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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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