I haven’t read any other opinions about the Dollhouse finale yet, but I can guess they’ll be mostly positive, perhaps even effusive. And seeing as my opinions are anything but that I didn’t see the point in comparing my thoughts with what the rest of the online community has to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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