massive scope in this brief separation from Mellie than he had in the preceding months working on the Dollhouse case for the FBI. But when Mellie returns all his paranoia goes away… at least until Mellie switched into imformant mode and tells Paul not to reveal the details of his investigation to Mellie because she’s been sent to spy on him. And now Ballard had to keep up the romance with Mellie, all the while knowing she’s programmed to love him and having to keep pretty much everything from her. Something’s gotta give, people.

Lots happened, and not in the “a lot happened” sort of way last week played out. This time things seem to have actually changed. Not only is Echo’s greatest adversary at the Dollhouse now out of commission, but her increasing awareness is no longer seen as a threat but as an advantage. It’ll be interesting to see how that, and Boyd’s new position as head of security, affect the situation at the Dollhouse next week. The ratings? Who gives a fuck about the ratings at this point? OK fine. They were just as shitty as ever.

Two weeks ago, when Port Prosperity was ceded to Gath, I was befuddled by David’s reaction. It seemed like he was more than happy to give away the land his family fought for. Some worry or trepidation seemed justified on his part. This week clarified that showing that Port Prosperity is merely in the same region as David’s land. But then, the King decides to return all of the land taken from Gath in their past wars, which does happen to include David’s homeland. He’s less than pleased. His hometown expects him to become the leader of their cause, but his loyalty to the King is constant.

David struggles this week with these divided loyalties. Ultimately, his family’s extremist unbending demands push him from blood to fealty. The one weakness of this plot for me, is that the insurrectionists’ position is irrational. Gilboa offers resettlement and equivalent employment in their new land. Would the soil beneath their feet not be drenched enough in the blood of their forebearers? I’ve never understood those feelings of “Our Land, Our Blood” so it’s hard to feel sympathetic to their cause. But the ultimate point the show makes is that peace requires sacrifices, and not always of haemoglobin.

But David’s struggles were ultimately pointless, and his failure to hold off the violent attempt at insurrection was expected. By allowing the situation to escalate while he went fishing in a river, King Silas made the conspirators against him be more forthright in their plans, which led to them all being gunned down safe for the King’s brother-in-law, William Cross, who was warned at the last minute by Silas’ head General, who’s come to see Silas as weak and is no longer willing to follow him.

Everything that happened this episode ended up working in the favour of Silas, at least in the short term. His son has been chastened, his brother-in-law’s coup-in-waiting has been severely hindered, the insurrection has been thwarted. Everything’s coming up Silas. Perhaps his sacrifice from last week is paying dividends.

Not much more to say this week. Sometimes I want to gush over every scene, other times I’m content to point out a few interesting moments. This week was one of the latter. I have to admit that some of this terseness is coming from my disheartenment over the utter failure Kings has been in terms of ratings. I find myself investing slightly less each week because the outlook is so bleak. So many of my favourite shows are on the cusp of cancellation or have already been denied renewal; I sincerely hope Kings doesn’t disappear at the end of this season, but it’s hard to see it coming back, barring a miracle as ostentatious as that of David slaying Goliath.

This episode was about, as the title indicates, needs. The Dollhouse needs their Dolls to function as required at all times. And recently, particularly after the memory drug from last week’s episode brought up the traumas of their past, some Dolls’ glitching has gotten out of hand. So, in the face of these repeated glitches, they instigate a radical plan: give the Dolls what they need. Rather then further sedate them, or attempt to further wipe their minds, or anything like that, simply give them a chance to resolve the issues that are causing their instabilities. Give them closure. This hearkens to an idea I discussed in my review of the premiere when Echo’s actions were implied to resolve the internal conflict of the personality she was imprinted with at the time. Even though the person for which these fears existed, facing them gave a sort of closure. To what, I’m not sure.

Echo, Victor, Sierra, November, and Mike all awaken early in the episode to find themselves back to their old selves, minus any specific memories of their old life. Their personalities, without any of the events that forged them. When Mike is taken away and returns as calm and docile as the other Dolls, the remaining four band together to find a way out of their situation, whatever it may be.

So, here we are with the personalities, but not the memories, of the Dolls original lives waking in their sleeping pods attempting to figure out where they are, how to get away, and what to do next. Echo, as was implied by last week’s episode, wouldn’t need to be free to find closure: she would need everyone to be free, she would need the Dollhouse to no longer exist. So rather than leave with the others in the inevitable escape she stays behind to free the other Dolls. A pleasant side-effect of Echo’s behaviour this episode is that it washes away the unpleasant taste Caroline’s personality left with me last week. Rather than being quippy despite the dire tasks, she takes on the role of saviour and wholeheartedly seeks the demise of the Dollhouse. I’m much more willing to accept this week’s Caroline as a character I can invest in.

Sierra confronts the man that put her in the Dollhouse, both a proxy to the closure she needs for what Hearn did to her and a legitimate trauma in and of itself. What’s interesting about this is that while Adelle DeWitt is discussing the voluntary nature of the Doll life, we discover that Sierra was made a Doll by a powerful man who wanted to control her and make her do whatever he wanted. This is the first time the pseudo-voluntary nature of a Doll’s tenure has been explicitly denied by the show.

And apparently Victor just wanted Sierra. It’s a little simplistic, but it works because Victor’s personality in this episode was both the most appealing and humourous, and he quickly took on a role as the de facto leader of the escapees so his closure was more related to the obtaining of closure for those under his “command.” Relatedly, Victor’s calm and controlled manner of leading the others makes me think that Victor’s original life was in the military, and so the traumatic war-time memory of Victor’s that we saw last week was of his original life. Which opens the question of whether Victor joined the Dollhouse to escape the horrors he’d committed on the battlefield or was taken from a happy life.

November’s past is the most sympathetic. In her original life, it seems her daughter died and she never fully recovered from it. It’s implied here that she gave herself to the Dollhouse to escape the sadness in her life. But with all of these stories what really got accomplished? The one weak point of the show, in retrospect, is how Dominic and DeWitt have early scenes together where they pretend as though what’s happening is not what they wanted. Put simply, there are too many head-fakes.

The episode starts with Topher saying he can mess with their drug levels, implying that doing that caused the unexpected “awakening” of the Dolls original personalities. But then DeWitt later pretends as though this is part of a training exercise for their staff. Then ultimately, it’s revealed that after Topher’s initial suggestion in that earlier scene Dr Saunders suggests that they give the most problematic Dolls emotional closure so that they can be reset to normal and those internal conflicts will no longer combat the programming of the Dollhouse. So, it all makes sense except for that one scene implying it’s all a training exercise. If that scene weren’t there, this episode would be perfect. We would have seen lots of character growth, the development of the romance between Victor and Sierra was particularly touching, and then ending the episode with all of that being a part of the Dollhouse’s plan. Not only that, but the ultimate reveal that it was Dr Saunders, one of the staff more sympathetic towards the Dolls, that perpetrated this plan was excellent; the show has worked very hard making her sympathetic to the audience, so showing the darker more twisted side of her psyche was a smart, and subversive, move on the writers. But all of it seems weakened by that one little thread that doesn’t mesh with the rest.

As usual, Ballard’s story is mostly dissociated from the Actives — though Echo does manage to leave a message on his voicemail before she manages to set the Actives in the Dollhouse free, thus triggering her “closure achieved” mindset and rendering her unconscious — but he does realize that the Dollhouse has been spying on him for an indeterminate amount of time, and that their technology is well beyond the local black-hat spy gear. Not completely revelatory, but it furthered Ballard’s investigation. But, unless the show offers up some tangible results to his investigation sometime soon, I’ll definitely start to find these scenes tiresome.

I’m a little annoyed that this episode resulted in not only no tangible emotional growth for the characters, but actually cancelled out what growth we’d seen thus far. But it’s also brilliant on the show’s part to twist our minds like this: the “happy ending” of the episode is the Dolls going back to normal. To return to their slavery. Really great stuff. Episodes six and eight were both being pushed as exemplary episodes, and they were both excellent. Let’s hope the quality level is maintained or surpassed as the season concludes.

Earlier this year, CW aired, and quickly cancelled, a show on their Sunday night block called Valentine, about a female romance novelist recruited by Aphrodite and Cupid, along with a few of their Olympian friends, to help reinvigorate the world with Love, one couple at a time. In many ways, the shows are very similar. Obviously, the former is going to emphasize the ambiguity of Trevor Pierce’s situation — is he a broken man, or an exiled god? — and the latter was quite explicit, and delightfully mythological, about the history of their Cupid. But overall, both shows will follow that structure of a weekly romance unfurling as the overarching story develops in the background.

I’ve admitted in the past to being an unabashed romantic and lover of love stories, which why it’s no surprise I enjoyed Valentine, and really enjoyed Cupid. I’ve also been re-watching Gilmore Girls from the beginning and find myself very much caught up in the girlie moments of the show, tittering when they describe their first kiss or sighing during that all-important first dance. So I guess what I’m trying to tell all of you, is that I’m a huge girl when it comes to these things, so my judgement of this sort of material is likely biased. But, hey, if you’re got an hour free Tuesday nights, might as well watch two people fall in love, right?

I’m generally slower writing my reviews than most TV blogs because I have a full time job and other real world responsibility whereas most bloggers have blogging as their job. This is a detriment to my work because it can often seem like an out of date topic by the time I get around to publishing. At the same time, I also get a chance to read other reviews and comments on those reviews. This can both colour my view and also give me a chance to crystallize rebuttals and confirmations of those discussions. Of course, sometimes I have these thoughts independently and it seems like I’m parroting others but what can you do. Other people can be right sometimes too.

A decent chunk of the discussion from the last few episodes, especially from io9 and its commenters, has been focused on the saccharine innocence of David, without recognizing that that is a necessary part of his character. I said last week that this show reminded me of Carnivàle, but it was for more than the use of prophetic dreams and religious destiny. They are both telling the story of the birth of a hero, in the classical sense. I can imagine these same cynics, who criticise David’s virtuousness, rolling their eyes when, early on in Carnivàle, Ben Hawkins uses his empathy to coax a grief-stricken mother to give up her dead child from her hand to be given a burial.

Carnivàle does a better job of this, obviously. Ben is introduced as a man on the run for murder, and that past follows him throughout the two year run, but at the same time, there is hardly a moment in the run of that show where Ben Hawkins is not perfectly virtuous or at the very least fighting desperately the temptations offered to him. But the journey is the same. Ben struggled with this role while being tempted until he ultimately grew into a more mature role and accepted his quest to kill Brother Justin. David will follow a similar path, because both stories are of the Hero chosen by God. So to criticise his virtuous origins is, I think, to completely misunderstand the story that is being told to you. And now onto the show.

The big thing I took away from this episode was that the Queen rules much more than anyone knew. Silas may have catalyzed a broken people, but it was her work in building and designing the monarchy that keeps their people strong and vibrant. Having something greater than themselves kept them believing in the dream of Shiloh in the long arduous years before the glistening city was built. And now that the years of war and conflict are over, the people of Shiloh need to see their royal family. The premiere of the ballet, around which the episode revolves, that the queen cares about. “We are the performance,” she says. The thing to inspire the people, and also to remind them of who is in charge and why. There’s something to be said for exploring that. Often, democracies fall into dictatorships and empires because particularly compelling and inspiring leaders come about. It’s just as reasonable that a modern day monarchy, one created recently not one long ago established and only retained for nostalgia’s sake, would require those same “larger than life” characteristics to remain viable.

Of course, in this episode Silas is doing his own work to maintain that larger than life persona, by abandoning his mistress and her son, possibly permanently; a sacrifice God demanded, it seems. His bastard son is once again sick, and this time it doesn’t look reparable. And, so his recent spat with Reverend Samuels be damned, he seeks Samuels’ counsel and wisdom. What must he do to regain God’s favour? Why must God constantly punish him? First by giving him a son who desires men, then by giving his people a greater hero to worship, and now by taking his younger son’s life. After Samuels offers little comfort, Silas’ truck flips over after colliding with a deer. Seeing the deer slowly dying on the ground before him, he realises that he needs to make a sacrifice in his life and quickly snaps the neck of the deer. He then returns to the hospital where his son lays near death, and goes to sleep. When he awakes, his son is better and he takes that as a sign that his decision from the night before was right. He leaves them both behind for his decadent, and solitudinous, royal life.

The solitude of Michelle Benjamin continues at the gala following the ballet, where she hopes to run into David — who was abruptly uninvited by the queen due to his rising star — but instead gets hooked up for a play date with a childhood friend, who is now a financial success, by her mother. She uses the situation to her advantage to obtain financial backing for her long suffering health care initiatives. Which will likely introduce a romantic rival for David as the story progresses. Speaking of, David is invited by Jack Benjamin to club hop and have a good time in general. Jack, having been ever so subtly pushed by his mother to take David down a peg or two, gets his female friend to get him to do dirty things in public places. Of course, David fights the urge and so the paparazzi only get a shot of him making out with her rather than shots of him fucking. But mackage is mackage, and Michelle sees the story online the next morning.

There are a few nuances I’m ignoring or glossing over here, but I can bring them up later on when they’re more relevant. Maybe I’d seem smarter if I mentioned my personal thoughts on these little scenes now and they come to fruition later, but I’m fine with leaving some of these details out when there’s no strong need to discuss them now. Overall, it was a good episode, and the show’s trajectory is interesting and quick thus far. The writing is strong and lyrical, and I don’t expect it to degrade. However, this is, I believe, the last episode directed by Francis Lawrence, so we’ll have to see if the visual beauty of the show can be maintained without his hand behind the camera next week.

First things first, Paul Ballard gets the shaft this week; he cooks Mellie/November some post-rape-slash-murder-attempt breakfast and then Mellie decides it’s over. After the brouhaha at the Dollhouse and Caroline’s old college, Mellie skips town, and Ballard tell her she knows where he is. So that relationship is apparently over. For now, at least. Which is sort of par for the course for Joss Whedon. And obviously, what Mellie experienced last episode was incredibly traumatic, but it still felt a little abrupt for me.

The rest of the story was interesting verging on cool, but it was all too cursory. The corporation behind the Dollhouse, is working on a memory drug, and one of the grad students they have developing it decided to go rogue and steal it to sell for billions. But he had a partner and he didn’t want to share. So before he took the drug and ran off, he dosed his partner-in-crime which led to a spread-by-touch craziness epidemic.

Because this drug in the wind is a huge deal to the Rossum Corporation, and they happen to own the Dollhouse, they get an army of Actives to play government agent on campus and clean up the mess while hunting down the vial of crazy juice. While all of this is happening, Echo is having another engagement with the motorcycle dude from the premiere, so she’s out of the loop. But when she sees the college on TV she leaves abruptly. She’s remembering flashes of her life before the Dollhouse.

Caroline was, apparently, a bit of a bitch. She dedicates all of her time to war protests and anti-animal testing crusading. So much so that, when she and her boyfriend break in to Rossum’s lab on campus and finds that they’re experimenting with human fetuses and mind control, she’s still most outraged by the doggie in the cage. That was a little much, and actually made Caroline less relatable to me. Regardless, it appears that this break-in is the event that led to Caroline’s enrollment in the five year “become a Doll and you live” program. So there’s one mythology mystery (mostly) answered.

When Caroline gets to the campus she’s taken in by the Doll agents, led by Victor, where she befriends the dude who is behind it all. She helps him break into the lab, where he plans to retrieve the vial so he can split town and sell it, with the memories or her previous break-in bubbling below the surface. He’s got a sad sack story about a momma with too many bills. Which is only relevant because at the end of the episode we see him being given the Dollhouse recruitment speech in exchange for them paying his mom. The cycle continues.

Along the way, Victor, Sierra, and November (AKA Mellie) all experience an unexpected side-effect of being dosed with the memory drug: they start remembering their most traumatic moments. Sierra remembers her rape by Hearn, November remembers Hearn’s attempted rape of her, and Victor seems to recall a eastern European war zone where he once worked. Whether this is before being an Active or not is unclear, but I’m sure it will be explored before the season is out. These traumatic memories fell flat for me as well. Mostly because the two that we remember are both so incredibly recent; the horror of those moments is still fresh in our minds, so it’s bizarre to experience them reliving it as something from a lifetime ago when it happened to them mere days ago. They also suffer no ill side effects from it, apparently. The drug makes them remember those things, then Topher cleans them out, which made the whole sequence feel empty to me.

And for the sake of comedy relief, Topher and DeWitt in the Dollhouse, and Dominic and Boyd on the campus all experience the effects of the drug and hilarity ensues. Topher is pantless, DeWitt jumps on a trampoline, Boyd laughs at his inability to control Echo, and Dominic is super super sorry for trying to burn Echo alive. It’s all really great, so I’ll leave those moments to be relished by the viewer on their own.

All of this isn’t to say that this episode wasn’t good. But the only parts that I really enjoyed, were the “Naked Time” moments where the buttoned up Dollhouse staff got a chance to let their freak flag fly. The rest felt subdued and simplistic to me. This was a solid episode, but one that just didn’t strike me as particularly amazing. I’m also writing this after only one viewing of the episode, whereas all my previous reviews were based on at least two viewings. So, when going back over the season after it’s all over, this may turn out to be a watershed moment for the series, but right now I’m just going to wait for the next episode and hope it’s better.

Kings begins this week with a sign of things to come, both literally and figuratively, in the form of a prophetic dream. Kings Silas bellows across a cloudy rain drenched sky “Don’t Go” and David wakes up to see his dead brother repeating the message: “Don’t Go.” And then he actually wakes up. The more of this show I see, the more it reminds me of Carnivàle: epic in scope, unafraid of complex storytelling and morally ambiguous protagonists, and completely willing to tell an earnest story with mysticism and drama.

This week the Premier of Gath came to Shiloh to sign the peace treaty that has been hashed out in the time between then and the premiere. Meanwhile, one quick to nip a butterfly-crown-based prophecy not in his favour in the bud, Silas orders his General to kill David. Lucky for David, the Premier wants to meet the young man who bravely put his life on the line for peace, so the killing is put on hold. Unlucky for David, the Generals of Gath aren’t as fond of peace as the Premier — something about being shown up by a punk kid with an RPG — and are willing to throw away the treaty for any minor infraction.

With the Generals of Gath readying to abandon the peace that his brother died for, David’s desperation reaches a fever pitch when he sees a sign held by a child saying “Don’t Go” and he steals a cab to block the path of the departing Gath envoy. During the ensuing stand-off, Silas and the Premier reestablish peace. The Premier of Gath says his people are jealous of Gilboa, for their industry and prosperity. But most of all for their glimmering city of Shiloh. And that’s where the Port of Prosperity comes in to play.

The Port of Prosperity is the land David’s father died protecting. It’s also one of the richest areas of Gilboa, taken from Gath years ago, and its riches were used to build Shiloh. Silas agrees to give that land to Gath, in exchange for peace. David’s loyalty to the King has been solidified by his selfless efforts for peace and Silas calls off the assassination.

Throughout this, there’s a story of the prince and his loyal squadron going on a shopping spree which leads to the news of the depleted reserves of Gilboa’s Treasury becoming public. Whether this was a part of CrossGen’s attempt to spread worry about the royal treasury or was merely coincidental is left unclear, but given the scene between William Cross and Jack Benjamin in the premiere, it seems likely it was a coordinated attack. The missing gold also causes King Silas to reach out to a “long dead” former ally he’s kept locked away for years. The former king’s gold was missing when Silas conquered his capital years ago, and been kept secret all these years, but Silas has a hold over the old king: his loved ones are still alive, but he won’t tell which of them are still alive until he gets the gold. And with this thirty-year-long gambit, the King saves the nation from overnight bankruptcy, much to the chagrin of William Cross.

Luckily, the King’s wife has finally decided that enough is enough, stepped aside from her diplomatic party planning duties, and convinced her brother to let the King win this battle. Apparently, Cross’ son has been exiled from the city for many years, and she can find a way to allow his return should he let this discretion slide.

In addition to all of this, David’s mother is in Shiloh attempting to receive her son’s veteran’s pension, and also trying to get David to return home. Not because she thinks he’s not capable of surviving the city, but because he’s too capable. She knows he has a destiny and that is what worries her.

Threaded through all of this is the romance between Michelle Benjamin and David. What seemed set in stone at the end of the premiere has now become very much a hazy prospect. Silas has reminded the princess of a oath she must not break. Is she betrothed to an ally? Is she a member of a convent of some sort? It’s left unclear, but regardless it quickly established a barrier to their relationship. How fast that barrier will fall remains to be seen.

So that’s a lot of stuff happening in this episode, and all of this is painfully oversimplified for the sake of brevity — after my 5500 word review of Dollhouse from the other day, I’m trying to constrain my word counts — but what’s clear is that there’s a lot more mystery in the past that this show will explore. The exiled son, the locked away deposed king, the princess’ oath, and the furthering of the signs that David is destined for far more than an advising role at the feet of King Silas. The story continues to fascinate me, and the sincerity of the storytelling is refreshing. I may be a cynic, but that doesn’t mean all art must devolve into nihilistic ultra-realism.

Unfortunately, the beauty of this show is mostly being ignored. The ratings for the second episode were even worse than the already atrocious ratings that the premiere suffered. This sort of very grandiose epic storytelling is new for network television, and I hope that these brief stumbles are not a sign that the public at large has no interest in it.

Eight months ago, I walked into a low capacity hall at San Diego Comic-Con for an early morning panel about an upcoming show from NBC called Kings. After a short discussion of the basic premise of the show — an alternate history drama set in a monarchy named Gilboa inspired by the biblical tale of David and Goliath — they screened the first twenty minutes of the pilot episode, and I experienced that same enraptured envelopment into a brand new world that that amazing album had beset upon me. Now, eight months after that initial burst of interest followed by a relative dearth of new information, Kings has finally premiered and my first impression has only been enriched by the complexities I once imagined were possible now made manifest by the remainder of this amazing premiere.

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve compiled snippets of the many reviews of this show. Some of them are fairly positive, but it seems as though most of them chide the show for having cheesy aspects, or soap opera trappings, comparing it to shows like Dynasty and Dallas. I’m not sure why any show that manages to tell a serious story is immediately a soap opera. Is Battlestar Galactica a soap opera because of its intense dour depiction of life? Of course not. It’s merely a show willing to deal with things seriously, as is Kings. To call the show a soap opera is to call Deadwood, or other such character drama, a soap opera: it’s not disingenuous to do so, but it belittles the show to use such a pejorative. All of the criticisms, though, are not unfounded. But the good, and more importantly the potential for good, more than outweighs what little there is to legitimately criticise.

The main story of the premiere, and likely of the rest of the series, is of David, played by Christopher Egan. Taking his name from the biblical slingshot-wielder, the show begins with David living the rural life as King Silas of Gilboa — Ian McShane in a typically brilliant performance — unveils the shiny new capital, Shiloh, built upon the ashes of the cities destroyed by the years of war that ravaged Gilboa before Silas united the lands in the unification War, a costly conflict that left David fatherless with a disenfranchised mother.

Before the inaugural speech is over, tensions are rising with the neighbour nation Gath and two years later the war carries on with David now at the front lines. When the survivors of an ambushed squad are taken hostage by Gath, David defies the orders and, crossing the front lines, rescues the hostages, including the King’s son. This rescue is no small feat given that the front lines of the war are lined by Gath ‘Goliath’ tanks, a menacing visage to all Gilboan soldiers. And so David returns as the hero who slayed a Goliath and saved the King’s son. That’s the first twenty minutes wrapped up in a few sentences. There’s much more there, but I find that the more I like a show the more I want to detail every nuance of the scene (which is why I rarely write about Lost; I don’t want to end up writing 15,000 words per episode) so I’ll leave the rest to the viewer to relish. I will say however, that those twenty minutes are the best and most effective exercise in world building I’ve ever seen.

This premiere has already established that, while this is an alternate history with kingdoms where America once reigned, this world only diverges from ours in the last two centuries. David’s love of classical piano, and more importantly his playing of a piece by Liszt, underscore an implicit history that will certainly get explored as the series continues. How did the world of Liszt change such that not America but Gilboa and Gath were formed? Hopefully, the writers already know the answer.

Perhaps as impressive as the world building is the character building, with every character having complexity and ambiguities which can be developed and exploited over time. The King’s wife, for example, is a quiet but manipulative woman who publicly expresses a distaste for politics while privately and silently ensuring her family’s skeletons stay in their respective closets. Similarly, his son portrays himself a womanizer to the paparazzi to keep up appearances, despite his homosexuality. His desire for power is clear but he is neither the villain nor the brat in this story. At least not yet.

The King’s brother-in-law, the head of a large corporation, Crossgen, which has bankrolled Silas’ rule for years is the most villainous character introduced thus far. His need for war to ensure quarterly profits impel him to push Silas to war despite peace being offered. It’s not until David, once again defying the will of the King, bravely reaches out to their faceless enemy, as the Goliaths stare him down, and brings about renewed peace talks, that his lust for war is sated. Even then, his plots and machinations continue apace to replace the King and continue the profitable war.

David is the archetypal hero. He is a farm-boy turned war hero who doesn’t understand nor desire the world into which he’s been thrown. He quickly falls for the King’s daughter, herself a passionate supporter of improving the nation’s health care much to the King’s dismay. His star rises precipitously, first due the the rescue of the hostages, then later from his part in the reestablishment of peace talks with Gath.

And of course, King Silas himself, around whom all this intrigue revolves, is one of the great draws of this show. Ian McShane, playing a character as conniving as Al Swearengen in a world much more civilized yet just as brutal as Deadwood, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale network television environment. Silas is a complicated man, a melange of numerous regal stereotypes. His opening speech, and most likely every speech after that, describes a story from the founding days of Gilboa when a flock of butterflies came upon him and perched upon his head in a ring as if they were a living crown. A sign from God. And yet, he has none of the trappings of the typical religiously driven leaders of our time: he knows full-well that evolution is a truth, and devotes a family breakfast to the topic; he accepts his son’s homosexuality as a part of his nature; he is an eloquent leader, who uses his words for both good and ill; he is a brilliant tactician whose military experience lent itself to the political travails of a King. Of course, his religiosity is tempered by his desire for power, and when the Reverend Samuels disowns Silas near the end of the premiere he is more than willing to abandon God. But despite these two conflicting aspects of his larger-than-life personality, beneath it all is a long dormant desire for a quieter life. He is a tragic yet terrifying hero, one we know will eventually fall away for David to rise.

The two weak points of the premiere are the wartime scenes and the relationship between David and the King’s daughter. That Gath would hold hostages just past the front lines of battle, even temporarily, strain credulity. In addition, David’s impassioned speech to Gath asking for compassion and common ground would have likely ended with David brutally destroyed by the numerous tanks trained on him throughout the speech. But I take both of these points in stride because a) this is a different world, with different alliances and territories, strategies and tactics could be slightly different b) David held a white cloth stained in his brother’s blood as he delivered his speech; had Gath fired upon a white flag, there surely would have been international repercussions and c) it is David’s destiny to become King — the final scene where the butterflies land atop his head to signal his coming reign is a sure sign of that — and so I’m willing to accept a few well-timed mistakes on his enemies’ parts; many of the most successful kings and emperors of the past have had such luck in the ascension to power.

The other weak part, the love story, is weak because it happened too easily. There’s no real conflict there, they both seem to already be smitten with each other and in a relationship. I was hoping for it to take a while for their bond to grow before all that happened, but this is a minor quibble as the show could easily still get those things done over the course of the season by introducing conflict. It’s also very daring that the show took what appears to be the only romantic relationship on the show and resolved it so quickly. It’s like if the writers of The Office got Jim and Pam together in the first episode. So I’m willing to believe, for now, that they’ve thought about this and are subverting the stereotypes again for effect.

It’s been a couple days now and the ratings have been tallied and they’re atrocious. Kings had a horrible opening. Kings has already finished filming for the season and I used to think that networks wouldn’t cancel a show with complete episodes ready to air, but Firefly and Daybreak shattered that misconception, so I have to hope that the word of mouth on Kings spreads fast and the ratings improve week-over-week, because this show is a real adventure. It’s an adventure in storytelling, it’s an adventure in world-building, and perhaps most importantly it’s an adventure in broadcasting. It’s the sort of high concept high drama story that’s been relegated to cable television in recent years, and yet here it is on a Big Three network (admittedly the smallest of the Big Three). If Kings becomes a ratings success, as it deserves to be, it could be a catalyst for the networks to reinvigorate the increasingly conservative and middling television they produce.

I loved the premiere. I’m  deeply impressed with the show so far. It’s an achievement in storytelling, and I’m sure the subsequent episodes will be as good if not better.

If anything, the problem with this show is that it’s too eager to explore the possibilities of this show. It’s too ambitious. The first episode explored the concept of delayed catharsis by proxy, when Echo’s imprint finally stood up to the man that had haunted her for years. The second episode examined the history of the Dollhouse while furthering the ongoing story of Echo’s awakening. The third episode discussed the way in which our society constructs and controls people just as much as the Dollhouse does its Actives. The fourth episode waxed poetically about art and what it is to be human, ideas entirely foreign to Echo, offering up the leading question “are the Actives even human at all anymore?” All of the ideas being examined are interesting and could have an entire series devoted to them, but Dollhouse has only begun. Perhaps its the seemingly haphazard exploration of these ideas that jars people, but it’s not the show’s fault that people had underwhelming expectations.

Nevertheless, this week’s episode continues to ask these sorts of questions. It opens with a group of cult members entering a store on a shopping excursion singing and smiling all the while. After a brief kerfuffle with a local yokel — where he hilariously responds to their continual singing and ignoring of him with “are you deaf, or you just tone deaf?” and offers up helpful nicknames like “Osama Bin Gandhi” — they leave, but their shopping list is left behind with an ominous “Save Me” message scrawled on the back.

Because of the rumours of what happens on the compound, the senator of the state where this cult resides is being pressured by his constituents and he wants a Dollhouse Active to help with the situation. Because of the note, they’ve obtained a short-term “sneak and peek” warrant but they wouldn’t be able to infiltrate the compound with an undercover agent that quickly; what they need is a true believer. And so Echo is imprinted with the personality of an extremely religious person, Ester Carpenter, who has been blind since she was nine. Both to facilitate the retrieval of surveillance of the compound and to reinforce the imprint’s belief that she is blind, Topher and Dr Saunders implant cameras into her eyes which redirect the eyes’ signals to the ATF leaving Echo blind.

Echo quickly gains the trust of the cult, primarily because she truly believes in the faith they espouse. And this is an idea that is mostly glossed over but is most definitely put out there to chew on: they program religiosity. Faith is often seen as something people have or don’t have, so this is another sacred cow the show is willing to challenge with the imprinting of the Actives on the show.

Though the trust of the cult is gained, their leader is more doubtful. He takes Echo to a dark room and shines bright lights in her eyes, looking for some sign of false blindness, but her pupils neither dilate nor retract. Then he suddenly aims a gun at her head but she is blissfully unaware of this and continues to praise him while the gun is pointed right between her eyes. He walks away mostly convinced that she’s the real deal, leaving Echo in the room to be walked out by Seth, the second-in-command. Unlucky for him and lucky for the ATF, the room he leaves her in is also where he stores his massive weapons cache.

The ATF has seen enough and is ready to go in guns blazing, but Boyd wants Echo extracted first seeing as her mission has been completed and it’d be dangerous to leave her in place during the raid. Of course, the head ATF agent is a huge dick — as they always are — denies the request and begins his breach. As Echo is being officially becoming a sister of the church, the ATF agents trip an alarm along the perimeter and have to fall back. But Jonas, the head of the church, is on alert now and begins accusing Echo of leading the ATF there. He bangs her around, disabling the cameras in her eyes, thus returning Echo’s vision. “It’s a miracle.”

The siege on the compound continues until Jonas decides that Echo truly was a miracle and a message to him: he’s not going to fight back with his arsenal. The church members head into a different building. I don’t like where this is going.

As this is happening, Boyd is trying to figure out who wrote the message, hoping for some inside help. After looking at the security footage in the store, he discovers that it was the ATF agent who manufactured the yokel’s conflict so that he could put that note there and further his investigation. “Nobody ever asked to be saved. Not by you.” Boyd says, in yet another little moment that opens up a world of ideas. Something that I noticed after I’d watched this episode was that, really, this cult didn’t actually do anything wrong. The members lived a pastoral life so there was no money to bilk from the members. There was no sexual abuse, no children being married off, no harem of women for the leader. Instead, this cult is just a bunch of people who believed a certain thing and wanted to extirpate modern society from their lives. They had weapons, but I think to complain about that is equivalent to complaining about the right for individuals to bear arms. I don’t know if this is meant to be a commentary on how society is discriminatory to people who are merely different, or an attempt to show how evil can be hidden in seemingly innocent environments, or something else entirely, but I thought it was interesting that little was done to demonize the cult.

So, now that I’ve praised the show for being measured in its treatment of cults, it’s time to disprove my entire argument. Echo is asked to recite a story about people being sent into a furnace to die and not being harmed by the flames because of their faith. Meanwhile, Seth heads off to do… something.  I really don’t like where this is going.

When Seth returns from setting fire to the building, some members decide enough is enough and start to leave but ultimately Jonas convinces them to remain in the building as it burns, relying on their faith to pressure them into staying. But Echo argues against him saying “You can’t force a miracle.” When Jonas remains steadfast in his faith, she knocks him out with a honking big candle holder and gets the rest of the church to finally flee the fire. All but one, that is, who asks “Where will we go?” and further asks “How can you doubt after God restored your sight?” to which she replies “I don’t think God let me see again so I could just watch.” Which is a wonderful skewering of the general mindset of a lot of fundamentalists. And so he spits in her face. She knocks him out, a useful problem solver in any situation, and Seth carries him out. But as she’s leaving Jonas awakens and cocks his gun. Before he can shoot Echo dead, someone in ATF gear walks in and shoots him dead. Too bad it’s Laurence Dominic, head of Dollhouse security, who’s had enough of Echo’s shenanigans and thinks this situation is a great opportunity to solve that problem. He knocks her out leaving her in the flames.

Shortly thereafter,  Boyd comes in in similar gear and rescues her, carrying her out of the fire as the ATF Agent-in-Charge tells reporters that they’re not hopeful for any more survivors. Oops.

So Echo returns to her peaceful life in the Dollhouse, but as she’s returning Dr Saunders asks her if her vision is ok. And after Echo looks around she looks intently at Dominic and ominously replies “I see perfectly.”

The two B plots of this episode revolve around Topher and Saunders, and Ballard and his lovelorn neighbour. Topher noticed that Victor had a “man-reaction” while in the shower. He noticed this while having a conversation about the Valsava Mechanism and he stutters after noticing it, which I’m pretty sure is a joke that nobody but the writer, Tim Minear, got; until I looked up the Valsava Mechanism. Be brings this up to Dr Saunders who cites her reports expressing concern over “residual imprinting” and then suggests they examine the shower videos from the recent past to see how long these “man-reactions” have been occurring.

Ultimately, they find out that Victor’s “man-reactions” aren”t a side-effect of repeated imprinting, because he only gets them when Sierra is in the shower as well. Turns out he’s just got a crush. DeWitt tells them that the purity of the Dollhouse must be preserved — immediately after Jonas had said something similar to Seth, to really drive home the comparison of the Dollhouse to the cult — and orders that Victor be scrubbed. Not sure what that means, but I am sure Victor won’t like it.

Ballard, on the other hand, is continuing his search to find any record of Caroline, Echo’s original identity, by going to someone with access to more government databases to search. Unfortunately, there’s no record of her anywhere. His neighbour brings him his pain medication and some “leftover” manicotti, even though it’s enough to feed a family of four, and she also has another mysterious package that somebody left with her down in the lobby of the building. It has the video of Caroline that Alpha was watching in the pilot on it, which only further intesifies his investigation, leaving his neighbour to be even more jealous and more lovelorn. There’s also a scene of Ballard watching the events at the cult unfold on TV and briefly seeing Echo. After the fallout, he tries to find her but is shot down by the ATF Agent-in-charge who’s a dick to everyone it seems.

There are a few really good beats here. Ballard trying to flirt and admitting it’s been a while. The man who gave the package to Ballard’s neighbour simply being a lazy mailboy was also a funny red herring. Neither of the B plots offer anything of real significance, but they both fill the episode with real humour while continuing to fill out the Dollhouse universe.

There are so many good things happening in this episode, that the complaints of others become even more baffling to me. This is an adventurous show that manages to examine TV-unfriendly ideas while remaining TV-friendly overall.  The people that are complaining about this show increasingly seem like people complaining because they think it’s the cool thing to do. Next week’s episode apparently is a big episode in the mythology of Dollhouse, so hopefully, it will shortly become cool to like this show.

On a meta note, this review/recap is around 2000 words, and the previous one was around 3500. Both of those numbers seem far too large. As this progresses, I think I’m going to find myself really paring down the descriptions of the plot and of specific scenes, however much I may enjoy them, and focusing on the philosophical questions and mythology the show introduces. But be warned. Sometimes I just don’t know when to shut up.

Dollhouse took another step up in quality this week after the slight fumble last week. In fact, aside from the opening scene where Echo serves as a doula in a secluded estate perched on an icy mountainside — which will surely engender endless theories about why someone would need to hire an Active to aid in childbirth, aside from the helpful and foreshadowy line “I want to forget!” — this episode was once again a marked improvement over its predecessor.

A scene with Boyd and Topher once again explores some of the nuances of the Actives and biology, in general. Topher’s worried about the “flocking” that the three main actives are exhibiting, which is likely a way for the show to explain away why the same four Actives will so frequently be seen cavorting in future episodes when their memory of past cavorts has been erased. This also emphasizes something left implied to this point: the Actives are completely wiped every time they’re brought back to the Dollhouse. Which is a convenient way of escaping the questions other Actives might naturally have when one is on a long-term mission. It also ensures Actives can’t develop long-term relationships even with other Actives or staff. The takeaway from these scenes, for me, was that the Dollhouse is very good at what they do.

After this prelude, the mission of the week is introduced. Here, we learn that (supposedly) nobody on staff knows what the missions are, and the risk factor is determined by a computer program. I don’t see how this could be done unless that program was a full-on artificial intelligence, and beyond that the handlers of the Actives are also fully aware of the mission as they observe it at all times. But for now, I’ll take them at their word, under the assumption they’re lying in some way. Either way, Echo’s mission this week has been rated as having “special requirements.” Meanwhile, a Voiceless Higher-Up calls up DeWitt about the progress of the Ballard mind fuck. They’re working on it, but not fast enough to warrant a goodbye from the VHU.

And now Echo’s “high risk” mission starts off and she’s a hooker. Look’s like that misogynist Joss Whedon has struck again. After the hot and heavy gyration’s of Taffy, Echo’s role du jour, the head of security for the hotel comes by offering a bit of champagne to get their dirrtiness, and Eliza Dushku’s over-the-top sexy squeals, up to their suite and away from the hotel lobby. We see Taffy’s client, now shirtless and chugging back the champagne, chasing her down the hallway and into the arms of the aforementioned head of security who wisks her away to his secret hideaway with its impenetrable keypad-based security, whose code Taffy dutifully observes for future use. Once in this fortress of securitude, the head of security gently consoles her and offers her a pay-off so that she’ll not sue either the hotel or her customers. What’s saddest about this is that I could totally see hotels having stacks of cash sitting around to pay off disgruntled hookers. Anyways, Taffy is outraged at this insult and refuses the money and then knocks the dude out and gets on her bluetooth headpiece, which would have looked so cool and spy-ish only a few years ago and now simply seems quite banal, to inform her team she’s in. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to the unconscious guard. She said it earlier too, but I can only type it so many times without bashing my head into my keyboard and I need to use it at least once more later on. And as the credits play, I once again have to express my appreciation of its length, even though it’s still much shorter than a truly great credit sequence, such as Six Feet Under’s or Carnivàle‘s, requires.

After the break, Taffy’s wonderful breasts are discussed, and a line as bizarre as “honest to blog” was in Juno is uttered in the course of said discussion when Taffy says “You can mention that when you blog about this later.” I guess it’s cheap way to explain that the guy she directs to blog is the tech guy for the job. Though really, I don’t think “I was aiding in the illegal theft of something last weekend and this chick I was working with had awesome boobs” is really the best thing to put on your blog. Incredibly personal discussions of the cause of your broken heart? Go for it. But leave illegalities out of it, m’kay?

In short order, all the men on the team have their roles defined. The blog guy is the tech-head, the “professor” is the one with domain expertise of what they plan to steal, and the guy pushing for the murder of the incapacitated head of security is the macho muscle that has no real purpose other than to argue for the most violent solution to any given problem. But Taffy, much like Baby, is not one for being put into corners and asserts her dominance with zeal explaining the “no-kill” order their boss has issued for this theft and that she knows to never second guess a client. And wear comfy shoes.

Now that everyone knows she’s the boss, she exposits that their job is to break in to an extremely secure vault which happens to be completely insecure right now due to an hour-long system upgrade hence the episode title “Gray Hour.” They break in and the other criminals quietly wonder why, if Taffy is the best, they’ve never heard of this criminal superstar. Put simply, she likes the quiet life and isn’t looking for attention. Which is a quick way of the show getting across that you don’t need to be famous to be the best at what you do, thus justifying virtually any mission the Actives might have in the future. And to emphasize that she’s simply another instance of the phrase “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” she promptly breaks through a very impressive looking vault door and leads them all into an artwork trove. After the professor makes us all aware of the value of the items in this vault, one painting alone is worth $17 million he says, we learn what they’re here to steal: the Parthenon.

Meanwhile, Agent Ballard has returned from the hospital with a gun shot wound, some drugs, and a sneaky suspicion that Lubov/Victor is lurking in the shadows. He interrogates Lubov about the picture he received from Alpha two weeks earlier and demands to know who gave him the tip that turned out to be a trap. Lubov was given the tip by someone — with a Georgian accent “Russia Georgia,” not “Sweet Home Georgia,” which Ballard Joss-fully corrects “Alabama” — who now knows that he’s in cahoots with Ballard and so wants protection. Ballard says he’ll help so long as he never sees Lubov again.

Returning to the vault, the professor exposits that Turkey, when they were in control of Athens, allowed the Earl of Elgin to take these small marble engravings from the Parthenon so while it’s not stolen per se, there’s probably a good reason it’s holed away in a vault. (Although, while doing a bit of perfunctory research for this post, I found out that these so-called Elgin Marbles are actually on display in the British Museum and Britain has publicly denied requests for their return to Greece, so all of this is a little misleading historically speaking.)

This little tidbit of historical information, leads the thieves to deciding that Greece hired them to steal the marbles back. As this pointless discovery is fleshed out by the non-professors, the professor is unartfully attempting to close the vault door behind himself locking them in and him out with the marbles. The tech-head tries to stop him but gets a gut full of ancient sword for his troubles, and they’re all stuck inside the vault as the professor makes a clean getaway. Luckily, Taffy’s got an outside man.

She calls up Boyd, who’s waiting in his surveillance van, to inform him of the man leaving the hotel and her desire that he not get away. The muscle attempts to interject with the brilliant line “how are you getting reception down here?!” but is shut down as Echo explains to Boyd that she’s got things under control and can get them out of the vault before the gray hour is over. But as her conversation with Boyd ends a sharp shrill noise rings out through the phone. Echo looks confused and quietly asks “Did I fall asleep?” Oh shit.

After the break, Topher is regaling a coworker with his opinions on the various nuances of his brain manipulating genius. It’s like this show knows how to get me all hot and bothered. Unfortunately, before the show can get me completely titillated, Topher notices that Echo’s vitals have gone off the charts. Her behaviour in the vault isn’t much better as she shudders in the fetal position “shall I go now?” awaiting her preprogrammed response. The muscle is confused and decides, as per usual, that the solution to the problem is more violence. Amazingly, it doesn’t work.

Boyd, on the other hand, has got his shit well in hand. He shoots the professorial prick just for the fun of it and gets the marbles. Meanwhile, Topher is explaining to DeWitt how Echo has lost hers. Her vitals are off the chart, and despite explanations from others, Topher knows that her pulse rate, with her current personality, would never go over 65 BPM. Something went wrong. Luckily, they’ve got a recording of Echo’s conversation with Boyd, and Topher is terrified when he hears the high pitched noise that ends the call. After a bit of befuddlement, he explains that Echo has been remotely wiped, something that has never been tested and shouldn’t have even been possible. Echo has essentially been born again without the comforts the Dollhouse has built into their wiping protocol. And she certainly won’t be able to help herself.

In the vault, the muscle is working on getting Taffy back, but all Echo can do is repeat the things he’s told her to say. “Taffy’s gone man, and she’s not coming back.” the tech-head says as he cradles his gut wound. Which leads us to Sierra waking up in the Dollhouse brain-changing chair. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to DeWitt who says she needs Taffy’s help. Taffy’s back, people.

After the break, we get a scene where the tech-head teaches Echo about art. He talks about the appearance of art, and how it can either be about what you see or about what is. “That’s what art’s for: to show us who we are” he says romantically. It’s an interesting little scene where the discussion about the art around them effectively mirrors Echo’s disintegration under the stresses she’s experiencing. It would be nice if the scene was a little longer, even though it’s a little shoe-gazy, but the muscle decides it’s time for more muscle. He calls them all weak and busts out a drill to… I’m not really sure what he plans to do with it, he does know vault doors have protection against that sort of thing, right?

SierraTaffy is livid back at the Dollhouse, that she got passed over after all the work she put into planning the Parthenon heist. She repeats EchoTaffy’s story about never second guessing clients. She even adds on the comfy shoes bit, to emphasize how meaningless the distinction between the first Taffy and the new Taffy is. They’re both the same person, just in a different body.

Now that Topher’s had some time to process what happened, he feels the need to barrage the audience with completely meaningless technobabble about “neurotropic factor” and how impossible it would be to break through all the firewalls he put into place. He’s certain that this isn’t a one-man hack. Which is a little odd given his scenes with DeWitt later on. He calls up Boyd to ask if Echo seemed normal when he took her out tonight. Boyd answers but wants to know why it matters. I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Was he thinking that Echo did the remote wipe to herself? That it was an inside job? Oh right, the show just needs a credible reason for Boyd to know that Echo’s in trouble. And so Boyd calls up DeWitt to complain that he was left out of the loop. And then he demands from the professor a map to the security room they entered the vault from. SierraTaffy continues her role as an exposition machine, explaining that while she has all the skills needed to solve this problem there’s a time factor as well. There are only nine more minutes left in the gray hour, so there’s no way for her to do the job in person, but if Echo can follow instructions everything will be all right.

Tech-head continues his art lecture series, soon to be released on his blog and available on iTunes, and Echo offers the crucial information that she likes sky. And that there’s a mountain in the painting they’re both looking at. She then asks what her name is and explains that when she’s “there,” her name is something else. Is this an example of her memory persisting, despite what Topher’s instruments indicate, or an example of the depth of the base state programming of the Actives? Is she programmed to have the name Echo when she’s in the Dollhouse? It’s a seemingly pointless digression, but it may be important in future episodes. Either way, tech-head is sick of Echo’s child-like persona. He asks her to get something from his bag. As he prepares the syringe, he explains to Echo that they’re fucked and the only way that door will be opened is by the security guards outside, who will take them to prison.

“What’s prison?” Echo asks. “It’s a place with no sky” Tech-head helpfully answers. The look on Echo’s face as she hears this description of prison is deep with meaning and memory. She’s been in prison before. “We’re bad guys.” Tech-head says as he slide the syringe up to his arm. But death is the easy way out, says the muscle. He takes the syringe away, lifts the no-kill order, and takes out a gun.

Topher continues to explore the list of possible hackers that could have remote wiped Echo. Although, that list should probably be pretty small given the secrecy about Dollhouse’s very existence. In fact, after throwing away his most recent accusation for being a hack, he says “there’s only one person I know, who could achieve a remote wipe. And he’s dead.” The look of confusion on his face lingers until just before the camera cuts away when it quickly shifts to one of understanding.

SierraTaffy is trying to call Echo but nobody’s picking up. She explains how she’ll open the vault door. Echo finally picks up. And SierraTaffy and EchoTaffy’s similarities are once again noted by the show. They both hide their vault-cracking resin in their bra. There’s a short vault-cracking scene which doesn’t end up successful and SierraTaffy heads off to her “treatment” with her briefcase full of cash. Something tells me, she’s not going to be leaving with that money.

Because official authorities are potentially getting involved, it’s time for the Dollhouse to make sure they’re isolated, so DeWitt orders a couple operatives to be ready to eliminate Echo should the need arise. She is also explicit that she doesn’t want Boyd knowing about it, as she thinks he’s grown too attached to Echo.

The alarm has been set off, the guards are closing in and the muscle is telling Echo to shoot at the bad guys. This confuses her because she was pretty certain that they were the bad guys. So the muscle holds his gun to her and says to shoot or be shot. Echo would prefer to just go, sans shootout. Somehow, she gets it into her head to take the syringe of death and inject it into the muscle’s neck. How she knew it would harm him is left unanswered as her previous reaction to it was completely benign. Regardless, the muscle goes down and shoots off a few rounds as he does instigating a one-way fire-fight in which he fires blindly and yet somehow manages to hit every guard that the camera shows. Tech-head gives Echo instructions on how to get out and then throws a smoke grenade. Boyd follows the map drawn for him. He gets to the whole in the wall as Echo and the tech-head are making their way out.

“Are you OK?” Boyd asks. “He’s broken.” Echo responds talking about tech-head as she passes him over to Boyd. Boyd reaches his hand out for Echo to take to which she says “I’m not broken.”

Finally, Ballard gets back from his help-getting mission which turns out wasn’t so much a “help you out” mission as it was a “fuck you over” mission. Lubov is marked for capture everywhere and if he tries to leave LA, he’ll be picked up by the FBI and dropped off with a handshake at the Russian mob’s doorstep. Harsh, dude.

Well, Echo’s back to being a blank slate, the marble is intact and headed to the client and Topher says the remote wipe did no permanent damage. But that’s not what Topher is really there to talk about. He knows that Alpha was the one that remote wiped Echo. Nobody else could have done it. DeWitt needs a signature from Topher: his security clearance has been upgraded. Alpha is indeed alive. And out there. The Dollhouse is not all powerful says DeWitt. Though its creation appears to be.

Echo has returned to her calm life at the Dollhouse, and yet seems affected by these recent events as she draws a sad face in the steam of her mirror. And wipes it away.

This episode once again relied on integrating the mythology with the episodic storyline. Like the second episode, Alpha introduced something unexpected into one of Echo’s missions. It still remains unclear what Alpha’s goal is with these sabotages, but they seem to be having an effect on Echo. For example, at first glance, the thread with Boyd trying to get to Echo to help her out seems pointless, but after re-watching, it seems like they’re trying to show that Echo managed the situation without Boyd’s help. Unlike what Topher said, she did help herself. Is this a growing ability in Echo? And if so, was it instigated by this event or was it always there waiting to be demonstrated? And is that why Alpha spared Echo during his massacre?

The mythology of the show and the questions regarding Echo’s growth are deepening. I’m glad that the show is expanding the mythology so quickly, though mostly because it means we’ll probably be getting answers some time this year, and given that the likelihood of Dollhouse getting another season diminishes each week, I hope for some level of closure before Fox bitch slaps this show into oblivion. The show still suffers from the problem that the Ballard storylines are far too separate from the rest of the action. This episode took a step in the right direction by getting DeWitt involved in his story, but it needs to be even more integrated. I know I say this every week, and given that the show started at a B+ and is thus far at about an A- the improvements might seem marginal, the show really does continue to improve with each new episode. And episode seven is supposedly when the season really kicks off. I can’t wait.

I started watching Kyle XY for a lot reasons. The first reason I had was the music: there’s an ongoing thread in the original scores for Kyle XY that, to this day, reminds me of Explosions in the Sky. And we all know that Explosions in the Sky’s music makes even the most mundane moments seem epic so the early moments of the show were greatly enhanced by the minimalist bombast of the score. I mean, there’s a scene where Kyle eats a freaking muffin in the first episode that makes it seem like he’s climbing Mount Everest.

So the music made me stay for a little while, but the thing that really made me stick around was the novelty and realism with which they handled a character with complete and utter amnesia, though it’s not really amnesia per se. The scene I linked to earlier is Kyle’s first meal. He didn’t know what food was or how to eat before that scene and his discovery of it is handled very well. In a scene shortly after this he pees his pants because he didn’t know what that strange sensation he was having meant. There are lots of little interesting trains of thought brought up through the narration in those early episodes that offer a fantastic look at what it might be like to be born fully grown. This sort of storytelling is already very much in the realm of science fiction, but the show goes beyond that by introducing Kyle’s superhuman abilities and the mystery of where he came from, why he isn’t there anymore, and why he has no bellybutton. And while those sci-fi elements are interesting, the thing that really truly makes me excited to see each new episode is the characters.

When I wrote about Kyle XY getting canceled I mostly brought up its sci-fi aspects, but the real world relationships are why the show is so good. That science fiction is a part of the tapestry of the show is surely a reason I enjoy it, but I get as much pleasure from Kyle using his super genius brain to hack into a mainframe as when he’s super nervous about his first date with Amanda.

Last night’s episode had some of the sci-fi stories to tell, but the real beauty of them was that they were there to facilitate telling stories about the characters. Kyle used his ability to visually explore memories to help Jessi, his female bellybutton-free counterpart, get some closure on the disappearance of her mother. Those scenes also brought some much needed empathy and humanity to Jessi and managed to convert me from a Jessi pseudo-hater into a full-on Jessi/Kyle shipper. And all of that happened in just one of the plots of the episode. In another thread, Josh and Andy, one of the best teenager relationships — one of the best relationships in general to be honest — on television, are forced to deal with their impending separation. And he makes all the stupid mistakes you know you shouldn’t make when you’re desperate not to lose the most important person in your life. Josh began the series as the slacker joker who never takes a moment seriously and if you started watching this show with this episode you would have been amazed at his evolution and growth.

I wish this show was continuing on. Mondays at 9, two shows come on that I watch: Heroes and Kyle XY. I think you all know my stance on Heroes by now, but I haven’t done my due diligence in expressing my love of this sweet little show. Don’t let the fact that it airs on ABC Family dissuade you: this show is worth your time. Enjoy it while it’s still here.

Of course, I wouldn’t title this post “The Death Spiral Continues” if I were extolling the wonders of a show. I merely take the time to discuss Chuck to contrast it with the increasingly dreaful show that follows it Monday nights on NBC. This week’s episode of Heroes continued to disappoint and downright offend as Parkman’s inexplicable prophetic painting continues to repeat a story that was overplayed and poorly executed when they did it the first five times. And when Rebel gives them useful intel, Matt and Peter finally start thinking and they double up on the mind powers to help them get past security. A smart idea and they got a couple good scenes out of it. Of course, why they wouldn’t at least cover the security camera in the room — leaving the others wondering who it could be — is one of many questions that are aroused by the idiotic behaviour in this episode.

Indeed, while in “Building 26″, Matt and Peter get ahold of video surveillance and Matt’s first plan is to leverage that information to get Daphne back. “One life at a time” he says, as though that makes sense. If your plan is to chip away at the problem until it’s been fixed and then suddenly you’re given material capable of destroying the very foundation of the bricks you’re chipping at, a change in stratagem might be in order. And then, when Peter escapes with that information, instead of bringing the information immediately to all the news outlets and uploading it to Youtube and posting to dailykos under the username LoveIsTheAnswer about the abuses of the Executive Branch and how horrifying the rounding up of these superpowered-Americans is for the freedoms of all Americans, he calls up his totally trustworthy brother who’s never betrayed him before and makes a deal to exchange all the incriminating evidence he has for Matt and Daphne. Even Nathan is astounded! It’s the stupidest deal ever. If you release the information to the public, Matt and Daphne would be ultimately freed, along with everyone else they’d illegally imprisoned. That’s what TNC would call “stepping over dollars to snatch up nickels.”

Oh but the stupid is strong with this episode. That’s just one of three equally stupid and repetitive stories. Claire is protecting Aquaman and, while he’s less annoying than West from last year, the story comes across virtually identical. They’re on the run and the guy saves her with his power somehow. Meanwhile, they discover that they’re not alone, that they have someone to share this part of themselves with. It’s just boring and Claire’s ongoing self-assuredness in the face of her obvious inadequacies is exasperating. And Sylar rediscovers his dad. Turns out his dad sold him to his uncle. Who knew?! The scene where Sylar relives that memory was played as though it were new astonishing information when it’s been known for at least a couple episodes now. The closest thing the scene has to a twist is when Sylar’s dad kills Sylar’s mom via some good old fashioned head-slicing telekenesis. Which, much like last week’s reveal of Mohinder’s pseudo-complicity, doesn’t make sense. Sylar obtained his telekinesis through his real power, the ability to understand complex systems intuitively and “fix” them, so to give telekinetic powers to his dad makes negative sense.

I’m feeling more and more angry with Heroes each new episode. I truly want the show to be good. I don’t like abandoning shows, especially not shows with sci-fi and comic book trappings, but Heroes is not entertaining for me anymore. Other shows are much better. Chuck, for example. Watch them instead.

The superstar-gone-crazy storyline isn’t entirely original, but because this is Dollhouse you get a chance to compare the assembly-line construction of pop stars the industry operates on  – there’s even a line about Rayna, the pop star in trouble, having stalkers since “singing for the Mouse” a clear reference to the Disney Mousketeers and their continual stream of stars — with the programming the Dollhouse gives to its Actives. Of course, there are obvious advantages to a story such as this…

Meanwhile, in the Dollhouse story-line a new aspect of the Active’s programming was revealed in this episode: Actives are given a persona, the identity they’re portraying, and a parameter, the underlying requirements of the mission. Echo’s persona is a singer, but her parameter is to protect Rayna at all costs. It’s an interesting addition to the mythos that opens up lots of possibilities regarding the inconsistent programming of the subconscious and conscious minds of the Actives.

The story definitely goes over-the-top with the diva personality — the exasperated line “Is somebody eating a mint?!” comes to mind — but I suppose it helps in establishing that she’s crazy. Echo’s solution to the Rayna’s suicidal tendencies is simple: bring her close to death so she can realize it’s not that appealing. But it breaks from her mission parameter in a 3 Laws of Robotics sort of way, which is interesting but a cause of consternation. Because of Echo’s improvisation there’s talk of an Attic, where inactive Actives go to sleep forever, which harkens to the boxing of Cylon models on BSG. But in the end she saves Rayna from herself. She also seemingly remembering her earlier interactions with Sierra at the Dollhouse during the mission; even stranger, Echo and Sierra seemed to remember each other when back at the Dollhouse. Things are moving quickly here, and Echo’s awakening will surely be a “game-changing” event in Dollhouse should the show survive long enough to feel its effects.

On a related note, I have to say I was really impressed by the performance from Dichen Lachman, the actress playing Sierra. Her captivity scenes were very good. She played the fear very realistically. Kudos to her. I just hope she doesn’t play an Australian persona too often; I know she’s already Australian so there’s no need to work on an accent but the landscape of American television is becoming inundated by Australian actors playing American roles which on occasion have to pretend to be Australian. Not that it’s a bad thing when they’re all as gorgeous as Yvonne Strahovski, Dichen Lachman, and Alex O’Loughlin.

And finally, Ballard’s Russian mob informant is revealed to actually be a Dollhouse Active presumably on a mission to get Ballard killed. It’s not a huge surprise, again because of the press photos showing that actor as an Active, but it’s a new development and the reveals thus far only skim the surface of what Viktor’s mission actually is and what the Dollhouse has in store for Ballard. At first glance, the information given to Ballard was to set him up to be killed by the mob, but who’s to say what the real intention was. Ballard’s plots are all so minor and insubstantial right now, it’s hard to put any effort into examining them, but I’m sure as the show progresses he’ll get closer to the Dollhouse and more integrated with the rest of the show’s stories.

The show’s improving. This week’s episode wasn’t as good as last week’s for the same reason the pilot was a little lackluster: the main story wasn’t that enthralling. But the show is getting better. The characterizations are getting richer, the long-term stories are getting layered in wonderfully, and the dialogue is getting smoother and Joss-ier. So freaking watch it, because the ratings are not good people.

Fuck off, Heroes.

On the TWOP forums, some people will come out proclaiming that a certain episode of Lost was patently obvious and they saw it all coming. Most of the time, I’m astounded by that. “Nobody could’ve seen all the little details that came out during that episode coming!” But the bookends of this Heroes episode were obviously supposed to come as a shock and failed utterly to do so. And the only reason the little details that came out during the episode weren’t obvious was because I was still under the assumption the writers would try to make the characters actions make sense.

Instead we get an utterly pointless “reveal” that Mohinder received oblique references to the Guantanomutant Brigade’s plan via HRG a few weeks before all this happened (which doesn’t even make sense because Suresh got into HRG’s car to try to escape the commandos earlier this season); and Parkman decided to become really stupid, or at least further express his innate stupidity. I admit, I enjoyed the scene last week where Suresh, Parkman, and Peter took HRG away for nefariously good purposes, but when they continued with that story all we got were a couple lame references to torture and Parkman realising that if Daphne is alive he doesn’t need to be a dick. He still barely knows Daphne. And the life that he initially saw of them living in NYC raising Molly isn’t going to happen since Molly seemed to have disappeared at some point during this season. They still haven’t really given a reason for the appeal of that relationship. I think they wanted to imply that they’d become a long-lived relationship earlier this season with the household squabbles they had before the squad of mutant-ready commandos took them away, but we never saw any of the connective moments before that so it feels hollow to me.

And the torture stuff was even worse, because in the real world torture doesn’t even get accurate results. So Heroes attacks the technique of torturing people for information not because it’s useless and doesn’t even get you useful information, but because it hurts people. And obviously the intense staring that Parkman gave HRG is nothing compared to the psychological warfare that took place inside the torture chambers of the Bush administration. So they fail in two ways.

And for some reason they’re trying to redeem Nathan now, but here’s the thing: this volume started off with him giving the information on the heroes to President Worf. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have needed to rein in the more extreme hardline members of his anti-hero task force. His intentions are bafflingly stupid.

Heroes failed to redeem itself. After last week’s episode, and the Heroes screed I wrote shortly afterward, I was close to quitting Heroes entirely — which is a pretty big deal given how long I’ve been watching Smallville, a show that peaked a long long time ago and was offensively bad for a few years there — and this episode has done nothing to shift me away from that stance. Naturally, I have to stick it out until at least the end of the season — i.e. Bryan Fuller’s return — but unless the show improves drastically in those last few episodes don’t expect me to still be watching when season four rolls around.

From what I’ve read online, this was originally scripted as the seventh episode of the season. Some of the direct correlations between scenes in the pilot and this one make that statement suspect but it does explains why there’s so much exposition regarding the mythology mysteries, answers which normally would have taken half a season to unfold. But if if truly was the seventh originally, I can see why they bumped this episode up because it was an amazing hour of television.

Last week’s main story was a little lackluster, despite the interesting implications of what happened in it. This week was more exciting, less cerebral. The sort of exciting adventure the show needed to let its audience see a less restrained side. Not that this was a light-hearted romp; an episode where a seemingly innocent adrenaline junkie’s weekend date — with the crazed survivalist Richard O’Connell played brilliantly by Matt Keeslar — for Echo turns into her running for her life from the same man determined to find out if she’s worthy of living, if she can escape his manhunt, isn’t something to dance around about. But there’s much more levity in this episode, and the dialogue has become much smoother. The growing pains the pilot suffered from are almost completely gone here.

While this week’s main story was by far the more interesting half of the episode, the flashbacks in the Dollhouse to the events of a few months ago were excellent as well. The naked man who ended last week’s episode is Alpha; an Active, presumably one of the earliest versions of the Actives given his name, who, either at least partially retained his implanted personalities despite mind wipes after missions or was implanted by an unknown party with a personality and skills he shouldn’t have, broke free killing almost everyone in the Dollhouse and disappearing. He spared Dr Saunders her death, instead slicing her face leaving her scarred and damaged, and left Echo alive and unharmed surrounded by the dead bodies of her fellow Actives.

In this back story, we also learn of the imprinting process Boyd, Harry Lennix’s character, went through with Echo which made her unconditionally trust him in any circumstance. This trust is ingrained in her via key phrases which she reacts to in a preprogrammed manner. Which is why when, in the midst of the hunt, Echo ignores Boyd’s invocation of the key phrase and instead takes charge of the situation and going up against O’Connell on her own Boyd is perturbed. As would the Dollhouse if Boyd mentioned it, but it seems like the paternal connection he has with Echo will encourage a few helpful omissions from his report.

Alpha is said to have been killed after his escape by the Dollhouse, but we know he hasn’t and his message to Ballard was received this week while Paul was examining the crime scene from last week’s episode, much to the chagrin of the detectives actually assigned to the case. (Ballard has a few scenes this episode and they’re all fairly unrelated to the rest of the action on screen which is why it’s possible they were taken from whatever was originally the second episode and injected into this one to make the continuity stick.) Now that Ballard has a face to connect to the Dollhouse, albeit a face that doesn’t exist according to the FBI database, he will be even more determined. There’s a nice scene in there where Ballard’s attractive and clearly into him neighbour tries to offer him a nice home cooked dinner and gets shot down via the obliviousness and doggedness of the agent. It’s a little heavy-handed at getting it’s point across, but it’s still better than the kickboxing scene from the pilot.

The beauty of Joss Whedon’s work, as I noted when discussing the Buffy episode Doppelgangland, is his ability to combine stand-alone story lines with ongoing arc threads and this episode is an brilliant example of this. O’Connell’s actions originate from him and the conflicts he introduces are resolved within the span of the episode but the mystery of his origin’s, which were meticulously constructed by someone else (most likely Alpha), add to the overall arc. Similarly, the back story related to Boyd’s introduction to Echo not only allows some exposition regarding the process and Active and their handler go through together but also develops the long-term relationship between the two characters which is built upon by the main action of the episode.

If this episode is a sign of what’s to come from Dollhouse, then consider me in it for the long haul. However long that may be.

You know, today I was asked only one question
One question all day
Do you know what that was?
“Do you want this supersized?”

Bullshit. Balderdash, even. Granted, I can come up with one or two extremely specific scenarios where that could happen but the most typical one — ordering food at McDonald’s — would have a question preceding that simply asking for your order. Lawyered! I get it, you think society is nothing but mindless corporate drones and pigs at the trough. I really do appreciate the inclusivity of your politics. I mean, I know I’m opinionated as fuck, but at least I target my disdain at specific groups which are disdainful not the entire fucking world.

Supersize guns
Supersize planes
Supersize satellites
…
How about we supersize 3rd World debt relief?

Laaame. Seriously, that’s just a stupid line. Supersize 3rd World debt relief? How ’bout you supersize your ego? Oh wait, that’s not possible. Also, I know you wrote this song when Canada was running a surplus but dude, we’ve got enough money problems as it is. Let’s put out our fire before we go water the neighbour’s lawn.

Around here our ambition throws a non-perishable item in a donation bin at Christmas
And it pats itself on the fucking back because it thinks it’s done something decent

Yes, Matt Good. Please belittle all the people in the world who try to be generous. I guess they’re not generous all the time so you might as well treat them like shit for giving even a bit of a damn. That’ll get society to be nice and apathetic, and that’s really what your music is all about isn’t it?

Most recently the hate has been pushed onto Hiro, and here’s why. The show sucks. It has nothing to do with Hiro, or his current journey. At least not in particular. What’s wrong with Hiro, is what’s wrong with Heroes.

Abuse of Awesomeness

During season one, one of the recurring characters was played by Richard Roundtree. AKA Motherfucking Shaft. So obviously he was playing a badass with awesome powers. Wait, what?

Shit. Well, he’s in a coma but he can wake up and reveal his awesome superpowers and kick all sorts of ass. Wait, what?

Fuck. Well, he’s dead — and it appears the only thing his death accomplished was to get Peter laid — but Hiro is all about the time travel, so Shaft can still show up in the past and be even more awesome because we didn’t see it coming!! Wait, what?

Oh, come on! You bring the guy back so that he can tell Peter that Love Is The Answer?! And what was his power anyways? Talking to the future? That’s a retarded power, and I don’t even think it was him doing it so it’s especially crappy.

And then, following their atrocious treatment of Shaft — not to mention the purposeless character Charles Deveaux’s very existence — they pump up the awesomeness by casting Bruce Boxleitner for a recurring role during season three. Except that he’s in two fucking scenes in total and they were pretty close to useless in the long run. My point is they’ve got a huge problem with follow-through. And not just with their stunt casting. Everybody remembers that most unheinous moment early on in season one of Heroes where time stops for Peter Petrelli and Ninja Hiro From The Future shows up to deliver him a message.

Future Hiro was fucking sweet! He spoke English without the accent; he carried around a katana; and the slimming lines on that leather trench coat really worked for him. He came from five years in the future but now three years later — possibly four given the sporadic time jumps the show does — he’s still a dweeb who talks in broken English and wears the office clothes for the job he hasn’t been to in years at this point. When Lost showed Jack depressed, addicted, and bearded up three years in the future, they followed the fuck through.

Discontinuity

Retcons are a staple of the comic-book world from which Heroes steals its ideas draws inspiration, but in the comic world, retcons typically come about because of universe altering events or because the story is being reimagined for a new generation. But changing the dynamics of the foundations of your characters doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In the series premiere, Angela Petrelli is arrested for shoplifting socks because she “wants to feel alive.” Presumably because the six months she’s lived without the love of her life, Arthur Petrelli, have left her feeling alone and empty; without her better half. No wait, she poisoned him and was planning on killing him even further just to make sure he was dead before her son walked in mid-homicide. It’s these emotional discontinuities that really kill Heroes.

Does Peter ever think about Simone Deveaux? Or the Irish chick he erased from existence? Does Hiro think about Charlie? Do any of these characters think about the consequences of their actions, or the pains in their past? I don’t see any of that in the performances or in the writing.

The characters perform as the plot requires. Their emotions exist to serve the plot. Their powers shift to drive the plot. Everything about the show is hollow and meaningless. You can change the pronouns of the last four sentences to refer to Hiro and the statements would stand, but the show, and how it treats its characters is the real problem.

Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s new show on the network he swore to never work with again, premiered Friday night to not-great ratings and to not-great reviews, but I think what we’re asking ourselves right now is “what did Blair think of it?” If you really want to hear about it, either read this longish review or, if you want to hurt my feelings, skip to the end.

The opening scene where Eliza Dushku’s character Echo signs up to become an “active” — a reprogrammable human willing and able to be whoever and do whatever the client requests — at the Dollhouse — the eponymous organization behind this booming industry — was definitely there for the mythology builders. It quickly established that the reasons Echo joined the Dollhouse will be a part of the mythology of the show while preparing the viewers by asking the question “what if actions didn’t have consequences?”

The first consequence-less action we’re shown is a perfect weekend between Echo, playing the flirty and fun twenty-something role, and some dude with too much money. It’s interesting that they chose to introduce people to Echo as a high-end prostitute, but it’s also obvious they chose it to demonstrate that actives are completely blank slates when they’re not “active.” Switching from Echo’s peppy and sexy dance moves with a bright smile on her face to the doll-like emptiness of the actives is both a quick way to demonstrate the answer to the opening scene’s question and also gives Dushku a chance to stretch her acting muscles, which is really what this show is all about.

After she’s returned to the Dollhouse and “reset” there’s a short scene of awkward exposition with a brief foray into the philosophical questions this show will undoubtedly ask week to week, when Topher, the tech behind the mind-wipes played by Fran Kranz, says “[Echo's] living the dream” to which her morally conflicted handler, played by Harry Lennix, responds “whose dream?” It’s a simple scene but it sets up Topher as the Xander of the Dollhouse, and establishes the conflict at the heart of Echo’s handler. I keep wanting to use the phrase “effectively introduces” because most of the scenes are explicitly designed to introduce these concepts and characters to the audience without being too weighed down by clunky dialogue.

Following this, the requisite Monster of the Week is introduced as a little girl is kidnapped out of her bedroom in a pretty effectively creepy scene. Then the credit sequence plays which is interesting but not quite interesting enough to want to watch each week. I’ve previously talked about my annoyance with the lack of interesting and evocative credit sequences in modern television. HBO and Showtime excel at this but the networks apparently aren’t willing to give up a full one or two minutes for credits the way cable stations are.

After another scene which establishes what the client of the week needs out of the Dollhouse, a hostage negotiator to handle the payment of the ransom for his daughter, we’re blessed with a scene between Echo and the staff doctor, Dr Saunders, played by the always beautiful Amy Acker. Acker plays this scene very peculiarly, with a strange cadence to her delivery. She seems guarded in her interactions, which may be as a result of the two or three large scars across her face, which do nothing to make you forget that Amy Acker is gorgeous.

Echo then walks in on the creation of an Active, a procedure which is more painful and invasive than the typical “treatments” she’s used to. Echo’s dialogue in this scene is a little too child-like for my tastes, actually all of her scenes in the Dollhouse have this problem. Hopefully her growing awareness of what she is will solve this problem, but for now we may be cursed with obnoxiously written child-like dialogue from the inactive Actives.

By now all the set-up for the episode, and most of the set-up for the series, is in place so it seems like a good time to introduce Paul Ballard, the FBI agent tasked with finding the Dollhouse, played by Tahmoh Penikett. Long story short: he’s very dedicated, to the detriment of the rest of his life, hence the ungraceful reference to his divorce. Oh, and in this scene Tahmoh has a weird shape to his lips that I never noticed on BSG so I hope it’s just a fluke of the scene and not something he’s actively applied to his character’s appearance. Because me no likey.

After all this set-up, we’re over a third of the way through the episode, already an extended 50 minute episode, so the story proper begins with Echo arriving at the client’s house as Eleanor Penn, an expert negotiator who’s handled these sorts of payouts time and again. At least she thinks she has. There’s a couple scenes of her establishing her dominance and her overall awesomeness, and an interstitial exposition scene from Topher about the techniques of implantation. The personalities the Actives are implanted with come from real people, which implies another mythology question that will be answered over time.

I’m not in love with the main story of this episode because, quite frankly, the story of someone who helps kidnappers get their money without police complications isn’t a particularly thrilling idea. There are some interesting tidbits though; in particular, one of the real people who was the basis for Eleanor Penn was kidnapped herself as a child and sexually and physically abused which makes the client, who’s aware of where Eleanor Penn came from, ask what would make those men put such terrible memories in her mind. An interesting question, and one that won’t be forgotten on this show.

Meanwhile, in the world of Paul Ballard he manages to find a Russian mob member who might be able to get him information about the Dollhouse. Though, the mobster looks remarkably like the third male Active in the promo photo above, so I’m thinking that might be a dead end.

After this little interlude, we return to the adventure’s of Ms Penn who’s about to hand over the money in exchange for the girl when one of the men in the team of kidnappers sparks a deep memory in her. He’s the man who took her years ago. Wait, what? Yeah. This episode doesn’t handle it very well, but the question is still floating there to be asked.

After a few scenes of Echo heading back for her “treatment,” which unbeknownst to her is when she will return to being Echo, the Dollhouse ultimately decides to allow her to remain as Ms Penn long enough to get the girl back from the kidnappers despite the complications of the mission. The girl is saved by Echo, and the kidnappers are all unhesitatingly shot down by another Active, Sierra, the one being created in the earlier scene and the other female Active in the photo above. There’s another interesting snippet here. The real person who was taken by the kidnapper years ago killed herself a few years earlier because she was haunted by the memory of that monster for the rest of her life. But here, her memory gets closure. The kidnapper is killed and before he did she gets a chance to stand up to him and face her greatest fear. Is this catharsis equivalent to the real thing? Is the recording of this woman’s memory resolving her deep-set issues in some way resolving them for the original person. It’s an interesting question and an idea I hadn’t thought of when first thinking about the premise of this show. It may be a ridiculous question and one that only I asked but it caught my attention regardless.

Finally, to close of the show we have another mythology building scene. A nude man is seen from behind preparing an envelope for Agent Ballard encouraging his hunt for the Dollhouse while watching a video of a pre-Active Echo discussing her post-graduation goals. The camera moves back to show the room he’s quietly resting in has several dead and bloody bodies in it. Who is this man? Why does he want to encourage, and aid, Ballard’s search for the Dollhouse? And why does he have a video of Echo before she was Echo? There’s a lot in that scene to be explored in later episodes.

This review was much longer than it probably needed to be, but I felt that a pseudo-scene-by-scene write-up was necessary to get at the numerous themes and ideas being introduced throughout this pilot. Should I keep up these episode reviews of Dollhouse, which is unlikely given my post frequency,  they’ll likely gloss over most of the details. As for this episode, the one thing I liked was that while the exposition wasn’t handled with excellence it was usually paired with a mythology or character development chaser that made it more palatable.

Overall, I’m excited about this show. I want to see what happens when Echo begins to remember things she shouldn’t. I want to see Ballard’s investigation progress. I want to see more of the history of the Dollhouse; how it came to be; how people become Actives; what kind of person donates their personality to the Dollhouse and why. Most of all, I want to see more Amy Acker. If this show gets a second season, I hope she’s upgraded from recurring to regular cast. She brought such intrigue and mystery to her two scenes and I can’t wait to see why her character is the way she is.

But then again, given the massive Joss Whedon marathon I undertook a little over a year ago, I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that I’ll be watching this show to the (most likely bitter) end.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

Footnotes

1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it.

The reasoning of the bad guys is never fully fleshed out — there’s some sort of merger in the works but why it’s so essential that Speed Racer not win the final race is really left unclear — but for the most part that’s not crucial. The movie might think it’s better than it is, but as long as you ignore that conceit you get to watch some really colourful and crazy car racing.

The visual style is distinct and consistent, it’s just really fucking insane at the same time. While talking back and forth during a race there’s a particularly interesting set of shots where the (virtual) camera quickly pans from Speed to Trixie who is behind him. It’s a little disorienting, and almost certainly would’ve caused some nausea from those susceptible to that sort of visceral reaction to visual insanity, but it’s also refreshing to see a director exploring what novel visuals can be accomplished with green screen filming rather than simply using it as an excuse not to build sets.

Frankly, the movie is weakest when nobody’s racing. There’s a scene here and there outside of the races that handles itself well enough — Racer X’s discussion of why he continues to race despite the unending corruption in the racing industry in particular that’s reminiscent of some of the themes of the final season of Angel, though obviously not as well done — but overall this movie is mindless but pretty racing.

But racing is what Speed Racer is all about, right? Did anyone go into that movie expecting anything beyond a paper thin plot designed to get Speed into the Mach 5 as many times as they could? If they did, they probably hated the movie. Luckily, I had lower expectations. I wanted pretty racing, and I got it in spades.

The races often confused due to rapid and frequent jump cuts which have become common in fight sequences over the past decade, and the vomit of colours on the screen certainly didn’t help comprehensibility, but it still made enough sense to enjoy the races. As I sat slightly tensed with Speed edging toward the finish line I had to wonder if NASCAR fans see those 3 hours of turning left they enjoy so much as exciting and tense as the races of this movie.

Ultimately though this movie is forgettable; not offensively bad or impressively good, a little too long for its own good, but perhaps worth the time to see it once for the impressive visuals and unique driving style the virtual cars employ.

It doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network.

Oops. My bad. Apparently, unbeknownst to me — but knownst to others — MRC was having cash flow and managerial issues which likely led to the cancellations. And sure, the atrocious ratings probably didn’t help, but in the end, it comes down to a lack of faith in your product. And me, I’ve got too much faith. Everyone I know considers me a pessimist of the highest order, but I’m in fact an incredibly optimistic, almost naïvely so, guy.

Which is why, when MRC shut down production to “work on scripts” I didn’t really see it as the company saving some cash while they decide the faith of the show. I saw it as a company willing to work to improve a product. For the most part, I genuinely believe that television networks want to do more than just sell advertising.

Yes, sometimes networks are too quick with their trigger finger, cancelling shows before they’ve had a chance to build a base, but overall they try to let shows develop if there is promise. Unfortunately, a brilliant show with ever-decreasing ratings doesn’t show promise to most network executives, much to the detriment of good taste. So there is a level of practised cynicism I should have by now, but I generally don’t. No matter how many times I get burned, I keep going back to the networks to see what new brilliance they have that no one seems to be watching. Not that Valentine or Easy Money were brilliant, far from it, but their deaths are a symptom of a greater problem that television is enduring right now. A problem I on occasion rail against, but most of the time am ignorant of simply because I have too much faith.

Oh well, two fewer shows to watch every week.

Beyond that, most of McCain’s policies were overly simplified or left unmentioned. And the few that were mentioned, such as the spending freeze, wlater had holes poked in them by Obama and McCain never rebutted. Every time McCain criticized a policy, Obama responded with a clarification of McCain’s lies and disinformation.

This debate was won by Obama, and in my opinion by a greater margin than any of the previous debates. Not only was Obama a more persuasive debater, but his policies align with my own personal opinions better than most politicians. Obviously, that skews me towards him, but I’d be willing to admit if McCain made valid points that made me question my preference. But he didn’t. Obama won. Hands down.

And Joe the Plumber is now officially a celebrity. Probably only for a week, but he’ll have a wikipedia article, gosh darn it, you betcha.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that both of the shows I’m looking at today are on the CW, a network that has done nothing to engender the support or interest of the internet since killing off the much loved Veronica Mars. It’s also fifth in a three-car race when it comes to network television, but being in last place doesn’t stop a network from having spectacular shows. Just look at early 90′s Fox.

In addition to being on a D-list network, these two shows are both a part of the new deal between the CW and Media Rights Capital which outsourced Sunday night programming to MRC, so the odds of anyone giving these shows more than a read through of their synopses before moving along were already pretty low. So, let’s take a look at two lesser-known television shows premiering this year and their odds of survival.

Valentine

Valentine is a dramedy that focuses on modern day love stories. So far each episode deals with a pair of soulmates who have come to a crossroads in their lives and if not pushed in the right direction their love will not come to be, which typically means bad news for all involved. And at those crossroads are a team of love specialists who are actually Greek Gods. Headed by Aphrodite, now known as Grace, the team consists of Aphrodite, Eros (AKA Cupid, AKA Danny Valentine), Leo (AKA Hercules), and Phoebe who mans the Oracle at Delphi (no longer at Delphi) which helps them gain intel on the love struck soulmates they’ll be helping that week. And since every show needs an outsider who needs expositing at, the first episode introduces a mortal romance novelist to the fray because the God Gang is losing their touch when it comes to Love and they needed a fresh pair of eyes.

Beyond the basic “couple needs some love” weekly story, there seems to be an ongoing story related to the greater mythology of the Gods. In the first episode we learn that as Gods become less relevant they become weaker until they become mortals. Aphrodite demonstrates this by cutting her son with a blade and showing him the blood. Clearly, love doesn’t have the sway it once had in our cynical world. It seems as though this show intends to argue for a few related issues in its overarching themes: What the world needs now is Love, sweet Love; War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing; and finally, that our modern lives are eliminating romance and intimacy from the world and replacing them with instant messages and twitters. That last one doesn’t have a snappy song lyric to go along with it. Sorry.

On the mythology front, Ares, the Greek God of War and Aphrodite’s husband, who now goes by Ari — which by the way is a really clever renaming, because Ari is a Jewish name and the middle east is basically the centre of war in the modern world — makes an appearance in the second episode and extols the power of War in the modern world and the uselessness of Love. There are other aspects to the God dramas but let’s not get bogged down in those details.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. The worst kept secret in the universe. I’m a sucker for a love story. Note that I didn’t say a good love story. A mediocre love story might not make my heart leap quite as much as a good love story, but it jumps nonetheless. Beyond loving Love, I also love mythology and the Greek and Roman mythologies in particular. (There’s a reason I watched six seasons of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and it wasn’t Kevin Sorbo’s brilliant acting.) So this show has the double whammy of mixing Love stories with Greek mythology.

That said, based on what I’ve seen so far it’s focusing far too heavily on the Greek God side of the story. It’s not that I don’t like that story line: it’s fairly interesting. But so far the love stories they’ve cooked up are more interesting and sorely underdeveloped, and given that each episode is unrelated they could really be milking that format and letting their serialized arc stretch out longer.

Easy Money

Easy Money is about a family-run loan shark company. It reminds me of Sons of Anarchy, though I’ve still only seen the pilot of SoA so I really don’t want to stress that comparison. The main character is middle child Morgan Buffkin, who is being represented as the smart one in the family. In the first episode, he buys a book and argues with his friend, who’s selling him the book, that Einstein invalidated Existentialism by showing that everything is connected…

Clearly the writers don’t have a strong grasp of either philosophy or physics (or want their audience to understand that their main character isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is) but at least they’re trying.

Despite his bizarre understanding of physics and philosophy, he really is the smart one of the family. While virtually every customer they have tries their best to get out of repaying their debts, Morgan manages to get it out of them, whether by pretending to be the manager to a ventriloquist, or by uncovering adultery to cajole payments out of people.

There are quite a few disparate threads in the two episodes I’ve seen: there’s a new loan shark business in town is run by thugs who are not above forcing competition out of business through threat and theft; the husband of the ditsy sister seems to be getting into money troubles; and a few different customers have been introduced with varying degrees of grudges against the family.

In addition to these, the main story revolves around Morgan’s origin. He’s always felt out of place in his family and at the end of the first episode he learns why: he’s not related to them. This seems to be the mystery that the show wants to develop over the course of the season, but it’s not nearly as intriguing as they’d like it to be. It’s possible that these threads are going to align very smartly and give a really good pay-off to the progeny mystery, but at the moment it’s not really drawing me in.

All told, these two shows aren’t half bad. They’re nothing special, but they’re good enough for me to keep watching at least for the remainder of the season to see where it’s all going. As for their odds of survival? Well, seeing as both of these shows have already stopped production, to give the writers time to catch up, it doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network. If the CW were calling the shows, these shows might already have been canceled.

There are few shows that excite me as much as The Office and with good reason. Not only is the show that perfect combination of dry hidden humour and outright slapstick, but it has one of the most compelling and engrossing romantic stories to ever grace television. Squee is usually meant to refer to the excited squeal that fangirls make, but I squee. The genius of this show is that the romance between Pam and Jim, ranging from a simmer to a full boil over the last four years, has never been the butt of the joke.

On any other sitcom, the people the writer’s want you to cheer for have stupid and unrealistic situations thrown at them with Hilarious Consequences and the pratfalls that ensue when one of them tries to hide their feelings are usually the heart of the show for many years. Ross and Rachel started off as a series of jokes and it wasn’t until they were together that the show developed any serious attachment to the relationship as a relationship and not as the source of humourous situations. Similarly, with Monica and Chandler the relationship began as a drunken one night stand and subsequent series of sexual escapades leading to an ultimately fulfilling relationship.

Never has a comedy dealt with unrequited love so earnestly. And from the beginning, the humour comes from elsewhere. The humour is the way they react to the mad world we share with them. The humour is the absurdities of the workplace that we all experience, whether we’re software developers or paper salesmen. The humour is never that Pam is engaged to a lazy man who doesn’t appreciate or understand the woman he’s managed to ensnare. What is the core of most sitcoms, an overweight man with a smart and beautiful woman, is handled with the gravity of the real world. And the show doesn’t suffer for it but rather it succeeds because it never laughs at the people in it. (I’m sure some of you think that the show laughs at Michael Scott but I don’t think you watch the show carefully enough.)

This show might not be the funniest show out there, though this premiere was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, but it is one of the best shows right now. It’s better than funnier shows because the laughs come puncuated by a story that many have experienced before and the rest wish they had. It’s better than more dramatic shows because it doesn’t have to rely on introducing drama to its world, forsaking the characters for the sake of the show.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that I really liked the premiere. Every note hit perfectly.

Holly’s geekiness and her hidden yet patently obvious affection towards Michael is opening up Michael as a person. Somehow, this episode made what would normally be a cringe inducing scene, when Michael encourages the whole office to judge Kelly by her physical appearance, into a slightly charming almost effective comment on eating healthy and accepting people’s appearances. And Jim’s advice during the finale of last year seems to have paid off because Michael is steadfast in the friend zone with Holly. Maybe it’ll take him five years and an engagement for him to tell her how he feels too.

Angela’s ongoing illicit yet amazingly drab affair with Dwight was hilarious, but the show was smart enough to show Angela regretting it and devoting herself Andy… at least until Andy decided that not having his college (he went to Cornell don’t you know) acapella groupas the wedding band was a “deal breaker.”

The second biggest surprise was Ryan returning to the Office. I half expected him to be in Jail for at least a portion of the season, but it appears some community service and a stern firing of was enough to set him straight. So now he’s back working reception, and quietly plotting revenge against pretty much everybody.

Being now spoiler free, I had no idea what was going to happen this year — though The Office is pretty good at keeping its secrets; last year I went into the premiere knowing remarkably little given how much I knew about Lost, a show known for its secrecy regarding future stories — so all of these moment were delightful and funny and all around awesome. But none of them could have prepared me for that final scene. Toby’s back! I’m kidding obviously. As much as I love Toby and am sure he’ll make it back to the Office at some point, the scene that made my day, night, week, and month was that penultimate scene in the rain. It was simple and powerful and managed to avoid all of the cliches by playing it as realistically as every other moment in that relationship. Oh and it made me squee. I’d missed that.

No Passion

These people aren’t driven by a desire to uncover the truth, or to find a sister taken from them years ago. Olivia Dunham is just another agent of the government doing her job. The closest we get to her having real passion for her new position investigating “fringe science” is her interest in the fucked up cases Lance Reddick’s character lists off. Which is really more of a “wow that’s pretty fucked up” interest than a “the world deserves to know the truth and I need to try to find proof” interest.

This lack of passion can be good if you take the show in a different route, but right now the show isn’t like X-Files in that way. With the X-Files, the fantastic things Mulder investigated were, for the most part, real. Aliens were out there, Tooms really did eat peoples liver to live longer. Most of the cases had at least a smidgen of scientific basis behind them. But in the world of The X-Files, no-one believed them. In the world of Fringe, these modern-day miracles are no longer on the edge of science only accepted by wackos. People have robotic arms. Corporations resurrect people for interrogation. We are no longer in a world where science cannot explain the seemingly magical. We are in a world where science is indistinguishable from magic. Granted, the worlds of Fringe and X-Files aren’t too different in this respect, and as the world is developed in the coming episodes they may diverge or coalesce, but right now the world of Fringe is full of people who have no vested interest aside from solving the case. That might work for your basic procedural, but I’m pretty sure Fringe isn’t hoping to be your basic procedural.

No Red Tape

Olivia Dunham is described as an inter-agency liason, which basically means she’s everyone’s boss. So instead of the local sheriff busting their chops about jurisdiction, she can just pull rank and get shit done. That’s great because very often that seemed to me like an arbitrary limitation the writers introduced to elongate a story that could be told in less than an hour. But it’s also terrible because red tape and people incredulous of the truth make you empathise with the protagonists. Of course, this world seems to be filled with true believers. The closest the show got to a skeptical response in the pilot was Joshua Jackson’s character, who is really played off as comical. His doubts aren’t seen as those of a rational scientist, but those of someone blind to the obvious truth. Even when Scully was obviously fighting the truth of the situation, you could see that she wasn’t simply saying “Mulder that’s ridiculous.”

Missing Time

This is purely a complaint on my part. There is no positive side to this. Walter Bishop and William Bell worked together in the 70′s on these bizarre things. Then Bishop was put in an institution and Bell moved on to create the biggest company in the world. Now, Bishop is back helping out Dunham and his son on cases similar to things he worked on back then, and Bell seems to be related to it. So my question is this: in the intervening years, no one was able to move beyond the things Bell and Bishop were working on all those years ago? Bell himself did nothing to move the field beyond what was developed thirty years ago? It’s a leap that I’m not willing to take and I have to hope that in future episodes they’ll come upon things vastly more advanced that even Bishop cannot explain.

Kirk Acevedo is Sorely Underutilized

This is just a personal rant about the misuse of actors in general. Kirk Acevedo played Miguel Alvarez on Oz, one of the first critically acclaimed shows for HBO. On that show, he got an opportunity to play a complex disturbed character, and he played it superbly. Over the years on Oz, that character was one of the few to remain compelling and likeable despite the numerous unpleasant actions he commits over the years and that’s a testament to both the writing and the acting. And every single role I’ve seen Kirk Acevedo do since then has been painfully one dimensional. This isn’t a problem with Fringe per se but rather a problem inherent in television today. TV shows have been getting more respect in recent years, but it still has a long way to go before clearly, because most TV shows today still function with barely awake characters thrumming through dialogue meant to continue the plot rather than to drive the characters. Admittedly, this is a shallow judgement given that only one episode has aired so far, but at the moment I’m not optimistic.

Well that’s all I’ve got for now, and it’s not much. Most of my issues are primarily with the implications for the rest of the series that the pilot sets up. They could be handled well, and one of my favourite shows of all time had a very substandard first season so I’m not completely giving up on the show, but I’m not yet in the thrall of this show and they’re going to have to work to convince me.

First of all, Bill Clinton’s speech was really good and was the best so far at explaining the core problems of the republican party. Some of the online pundits are saying that his arguments against the last 25 years of Republican policy would have been better if focused on just the last 8 years, but I think that the very problem is that they’re trying to sustain decades old policies without reevaluating them based on new evidence. Obviously, Bush’s policies are broken, but they’re not broken solely due to Bush’s incompetence, the deeply entrenched problems of the Republican party clearly contributed.

I do think that Hillary’s speech last night, or what I saw of it, was a bit better in its rhetoric, a bit more lyrical and driving, but Bill Clinton’s speech had more depth, more reasoning, much more information about why McCain was the wrong choice and why Obama was the right one. And of course, he let fly those magic words: “Barack Obama is ready to lead.” and hearing that coming from a former president carries a lot of weight.

I see the Clintons’ two speeches as a one two punch. The first telling Hillary’s supporters to really think about why the voted for Hillary and why they shouldn’t vote for McCain. It was a very feminist-oriented speech with many references to the suffrage movement and the great strides her campaign made to eliminating the inequalities between genders our society still grapples with. The second speech was much broader, attacking the Republicans for claiming that Obama is too inexperienced, just what they said about Bill in ’92. It also touched on why our foreign policy needs to change, and that part of the speech left the best most quotable line from his entire speech where he said that America should lead by the power of their example and not by example of their power.

After Clinton, I saw a bit of John Kerry’s speech but not the whole thing. While it did bring up some good points and continued the attack on McCain, I found myself having trouble listening to it because Kerry’s delivery was lacking. Basically, even though I agreed with what he said, he still sounded like a tool.

Finally, Biden closed out the night with a retelling of his and Obama’s life stories, emphasizing the decisions Obama made to get to this position, letting the people know that this is someone who cares about the nation and genuinely wants to fix it and isn’t just some politician seeking power. In regards to his attacks on McCain, I thought the first was bad and reminiscent of McCain “that’s not change we can believe in… [disturbing chuckle]” speech — though not as bad, half because of Biden’s delivery and half because the audience was willing to at least feign excitement — but I thought the second was really good and probably connected with many more people. For weeks and months now people from every corner of the political realm have been questioning Obama’s judgment and ability to lead the nation. Biden’s repeated refrain of “McCain was wrong. Obama was right.” was really good at showing that just because McCain’s been in the game longer doesn’t mean he’s the better man for the job.

I also want to make a special note of Beau Biden. His introductory speech for his father was amazing. It truly and honestly moved me and I welled up a few times. That guy’s going places if he wants to.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the speeches from the DNC so far and thought they’ve painted a compelling argument against McCain as much as it has been for Obama. And watching all of this convincing compelling rhetoric demanding change and improvement for our government definitely got me fired up and ready to go. I can hardly wait for Obama to turn these four nights of speeches into a Grand Slam.

I know that sounds like a pithy remark with nothing behind it, but it really isn’t. Every other Star Trek captain in the canon of Star Trek (which excludes the novels thankfully) is better than her. Even that douche that got Kirk stuck in the Nexus in Generations. Even that shitty I’m-so-goddamned-evil captain in the episode of Voyager where the other Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant shows up and much more worse for the wear.

Now you might think that her ship is in such good condition because she’s managed to avoid conflict and stayed out of interplanetary politics in this backwater ditch of a quadrant. If you thought that, clearly you’ve never seen the show.

Janeway didn’t survive because of her natural leading ability, like Kirk; Janeway didn’t survive because of her subtle politics and ability to empathize with opposing views, like Picard (among other reasons); and Janeway certainly didn’t survive because she had a deep spiritual connection with the plight of those around her and was destined to play a part in shaping the worlds and future before her. Janeway survived because every week, there was a new particle discovered, or existing one exploited for purposes completely unrelated to all previous known usages, that was exactly what her ship needed to get out of the Tight Jam of the Week.

And her ship wasn’t pristine because of the military strategies she employed in her frequent needless battles, but because the budget required exterior shots of the ship to be repeated in new episodes to make the CGI department cost-effective. Every single battle that Voyager went through in those seven years in the Delta Quandrant — always 75 years away from the Alpha Quadrant even though every season they would find at least one shortcut that shaved five to ten years off their journey — was more destructive than anything the Enterprise D suffered but every week the ship was in tip-top shape once again. Even Enterprise made some lame attempts to show that not everything can be repaired without a starbase and some dry dock time with their body-snatching space station episode. But Voyager doesn’t need things like ship repair and shore leave.

Admittedly, some of these complaints are about the show in general, but the fact is the captain is the show. People will prefer The Next Generation if they prefer Picard. But even ignoring the completely unrealistic journey that Voyager took, there are plenty of things wrong with Janeway.

She was a hypocrite of the highest degree. The very first episode of the show, Janeway barters with a tribal species known as the Kazon for some information. What does she barter with? Water, something she can generate unlimited supplies of through Alpha Quadrant replicator technology, but is incredibly rare on the dying desert planet on which those Kazon reside. Eventually Neelix, her tentative ally up until now, destroys all the water they brought just to fuck with the Kazon. Any other captain would have kicked that rat-faced little shit off their ship then and there. But she keeps him around because he knows his way around the Delta Quadrant. If she had seen the rest of the first season already, she would know how little Neelix actually knew about the area, but even without that foresight, trusting someone who acts so duplicitously is an idiotic move.

That’s not completely hypocritical, although her over-the-top reactions to lesser crimes later on in the series show that she has absolutely no memory of past actions; what’s truly mind-bogglingly hypocritical is when she next runs into the Kazon, instead of offering replicator technology and a sincere apology for the actions of one fool under her stead, she claims moral and intellectual superiority by telling the Kazon that they shouldn’t have fucked with Voyager and that she couldn’t give them replicators, or even replicate supplies for them, because it would violate the Prime Directive: noninterference in undeveloped civilizations.

The closest the Prime Directive ever got to noninterference with already space-faring species was when Picard refused to repair the rickety shuttles used by the two planets to deliver the “medicine” for a long-lived plague from one planet to another. Not only was that an exceptional situation where Picard used the Prime Directive to stick it to the planet of smug drug dealers, but it was also exceptional because their ships were actually inferior. The Kazon had warp drives, a massive interstellar pseudo-empire, and could hold their own in battle against virtually every adversary in their midst, Voyager included. That’s hardly an inferior species. No-one would begrudge her for making peace with the Kazon through a cultural and technological exchange.

But that’s all semantics and law interpretation, right? We know now that Janeway has a very strict interpretation of the Prime Directive, so everything’s good. Right? Well, it is until the Hirogen show up and beat the living snot out of Voyager (another instance of the reset button enacting miraculous repairs) and after two episodes of pointless World War 2 holodeck simulations with the Hirogens as the Nazis (why they wouldn’t chose to be the allies is left unclear) Janeway gives them holodeck technology and databases of pre-existing holodeck programs to give them a head start! But at least she’s consistent. Within an episode. (And even that isn’t a guarantee, I just don’t have the time to do more than vaguely recall the idiocy of this show.)

I recall when a lot of people would get angry at disliking Janeway because she was a female captain, so she’d have to be a little tougher. First of all, Star Trek is supposed to be a colour-blind, gender-blind, species-blind co-operative of planets, so why exactly would the sexism of our society be relevant to her? Second of all, she wasn’t a little tougher, and she wasn’t just being an assertive woman. Her character changed depending on the episode, for the sake of a plot. One episode she’d be a tough-as-nails take-no-prisoners hardass, and the next episode she’d be a soft demure lady-in-waiting who had fallen for the Brave Man of the Week. It’s not that people can’t be both those things, or that people can’t change and grow over time, it’s that these disparate aspects of her personality don’t complement each other and they don’t mesh together naturally.

When we see Picard get stabbed by a Nausicaan as a rebellious youth, it’s not a sudden jarring discontinuity in the character, it informs the character we’ve come to know and love. Picard was a complete character, as was Sisko, but Janeway is woefully outgunned here, both by the calibre of the acting but also by the writing and characterizations. Again it’s not that her characteristics couldn’t work together, or couldn’t work together in a female character; Voyager could have been the best Trek up until that time if done properly, but it wasn’t so we’re left with the piece of shit that unfortunately stinks up the rest of Star Trek canon.

I could go on for much longer (I really really could) ranting and foaming at the mouth about all the things that Voyager did wrong and why Janeway is at the heart of most of these problems, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t know of anyone who genuinely enjoys all or most of Star Trek — that is, not just Voyager — and doesn’t dislike Voyager, and Janeway herself, to a certain degree. And it’s not hard to see why. She was an egocentric and fickle, yet stubborn, captain who, despite years of efforts on the writers’ parts, never became a sympathetic or respected character.

It was Voyager and Janeway (and we’ll never forget the horror that was Seven of Nine) that degraded the image of Star Trek to the world. Deep Space Nine was never as popular as The Next Generation or Voyager, but it was consistently better than the latter and was at least as good as the former. With each new year Voyager got worse, and DS9 got better. But when Deep Space Nine left the airwaves, Voyager had to stand for all of Star Trek on its own. It took only a year, but without the credibility of Deep Space Nine to bolster the weaker Voyager, Star Trek was soon tarnished and that scar remained for Enterprise’s entire run. Enterprise didn’t do much to repair Trek’s image until its later years but it was still better than Voyager on its worst days.

I sometimes wonder what the landscape of Star Trek would be like right now if Voyager and to a lesser degree Enterprise hadn’t failed their progenitors so horribly. Would we still have a relaunch movie coming out next year? Or would Enterprise be closing off its seven year run with a Deep Space Nine movie coming out and a new series exploring the troubled lives of intergalactic starfleet explorers as they journey to our nearest neighbour galaxy. Who knows what wonders they would have found in that deep void. And what terrors.

That said, their newest song, Viva La Vida, is quite stuck in my head but it’s not because of the song but what it makes me think of.

Kings is a new show which looks to be coming to NBC in February and while it claims it’s a modern retelling of the classic tale of David and Goliath — with David played by a young man named David, and the part of Goliath being played by a fucking Tank — it seems much more likely from the footage I’ve seen that David’s triumph is merely a kicking off point for a show that will explore many themes ranging from Love and Devotion, both to family and country, to War and Fanaticism.

So what does this have to do with Coldplay? Well, at the end of the Kings panel at Comic-con they showed us a trailer which was most likely cobbled together from the pilot episode set to Coldplay’s song Viva La Vida. And there was something about the interleaving of the song and the show that stuck out to me. It also goes to show how ineffectual Coldplay really is, something a friend of mine noted a few weeks ago, that a trailer for a show that I had never heard of an hour before I saw it left a greater impact than the song itself.

Before the trailer, there was a discussion with the producers and some of the cast, though Ian McShane was stuck in traffic and didn’t make it to the panel, which talked in very broad terms about where the show was going and the kind of support they’re receiving from the studio and none of it was particularly revelatory or insightful so I’m fine with not dicussing it further. But before that they showed us the first twenty minutes of the pilot to give us a taste of what the show will be like.

I really wish that I had seen the whole pilot or at least had the chance to watch what I was given a couple more times because I don’t want to jump the gun on this and overhype the show. At the same time, I’m seriously majorly intensely excited about this show. What I saw was really impressive; the scope of the show is epic, pardon the pun, with the story beginning as a war-torn nation (or city-state, it’s not quite clear) is finally opening their new capital of Shiloh after years of hardship and struggle. Opening is obviously the wrong word because the city has been lived in as it was being built but with construction complete, an inaugural celebration is at hand.

After this brief introduction to the world and people of this tale, we jump ahead a year and a half to the war of their fathers born again. It’s here that David goes up against Goliath, the name of the type of tank that their adversary lines their front lines with, and by defeating it frees the captive hostages on the other side, one of whom is the King’s son.

I’m leaving out a lot of nuance and storytelling here because when I sat down for the Kings panel I didn’t know what to expect, so I wasn’t mentally prepared to analyze and record it in great depth. But what I saw was enough. This show could be “Carnivàle” good, which is really really fucking good in my books. The acting from everyone was really good, the story drew you in, and you can tell a lot of care has been taken by the creators to develop this world.

I don’t know if this is overhyping it because I’ve seen so little but I’ve been burned before by not hyping shows. I sat by and let my friends not watch Firefly when it first aired, I didn’t push anyone I know to watch Journeyman even though I knew it was one of the best new shows of the year and needed the audience. I’m sick of my favourite shows dying before their time. So if my choices are to overhype a show which might end up sucking, or not offer my support for a show which needs a fan base as it develops, I’ll take the former. Watch it. Make it through a full season. If you hate it, leave it be, but give it a real chance.

I’m not calling it “The Dark Knight Returns” because The Dark Knight Returns is a comic about an aging Batman coming out of retirement, and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is about a young batman whose still establishing his role in Gotham. Also, because I try to avoid lame puns whenever possible, but primarily it’s my pedantic comic geek nature.

I’ve been talking about this movie with a friend of mine who’s been insanely psyched for it for months, and his level of excitement has scared me, because while I wanted to see the movie, I wasn’t salivating over every morsel of footage. I wasn’t re-watching each and every trailer growing more and more in love with the movie. And now I know why: in my mind, The Dark Knight being a great movie, and probably the best superhero movie ever, was a foregone conclusion. I left the theatre after seeing Batman Begins knowing the Christopher Nolan knew what to do with Batman. He knew where to take him and he knew how far he’d go. There wasn’t a whiff of worry about the sequel so I didn’t need to constant reassurance. And I was right.

At two and a half hours long, this movie could’ve easily been filled with extraneous action shots and unnecessary subplots, but every moment felt necessary. Beyond that, it left me guessing. Last week, when I saw Hellboy 2, I thought it was a great movie, but many of the beats were predictable. A predictable plot doesn’t mean that the movie won’t be enjoyed, because it’s all in the way a story is told, but when a story draws you in so much that you fail to notice the common threads that run through it… that’s something special.

Gordon’s fake death is something I should have seen through, mostly because killing Gordon would’ve resulted in comic fans literally killing Christopher Nolan. And yet, it felt like it could’ve been real, the film played it real so you felt it was real. Similarly, Rachel Dawes’ death felt temporary; a comic book death. But when I look back at those beats, I don’t see illusion, I see inevitability.

Of course Gordon had to fake his death. The silent partnership he founded with Batman was crucial to Batman’s belief that there were still good people in Gotham. We had to see just how far Batman would go when pushed to the brink. We had to know that while he is the Dark Knight he is still a knight; murder is never an option for him. And of course Rachel Dawes had to die. Without her, there’s no catalyst for Harvey’s fall; Gordon’s death may have been enough, but Rachel’s is much more compelling as a catalyst. And beyond that, without Dawes, Batman has a tragic lost love to add to his tragic past. Now, not only is he haunted by his fear and inaction, but also by the consequences of his courage and conflicts. In this way, we can see how Batman Begins was not the origin story, but rather part one. Both of these films work together to create the complex psyche of Batman and they don’t sugar-coat his deep-seated issues.

But as much as this movie was about further developing Batman, Harvey Dent’s downfall was the centre of it all. Aaron Eckhart’s performance sells you on the earnest DA hoping to take the city away from the mobsters; someone who hopes to one day raise a family in that city. And the scars, both mental and physical, caused by that horrific fire both realistically and tragically showed him that what the Joker espoused was in many ways the only sane way to live in a city as crazy as Gotham.

Rachel Dawes, whose life with Harvey and her inevitable death which push him over the edge, is played perfectly by Maggie Gyllenhaal, though I was not offended by Katie Holmes’ performance in the first film. She is strong and secure, and at the same time deeply and vulnerably conflicted by the two loves of her tragically short life. Michael Caine’s work is also a great boon to the film. The storied past of his Alfred give him a greater depth and allows him to provide insight which elevates him above being a mere butler to a member of the silent force behind Batman; the group who inevitably suffer yet fight on despite that certainty.

Of course a review of The Dark Knight wouldn’t be a review without discussing Heath Ledger’s Joker. It goes without saying that Heath Ledger embodied the role perfectly, but it wasn’t just his performance which solidified the Joker as a classic film villain. This was exactly what Joker should be: malevolent, violent, brilliant. The closest thing he has to a rationale is to prove to the world that anyone can be torn down. That a city can be torn apart through terror. The fact that he is so mysterious is his greatest strength. He has no name, he has no past, he has no reason. Of all the versions of the Joker that I’ve seen and read, this one was the best. The tattered clothes he made himself, the warpaint, the scarred smile, his anarchistic aims. I can’t think of a better way to portray that character, and that’s both a testament to him, and to every other person involved in the character’s creation, from the costume designers to the writers.

Some of the nice touches I liked about the movie ranged from the origin of Harvey’s “Two-Face” name which is foreshadowed in the early beats of the story to good effect, and the idea that Batman is “more than a hero” which I read as a subtle reference to Batman being a superhero. I also loved that copycat Batmen were dealt with in the film as they would inevitably arise in that world of burgeoning hope, however misguided.

My only complaint is the Batman voice. Bale’s efforts to differentiate between Batman and Bruce Wayne are admirable but troublesome. Kevin Conroy’s work in the Animated Batman stories is much better, because the difference between the two voices is noticeable but subtle. Here, the gravel in Bale’s throat distracts from what he’s saying, though only slightly and not nearly enough to detract from the major accomplishments of this film.

So based on the comment by Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox, another excellent performance in a film stocked with them, that Batman’s new armor will handle cats, I’m expecting Catwoman to play a role in the next Batman film, though that may have been an unintended reference. But forget about sequels and prequels and all of that junk. This movie stands on its own without any help. The stellar main cast, backed up by strong performances from the supporting cast members, make this not only one of the best superhero movies ever made, more than one of the best comic book movies ever made, but one of the best movies ever made.

But all told, this week was pretty awesome. Of course, the real meat of this awesome sandwich was Y’s last issue and Lost’s premiere. As much as it sucks to see a long-term story you’ve come to look forward to go away, all stories need to end. That’s why Y was such a bittersweet experience. The final issue was more of an epilogue, recapping sixty years of the new world of inordinately few males. It highlighted the greatest hits of Yorick’s remaining life. There are some reasonably shocking moments, but all in all the story ends with a conscientious, relaxed whimper.

Lost goes in a different direction. The show blasts out of the gate and lays on the awesome in heaping dollops. From the flashforwards to the freighter people to the splitting of the losties, everything follows from the finale of last year and sets up the rest of the season. I say it sets up the rest of the season, but from what I’ve heard this season moves very fast, so many of the threads introduced over the course of this episode may be mostly resolved within the next few episodes, naturally leaving more unraveled threads to play with.

And yes, I purposefully used the word awesome way too many times in this post. I’ve always been bad at describing my opinions on recent events. I typically need some level of hindsight before I can articulate well enough to get my point across, so I’ve decided to avoid that quagmire entirely by using a simplistic adjective to demonstrate my general state. I feel that this may be yet another awesome step in my progress to developing my writing ability through accepting of existing un-awesome limitations. So… this week was pretty freaking awesome.

Another thing that most people seem to generally agree on is that Firefly is the best of the three Whedon shows. I tend to disagree on that as well.

Firefly has a great cast and thanks to some great writing they managed to form a familiar and familial bond in the short time they had with each other (the show was canceled before its first 13 episode season had even completed airing) but I don’t think that’s a particularly exceptional task when it comes to Joss Whedon. I don’t think that just because it was Joss Whedon who created this show that its achievements are lessened, I just don’t think that in the grand scheme of things, Firefly told the stories it wanted to tell.

It managed to get across some great stories about family, commitment, friendship, and didn’t shy away from hating on big government. In many ways, the merging of government and corporate seen in Firefly was more fully fleshed out in the final season of Angel — not coincidentally after Firefly had been canned — and it was hardly visible in Firefly; the only reason it’s known is because of obsessive fans hunting for clues for future arcs in the severely truncated run time.

Are Firefly’s episodes great? Yes. I wouldn’t deny that. In fact, the few episodes that aired may have been better than most of the episodes of Buffy or Angel, but I’m into shows for the long haul. It’s the season long stories and the growth of the characters that keeps me coming back. If Buffy had ended in the first season, the few people who grew attached to the show in that time would have enjoyed the show but what would they think of Xander? Xander is probably the most noble person on that show and his personal journey is the most deeply touching and haunting. Without the time it takes to develop that kind of depth, the character is fun but empty. I like the fun, but the empty? Not so much.

In the end, it comes down to distance. To use a lame car analogy, Firefly might be able to drive faster than Buffy or Angel, but it didn’t get as far as them so it’s immediately a lesser series. So, while I fully believe that Firefly would have been a better series if given the time, it wasn’t given that time. It’s still a great show, but because it was so short — more specifically, so unexpectedly short — it falls short.

There is a problem here though: the amulet. Why would Wolfram and Hart give it to Angel? There are some rationalizations made along the way but some contradict each other and none are particularly satisfying for me. It really comes down to one thing: it was a double-edged deus ex machina. The first being the thing that will save the thirty slayers from the army of twenty million ubervamps to cap off the most climactic battle in Buffy history. The second to bring Spike to Los Angeles. And dei ex machinis annoy me. But and they are not unprecedented in the Buffyverse, so I can manage.

If you ignore that little qualm, which doesn’t much interfere with your enjoyment anyways unless you’re someone who tends to quibble the minutiae, this season not only caps off one of the best shows that ever graced Television but also introduces some larger ideas that the show could have explored in future seasons. Previously, the show explored the ideas surrounding Faustian bargains and Pyrrhic victories, and those themes are expanded on this season which puts the phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” to the test.

Angel and his team have been offered a powerful weapon to wield against the dark forces of the world, the only problem is it exists because of those dark forces, so to keep the weapon you have to pick your battles. Therein lies the rub, and man do the senior partners rub that shit. This season, above anything else in the series, shows that Wolfram and Hart are not really evil. They operate because of the evil in the world, and the evil inherent in the way businesses are run. Firefly had a company, Blue Sun Corporation, that arguably was the greatest force of evil in that universe, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Joss Whedon was in an anti-corporate mood when breaking these stories.

The interesting thing about this season is how various ignorant factions of evil battle each other and the casualties are all Angel’s friends. Gunn was given knowledge of the law, which led to the rebirth of Illyria inside of Fred. Meanwhile, Lindsay was employing the amulet, used in the finale of Buffy, to garner favour with the senior partners and join the Circle of the Black Thorn. And the senior partners were slowly wearing away the team’s once heroic worldview. As Lindsay said near the end of the season, heroes don’t compromise with the world; they see the world the way it is and they fight it.

All of these evils twist and distort our heroes intentions, making them less and less heroic, whether they know it or not. And when Angel is finally returned to the right path, it made sense that Cordelia would be the one to do that for him. Not because Cordelia was Angel’s most recent Love — we’ll exclude Nina since they weren’t dating yet — but because she’s the one who’s been with him since the beginning. She’s seen his ups and downs and knows what he wants to hear and what he needs to hear. It was a fitting end to the character, though if they hadn’t made her so damned mature over the past couple years it would’ve been entertaining to see her get completely swallowed up by the glitz and glam of the Wolfram and Hart lifestyle.

There are some who feel like the ending for this season was bad: they are wrong. It was the most tragic yet uplifting ending the show could have done and it’s the melange of those two characteristics that has always made Angel such a fantastic show.

Dawn is completely annoying almost all of the time. One of the few episodes she doesn’t piss me off is the aforementioned where she thinks she might be a potential slayer; in that episode, she’s mature, responsible and selfless. But in every other episode where she plays anything beyond a peripheral role she’s a completely insufferable selfish childish brat. The first time through I’d probably given up hope of Dawn being a character of any depth, but damn my naivete I really thought going into this rewatch that I’d like Dawn by the end of all of this.

And I already knew I didn’t like Kennedy all that much, but it’s amazing just how much I truly hate her. It’s not that she’s bossy and acts like she knows more than Buffy, and it’s not that she does nothing but encourage Willow’s magic, willingly ignorant of her dangerous addiction, and it’s not the hastily developed lesbian relationship between her and Willow, which was probably only created so that Joss Whedon could finally state conclusively to the world that Willow was not bisexual but homosexual. It’s that the writers so obviously want her to be an appealing character by making her strong, independent and “sassy” but, in my eyes, it just made the character abrasive and annoying.

And Buffy was just plain annoying. After about the 30th speech to the potentials about how much they suck and they’ll probably all die trying to conquer this evil… it gets a little tired. Almost every second episode of the season ended with Buffy giving a rousing speech full of bravado both stating how unprepared they all were for this and how they’re going to win regardless. Meanwhile this speech was immediately preceded by Buffy getting the shit kicked out of her or some other terrible calamity. So we get a season full of barking paired with useless impotent bites.

The writers were trying to show how desperate the situation really was but by doing so they made the ultimate success seem… unrealistic. When the single Turok-Han is released early on in the season it’s OK if he kicks Buffy’s ass at first; that’s expected from new enemies. But when, for three straight battles, she is utterly pummeled and barely survives it’s a sign that this is a formidable enemy and not a minion. This is not her being off her game for a fight, this is a real badass kicking hers.

But what happens when the final plan is devised about, oh say, five minutes before the climactic battle? All of the potentials, who have barely been trained in battle let alone hardened by years of real world apocalypse aversion, become ubervamp destroying machines because they have… the exact same mystical strength Buffy always had. So what turned the ubervamps into a bunch of pussies? Plot contrivance, that’s what did.

But that kind of thing is something I’m usually willing to ignore if the other aspects of the story felt true; but the emotions Buffy went through during this season didn’t feel true. Buffy constantly isolates herself despite every single one of her friends constantly trying to open her up. And I don’t think that leadership implies a solitary life. I think Buffy thinks that, despite all the friends she has been surrounded with her entire career as a slayer. And quite frankly, it’s getting old. Well actually it got old in the fourth season but its annoying persistence has yet to win me over.

I think I would have appreciated this path of further isolationism if it led to some lesson for Buffy, but all it led to was Buffy Being Right. When Buffy is finally called on her self-righteous, mightier than thou bullshit by… all of her long-time friends and the potential slayers she isn’t taught a valuable lesson about how to lead without alienating your charge, she doesn’t see the dissent and rethink her authoritarian stance, she gets pissy and decides that hey, her friends are all fucking worthless anyways. I mean, Spike agrees with her so she must be right, right?

So Faith gets a chance to take charge and she royally fucks up. Right? Well that’s what the show would like you to think. In reality, through some magic (literally people, this is a show about vampires) she managed to get some information out of one of the Harbingers but it turned out to be a nasty trap. Well that’s some bad luck but there’s no way for them to have known. Buffy is gracious enough to admit this when she returns to pick up the tattered pieces of their dissent. She ever so graciously absolves Faith of her sins. And then Faith decides to let the audience in on how completely alone you are the second you’re responsible for anyone else, just so any stragglers in the audience can finally figure out the Buffy was right all along. Of course, her feeling alone doesn’t really explain her behaviour except that when you feel alone, no-one else matters so treat everyone like shit instead of treating them like people which isn’t a particularly good message.

With that unexpectedly long rant over with, I feel I should finish this off by saying I still loved the season. The story was compelling, I still loved the characters (most of the time), and, like I said at the beginning of this whole mess, the final moments of the show are terribly moving and I don’t just tear up, I sob like a baby when it comes around. When it’s all said and done, the finale was practically perfect, but there was a lot of parts of the build-up that didn’t ring true for me. But I can live with that if it lets me have the ending the show received. The ending a show that held my heart for so long deserves.

My biggest gripe with Angel was the Cordelia/Angel love story. They were very close and grew closer as the show continued but their love should have remained platonic: the deep respect and admiration shared between champions who have fought beside each other. And their relationship was not a heavy catalyst for anything else. All of the events necessary to bring forth Jasmine could have happened over the course of the series without the burgeoning love. The conflicts therein fed into certain developments along the way but those developments could have happened some other way.

I also don’t like Cordelia being evil, even if it is only because she’s being controlled by a Power That Was. Though when you rewatch the season it’s fun to see all the points where evil Cordelia is subtly twisting the world around her preparing for Jasmine’s arrival.

Season three and four of Angel told a really compelling story, continued to explore themes of redemption and atonement, and had murky water, “so grey there’s hardly any black or white to it” ambiguous moral decisions galore. So it’s hard to complain. Much like season five of Buffy, there’s nothing especially horrible about it, but the moments of greatness come with a nasty tinge of adequacy and questionable plot development.

Both have been so impressive and expressive with their core message. From the startling and terrifying realism of the shock of losing a loved one found in The Body to the nearly beatific monologue Angel gives at the end of Epiphany, both shows were just endlessly awesome through and through those years. One thing that I noticed this year was the much improved serialization on Buffy. In previous years, there was an overall season arc but each episode felt fairly self-contained but this year the stories spread out over the season in a much smoother manner. I still think that seasons two and three were their best stuff but the constantly intensifying story really made the season much more dramatic and addictive.

But as much as I like the more mature themes the show explores in the fifth season, I can’t help but remember the annoying early Dawn. I never loved the character, even in the final year of the show — probably because she was more and more frequently given the childish reactionary personality the annoying selfish half of Buffy handled in earlier seasons — but in the first half of this season she’s like Wesley Crusher on crack for annoying fans. It seems to me that they created the Dawn character to give Buffy someone to care for and not lead — a daughter of sorts — but I don’t think the show ever recovered from her introduction. For that season the story was beautiful and moving and I love the sacrifice that ends the season, but after that she returns to being an annoying teenager who gets in the way more than anything else. Like season four, season five has some fantastic episodes and some really moving moments, but there are aspects of it which still rub me the wrong way. Of course, it’s still a vast improvement over season four in virtually every way.

And yet, with all the greatness going on over on Buffy, Angel still wins out for me. The thing that really stands out about Angel to me is this: there is no Big Bad. When the season is over, the world doesn’t decide that evil is Just Not Worth It for the summer before a new unspeakable evil decides to give it a try. From the very first episode of Angel, Wolfram and Hart is shown as ambiguous at best with regards to morality. But they’re never the Big Bad. Evil simply persists in Angel’s world. Holland Manners says to Angel that if each and every human didn’t have a little tinge of evil in them, Wolfram and Hart couldn’t exist. This goes with the idea that Angel is in many ways about the banality of evil. Wolfram and Hart isn’t the source of the evil we see in our world, it survives because of it. When Angel finally understands this after a dark turn in his character he comes to a realization:

If there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today. … All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don’t think people should suffer as they do, because if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

That idea is the reason I think Angel is the better show. Angel comes to a realization that, no matter what you do, evil will persist but that doesn’t matter; what matters is what we do in the face of evil. This sentiment echoes something Angel says in the fourth season.

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us. Champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from, or what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be. To show it what it can be.

And all of this comes back to the idea that there is no Big Bad. There’s life and there’s what you do with it. Which is a good philosophy whether you’re in our world or a supernatural one filled with demonic monsters hoping to bring ruination to all of humanity. Beyond the appealing worldview there is the fact that, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a great deal of stuff going on with the peripheral characters, Angel was much more of an ensemble show. It wasn’t until the later seasons that Buffy explored the lives of the Scooby Gang in any real depth; there were episodes like Dopplegangland and The Zeppo earlier but they dealt with the insecurities of the character and weren’t a part of the greater mythos of the show. On Angel, on the other hand, characters underwent strife and character growth from the beginning. Doyle’s heroic sacrifices stemmed from what was revealed about him and what had happened to him in earlier episodes. Cordelia’s ongoing struggle with her visions rarely took the spotlight but was persistent even when the plot of an episode was not reliant upon it. Wesley’s development from a bookish weakling to a warrior, though still bookish, and his ongoing distaste for father figures never felt forced and informed much of how we see Wesley’s actions. I did not even mention any of what has happened to Angel over the course of these two seasons; the show is so rich with well developed characters and subplots that it’s not necessary.

There is just so much that I love about Angel and Buffy as shows and as explorations of the human condition through inhuman subjects. Now that these seasons are over with I get to enjoy seasons six and three respectively. Buffy will pleasure me (in my dreams) with episodes like Once More, With Feeling and Tabula Rasa and finally let the fans who had yet to realise it see that Xander is what keeps the world from falling apart. Meanwhile, Angel’s actions from the last season will come back to haunt him in more ways than one and the consequences will reverberate throughout not only the characters but also their world for the rest of the series. This rocks way too hard.

Let’s be honest here for a second, Buffy is a bit of a bitch sometimes, and the rest of the time she’s a huge bitch. Most recently was her behaviour towards Riley during the fifth season. On first viewing it might not have been noticeable but Buffy’s distance from Riley stands out in hindsight. And I feel like his actions, while not completely justified, make a heck of a lot of sense. When I was younger I probably just sided with Buffy because she reacted to any accusations, no matter how accurate, with utter disdain and indignation, but with age and experience I can see what Buffy is doing and it doesn’t endear me to her.

Through the course of the show Buffy reverts to a childish little girl a little too often for my tastes, but every time she does someone is there to give her some freaking perspective. And most of the time it’s Xander. Without Xander, Buffy would either be a mess or dead. Granted, Xander can be a douche sometimes too; they all can. But they all contribute to the slayer. We can even ignore the most obvious example of this — when Xander, as the heart, joined with Buffy to defeat Adam — and still see that Xander is the one who keeps Buffy on track. He’s their rock. He provides stability to the whole gang and from that stability comes strength. And that’s how Buffy wins.

The show was much less serialized than in later years, but you could still see the reverberating consequences of stories. The most interesting aspect of the season is the growth of Angel. As Wesley said, it’s our desires that define our humanity and, while there was a tacit understanding of why Angel fought the good fight, the Shanshu prophecy gave Angel something to desire; something to make him human. Angel moves from that view as his story continues, he begins to fight the good fight because it should be fought, not because of some base self benefit. Angel is always seeking redemption, but somewhere along the way he realizes that redemption isn’t a destination, it’s an ongoing process.

Already in the first season, you can see how the stories told on Angel will be much darker and ambiguous as to who is evil and what is moral. And neither the questions nor the answers get easier as the show progresses.

I think that to properly handle this kind of stuff out you have two options: you can either have a Buffy marathon where you watch the Angel episodes that directly crossover with Buffy episodes or, if you really need to see all of Buffy and Angel, you should go through a detailed analysis of where Buffy and Angel episodes overlap and schedule accordingly. My best idea so far is to interleave Buffy and Angel episodes unless there is a multi-part story. So if there is a two parter in Sunnydale then you watch them directly after one another and then follow it up with two Angel episodes. This way, each series goes steadily forward but the ratcheted tension of multi-episode stories doesn’t get broken up by intervening series episodes.

There are some problems with that but it’s probably the best way to do it when dealing with a multiple TV shows. Of course, how many shows have interconnected shows running at the same time. I mean, you could have a Frasier Crane marathon, but that would entail watching all of Cheers and then all of Frasier; neither show aired at the same time. I’d wager that no other shows have this kind of problem — with the possible exception of the Star Trek shows, but they have completely separate storylines so you could easily watch them independent of each other — so this may be the last time I have to really think about this kind of problem.

But at the same time, the first thing Angel wants to know of the Oracles when asking of his new fate is if he is “free.” In the third season episode of Buffy, Amends, Angel says that he’s a weak person and he always had been. He was tortured by his past actions for over a century and in the back of his mind perhaps he felt that if he did enough good, the math would even out. And it’s with this shallow idea that Whistler convinces Angel to fight for good and aid Buffy. And with this scene we can see that this idea still holds a place in Angel’s mind; as much as he does what he does to “show the world what it can be” he’s still a weak person hoping for redemption. In later years, he realises that there is no redemption for what he’s done and that fighting with that goal is fruitless. The goal of fighting evil is to fight evil; because the people who can, should.

I really love this episode not only because of the heartbreak Angel must endure — to give up what is surely his ultimate dream — to continue the fight against evil, but also because it shows us a point in Angel’s progression as a character that shows a sort of shallow heroism; but heroism nonetheless.

The show doesn’t have the corny or cheesy mentality that drives a lot of Buffy, so its stories can be much darker and the show immediately takes itself much more seriously. Not that Buffy didn’t become a really serious, and sometimes very depressing, show in its later years, but Angel started off with the mentality of showing the real world. This show isn’t meant to be a supernatural allegory for adolescence, it deals with the nuanced evils in the world like the evils of apathy and of banality.

In the coming episodes, the show will grow, and, while it won’t reach its apex until its later seasons, these early episodes show a show ready to deal with the big ideas. Also, this is the first time I’ve watched the Buffy and Angel episodes interleaved since they aired that way lo those many years ago so it’s great to experience all those fun little cross-references anew.

And when Buffy started off in high school at the beginning of the series she made all sorts of friends quite fast. Hell, by the end of the series she was commanding a damned army of students! Do the writers really expect us to believe she’s the demure, insecure wallflower she’s presented as in this episode? And are we really supposed to believe that she could get her ass kicked by a poser on-campus vampire? She has, to date, kicked the Master’s ass, defeated Angel and Spike — two notoriously vicious brutal vampire of the past — and yet this wannabe vampstress can kick her ass? I don’t care how bad she’s feeling about not fitting in on campus, vamp slaying is mechanical at this point and she needs a real threat for it to be realistic.

I’m not great at making friends, in fact I’m terrible at making friends, but even I managed to scrounge up a couple people to talk to in between classes, so to have the show act like someone who is as pretty, as funny and as interesting as Buffy would have trouble making new friends, in any situation, is beyond absurd.

A lot of people hate season 4 a lot because it introduced Riley, and while I never had any strong distaste for Riley myself, I get the feeling I’m going to be considerably more annoyed with this season than any of the previous ones. There are some really great episodes this season, including the Emmy-nominated Hush, but that doesn’t mean the season as a whole isn’t poor. More as my marathon progresses.

But the marathon process behooved quick turnover so I read and I read and I read. And it was a damn good read. The pace was quick, and the story was filled with bizarre twists. The most entertaining thing about the series though is the inexplicable connections between the two worlds. From the soulful singing of the old folk song “Hey Jude” in Mid-World, to the mystically haunted locations strewn about our world that seem to have indelible connections to Roland’s world that has moved on. The next two books are both 700 pages so they’ll be a little more arduous and might have to be split over multiple days but I won’t find out until I’ve watched a couple more seasons of Buffy/Angel.

Xander was still a douche when it comes to Angel but it was considerably more sedated than in previous seasons so it didn’t bother me nearly as much. So much happened in this season with all of our main characters growing up in some way or another. Xander finally managed to find a place in the world and accept his place in the Scooby gang. Willow grew into the wiccan arts, a story thread that will continue to build for the rest of the series. Even Cordelia is given moments of real growth. But beyond that, this season was about how things change. Not always for the better, but things change. And as Whistler said in the season two finale “the big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”

And one thing I have to say about the Faith storyline is this: it’s what the writers of Lost wanted for Michelle Rodriguez. They didn’t get it because they made the character too unlikeable too fast, but because Faith started off as a more vivacious version of Buffy, and was slowly revealed as a deeply troubled person we feel for her much more. I only mention Lost because as I was rewatching the Faith arc it reminded me so much of Ana Lucia that I felt it deserved comparison.

This season was about self-discovery which, unsurprisingly, is something that normal students must go through as they prepare to either enter the real world or head into post-secondary education. Either choice is scary and leads to a much more complicated and dangerous world, and the tone of future seasons only represents the realities of our world transposed to the realities of theirs. They made it through high school and next season… things fall apart. Not only is the former gang schizmed across two shows but the trials they are put through change them all in drastic ways. I can’t wait.

But I’m gonna pretty much ignore the arc elements. It suffices to say: Faith bad, Mayor badder. On to Willow. Something about which I have had many a dream.

She finally realises that she’s boring. Well, she’s not actually boring; she’s a computer-hacking, witchcraft-performing, super-nerdy, super-sexy girl. Any one of those things on its own would mean she was not boring, and putting them all together is not a “two rights make a wrong” kind of situation. But anyway, she likes to think she’s boring and decides to be more dangerous. Which lead to her performing a funky time-folding spell with Anya, formerly the vengeance demon du jour for scorned women, that got messed up and led to her parallel world vamp version coming to in our world. And then the fun begins.

The jock whose homework was to be done by Willow get his ass womped, Willow gets to pretend to be a dominatrix psycho bitch, and last but not least we get our first overt clue to Willow’s future homosexuality. My personal views on homosexuality aren’t exactly as strict as Joss Whedon’s; for instance, just because you fall in love with a girl doesn’t mean you couldn’t also fall in love with a guy. Most people would stick to whatever side of the tracks they’re on, but if you’ve gone both ways before, you’re no longer bound to one side or the other. (To be fair, that might just be a part of my consistent delusion of hoping that Xander and Willow will end up together in the long run, because they’re perfect for each other)

There are so many school-boy-squealing, this-is-freaking-awesome moments in this episode but the best ones sums it up pretty well. Giles rushing like a little boy headed toward his mom to hug Willow. Nuff Said.

The episode is your standard episode: impending apocalypse and relationships in turmoil. The only difference being that Xander isn’t really a part of the gang here. They’re all too worried that Xander is putting himself in too much risk and shouldn’t be as involved in their escapades. So while they’re off saving the world from falling into hell, Xander is having all sorts of adventures. First he falls into some bad luck with a group of undead guys looking to blow shit up, and that’s all well and good until they want him to join their undead gang whose main prerequisite is… well, being undead.

Then, he gets to save the day, at least marginally, by slamming his car into an apocalypse demon whose plan is pushed into the background where it would normally be the foreground. But again, this episode is Xander’s which tends to shift the focus. Anyways, this momentary success leads to a sexually frustrated Faith and Xander’s first time. Then, as we can’t just make fun of Xander for a whole episode without some sort of personal growth or life lesson, he finally manages to save the day. The crazy zombies plans are thwarted when Xander chicken’s the main unman into defusing the bomb. And thus Xander is a hero, though no-one will ever know because Xander realises that showing off isn’t what heroes do.

Of course, really this whole episode is a massive adventure in cock-teasing because they show glimpses of a massive battle with a vicious demon, and even revel each other with the spectacular events of the previous night the following day, all without having to destroy their budget with heavy effects. Just a couple tentacles and and some strobing lights and they can simulate a season finale sized battle. Bastards. But God do I love them.

When the show Angel begins, we’re treated to a new prophecy related to the ensouled vampire. The so-called Shanshu prophecy promised Angel the chance to be human after preventing the apocalypse. But the final story of Angel isn’t that Angel fights to give himself a better life. He fights because there are people worth fighting for. He fights because the world isn’t as it should be and he can do good. As Buffy says in the climactic scene “You have the power to do real good. To make amends.”

Angel doesn’t want to keep fighting. The memories of the things he’s done are so terrible and haunting that he doesn’t think life is still worth fighting for. He thinks the world would be better without him. He says to Buffy “I’m weak. That’s all I’ve ever been.” trying to convince her, and himself, that he can’t resist the temptations of the world and its inevitable that he’ll make the world a worse place. Buffy says “If you die now, all you ever were was a monster.”

Every moment of this scene is replayed in the later years of Angel. And the most powerful moment is when Angel, begging Buffy to let the sunrise destroy him and end both his suffering and the threat he represents to the world, says “Just this once, let me be strong” to which Buffy replies “Strong is fighting. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s every day. It’s what we have to do.” As a long time Angel fan, who on most days considers Angel to be the better show of the two, I can attest that this sentiment is at the absolute centre of what that show is about. So this episode, aside from being a great addition to the ongoing stories of Sunnydale, prepares the viewer to see Angel go through these struggles on his own in the coming years.

All joking aside, the episode is really great because it shows a truly hopeless world and, quite frankly, life without hope shows you what hope really is. By the end of the episode the world is… well, the world is over. Cordelia, who initiated the parallel universe in the first place, dies midway through the episode and you realise that, it doesn’t matter how it happened, this is the real world now. And the world just keeps getting worse until you arrive at the final moments and all the people we’ve grown to love and care for over the intervening years, however twisted they may be in this dreary world, dying by each other’s hands. Angel calls out for Buffy as he turns to dust, and though there is no history between them, the pain of the life lost to the ether reverberates through the moment.

Finally, we come to the end of the montage. Everyone is dead save Giles, who now knows how to reverse all of this. Just as he is to destroy Anyanka’s power centre, she asks of Giles “You trusting fool. How do you know the other world is any better than this?” and Giles replies with such pain in his voice “Because it has to be.”

The plus side here is that all of this is a part of Xander’s growth. Xander’s hatred comes from Angel’s involvement with Buffy so it makes sense. That doesn’t make it less annoying or a more desirable storyline. Really, the only good thing about these annoying storylines is that they are a part of realistic character developments. Sometimes, you don’t like what kind of person someone was, but that doesn’t devalue who they have become.

Overall, the season was even better than the first, and the interesting thing is that it didn’t seem to follow the formula later seasons dictated. Later on in the series, the show settled into a form more like the first season, where the “Big Bad” of the season in introduced within the first couple episodes with trickles of arc development revealed each subsequent episode. The second season was much more casual with its arc development. The real Big Bad of the season wasn’t revealed until the middle of the season, when Angel lost his soul. The arc was still continuous but it seemed structured as three or four smaller arcs joined together through consequence.

If memory serves, season three is structured differently, and seeing as those two seasons are probably the strongest of the series, I’ll have to compare the two once I’m finished the third season, which should be in around twenty hours or so.

And just now, I noticed a fairly glaring plot hole. In the episode “Innocence,” the Gypsy man talks to the person entering his room as though they were Jenny Calendar with Buffy, which is what we’re led to believe given the previous scene, but it turns out to be Angel who’s there to kill the guy. Now it’s entirely plausible that Angel Knocked on the door and the Gypsy guy said “Come in” without looking assuming it was Jenny, but you’d think they could’ve shown that. Without those two additional seconds the scene feels like a gaping hole left by the writer and not only that, but the mistake wasn’t picked up by anyone else on the staff.

And yet, as with all my issues related to Buffy, it’s a drop of sucky surrounded by oceans of awesomeness, so I can’t really complain about my own growing cynicism.

Enter Religion. Now we’ve got a bunch of guys claiming to know how God wants you to act and most of the time it’s decent but some of the time it’s horrific. Of course, the problem with religion is that most of the big ones are pretty loose about their moral restrictions; Christianity, in particular, allows complete forgiveness and acceptance to heaven for simply asking forgiveness on your death bed. It’s supposed to be sincere, but the priest providing the last rites has no special ability to discern sincerity. So you can do whatever the fuck you want to as long as you feign sincerity long enough to ask forgiveness.

The reason you can do whatever you want is this ephemeral promise of eternity. So what’s a benevolent God to do? Convince people he doesn’t exist! Without the supernatural crutch of God, people would have to get their act together, do unto others and all that good stuff; you’ve only got one life, so you better not fuck it up. So you wanna know my theory? I think that if God existed, he would be working towards an atheist world where they follow his principles because they think it’s best, not because He thinks it’s best.

You want to know the really insidious thing about this? This means, that religion is a creation of the devil. Yeah. I know. It’s fucked. By creating religion, the devil co-opted God’s kick-ass plan. And the best thing about it (that devil is really tricky) is that God can’t interfere. He can’t come down and say “No! There is no God! Do not follow these religions which the devil has created!” because he would then be co-opting his own plan. Some people say that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist” but that’s wrong; the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that God does.