I intend to write a full post about the phenomenal start to Dollhouse’s second season, but I need some time to formulate my thoughts. In the meantime, I want to reiterate some of my issues with the unaired 13th episode “Epitaph One.”

My biggest problem is it’s not a cliffhanger, it’s an ending. It’s not a flash forward in the vein of Lost’s third season finale, giving us a glimpse of the future to entice the audience, it’s an epilogue, meant to offer up a few closing notes on the themes the show wanted to explore.

Joss Whedon has walked back the significance of Epitaph One, claiming that, while it is canon, the memories we saw of the Dollhouse’s future are not set in stone. But the memories are the least of my concerns. What concerns me is that the show now has a guarantee that, ten years from now, the Dollhouse universe will be a fractured world with middling tribes of humanity surviving away from all technology as the world falls apart around them. It’s a powerful message, and Epitaph One expresses it brilliantly, but it’s better suited as a separate story, not as a part of a television show’s larger universe.

And yes, the nihilism of the ending still troubles me. I don’t need a happy ending, but I do need one with some heft to it. The ending of Dollhouse, as it stands, is that technology was a failed experiment. We tried it, but man’s vainglorious desire for knowledge led him down a nearly fatal path and what remains now is a small group capable of rebuilding mankind, but without all that icky technology. That, to me, is an extremely lazy ending. Granted, they only had an episode to delve into this but it still strikes me as hollow, and slightly hypocritical.

Indeed, one of the commons threads of the Dollhouse’s first season, and one that seems to be persisting into its second, is that while the Dollhouse’s technology is an attempt at rewriting a human from the ground up, it is only an attempt. The mind reaches out despite its removal and/or deletion. This is a repeated theme, something that has imbued all the glitches the Dolls have experienced with a greater meaning. But this episode leaves you with the message that those moments of significance weren’t really all that significant, the world will go to hell, and the only solution is to run away.

Again, this isn’t about the ending per se, though it is to an extent, it’s more about earning the ending. I don’t think they earned the ending they gave us. Let me know why I’m wrong in the comments, because I haven’t really seen anyone address my complaints with Epitaph One yet.

I still love it as an hour of great sci-fi, so long as I think of it as separate from the rest of the Dollhouse universe, but I can’t brook its existence in the standard Dollhouse canon. It would’ve been a great (though not amazing) ending to Dollhouse had the show ended then and there, but Dollhouse went on and now it feels out of place and best left out of canon along with the original unaired pilot.