I’ve been rewatching Scrubs recently. So far the thing I’ve noticed the most is that JD is a huge dick, and he never really improves despite every episode being about confronting one of his (many many many) flaws and weaknesses.

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?

What follows is me discussing things my mind lingers over as I watched the season premiere of Dollhouse. Plot will be discussed but not described, arcs will be examined but not articulated. This ain’t my old-style Dollhouse review, and I’ll likely continue to experiment with form and focus as the season continues. I got tired of the relentless crutch of the recap template so the style will drift dramatically from week to week I’d imagine.

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.

I’ve been known to complain about Heroes’ lack of consistency, lazy storytelling, poor use of quality character actors, and all-around suckery, but I’m more than willing to admit that this new season isn’t terrible.

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.

This was supposed to be a brief write-up, because I’m still reading Infinite Jest and because it’s three in the morning on a work night, but I just kept writing so now it’s basically a full-length review. However, the cliff notes is: I really liked the second episode of Glee, despite the slight sophomore slump. The only complaint that I have for this episode was that there wasn’t a sense of development from the pilot, the relationships seemed to be mimicking the pilot not building off it. That’s obviously not strictly true, because the plot has moved along, and it’s not like there were drastic character shifts that happened in the pilot (seeing as we first met the characters in the pilot) so all I’m saying is the characters are consistent, but in an ineffably troubling sort of way. And it’s not that that’s a weakness of the show, as much as it’s a necessity due to the four month gap between the pilot and the second episode.

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.

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• 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.’

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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. [↩]

There’s been a lot of talk about the new ABC show Defying Gravity, most of it negative. But, when people started describing it as “Grey’s Anatomy in Space” it became pretty clear they were biased against it.

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.

I’ve refrained from writing about the unaired episode of Dollhouse since I watched it because I wanted to see what other people had to say about it. The reviews I’ve read thus far are unsurprising. They are universally gushing, which is exactly what I expected.

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

Read the rest of this article

A movie that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to when it first came out was Ghost Town. Now, me not paying attention to a movie is fairly unremarkable: I watch considerably more television which leads to me lagging behind the movie world with respect to most movies, especially when it comes to hidden gems.

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.

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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. [↩]

I said I was going to meticulously go through the entirety of Star Trek Voyager and describe the many ways the show went wrong (and the few ways it didn’t), and I’ve been taking notes as I go along. But a problem has come up.

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.

Dollhouse is a hard show to pin down. Through its run — I’m not implying anything by that phrasing, I still hold out hope that it will get a second season — it’s experimented with the implications of the technology at use on the show. It is, in many ways, one of the true science fiction shows remaining. This episode not only tinkered with virtually every form of mind-frakking, but it blew away all my issues with the way last week ended by taking the cliche and playing with it.

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.

This review took a lot longer to come out, not because I had trouble writing it, but because I got distracted by the Save Chuck campaign and by reading the Death Note manga (which is fucktastically good, by the way) during every spare moment of time. I’m not really sure how I feel about this week’s episode of Dollhouse. I want to hold out on judgement until next week, since this episode was all about the set-up for next week’s finale¹, but in reality the entire season has been leading up to next week. I think this entire episode was wonderful, until the last few moments and those I’m still not sure about.

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.

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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. [↩]

Last week, when Prison Break took over Dollhouse’s time slot and its ratings were even worse than Dollhouse’s, I thought that maybe — just maybe — Dollhouse had a chance of renewal. But then the ratings for this week came in and Dollhouse hit yet another series low and underperformed compared to the Prison Break episode that aired earlier that night. So Dollhouse looks truly, and unequivocally, dead. But let’s not dwell, let’s follow the show into the dark.

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.

I wasn’t feeling this episode. I don’t know. Maybe I shot my proverbial wad by internally hyping the show to such a level that there was no way it could maintain its momentum for its run. Either way, this episode didn’t rock my world. It jostled it, but that’s about it.

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.

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Footnotes

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

I’m going to discuss tonight’s episode of Heroes, so avert your eyes if you still give a damn about what happens on that show.

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.