I’ve always been told that the excessive violence and disregard for human lives exhibited in the gladiatorial ring of Ancient Rome was one of the signs that their society was decaying. The blood lust from the crowd had become so extreme and perverse that society slowly collapsed from the weight of it.

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.

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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. [↩]

I tried to keep this one short, but it’s still touching on 900 words. The gist, though, is that I liked it, but I was hoping for more.

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.

Fridays’s episode of Dollhouse was yet another in a string of strong episodes bring the show to its rushed but still enthralling conclusion.

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.

Earlier this week I was talking with my sister and her daughter and the conversation led as it always does to Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues and his death by heroin overdose. I know what you’re thinking, people who read this blog and also listen to Steve Burns’ indie rock musical efforts, you’re thinking that I’m dead wrong and Steve is alive and kicking and in fact you saw his show last week and he rocked the house.

To clarify, Steve Burns is not dead, but my sister and her daughter were both absolutely certain that he was. My sister even bet me twenty dollars that I was wrong, though I doubt I’ll ever see that money.

The more troubling aspect of this brief foray into morbid gambling was my niece who even upon seeing Steve Burns’ Wikipedia page, his IMDB page, and his band’s MySpace page still refused to believe that he was not dead. I’ve struggled with her for a while now, trying to get her to accept things when the facts confront her — she’s still a steadfast believer in the Loch Ness Monster — but this was a particularly galling example.

Steve Burns’ death is not a conspiracy theory, but the way my niece reacted to confrontation was similar to that of a conspiracy theorist, driven by the same sort of behaviour, an unwillingness to change your beliefs. What I took from that conversation was that my niece preferred it when what she had believed for years was correct, that to accept that she was wrong was a slight on herself, an embarrassment. Unfortunately, not changing her opinions as her understanding of the facts improves is the more shameful tact.

This reaction of ossification in the face of new evidence is one facet of why conspiracy theories continue to drain on us. Another is the excitement of it all. It’s more enticing to believe that all the horrible things that happen to the world and the people in it have a shadowy figure lurking behind it all, tugging strings, calling out orders, making the world dance their dance of death.

Kennedy? It wasn’t a lone nut job, it was a conspiracy so vast in its reach yet so stealthy in its wake that there is literally no proof, no substantive witness that can corroborate any of it. That second version is sexier to be sure, so it’s easy to get swept up into the ‘majesty’ of the conspiracy.

I used to be a Kennedy believer, and I even had my doubts about the moon landing after Jonathan Frakes brought forth some compelling evidence¹ so I know what it’s like to be on the conspiracy bandwagon.

Well actually that’s not true. It was easy to believe these things when it was just me and shitty television specials, but once there were other people involved, once I started looking into these sorts of things online rather than on exploitative television specials, I found the endless supply of debunkers, ready with piles of facts discounting every piece of ‘evidence’ conspiracy theorists throw at you. I accepted that I was misled and mistaken, and I moved on with my life.

But many people, it seems, get trapped in this vortex of fear, they get dragged into it by misinformation and by the time someone is there to correct them they’ve become invested in the lie. I don’t think there’s a way out of this — conspiracy theories will never go away completely — except that the media should be more responsible about what they put out there.

Unfortunately, the media seems to be getting lazier and more willing to lie for ratings. Last night, I watched an episode of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, a show that takes the baton from the Fox Alien Autopsy specials from the 90′s and runs like it’s being chased through the woods by a ManBearPig. It’s so obviously misleading and manipulative that it was entertaining to me. But it also infuriated me.

I don’t know if regulation of these sorts of things is possible or even viable — the sketchy claims of these shows are often veiled in excuses and hedge words designed to evade these sorts of regulations — but the visceral disdain for truth, reality, and yeah I’ll say it humanity that shows like this demonstrate with their lies and obfuscations is deeply deeply troubling to me.

I think that the way these sorts of shows exploit people’s imaginations and their desire for an exciting world with villains to point fingers at is one of the most pernicious aspects of modern day media. Too often you’re given the words of crackpots as gospel, or even worse the words of a reputable scientist twisted to fit the narrative the show wants to follow.

Unfortunately, I’ve got no solutions. Except continuing to ridicule my niece until she gets it through her head that the Rule Of Cool² doesn’t apply to the real world. You should do that same.

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Footnotes

1. Yes, this is sarcasm. [↩]
2. NB Don’t click that link if you want to be productive ever again [↩]

This fabulous episode cemented for me a thought I’ve had for the entire season: Epitaph One should not exist.

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.

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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. [↩]

This episode seemed like a big drop in quality, especially the initial setup but what’s most shocking is how great this episode is despite being a markedly weaker episode.

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.

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Footnotes

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

Dollhouse continues to barrel toward its conclusion with a mostly Dollhouse-set episode and the return of Alpha. Fun times all around.

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.

The revelations of this episode should have been much more dramatic. But, like all the stunning developments of this season, they lack the proper oomph because I knew they had to happen.

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.

This was without a doubt the best episode¹ of Dollhouse yet. I don’t need to say that to anyone watching, of course. This episode took every single viewer by the balls and didn’t let go.

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.

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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. [↩]

A few people have been talking recently about how depressing The Office is. Put simply, they argue that Jim and Pam’s settling into life at the Office – a common thread running through most of the early seasons was Pam’s desire for success as an artist and Jim’s unwillingness to move on to greener pastures because Pam was still there – turns the show into a lesson in failed dreams.

I’m 25 now, and still have accomplished shockingly little with my life, so I sympathize with this view. Watching Jim Halpert settle into a life that we’ve all been silently (or not) rooting for him to escape is a little sad, wistful perhaps. But depressing? No. Because Jim isn’t settling, he’s settling down.

I don’t know why people don’t see this. From the first moment Jim Halpert graced our televisions, his life’s purpose has been little more than sharing said life with Pam Beasley. Jim didn’t want to change the world, he wanted to be Pam’s world. Mission accomplished. Time to hunker down and start a family. It might be a little banal, but that’s what he wants out of life.

Similarly, Pam wanted to be an artist, but more than that she wanted to not be a receptionist for the rest of her life. Now she’s a saleswoman. Mission accomplished.

They probably could leave the office and become more successful somewhere else, and maybe when the show ends, the finale will be them moving on with their lives, I don’t know. But the last couple seasons haven’t been leading us down that road. The Office seems to be about what a family is.

Last year, when Jim and Pam almost eloped they stopped because their coworkers – their friends – were having a goofy dance party and they realized that they wanted the odd little community they’ve joined to be there, to take part in the celebration.

I think it was the second season when Jim invited the office over to his apartment to have a little shindig of sorts. He had a roommate and there have been references to non-work friends in the past, so to claim that Jim has no friends outside of work is disingenuous. Maybe he’s not friends with most of those people anymore, but to me that’s more an after-effect of growing closer to his office mates.

Work relationships, romantic or not, are very very common in the real world. Settling down and starting a family is very common in the real world. The Office is about the real world. There’s a bitter taste to that, because not many people have the desire for a simple uneventful life shared calmly with a lifelong best friend. But, quite frankly, if that ending is depressing to you, well that’s just depressing.

A few months ago, V shut down production to give the writers a chance to improve the scripts coming out of writer’s room. Before that Caprica was put on hold, according to some, to let the writer’s catch up and rethink the direction of the show. Further back still, Dollhouse suffered numerous writer’s room lock-downs and rewrites. And now, the same thing is being done with Flashforward.

Too many intelligent shows are falling quickly in quality after the first few episodes, those written external from the production process, and too many shows are experiencing staggered airing of new episodes because of the logjam in the writer’s room.

The lesson here, is that writing doesn’t work the same for all shows. When most television was episodic — that is, each episode was mostly independent — it was easy for a writer’s room to work on episodes as the season progressed. But with the new generation of television shows becoming increasingly serialized, writers need more time to make sure each episode fits into the overall story well, that the various threads are intertwining at a decent pace while maintaining suspense and tension.

It seems more and more obvious that networks should be ordering scripts well in advance of air date, before any production begins, in fact. Sopranos did something akin to that for the second half of its sixth season, taking a year and a half to, among other things, ensure the final season’s scripts were all high caliber. I’m not saying you need a year and a half off between seasons, but the precedent is there.

The danger with this is that the seasons as written would be immutable, if there’s a character that the audience loves and they’re killed halfway through the season well the audience might jump ship because their favourite character is dead. But this fixed structure is also a boon to the show, because quite frankly the whims of the audience are not the best compass for plot or character progression. Writers follow the audience’s whims because it means they might keep their audience, and in turn can continue to write their show. What needs to happen is for just one network to take a risk: get a spec script, interrogate the writer as to their plan for the show, and make sure they have an ongoing vision. Give the writer a full staff of writers and assistants and whatnot, that either the original writer or an experienced showrunner will guide, and let them write a full season.

That won’t happen, of course. And even if it did happen, there’s no guarantee the material produced will find an audience, so there’s no guarantee it would work. But something needs to happen. Somebody needs to try something; preferably not the abandonment of serialized television.

I’ve used up a lot of space on this blog trying to articulate why I don’t like Epitaph One. Last episode, I worked to describe why all this apocalypse foreshadowing doesn’t feel as powerful if you know it’s coming the first time through. I think I made my point, so I won’t go into another spiel about the exact same point regarding this episode’s excellent (but to my eyes hollow) foreshadowing. But this week’s episode of Dollhouse — the last before the great ratings escape hiatus — was another in a string of stellar episodes that divide their work between arc development and character development, all while masking it as your basic one-off episode.

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.

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Footnotes

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

For reasons unknown, I recently undertook a re-watch of the first eight seasons of Scrubs. The ninth season which will be airing on ABC sometime during this season of network broadcasting will retain a few original cast members but according to all reports will be a new show in the same universe as the original. Perhaps its this (supposed as yet unverified) distinct dichotomy between the first eight seasons and whatever subsequent seasons are left in the workhorse comedy that made me go back to the beginning and reevaluate the show.

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.

One of the strengths of JM Straczynski having planned the five year story of Babylon 5 was that he laid lots of interesting nuggets of foreshadowing into the earlier seasons. Plot devices used in one-off episodes in the early episodes could play a huge part in culminating events years later. It works so well because you likely won’t notice those hints the first time through, and when you return to the show for a second viewing, the relationships and significance of the events lets the foreshadowing impact you with even more force.

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.

Last week I closed off my post hoping that the stories that happen outside of the Dollhouse would improve, and this week they did though at the expense of an in-house story. But despite being a mostly self-enclosed story, it managed to integrate a new development in the arsenal of the Dollhouse and latch on an unrelated subplot that pushed the seasons arc ever so slightly forward.

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.