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.

Footnotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Footnotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Footnotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m really excited about this — despite it meaning I will have to write detailed recap/reviews of each episode — because the first season was, aside from a few weak moments, really great: entertaining, funny, brave, contemplative, and so many other things.

I’ve had my gripes with Fox in the past; they canned Firefly without giving it a chance, the cancelled Futurama despite it being the funniest animated series they ever produced, and of course the brutal prolonged death they offered Arrested Development was visceral and painful to me. That said, Dollhouse was never a strong performer in the ratings — though it fared better than most of the programs Fox aired on Friday nights — and Fox is giving it another chance. So Kudos to you, Fox: you’ve regained a modicum of fanboy respect.

But that’s a fairly cold and calculating way to look at writing a review. I don’t want to merely insert enough keywords as to increase my traffic by throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. That said, I have found myself more willing to go back and examine and re-read my more detailed reviews. Looking at the little moments that make a show good is one thing that many other reviewers fail to do, and to write about those details in the hopes of reaching others who, like me, appreciate the little things a show does is a big reason I write about television.

So I’ve decided that if Dollhouse gets renewed for another season, I will write detailed reviews — luxuriating over every shot, every thought, every furtive glance — for every episode of Dollhouse until the series ends. And I mean series the way an American or a Canadian does. If Dollhouse becomes a breakaway hit in its second season and then airs continuously for the next fifty years, I will have a horridly long review for every single episode in the bunch. Of course, the real question is this: is this promise a reason to renew or a reason to not?

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.

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.

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.

I remember two years ago, when Jericho was a show was less than stellar ratings that looked “on the bubble” just as Chuck is now; there were rumblings that it might not be renewed, but nobody was ardently fighting for its renewal. Not until the season ended with a spectacular climax and CBS announced that the show would not be returning for a second season did the fan base explode with fury and begin sending tonnes (literally) of peanuts to CBS to demand a new season of Jericho.

Miraculously, it worked. No write-in campaign that I know of had been successful in reviving a show since Star Trek in the 60′s, but the dedication of the fans astounded the executives and so they made an abrupt about-face and gave Jericho a second season. Of seven freaking episodes.

In the case of Jericho, the network execs were essentially telling the writers to finish off whatever they had planned. They kept up the pretense of a possible third season, even having the writers create two alternate endings, but everyone could see the writing on the wall. Some might argue that this is the best you can get, but I think what’s happened with Chuck is a sign of the future of fandom.

Chuck has never been more than “on the bubble,” and even in this impoverished state, most experts have been quietly optimistic about its possibilities. But we’ve learned not to take “good enough” for granted. Jericho had higher ratings than Chuck, and it still got cancelled. The fans have learned their lesson, and they will fight for the shows they love, even before the fight has begun. Preemptive war is the tactic du jour in our world now. And one has to hope it will result in greater gains than the Jericho campaigns.

The fans of other shows haven’t learned their lesson yet, or they’ve been conditioned for failure. In fact, most of the ardent supporters of Dollhouse in the early days were the ones virtually promising that it would be cancelled.

At this point, Chuck seems likely to be renewed, but its relative success — whether or not it gets a crappy timeslot, or a truncated run, or substantial network support, etc. — will be the litmus test for this new form of fandom. Bringing the fight to the network before the network knows there’s a fight is a potent tactic. If it works, that is.

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.

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.

Footnotes

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

First things first: the inside man. This episode leads you to believe that the climax will reveal who has been feeding Ballard information via Actives, but when it’s revealed that Dominic was the inside man — not only that, but he was on a mission from the NSA to ensure that the Dollhouse doesn’t fail — we’re left with the initial question. Here’s who I think it is: DeWitt. My theory relies on one thing: Topher didn’t know that DeWitt was Ms Lonely Hearts. Which, to me, means that DeWitt added a secondary protocol to the Roger Imprint that redefined who he was in love with.

In some instances, I’d be willing to accept Topher not knowing what the engagement is in detail, but to define an imprint which professes to the Dollhouse staff love for an octogenarian while secretly loving DeWitt without knowing some of the details seems unlikely. So, the logical conclusion is that the imprint-overrider that Topher found this episode was being used by DeWitt to adjust the Roger imprint, while also sending messages to Ballard. The only other alternative is that there are a bunch of imprint adjusters hooked into the system that Topher failed to notice. Some of you might say that Ivy, Topher’s assistant is still a suspect but Echo’s spy-catcher imprint would’ve detected that because she interrogated her. Of course, if the messages to Ballard continue, we’ll know I was wrong.

Now that I’ve recorded my idiocy so that others can point to it and laugh later on, I’ll talk about some other things. Echo’s growth this episode was great. The idea of a Doll asking to be imprinted is an awesome stepping stone towards full-on self-awareness. That said, I have to wonder how much the early scene where Ivy gives a lackluster opening script greeting to Echo was a part of that. Immediately afterward, Topher begins talking about the effect it can have on a freshly wiped Doll. Later on, she sees Sierra taken to the chair and then leaving the room a hardened spy. Before then, she sees November go into the chair and return as someone who looks at Echo waving at her with confusion. The glimpses of Echo observing and seemingly understanding these conversations and events going on around her were excellent. And the non-chronological storytelling of the episode enhanced this by letting us see Echo at different points in this arc.

Even the first scene, where Echo says that “she made a mistake and now she’s sad” about Dominic’s Attic-ing, which could be missed one first viewing reveals more of Echo’s growth. Echo has looked beyond the obvious and found the hidden answer: DeWitt’s faith in Dominic was misplaced, and that hurt her. And if you subscribe to my theory, she’s hurt in more than one way because she has to give up her Roger imprint because her surreptitious imprint rewriter is now gone.

Sierra’s Alias-esque foray at the NSA was great for the sheer sci-fi spy-action-ness of it. But what was even better was Ballard’s brief appearance this episode. First off, he’s clearly become increasingly paranoid since he discovered the bugs. Which apparently helps when you’re investigating massive conspiracies, because he’s unspooled more about the Dollhouse and its massive scope in this brief separation from Mellie than he had in the preceding months working on the Dollhouse case for the FBI. But when Mellie returns all his paranoia goes away… at least until Mellie switched into imformant mode and tells Paul not to reveal the details of his investigation to Mellie because she’s been sent to spy on him. And now Ballard had to keep up the romance with Mellie, all the while knowing she’s programmed to love him and having to keep pretty much everything from her. Something’s gotta give, people.

Lots happened, and not in the “a lot happened” sort of way last week played out. This time things seem to have actually changed. Not only is Echo’s greatest adversary at the Dollhouse now out of commission, but her increasing awareness is no longer seen as a threat but as an advantage. It’ll be interesting to see how that, and Boyd’s new position as head of security, affect the situation at the Dollhouse next week. The ratings? Who gives a fuck about the ratings at this point? OK fine. They were just as shitty as ever.

It’s only been a few weeks for me as a regular recapper of television shows, and in that brief amount of time both of the shows I cared about enough to discuss on a weekly basis have been cancelled. Not officially cancelled, of course; Dollhouse’s 13th episode, originally planned as the finale for the season, will not be aired, and Kings has been moved to Saturdays. But they’ve been cancelled nonetheless. So I’m done with all that. The more I write about shows, the sooner they seem to be cancelled. Besides, I could continue writing about each new episode — detailing the many ways I love each scene, each characterization, each twist — but everything would end with “if only the show wasn’t cancelled.” I don’t think I want to subject myself to that. So I’m finished. For now, anyways.

UPDATE: Supposedly, the non-airing of the 13th episode was expected. So the show isn’t necessarily cancelled. That said, I’m not buying it. I’ve given up hope. It’s over. Even if the non-airing of this final episode was done in good faith, the damage is done. To the dedicated fans, the ones who were willing to go back to Fox, despite the abuse they suffered with Firefly and Arrested Development, because they were assured that things would be different, this was what we knew was inevitable but silently ignored as the evidence mounted around us. The show is dead. At least this time, people won’t be able to blame shifting schedules on the show’s failure. The sad truth is, the vocal fans of Joss Whedon do little but talk. Because none of them came to watch.

This episode was about, as the title indicates, needs. The Dollhouse needs their Dolls to function as required at all times. And recently, particularly after the memory drug from last week’s episode brought up the traumas of their past, some Dolls’ glitching has gotten out of hand. So, in the face of these repeated glitches, they instigate a radical plan: give the Dolls what they need. Rather then further sedate them, or attempt to further wipe their minds, or anything like that, simply give them a chance to resolve the issues that are causing their instabilities. Give them closure. This hearkens to an idea I discussed in my review of the premiere when Echo’s actions were implied to resolve the internal conflict of the personality she was imprinted with at the time. Even though the person for which these fears existed, facing them gave a sort of closure. To what, I’m not sure.

Echo, Victor, Sierra, November, and Mike all awaken early in the episode to find themselves back to their old selves, minus any specific memories of their old life. Their personalities, without any of the events that forged them. When Mike is taken away and returns as calm and docile as the other Dolls, the remaining four band together to find a way out of their situation, whatever it may be.

So, here we are with the personalities, but not the memories, of the Dolls original lives waking in their sleeping pods attempting to figure out where they are, how to get away, and what to do next. Echo, as was implied by last week’s episode, wouldn’t need to be free to find closure: she would need everyone to be free, she would need the Dollhouse to no longer exist. So rather than leave with the others in the inevitable escape she stays behind to free the other Dolls. A pleasant side-effect of Echo’s behaviour this episode is that it washes away the unpleasant taste Caroline’s personality left with me last week. Rather than being quippy despite the dire tasks, she takes on the role of saviour and wholeheartedly seeks the demise of the Dollhouse. I’m much more willing to accept this week’s Caroline as a character I can invest in.

Sierra confronts the man that put her in the Dollhouse, both a proxy to the closure she needs for what Hearn did to her and a legitimate trauma in and of itself. What’s interesting about this is that while Adelle DeWitt is discussing the voluntary nature of the Doll life, we discover that Sierra was made a Doll by a powerful man who wanted to control her and make her do whatever he wanted. This is the first time the pseudo-voluntary nature of a Doll’s tenure has been explicitly denied by the show.

And apparently Victor just wanted Sierra. It’s a little simplistic, but it works because Victor’s personality in this episode was both the most appealing and humourous, and he quickly took on a role as the de facto leader of the escapees so his closure was more related to the obtaining of closure for those under his “command.” Relatedly, Victor’s calm and controlled manner of leading the others makes me think that Victor’s original life was in the military, and so the traumatic war-time memory of Victor’s that we saw last week was of his original life. Which opens the question of whether Victor joined the Dollhouse to escape the horrors he’d committed on the battlefield or was taken from a happy life.

November’s past is the most sympathetic. In her original life, it seems her daughter died and she never fully recovered from it. It’s implied here that she gave herself to the Dollhouse to escape the sadness in her life. But with all of these stories what really got accomplished? The one weak point of the show, in retrospect, is how Dominic and DeWitt have early scenes together where they pretend as though what’s happening is not what they wanted. Put simply, there are too many head-fakes.

The episode starts with Topher saying he can mess with their drug levels, implying that doing that caused the unexpected “awakening” of the Dolls original personalities. But then DeWitt later pretends as though this is part of a training exercise for their staff. Then ultimately, it’s revealed that after Topher’s initial suggestion in that earlier scene Dr Saunders suggests that they give the most problematic Dolls emotional closure so that they can be reset to normal and those internal conflicts will no longer combat the programming of the Dollhouse. So, it all makes sense except for that one scene implying it’s all a training exercise. If that scene weren’t there, this episode would be perfect. We would have seen lots of character growth, the development of the romance between Victor and Sierra was particularly touching, and then ending the episode with all of that being a part of the Dollhouse’s plan. Not only that, but the ultimate reveal that it was Dr Saunders, one of the staff more sympathetic towards the Dolls, that perpetrated this plan was excellent; the show has worked very hard making her sympathetic to the audience, so showing the darker more twisted side of her psyche was a smart, and subversive, move on the writers. But all of it seems weakened by that one little thread that doesn’t mesh with the rest.

As usual, Ballard’s story is mostly dissociated from the Actives — though Echo does manage to leave a message on his voicemail before she manages to set the Actives in the Dollhouse free, thus triggering her “closure achieved” mindset and rendering her unconscious — but he does realize that the Dollhouse has been spying on him for an indeterminate amount of time, and that their technology is well beyond the local black-hat spy gear. Not completely revelatory, but it furthered Ballard’s investigation. But, unless the show offers up some tangible results to his investigation sometime soon, I’ll definitely start to find these scenes tiresome.

I’m a little annoyed that this episode resulted in not only no tangible emotional growth for the characters, but actually cancelled out what growth we’d seen thus far. But it’s also brilliant on the show’s part to twist our minds like this: the “happy ending” of the episode is the Dolls going back to normal. To return to their slavery. Really great stuff. Episodes six and eight were both being pushed as exemplary episodes, and they were both excellent. Let’s hope the quality level is maintained or surpassed as the season concludes.

First things first, Paul Ballard gets the shaft this week; he cooks Mellie/November some post-rape-slash-murder-attempt breakfast and then Mellie decides it’s over. After the brouhaha at the Dollhouse and Caroline’s old college, Mellie skips town, and Ballard tell her she knows where he is. So that relationship is apparently over. For now, at least. Which is sort of par for the course for Joss Whedon. And obviously, what Mellie experienced last episode was incredibly traumatic, but it still felt a little abrupt for me.

The rest of the story was interesting verging on cool, but it was all too cursory. The corporation behind the Dollhouse, is working on a memory drug, and one of the grad students they have developing it decided to go rogue and steal it to sell for billions. But he had a partner and he didn’t want to share. So before he took the drug and ran off, he dosed his partner-in-crime which led to a spread-by-touch craziness epidemic.

Because this drug in the wind is a huge deal to the Rossum Corporation, and they happen to own the Dollhouse, they get an army of Actives to play government agent on campus and clean up the mess while hunting down the vial of crazy juice. While all of this is happening, Echo is having another engagement with the motorcycle dude from the premiere, so she’s out of the loop. But when she sees the college on TV she leaves abruptly. She’s remembering flashes of her life before the Dollhouse.

Caroline was, apparently, a bit of a bitch. She dedicates all of her time to war protests and anti-animal testing crusading. So much so that, when she and her boyfriend break in to Rossum’s lab on campus and finds that they’re experimenting with human fetuses and mind control, she’s still most outraged by the doggie in the cage. That was a little much, and actually made Caroline less relatable to me. Regardless, it appears that this break-in is the event that led to Caroline’s enrollment in the five year “become a Doll and you live” program. So there’s one mythology mystery (mostly) answered.

When Caroline gets to the campus she’s taken in by the Doll agents, led by Victor, where she befriends the dude who is behind it all. She helps him break into the lab, where he plans to retrieve the vial so he can split town and sell it, with the memories or her previous break-in bubbling below the surface. He’s got a sad sack story about a momma with too many bills. Which is only relevant because at the end of the episode we see him being given the Dollhouse recruitment speech in exchange for them paying his mom. The cycle continues.

Along the way, Victor, Sierra, and November (AKA Mellie) all experience an unexpected side-effect of being dosed with the memory drug: they start remembering their most traumatic moments. Sierra remembers her rape by Hearn, November remembers Hearn’s attempted rape of her, and Victor seems to recall a eastern European war zone where he once worked. Whether this is before being an Active or not is unclear, but I’m sure it will be explored before the season is out. These traumatic memories fell flat for me as well. Mostly because the two that we remember are both so incredibly recent; the horror of those moments is still fresh in our minds, so it’s bizarre to experience them reliving it as something from a lifetime ago when it happened to them mere days ago. They also suffer no ill side effects from it, apparently. The drug makes them remember those things, then Topher cleans them out, which made the whole sequence feel empty to me.

And for the sake of comedy relief, Topher and DeWitt in the Dollhouse, and Dominic and Boyd on the campus all experience the effects of the drug and hilarity ensues. Topher is pantless, DeWitt jumps on a trampoline, Boyd laughs at his inability to control Echo, and Dominic is super super sorry for trying to burn Echo alive. It’s all really great, so I’ll leave those moments to be relished by the viewer on their own.

All of this isn’t to say that this episode wasn’t good. But the only parts that I really enjoyed, were the “Naked Time” moments where the buttoned up Dollhouse staff got a chance to let their freak flag fly. The rest felt subdued and simplistic to me. This was a solid episode, but one that just didn’t strike me as particularly amazing. I’m also writing this after only one viewing of the episode, whereas all my previous reviews were based on at least two viewings. So, when going back over the season after it’s all over, this may turn out to be a watershed moment for the series, but right now I’m just going to wait for the next episode and hope it’s better.

Kings begins this week with a sign of things to come, both literally and figuratively, in the form of a prophetic dream. Kings Silas bellows across a cloudy rain drenched sky “Don’t Go” and David wakes up to see his dead brother repeating the message: “Don’t Go.” And then he actually wakes up. The more of this show I see, the more it reminds me of Carnivàle: epic in scope, unafraid of complex storytelling and morally ambiguous protagonists, and completely willing to tell an earnest story with mysticism and drama.

This week the Premier of Gath came to Shiloh to sign the peace treaty that has been hashed out in the time between then and the premiere. Meanwhile, one quick to nip a butterfly-crown-based prophecy not in his favour in the bud, Silas orders his General to kill David. Lucky for David, the Premier wants to meet the young man who bravely put his life on the line for peace, so the killing is put on hold. Unlucky for David, the Generals of Gath aren’t as fond of peace as the Premier — something about being shown up by a punk kid with an RPG — and are willing to throw away the treaty for any minor infraction.

With the Generals of Gath readying to abandon the peace that his brother died for, David’s desperation reaches a fever pitch when he sees a sign held by a child saying “Don’t Go” and he steals a cab to block the path of the departing Gath envoy. During the ensuing stand-off, Silas and the Premier reestablish peace. The Premier of Gath says his people are jealous of Gilboa, for their industry and prosperity. But most of all for their glimmering city of Shiloh. And that’s where the Port of Prosperity comes in to play.

The Port of Prosperity is the land David’s father died protecting. It’s also one of the richest areas of Gilboa, taken from Gath years ago, and its riches were used to build Shiloh. Silas agrees to give that land to Gath, in exchange for peace. David’s loyalty to the King has been solidified by his selfless efforts for peace and Silas calls off the assassination.

Throughout this, there’s a story of the prince and his loyal squadron going on a shopping spree which leads to the news of the depleted reserves of Gilboa’s Treasury becoming public. Whether this was a part of CrossGen’s attempt to spread worry about the royal treasury or was merely coincidental is left unclear, but given the scene between William Cross and Jack Benjamin in the premiere, it seems likely it was a coordinated attack. The missing gold also causes King Silas to reach out to a “long dead” former ally he’s kept locked away for years. The former king’s gold was missing when Silas conquered his capital years ago, and been kept secret all these years, but Silas has a hold over the old king: his loved ones are still alive, but he won’t tell which of them are still alive until he gets the gold. And with this thirty-year-long gambit, the King saves the nation from overnight bankruptcy, much to the chagrin of William Cross.

Luckily, the King’s wife has finally decided that enough is enough, stepped aside from her diplomatic party planning duties, and convinced her brother to let the King win this battle. Apparently, Cross’ son has been exiled from the city for many years, and she can find a way to allow his return should he let this discretion slide.

In addition to all of this, David’s mother is in Shiloh attempting to receive her son’s veteran’s pension, and also trying to get David to return home. Not because she thinks he’s not capable of surviving the city, but because he’s too capable. She knows he has a destiny and that is what worries her.

Threaded through all of this is the romance between Michelle Benjamin and David. What seemed set in stone at the end of the premiere has now become very much a hazy prospect. Silas has reminded the princess of a oath she must not break. Is she betrothed to an ally? Is she a member of a convent of some sort? It’s left unclear, but regardless it quickly established a barrier to their relationship. How fast that barrier will fall remains to be seen.

So that’s a lot of stuff happening in this episode, and all of this is painfully oversimplified for the sake of brevity — after my 5500 word review of Dollhouse from the other day, I’m trying to constrain my word counts — but what’s clear is that there’s a lot more mystery in the past that this show will explore. The exiled son, the locked away deposed king, the princess’ oath, and the furthering of the signs that David is destined for far more than an advising role at the feet of King Silas. The story continues to fascinate me, and the sincerity of the storytelling is refreshing. I may be a cynic, but that doesn’t mean all art must devolve into nihilistic ultra-realism.

Unfortunately, the beauty of this show is mostly being ignored. The ratings for the second episode were even worse than the already atrocious ratings that the premiere suffered. This sort of very grandiose epic storytelling is new for network television, and I hope that these brief stumbles are not a sign that the public at large has no interest in it.

But before we talk about the real story of this week, let’s talk about the “Man on the Street” segments that open each act. The public perception of the Dollhouse has been mostly lacking from the show until now. Aside from Ballard, the FBI almost universally thinks the Dollhouse is a ridiculous notion. And we knew that  They were probably the best way to get the various mindsets the public would have about the Dollhouse. As with most things, it depends on your scenario. The sassy black woman compares it to slavery, and just as was implied when Caroline said in the first episode she didn’t have a choice, when told that some think the Dolls are volunteers she replies “there’s only one reason someone would volunteer to be a slave, is if they is one already.” The disenfranchised twenty-something asks where to sign up for the life of consequence-free good times with rich people. The creepy-in-a-good-way old dude wishes he’d had it back in the day, and the pretty, though slightly chunky, professional woman won’t even tell the camera crew the acts of depravity she’d commit if the Dollhouse were real.

The young hippy chick — whose opinions are notable placed immediately after hearing about why Joel Mynor, Patton Oswalt‘s character, uses the Dollhouse — are about the beauty of reliving, or creating whole cloth, beautiful moments through the Dolls. The young environmentally-friendly socially-conscious chick, who I would’ve called a hippy if the free-love quixotic variety hadn’t already been used tonight, considers it repulsive and tantamount to human trafficking. The butch dude with his arm draped across his wife has a very distinct and hilarious stance on it which I will quote in full, because it’s awesome:

Hey everyone’s got their fantasies right? Guy wants to know what it’s like, you know, be with another man. Just once, nothing queeny, two guys checking it out and then the other one forgets. That could be sweet for some guys.

There’s also the requisite (uber-)crackpot who says society is already a giant Dollhouse but no one’s willing to admit it. Finally we have what I consider to be Joss Whedon’s stance on the Dollhouse. It’s not funny, but it’s powerful, so let’s put it here for everyone to read and ponder:

Forget morality. Imagine it’s true. Imagine this technology being used. Now, imagine it being used… on you. Everything you believe: gone. Everyone you know: strangers, maybe enemies. Every part of you, that makes you more than a walking cluster of neurons dissolved. At someone else’s whim. If that technology exists, it’ll be used. It’ll be abused. It’ll be global. And we will be over. As a species, we will cease to matter. I don’t know, maybe we should.

I’m belabouring all this seemingly filler material because I think it’s something the show has been missing, to its detriment. The show has left you wondering what goes on in the mind of the Doll. Alpha’s ongoing journey to awaken the other Actives, Echo’s glitches and missions gone awry. It’s all within the Dollhouse universe. But what do you think about this? What should you think about this? The show shouldn’t dictate to you, but to show people not caught up in the machinations of the Dollhouse asking these questions is a necessary action at this point. We’ve been asking all these questions to ourselves, but the show had yet to announce that it too is asking these questions, and that it wants you to ask them.

OK, so now that I’ve finished my little rant, let’s get on with the rest of the episode. This is the first episode that truly integrates Ballard’s search for the Dollhouse and the Dollhouse itself, so it’s fitting that it begins with Ballard, watching a TV report about the Dollhouse that says the FBI denies the Dollhouse is being investigated. He’s looking into the kidnapping case from the pilot, the case closed by agent Tanaka played by BSG and Firefly vet Mark Sheppard. Tanaka causes a fuss, telling Ballard to “stay out of his soup,” to which Ballard says “shoulder dislocate!” but he speaks more with actions not words.

At the Dollhouse, Victor and Echo are enjoying a meal and Sierra comes by and sits at a nearby table. Victor doesn’t like that she’s alone. He thinks that since she usually sits with them, maybe she just didn’t see them. He goes over and grabs her by the shoulder, causing her to leap away screaming. In the next scene Dr Saunders has Sierra up on her gynecological stirrups, so we already know something shadily sexy has gone down. She asks if Victor upset her. Sierra says that Victor pretends they’re married. I know this is supposed to make you think Victor is screwing Sierra but given how peaceful the Dolls have been so far, I immediately saw that as a red herring. Unless doing pretend dishes and worrying about the mortgage can cause Sierra to be psychologically traumatised, because that’s totally the sort of stuff I imagine are entailed in Victor’s pretend marriage.

Dr Saunders consults with Boyd and Sierra’s handler Hearn — played by Kevin Kilner who I mostly recall from Earth: Final Conflict, so to see him in respectable television is a bit jarring — and informs them both that Sierra has had sex. “No, sir” says Hearn. “Her last engagement was with the governor’s niece at a children’s cancer ward.” Saunders says it wasn’t during a mission, it happened within the Dollhouse. Boyd asks what she said about Victor, and she says the Victor liked to play, which isn’t really the whole truth. Regardless, Hearn is confused. Dolls don’t have sex drives. Right? Boyd and Saunders look uncomfortable, although neither Saunders nor Topher talked to Boyd about Victor’s “man reactions” during last week’s episode so it’s left unclear how he learned of them.

Hearns is disgusted. He’s livid! Which of course, means he’s the one that did it. “Just because I’m not Andy Griffith with these guys doesn’t mean I want to see them abusing each other.” Yeah! Only he can abuse them. He worries that Victor could be “Jekyll-and-Hyding” like Alpha. I’m not sure if that’s been established before. It’s being implied here that Alpha pretended to be a good little Active for a while before staging his escape, which could be interesting if one of the Dolls does the same thing at some point.

Saunders warns Hearn not to jump to conclusions. Hearn retorts that they can “go to the video tape.” And yeah, he says it as though “video” and “tape” are two separate words. It’s weird. Anyways, there are two days of “video tape” to examine, so it shouldn’t take too long. And if Victor was “playing doctor when not imprinted with an MD” he goes to the Attic. After Hearn leaves, Boyd asks Saunders if Sierra has shown any other signs. Echo is there to clue everybody in. Turns out Sierra cries in her pod when they go to bed. And here’s where I have to correct a previously stated opinion. A couple episodes ago, when Echo was reset after her trauma in the antiquities vault, I said that they must be completely reset after each mission, but that’s clearly not the case. Because this episode has established that they have long-term histories of each other that persist across missions.

Ballard is now gushing to his boss about the connection he’s found between the kidnapping case and the Dollhouse. In particular, a payment was made to a massive hedge fund just after the kidnapping, the same hedge fund that one Joel Mynor, long suspected of being a Dollhouse client, pays into on the same day every year. The amount shown on the monitor is $439 million. Every year. Fuck me, that’s a lot of money.

That yearly payment apparently happened either that day or will happen the next day, because Ballard thinks he can catch Mynor in the act by the next day. But before he does that he has to have dinner with his neighbour Mellie, played by Miracle Laurie, where they bond over the “Rickishness” of her former boyfriend, who broke up with her using stock jargon despite his job at a donut shop. By the way, who really uses the full spelling of donut? Doughnut? It’s not like they’re nuts of dough. They’re rings of dough. Get with it, society. Anyways, Mellie goes fishing for compliments saying that she’s not the Gold Standard in LA. Which is a good thing, because the first thing you do in times of economic turmoil is dump the Gold Standard. Ballard obliges by calling her gorgeous, which she is. But Ballard’s still got a Caroline fixation, since he’s talking about bringing “her” in rather than “them.”

The next day, Joel Mynor gets a visit from Rebecca Mynor, AKA Echo. He’s got some news for her: he just bought their first house! Ah young love. Unfortunately, while explaining to Rebecca that the stove in their kitchen actually cooks food, a miraculous event to many living a shit life waiting to make it big in LA, Ballard kicks a shit tonne of ass and then asks them both to turn around very slowly. Then he sees “Rebecca” and freaks the fuck out. And the credits roll.

Oh man, I’m only finishing up the pre-credits act and I’m already over 1500 words. Looks like this is gonna be a long one.

When we return, Ballard explains he’s an FBI agent and Rebecca instantly assumes that Joel’s new success, which afforded him the luxury of a house, was porn. The best part about this though is that she assumes he performed in porn. She really loves this guy, because a) porn doesn’t pay very well for men, in general, and b) Patton Oswalt is not a very pretty man. Of course, for men looks aren’t a prerequisite for success in porn, so maybe she just knows he’s a well-endowed and fabulously skilled lover. Ballard tries to explain to a distraught Rebecca that she’s really Caroline and she’s being used, but before he gets any further he’s tased by Joel’s security forces, who Rebecca didn’t know about before now and so she, again, assumes they’re “porn men.” This woman’s obsession with porn is really telling. No wonder Joel pays $439 million a year for her.

Rebecca continues to freak out, and the taser’s effects begin to wear off and so Ballard goes nuts on the security guys. In the ensuing melee, Boyd appears and gets Rebecca safely away and off to her treatment. Now that Rebecca’s gone, and Joel’s security forces are taken care of, Ballard and Joel have a heart-to-heart. Joss Whedon has always been good at writing conversations between enemies and this scene is another great example of it. Ballard asks him about the Dollhouse, which Mynor delightfully describes as a place where “we learn about urges,” but Ballard’s had enough and tosses a table aside to prove that point.

After a brief period where Ballard plays Mr. Self-righteousness, Mynor begins his psycho-analysis of Ballard. “If we’re gonna talk, we’re both gonna talk.” He tells him that everyone has fantasies, that we need them to survive. He calls out Ballard’s “Knight in shining armour” complex. In particular, his obsession with Caroline/Echo/Rebecca. It’s a lot of fun, seeing Ballard squirm over the accuracy with which Mynor describes his life, from the broken marriage, to the way he discovered Caroline, to his own fantasies of saving her and whisking her away. He says Ballard’s fantasy is sadder than his. And what is that fantasy? Stay tuned to find out!

Victor’s getting questioned by Topher and Dr Saunders. He thinks Sierra’s special and different, and that she makes him feel better. Sounds like a rapist to me. Outside, Victor’s handler is chatting up Boyd. He’s astounded that he’s gone for a week and his Active “invents rape.” I’m not really sure that rape is something you can invent, and if it was then its invention was many many years ago. Maybe he meant “commits?” Boyd is calmer. He says that Hearn, who’s been doggedly investigating this outrage (hint hint), hasn’t found anything on the tapes. Victor’s handler, who I will call Bicks even though I’m not sure that’s his name, during a long rambling rant wonders why Sierra only cries at night which sets a light bulb off in Boyd’s head. Bicks asks if maybe Sierra is broken. Boyd says “they’re all broken” and heads off.

Back in the Mynor residence, after calling out Ballard, Joel describes Rebecca, the real Rebecca. She was a beautiful nurse, who loved him and trusted him for years while his near-successes in the tech world kept coming up short. Then “long story, still kinda long” he finally hits it big — his first cheque had more zeros than the Lutwaffe, which Ballard corrects saying Japan had Zeros, not Germany. First “Sweet Home Georgia” now this? He’s becoming the show’s little pedant, isn’t he? — he bought a nice little house that he knew Rebecca would love and called her up telling her to meet her at the address and that it was really important. He’d rehearsed how he’d tell her that the house was theirs in his head as she raced over there. But three block from the house, she was hit by a sanitation truck, and died instantly. She never found out that he finally had success. So every year on their anniversary, he recreates the scene as he wished it happened. A lot of stand up comics become actors without any real reason or talent, but Patton Oswalt is not one of them. He’s a talented guy, and he really sells the emotion of this scene.

With the touchy feely stuff out of the way, Ballard calls him a predator and threatens to bring him to court, but Mynor knows better. He says if Ballard brings him to court, they’ll take Ballard down. He says they’ll “throw the Kindle at you,” which is a line that only Joss Whedon would try or could pull off. Now sirens can be heard in the background, so Ballard has to leave, but not before he promises to take the Dollhouse down, leaving Mynor alone to toast a happy anniversary.

Meanwhile, Boyd is looking at the security camera placement within the Dollhouse, starting with the pod room. Finally he comes across a small alcove near a wall of plate glass windows out of the view of the cameras. He picks up his phone and tell Mr Dominic that Victor needs to isolated, along with his handler. Now, what did Bicks do to deserve this?

Victor is sitting sadly on a sofa. Echo shows up and he says that he did something bad, but nobody will tell him what, then a smiling woman tells him to come with her (if he wants to die). Echo asks Boyd and Hearn why they’re taking Victor, and so Hearn, who will soon be revealed to be a despicable rapist, has to up his douche quotient and tell her to go paint something. Boyd tells her that he’s protecting Sierra, and that she won’t cry anymore.

After the utter failure that was his Mynor meeting that day, Ballard’s invited Mellie over to help him lick his wounds. Whether that’s only metaphorical is yet to be determined. Regardless, he’s walking around incredibly topless. And you just don’t do that to your love-sick neighbour. Or me. I mean, I’m straight, but god damn.

He’s busy blaming himself for screwing up because he let his feelings for Caroline get in the way. Mellie asks if he got a chance to talk to the client and what the client said, which causes Ballard to reach forward and give her a kiss. Looks as though Joel’s therapising made Ballard reexamine some things. For the better. Or at the very least, for the increase in near nudity, as we will see shortly.

Mellie appreciates the kiss, but doesn’t want him thinking about Caroline when he kisses her. They should forget it. And just be neighbourly. He tells Mellie that the client was Joel Mynor. Mellie is astounded. The creator of “Bouncy the Rat?” Some have said the whole “Bouncy the Rat” conceit, which has carried on throughout the episode, is a reference to Ratatouille, since Oswalt provided the voice. I can sort of see that, but I’m much more inclined to believe that even if the role hadn’t gone to Patton Oswalt there would have been something like that there, otherwise Mellie would have no real reason to know who Joel Mynor was prior to this scene.

Sierra and a few other Dolls are walking down a hall, the same hall in which Boyd noticed the camera gap, and as they all continue down the hall — except for one Doll who seems to have screwed up the stage direction because she totally slows down with Sierra at first and then walks in front of Sierra and then breaks her dumbass face and looks toward something, which I can only assume is a pissed off AD — Sierra slows down and eventually stops. Once the other Dolls made it down the hall, she approaches the glass wall and one of the panes opens to reveal a hidden area. She walks in, the door closes, and a douche’s shadow appears. Even from the shadow we all know it’s Hearn. He asks her if she trusts him, to which she instinctively answers “with my life.” And that’s even worse. The fact that he’s a rapist? That’s bad. The fact that he’s raping someone who probably barely understands that rape isn’t good, some who is “broken?” That’s even worse. But he’s taking advantage of her pre-imprinted trust of him to commit this heinous act? That’s the worst part of all.

He asks if she wants to play the game. She’s not in the mood, actually. But he doesn’t care about mood, so long as she knows to be quiet. “Noise is upsetting” Sierra replies. Hearn tells her to lift up her dress, and this scene becomes unbearably disturbing, but then Boyd comes from the darkness and punches Hearn right through the plate glass window. Sierra says “That wasn’t quiet” and Boyd replies “It wasn’t meant to be.” Hearn is too busy bleeding profusely to have a witty comeback.

DeWitt looks out her window, her hands resting on her hips, as she asks Boyd why he left them out of the loop on the Hearn feint. Boyd explains that Hearn needed to feel completely in the clear to be willing to try again. DeWitt tells him he will never take action like that again, which he obliges. She tells him a bonus has been wired to his account, but Boyd doesn’t need a bonus. Unlike some people. DeWitt, however, needs to give it to him. Boyd leaves and DeWitt and Dominic talk shop. Turns out they’ve been keeping an eye on Ballard and caught his conversation with Mellie about Joel Mynor. Dominic is worried: a handler was abusing an active, and now Ballard has interrupted an engagement and spilled the beans about the Dollhouse to a civilian. The higher ups won’t like the smell of this, and the hammer will likely come down hard on the both of them, though mostly on DeWitt. DeWitt’s not too worried though. She wants Hearn brought to her, and she wants Topher to prep Echo for a “second date.”

Topher apparently got the specs because now he’s building a brain for Echo. A sexy super agent. At this point, you’d think he’d have a couple of those ready and waiting. His first attempt leads to an instability. Note to self: control issues + enhanced combat skills != crazy delicious. His Asian assistant Ivy, who previously appeared as a huge bitch on Dexter, suggests some modifications which lead Topher to rant about food and then send her off to get something from the kitchen for him. She heads off and Topher creates a successful personality for Echo’s new mission. He loads it into a drive and takes it over to another computer. Those should probably be networked together at some point, given the problems this step introduces. As he’s uploading the imprint — which he says aloud in a very “are my actions too confusing? well let me narrate to myself for you” sort of way — Boyd interrupts him to talk about something. Before he leaves, the door behind him is closed.

Boyd tells him that he’s been taken off duty, but Echo’s been engaged. He wants to know what her mission is. Topher lies that it’s a life coach mission, and then congratulates him on figuring out what Hearn was doing. Boyd is very nonchalant about it and then leaves. Topher heads back in to finish the upload and the door that was previously closed is now ajar. And when is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.

The thing about this open door is that it was clearly done to reinforce a future scene. When Echo tells Ballard that somebody on the inside inserted her “tell Ballard to keep looking” parameter into the imprint, we can easily take that as a part of the personality. Maybe DeWitt just really likes fucking with Ballard. In fact, the first time watching this episode I was unsure, but this door discontinuity reinforces that it really was someone on the inside. Was Boyd in on it? Could be. There’s also the question of who did the imprint. It seems like the only person with enough experience to insert new parameters into an imprint would be Ivy, Topher’s assistant, but it could be someone else who was given something that could do it all automatically. These are questions for future episodes to answer.

Anyways, Echo is brought to Topher and he asks her if she’s ready to play. Which again, this is sort of innocuous, but if you look at it for more than a second you realize Whedon is comparing what Topher is about to do, erase her mind and give her a new one, to the “game” that Hearn asked Sierra to play earlier. Just because Echo won’t remember it doesn’t mean it’s not as bad.

As Topher and Echo play a game, Hearn is suffering the consequences of his. Hearn asks DeWitt if she’s going to turn him into an Active. Which just goes to show you how conceited this douche really is. Which DeWitt makes note of. Hearn leers and sneers at DeWitt and so Dominics knocks him upside the head. Hearn screams at her, saying that he won’t beg. He says “You want to kill me, you want to put me in the Attic, I can’t stop you.” And let’s examine that for a moment. Handlers can be put in the Attic too? It’s possible he’s equating the Attic with death here, but it’s much more likely that the Attic is something more universal than mere storage for broken Dolls.

Anyways, DeWitt want to hear the sordid details of his “game” and Dominic says he’s disgusting. Hearns says “we’re in the business of using people.” DeWitt retorts that he knows less about their business than he thinks, a line that foreshadows the conversation Echo and Ballard will have in a few scenes.

After a few more exchanges where Hearn digs a deeper whole of evil for himself, DeWitt asks Mr Dominic to leave. DeWitt admits that they’re in the business of using people. But what is the best use for someone like Hearn, she asks. He hands her a dossier with information about Mellie and tells him that she’s a problem for the Dollhouse. She needs to be killed. “And it can’t be clean” she adds.

Speaking on unclean, here’s Mellie and Ballard being very “neighbourly” in the dirtiest way that can possibly be interpreted. Her pants and moans, which start before the scene starts, are clearly not the sounds of an attack. Unless it’s an attack of penis, because she’s having an orgasm. Ballard (who I’ll probably have to start referring to as Paul at some point, now that he has a personal life and it’s relevant to the plot) and Mellie are now extra cuddly, and extra naked, talking about their future. Mellie, for her part, will not freak out if he wants to forget about all this. Mellie is being extra cool this episode, charmingly chiding him for his affection for her, which in the Joss Whedon world means he’s preparing to kill her.

Mellie thinks that he should keep looking for the Dollhouse, that his work is important. He wants her to help him. I’m not really sure why he thinks someone with no experience in crime would be able to help him unravel this conspiracy, or if he’s allowed to show her any of that information since I assume it’s classified, but what the hey. Let’s just call it Love. He says he’ll go pick up some dinner and when he gets back they’ll “look over his case files” though that’s unfortunately not a sexual metaphor.

At the Chinese restaurant, he sees Caroline in a reflection in a window and goes to investigate. He reaches for his gun, but she gets to it first. He says he doesn’t want to hurt her, which she appreciates. Because it’ll make her job of killing him that much easier.

When we get back from commercials, there’s an awesome fight sequence between Echo and Ballard. When it spills out of the restaurant’s kitchen and into the alley the stunt doubles make too many, and too noticeable, appearances but otherwise, the fight is really cool. I’m not a stunt choreographer though, so I won’t describe it. At one point Ballard gets the upper hand and hesitates because Echo feigns fear, then she knocks his shit down and tell him that the Dollhouse is real, they’re aware of his work, and they’re going to get him taken off the case.

Ballard wants to know why she’s telling him this. There’s a person inside the Dollhouse who’s working against it. They fiddled with the imprint. Ballard wants to know if it’s the same person that sent him the picture and the DVD, but Echo says it’s not. Ballard wants to know where the Dollhouse is, but Echo says that’s the wrong way to take the Dollhouse down. She says there are over 20 Dollhouses in cities around the world. They’ve got deep pockets, deep influence, and there’s no way Ballard can take them down either on his own or by targeting the LA branch alone.

Ballard wants to know why the person that set up this meeting wants to help him. Echo says “The Dollhouse deals in fantasy. That is their business, but that is not their purpose.” They need Ballard to find out its purpose. See this is where the show starts to get really interesting. We’re moving beyond the simple reason for Dollhouse’s existence — that if the technology exists, someone will use it for profit — into more murky waters. Given the pace of the show thus far, I feel like we’ll get the answers some time this season, but I’m sure they won’t be the end to the mysteries behind the Dollhouse.

Echo says that his allies will contact him again, with Echo’s body again if possible, but in the meantime, he has to let the Dollhouse win. Or at least think they’re winning. She hands him back his gun just in time to point it at the cop that came racing into the alley and fire. Echo’s mission was exactly this. Get Ballard implicated in the shooting of an officer to get him suspended from active duty. Now that it’s been accomplished, no one at the Dollhouse will know they spoke. Echo then tells Ballard, somewhat non-sequitorially, that they don’t want Ballard dead, but anyone else with information about the Dollhouse is fair game. And so Ballard realises the danger Mellie is in and goes running back to her.

Meanwhile, Mellie being all sexy wearing a dress shirt with no pants (seriously ladies, that is the one outfit choice that no guy can resist) when Hearn comes in to make a messy mess of death. He throws her around and she flails uselessly. Ballard races down the street while calling Mellie with his phone. Mellie crawls across the apartment floor, but Hearn grabs her by the legs and turns her over. Ballard continues to run down the street with his phone held to his ear. As Mellie struggles, the phone rings. Hearn mounts her and starts to choke her. She pulls off his mask. The answering machine comes on, and Adelle DeWitt says over the machine “There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is green.” and Mellie immediately switches from frightened girl to cold killer. She punches Hearn off of her, grabs him by his crotch and slams him into the wall, beats him up and then throws him down onto the coffee table and kicks his neck into the table, killing him. DeWitt, seeing that Mellie’s mission is complete, continues “There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is yellow.” And once again Mellie revert to her normal personality. Confused by what happened and how Hearn came to be dead, she stumbles over to the wall and begins to cry. Ballard finally arrives and, after confirming that Hearn is dead, falls down beside her and holds her in his arms.

OK, so Mellie is a sleeper Active. I thought she might be an Active from her very first appearance, but I was hoping she wasn’t simply because it gets a bit too much if everybody in Ballard’s life is an Active in disguise. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the twist when it ultimately happened. And while Joss defied expectations by not killing an awesome character in love, he still made that experience a manufactured reality. And that scene was awesome for Miracle Laurie. I mean, put that shit on your acting reel, and spend the next month turning down auditions. Wow. Great stuff.

The next day, Ballard is handing in his badge and gun, the backlash from the police officer shooting. Dominic receives word of this — and in the previous scene Tanaka seemed to be taking a bit too much pleasure in this so he might be the man on the inside of the FBI, informing the Dollhouse and keeping their dirty laundry out of the FBI reports — and informs DeWitt that Ballard’s been suspended pending an investigation. They’ve also made sure that Hearn’s fingerprints come back as those of a Russian floater to tie Ballard’s feud with the Russian mob to the break-in, ensuring that no one will be able to connect any of this to the Dollhouse. And even though their sleeper Active worked perfectly, DeWitt wants to bring her in just to make sure.

Dominic congratulates her on playing a good hand, to which she badassedly replies “I played a very bad hand very well, there is a distinction” which makes me all of a sudden love her character. The power of Joss Whedon, people. She wants Dominic to contact his counterparts in the other Dollhouses about what happened with Hearn and Sierra, so that it doesn’t happen again. He asks if Sierra’s all right. Apparently Topher took the trauma’s out of Sierra. “Ignorance, in this case, truly is bliss” DeWitt quips. “I don’t think they’re ignorant as they’re supposed to be.” Dominic says. But DeWitt assures him “we’re working on it” which doesn’t bode well for the Actives.

Sierra is looking at a book as Victor approaches. Sierra invites him to look at it with her. Things are back to normal. Meanwhile, Echo is painting a house with Sierra and Victor in front of it. DeWitt comes by and compliments it. “It isn’t finished” Echo says. “The picture?” DeWitt asks. And Echo mysteriously, yet innocently, repeats “It isn’t finished.” DeWitt asks if she’d like it to be finished but we’re left hanging on the answer to that question as a Greg Laswell’s song “Sweet Dream” begins to play. We cut to Echo driving up to Joel Mynor’s house where he finally gets to tell his wife the good news.

So, yeah this episode was awesome. Was it “5500 words” awesome? Apparently, because that’s how long this is. The good news here is that the ratings for this week were solid. Solid in that they didn’t drop significantly from last week, although I figured BSG’s finale would’ve affected it at least a little. Hopefully, with this week’s really excellent episode the word of mouth will finally start to kick in and the rating will improve.

P.S. Seriously, the next review will be shorter. Honest.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.

If anything, the problem with this show is that it’s too eager to explore the possibilities of this show. It’s too ambitious. The first episode explored the concept of delayed catharsis by proxy, when Echo’s imprint finally stood up to the man that had haunted her for years. The second episode examined the history of the Dollhouse while furthering the ongoing story of Echo’s awakening. The third episode discussed the way in which our society constructs and controls people just as much as the Dollhouse does its Actives. The fourth episode waxed poetically about art and what it is to be human, ideas entirely foreign to Echo, offering up the leading question “are the Actives even human at all anymore?” All of the ideas being examined are interesting and could have an entire series devoted to them, but Dollhouse has only begun. Perhaps its the seemingly haphazard exploration of these ideas that jars people, but it’s not the show’s fault that people had underwhelming expectations.

Nevertheless, this week’s episode continues to ask these sorts of questions. It opens with a group of cult members entering a store on a shopping excursion singing and smiling all the while. After a brief kerfuffle with a local yokel — where he hilariously responds to their continual singing and ignoring of him with “are you deaf, or you just tone deaf?” and offers up helpful nicknames like “Osama Bin Gandhi” — they leave, but their shopping list is left behind with an ominous “Save Me” message scrawled on the back.

Because of the rumours of what happens on the compound, the senator of the state where this cult resides is being pressured by his constituents and he wants a Dollhouse Active to help with the situation. Because of the note, they’ve obtained a short-term “sneak and peek” warrant but they wouldn’t be able to infiltrate the compound with an undercover agent that quickly; what they need is a true believer. And so Echo is imprinted with the personality of an extremely religious person, Ester Carpenter, who has been blind since she was nine. Both to facilitate the retrieval of surveillance of the compound and to reinforce the imprint’s belief that she is blind, Topher and Dr Saunders implant cameras into her eyes which redirect the eyes’ signals to the ATF leaving Echo blind.

Echo quickly gains the trust of the cult, primarily because she truly believes in the faith they espouse. And this is an idea that is mostly glossed over but is most definitely put out there to chew on: they program religiosity. Faith is often seen as something people have or don’t have, so this is another sacred cow the show is willing to challenge with the imprinting of the Actives on the show.

Though the trust of the cult is gained, their leader is more doubtful. He takes Echo to a dark room and shines bright lights in her eyes, looking for some sign of false blindness, but her pupils neither dilate nor retract. Then he suddenly aims a gun at her head but she is blissfully unaware of this and continues to praise him while the gun is pointed right between her eyes. He walks away mostly convinced that she’s the real deal, leaving Echo in the room to be walked out by Seth, the second-in-command. Unlucky for him and lucky for the ATF, the room he leaves her in is also where he stores his massive weapons cache.

The ATF has seen enough and is ready to go in guns blazing, but Boyd wants Echo extracted first seeing as her mission has been completed and it’d be dangerous to leave her in place during the raid. Of course, the head ATF agent is a huge dick — as they always are — denies the request and begins his breach. As Echo is being officially becoming a sister of the church, the ATF agents trip an alarm along the perimeter and have to fall back. But Jonas, the head of the church, is on alert now and begins accusing Echo of leading the ATF there. He bangs her around, disabling the cameras in her eyes, thus returning Echo’s vision. “It’s a miracle.”

The siege on the compound continues until Jonas decides that Echo truly was a miracle and a message to him: he’s not going to fight back with his arsenal. The church members head into a different building. I don’t like where this is going.

As this is happening, Boyd is trying to figure out who wrote the message, hoping for some inside help. After looking at the security footage in the store, he discovers that it was the ATF agent who manufactured the yokel’s conflict so that he could put that note there and further his investigation. “Nobody ever asked to be saved. Not by you.” Boyd says, in yet another little moment that opens up a world of ideas. Something that I noticed after I’d watched this episode was that, really, this cult didn’t actually do anything wrong. The members lived a pastoral life so there was no money to bilk from the members. There was no sexual abuse, no children being married off, no harem of women for the leader. Instead, this cult is just a bunch of people who believed a certain thing and wanted to extirpate modern society from their lives. They had weapons, but I think to complain about that is equivalent to complaining about the right for individuals to bear arms. I don’t know if this is meant to be a commentary on how society is discriminatory to people who are merely different, or an attempt to show how evil can be hidden in seemingly innocent environments, or something else entirely, but I thought it was interesting that little was done to demonize the cult.

So, now that I’ve praised the show for being measured in its treatment of cults, it’s time to disprove my entire argument. Echo is asked to recite a story about people being sent into a furnace to die and not being harmed by the flames because of their faith. Meanwhile, Seth heads off to do… something.  I really don’t like where this is going.

When Seth returns from setting fire to the building, some members decide enough is enough and start to leave but ultimately Jonas convinces them to remain in the building as it burns, relying on their faith to pressure them into staying. But Echo argues against him saying “You can’t force a miracle.” When Jonas remains steadfast in his faith, she knocks him out with a honking big candle holder and gets the rest of the church to finally flee the fire. All but one, that is, who asks “Where will we go?” and further asks “How can you doubt after God restored your sight?” to which she replies “I don’t think God let me see again so I could just watch.” Which is a wonderful skewering of the general mindset of a lot of fundamentalists. And so he spits in her face. She knocks him out, a useful problem solver in any situation, and Seth carries him out. But as she’s leaving Jonas awakens and cocks his gun. Before he can shoot Echo dead, someone in ATF gear walks in and shoots him dead. Too bad it’s Laurence Dominic, head of Dollhouse security, who’s had enough of Echo’s shenanigans and thinks this situation is a great opportunity to solve that problem. He knocks her out leaving her in the flames.

Shortly thereafter,  Boyd comes in in similar gear and rescues her, carrying her out of the fire as the ATF Agent-in-Charge tells reporters that they’re not hopeful for any more survivors. Oops.

So Echo returns to her peaceful life in the Dollhouse, but as she’s returning Dr Saunders asks her if her vision is ok. And after Echo looks around she looks intently at Dominic and ominously replies “I see perfectly.”

The two B plots of this episode revolve around Topher and Saunders, and Ballard and his lovelorn neighbour. Topher noticed that Victor had a “man-reaction” while in the shower. He noticed this while having a conversation about the Valsava Mechanism and he stutters after noticing it, which I’m pretty sure is a joke that nobody but the writer, Tim Minear, got; until I looked up the Valsava Mechanism. Be brings this up to Dr Saunders who cites her reports expressing concern over “residual imprinting” and then suggests they examine the shower videos from the recent past to see how long these “man-reactions” have been occurring.

Ultimately, they find out that Victor’s “man-reactions” aren”t a side-effect of repeated imprinting, because he only gets them when Sierra is in the shower as well. Turns out he’s just got a crush. DeWitt tells them that the purity of the Dollhouse must be preserved — immediately after Jonas had said something similar to Seth, to really drive home the comparison of the Dollhouse to the cult — and orders that Victor be scrubbed. Not sure what that means, but I am sure Victor won’t like it.

Ballard, on the other hand, is continuing his search to find any record of Caroline, Echo’s original identity, by going to someone with access to more government databases to search. Unfortunately, there’s no record of her anywhere. His neighbour brings him his pain medication and some “leftover” manicotti, even though it’s enough to feed a family of four, and she also has another mysterious package that somebody left with her down in the lobby of the building. It has the video of Caroline that Alpha was watching in the pilot on it, which only further intesifies his investigation, leaving his neighbour to be even more jealous and more lovelorn. There’s also a scene of Ballard watching the events at the cult unfold on TV and briefly seeing Echo. After the fallout, he tries to find her but is shot down by the ATF Agent-in-charge who’s a dick to everyone it seems.

There are a few really good beats here. Ballard trying to flirt and admitting it’s been a while. The man who gave the package to Ballard’s neighbour simply being a lazy mailboy was also a funny red herring. Neither of the B plots offer anything of real significance, but they both fill the episode with real humour while continuing to fill out the Dollhouse universe.

There are so many good things happening in this episode, that the complaints of others become even more baffling to me. This is an adventurous show that manages to examine TV-unfriendly ideas while remaining TV-friendly overall.  The people that are complaining about this show increasingly seem like people complaining because they think it’s the cool thing to do. Next week’s episode apparently is a big episode in the mythology of Dollhouse, so hopefully, it will shortly become cool to like this show.

On a meta note, this review/recap is around 2000 words, and the previous one was around 3500. Both of those numbers seem far too large. As this progresses, I think I’m going to find myself really paring down the descriptions of the plot and of specific scenes, however much I may enjoy them, and focusing on the philosophical questions and mythology the show introduces. But be warned. Sometimes I just don’t know when to shut up.

Dollhouse took another step up in quality this week after the slight fumble last week. In fact, aside from the opening scene where Echo serves as a doula in a secluded estate perched on an icy mountainside — which will surely engender endless theories about why someone would need to hire an Active to aid in childbirth, aside from the helpful and foreshadowy line “I want to forget!” — this episode was once again a marked improvement over its predecessor.

A scene with Boyd and Topher once again explores some of the nuances of the Actives and biology, in general. Topher’s worried about the “flocking” that the three main actives are exhibiting, which is likely a way for the show to explain away why the same four Actives will so frequently be seen cavorting in future episodes when their memory of past cavorts has been erased. This also emphasizes something left implied to this point: the Actives are completely wiped every time they’re brought back to the Dollhouse. Which is a convenient way of escaping the questions other Actives might naturally have when one is on a long-term mission. It also ensures Actives can’t develop long-term relationships even with other Actives or staff. The takeaway from these scenes, for me, was that the Dollhouse is very good at what they do.

After this prelude, the mission of the week is introduced. Here, we learn that (supposedly) nobody on staff knows what the missions are, and the risk factor is determined by a computer program. I don’t see how this could be done unless that program was a full-on artificial intelligence, and beyond that the handlers of the Actives are also fully aware of the mission as they observe it at all times. But for now, I’ll take them at their word, under the assumption they’re lying in some way. Either way, Echo’s mission this week has been rated as having “special requirements.” Meanwhile, a Voiceless Higher-Up calls up DeWitt about the progress of the Ballard mind fuck. They’re working on it, but not fast enough to warrant a goodbye from the VHU.

And now Echo’s “high risk” mission starts off and she’s a hooker. Look’s like that misogynist Joss Whedon has struck again. After the hot and heavy gyration’s of Taffy, Echo’s role du jour, the head of security for the hotel comes by offering a bit of champagne to get their dirrtiness, and Eliza Dushku’s over-the-top sexy squeals, up to their suite and away from the hotel lobby. We see Taffy’s client, now shirtless and chugging back the champagne, chasing her down the hallway and into the arms of the aforementioned head of security who wisks her away to his secret hideaway with its impenetrable keypad-based security, whose code Taffy dutifully observes for future use. Once in this fortress of securitude, the head of security gently consoles her and offers her a pay-off so that she’ll not sue either the hotel or her customers. What’s saddest about this is that I could totally see hotels having stacks of cash sitting around to pay off disgruntled hookers. Anyways, Taffy is outraged at this insult and refuses the money and then knocks the dude out and gets on her bluetooth headpiece, which would have looked so cool and spy-ish only a few years ago and now simply seems quite banal, to inform her team she’s in. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to the unconscious guard. She said it earlier too, but I can only type it so many times without bashing my head into my keyboard and I need to use it at least once more later on. And as the credits play, I once again have to express my appreciation of its length, even though it’s still much shorter than a truly great credit sequence, such as Six Feet Under’s or Carnivàle‘s, requires.

After the break, Taffy’s wonderful breasts are discussed, and a line as bizarre as “honest to blog” was in Juno is uttered in the course of said discussion when Taffy says “You can mention that when you blog about this later.” I guess it’s cheap way to explain that the guy she directs to blog is the tech guy for the job. Though really, I don’t think “I was aiding in the illegal theft of something last weekend and this chick I was working with had awesome boobs” is really the best thing to put on your blog. Incredibly personal discussions of the cause of your broken heart? Go for it. But leave illegalities out of it, m’kay?

In short order, all the men on the team have their roles defined. The blog guy is the tech-head, the “professor” is the one with domain expertise of what they plan to steal, and the guy pushing for the murder of the incapacitated head of security is the macho muscle that has no real purpose other than to argue for the most violent solution to any given problem. But Taffy, much like Baby, is not one for being put into corners and asserts her dominance with zeal explaining the “no-kill” order their boss has issued for this theft and that she knows to never second guess a client. And wear comfy shoes.

Now that everyone knows she’s the boss, she exposits that their job is to break in to an extremely secure vault which happens to be completely insecure right now due to an hour-long system upgrade hence the episode title “Gray Hour.” They break in and the other criminals quietly wonder why, if Taffy is the best, they’ve never heard of this criminal superstar. Put simply, she likes the quiet life and isn’t looking for attention. Which is a quick way of the show getting across that you don’t need to be famous to be the best at what you do, thus justifying virtually any mission the Actives might have in the future. And to emphasize that she’s simply another instance of the phrase “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” she promptly breaks through a very impressive looking vault door and leads them all into an artwork trove. After the professor makes us all aware of the value of the items in this vault, one painting alone is worth $17 million he says, we learn what they’re here to steal: the Parthenon.

Meanwhile, Agent Ballard has returned from the hospital with a gun shot wound, some drugs, and a sneaky suspicion that Lubov/Victor is lurking in the shadows. He interrogates Lubov about the picture he received from Alpha two weeks earlier and demands to know who gave him the tip that turned out to be a trap. Lubov was given the tip by someone — with a Georgian accent “Russia Georgia,” not “Sweet Home Georgia,” which Ballard Joss-fully corrects “Alabama” — who now knows that he’s in cahoots with Ballard and so wants protection. Ballard says he’ll help so long as he never sees Lubov again.

Returning to the vault, the professor exposits that Turkey, when they were in control of Athens, allowed the Earl of Elgin to take these small marble engravings from the Parthenon so while it’s not stolen per se, there’s probably a good reason it’s holed away in a vault. (Although, while doing a bit of perfunctory research for this post, I found out that these so-called Elgin Marbles are actually on display in the British Museum and Britain has publicly denied requests for their return to Greece, so all of this is a little misleading historically speaking.)

This little tidbit of historical information, leads the thieves to deciding that Greece hired them to steal the marbles back. As this pointless discovery is fleshed out by the non-professors, the professor is unartfully attempting to close the vault door behind himself locking them in and him out with the marbles. The tech-head tries to stop him but gets a gut full of ancient sword for his troubles, and they’re all stuck inside the vault as the professor makes a clean getaway. Luckily, Taffy’s got an outside man.

She calls up Boyd, who’s waiting in his surveillance van, to inform him of the man leaving the hotel and her desire that he not get away. The muscle attempts to interject with the brilliant line “how are you getting reception down here?!” but is shut down as Echo explains to Boyd that she’s got things under control and can get them out of the vault before the gray hour is over. But as her conversation with Boyd ends a sharp shrill noise rings out through the phone. Echo looks confused and quietly asks “Did I fall asleep?” Oh shit.

After the break, Topher is regaling a coworker with his opinions on the various nuances of his brain manipulating genius. It’s like this show knows how to get me all hot and bothered. Unfortunately, before the show can get me completely titillated, Topher notices that Echo’s vitals have gone off the charts. Her behaviour in the vault isn’t much better as she shudders in the fetal position “shall I go now?” awaiting her preprogrammed response. The muscle is confused and decides, as per usual, that the solution to the problem is more violence. Amazingly, it doesn’t work.

Boyd, on the other hand, has got his shit well in hand. He shoots the professorial prick just for the fun of it and gets the marbles. Meanwhile, Topher is explaining to DeWitt how Echo has lost hers. Her vitals are off the chart, and despite explanations from others, Topher knows that her pulse rate, with her current personality, would never go over 65 BPM. Something went wrong. Luckily, they’ve got a recording of Echo’s conversation with Boyd, and Topher is terrified when he hears the high pitched noise that ends the call. After a bit of befuddlement, he explains that Echo has been remotely wiped, something that has never been tested and shouldn’t have even been possible. Echo has essentially been born again without the comforts the Dollhouse has built into their wiping protocol. And she certainly won’t be able to help herself.

In the vault, the muscle is working on getting Taffy back, but all Echo can do is repeat the things he’s told her to say. “Taffy’s gone man, and she’s not coming back.” the tech-head says as he cradles his gut wound. Which leads us to Sierra waking up in the Dollhouse brain-changing chair. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to DeWitt who says she needs Taffy’s help. Taffy’s back, people.

After the break, we get a scene where the tech-head teaches Echo about art. He talks about the appearance of art, and how it can either be about what you see or about what is. “That’s what art’s for: to show us who we are” he says romantically. It’s an interesting little scene where the discussion about the art around them effectively mirrors Echo’s disintegration under the stresses she’s experiencing. It would be nice if the scene was a little longer, even though it’s a little shoe-gazy, but the muscle decides it’s time for more muscle. He calls them all weak and busts out a drill to… I’m not really sure what he plans to do with it, he does know vault doors have protection against that sort of thing, right?

SierraTaffy is livid back at the Dollhouse, that she got passed over after all the work she put into planning the Parthenon heist. She repeats EchoTaffy’s story about never second guessing clients. She even adds on the comfy shoes bit, to emphasize how meaningless the distinction between the first Taffy and the new Taffy is. They’re both the same person, just in a different body.

Now that Topher’s had some time to process what happened, he feels the need to barrage the audience with completely meaningless technobabble about “neurotropic factor” and how impossible it would be to break through all the firewalls he put into place. He’s certain that this isn’t a one-man hack. Which is a little odd given his scenes with DeWitt later on. He calls up Boyd to ask if Echo seemed normal when he took her out tonight. Boyd answers but wants to know why it matters. I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Was he thinking that Echo did the remote wipe to herself? That it was an inside job? Oh right, the show just needs a credible reason for Boyd to know that Echo’s in trouble. And so Boyd calls up DeWitt to complain that he was left out of the loop. And then he demands from the professor a map to the security room they entered the vault from. SierraTaffy continues her role as an exposition machine, explaining that while she has all the skills needed to solve this problem there’s a time factor as well. There are only nine more minutes left in the gray hour, so there’s no way for her to do the job in person, but if Echo can follow instructions everything will be all right.

Tech-head continues his art lecture series, soon to be released on his blog and available on iTunes, and Echo offers the crucial information that she likes sky. And that there’s a mountain in the painting they’re both looking at. She then asks what her name is and explains that when she’s “there,” her name is something else. Is this an example of her memory persisting, despite what Topher’s instruments indicate, or an example of the depth of the base state programming of the Actives? Is she programmed to have the name Echo when she’s in the Dollhouse? It’s a seemingly pointless digression, but it may be important in future episodes. Either way, tech-head is sick of Echo’s child-like persona. He asks her to get something from his bag. As he prepares the syringe, he explains to Echo that they’re fucked and the only way that door will be opened is by the security guards outside, who will take them to prison.

“What’s prison?” Echo asks. “It’s a place with no sky” Tech-head helpfully answers. The look on Echo’s face as she hears this description of prison is deep with meaning and memory. She’s been in prison before. “We’re bad guys.” Tech-head says as he slide the syringe up to his arm. But death is the easy way out, says the muscle. He takes the syringe away, lifts the no-kill order, and takes out a gun.

Topher continues to explore the list of possible hackers that could have remote wiped Echo. Although, that list should probably be pretty small given the secrecy about Dollhouse’s very existence. In fact, after throwing away his most recent accusation for being a hack, he says “there’s only one person I know, who could achieve a remote wipe. And he’s dead.” The look of confusion on his face lingers until just before the camera cuts away when it quickly shifts to one of understanding.

SierraTaffy is trying to call Echo but nobody’s picking up. She explains how she’ll open the vault door. Echo finally picks up. And SierraTaffy and EchoTaffy’s similarities are once again noted by the show. They both hide their vault-cracking resin in their bra. There’s a short vault-cracking scene which doesn’t end up successful and SierraTaffy heads off to her “treatment” with her briefcase full of cash. Something tells me, she’s not going to be leaving with that money.

Because official authorities are potentially getting involved, it’s time for the Dollhouse to make sure they’re isolated, so DeWitt orders a couple operatives to be ready to eliminate Echo should the need arise. She is also explicit that she doesn’t want Boyd knowing about it, as she thinks he’s grown too attached to Echo.

The alarm has been set off, the guards are closing in and the muscle is telling Echo to shoot at the bad guys. This confuses her because she was pretty certain that they were the bad guys. So the muscle holds his gun to her and says to shoot or be shot. Echo would prefer to just go, sans shootout. Somehow, she gets it into her head to take the syringe of death and inject it into the muscle’s neck. How she knew it would harm him is left unanswered as her previous reaction to it was completely benign. Regardless, the muscle goes down and shoots off a few rounds as he does instigating a one-way fire-fight in which he fires blindly and yet somehow manages to hit every guard that the camera shows. Tech-head gives Echo instructions on how to get out and then throws a smoke grenade. Boyd follows the map drawn for him. He gets to the whole in the wall as Echo and the tech-head are making their way out.

“Are you OK?” Boyd asks. “He’s broken.” Echo responds talking about tech-head as she passes him over to Boyd. Boyd reaches his hand out for Echo to take to which she says “I’m not broken.”

Finally, Ballard gets back from his help-getting mission which turns out wasn’t so much a “help you out” mission as it was a “fuck you over” mission. Lubov is marked for capture everywhere and if he tries to leave LA, he’ll be picked up by the FBI and dropped off with a handshake at the Russian mob’s doorstep. Harsh, dude.

Well, Echo’s back to being a blank slate, the marble is intact and headed to the client and Topher says the remote wipe did no permanent damage. But that’s not what Topher is really there to talk about. He knows that Alpha was the one that remote wiped Echo. Nobody else could have done it. DeWitt needs a signature from Topher: his security clearance has been upgraded. Alpha is indeed alive. And out there. The Dollhouse is not all powerful says DeWitt. Though its creation appears to be.

Echo has returned to her calm life at the Dollhouse, and yet seems affected by these recent events as she draws a sad face in the steam of her mirror. And wipes it away.

This episode once again relied on integrating the mythology with the episodic storyline. Like the second episode, Alpha introduced something unexpected into one of Echo’s missions. It still remains unclear what Alpha’s goal is with these sabotages, but they seem to be having an effect on Echo. For example, at first glance, the thread with Boyd trying to get to Echo to help her out seems pointless, but after re-watching, it seems like they’re trying to show that Echo managed the situation without Boyd’s help. Unlike what Topher said, she did help herself. Is this a growing ability in Echo? And if so, was it instigated by this event or was it always there waiting to be demonstrated? And is that why Alpha spared Echo during his massacre?

The mythology of the show and the questions regarding Echo’s growth are deepening. I’m glad that the show is expanding the mythology so quickly, though mostly because it means we’ll probably be getting answers some time this year, and given that the likelihood of Dollhouse getting another season diminishes each week, I hope for some level of closure before Fox bitch slaps this show into oblivion. The show still suffers from the problem that the Ballard storylines are far too separate from the rest of the action. This episode took a step in the right direction by getting DeWitt involved in his story, but it needs to be even more integrated. I know I say this every week, and given that the show started at a B+ and is thus far at about an A- the improvements might seem marginal, the show really does continue to improve with each new episode. And episode seven is supposedly when the season really kicks off. I can’t wait.

The superstar-gone-crazy storyline isn’t entirely original, but because this is Dollhouse you get a chance to compare the assembly-line construction of pop stars the industry operates on  – there’s even a line about Rayna, the pop star in trouble, having stalkers since “singing for the Mouse” a clear reference to the Disney Mousketeers and their continual stream of stars — with the programming the Dollhouse gives to its Actives. Of course, there are obvious advantages to a story such as this…

Meanwhile, in the Dollhouse story-line a new aspect of the Active’s programming was revealed in this episode: Actives are given a persona, the identity they’re portraying, and a parameter, the underlying requirements of the mission. Echo’s persona is a singer, but her parameter is to protect Rayna at all costs. It’s an interesting addition to the mythos that opens up lots of possibilities regarding the inconsistent programming of the subconscious and conscious minds of the Actives.

The story definitely goes over-the-top with the diva personality — the exasperated line “Is somebody eating a mint?!” comes to mind — but I suppose it helps in establishing that she’s crazy. Echo’s solution to the Rayna’s suicidal tendencies is simple: bring her close to death so she can realize it’s not that appealing. But it breaks from her mission parameter in a 3 Laws of Robotics sort of way, which is interesting but a cause of consternation. Because of Echo’s improvisation there’s talk of an Attic, where inactive Actives go to sleep forever, which harkens to the boxing of Cylon models on BSG. But in the end she saves Rayna from herself. She also seemingly remembering her earlier interactions with Sierra at the Dollhouse during the mission; even stranger, Echo and Sierra seemed to remember each other when back at the Dollhouse. Things are moving quickly here, and Echo’s awakening will surely be a “game-changing” event in Dollhouse should the show survive long enough to feel its effects.

On a related note, I have to say I was really impressed by the performance from Dichen Lachman, the actress playing Sierra. Her captivity scenes were very good. She played the fear very realistically. Kudos to her. I just hope she doesn’t play an Australian persona too often; I know she’s already Australian so there’s no need to work on an accent but the landscape of American television is becoming inundated by Australian actors playing American roles which on occasion have to pretend to be Australian. Not that it’s a bad thing when they’re all as gorgeous as Yvonne Strahovski, Dichen Lachman, and Alex O’Loughlin.

And finally, Ballard’s Russian mob informant is revealed to actually be a Dollhouse Active presumably on a mission to get Ballard killed. It’s not a huge surprise, again because of the press photos showing that actor as an Active, but it’s a new development and the reveals thus far only skim the surface of what Viktor’s mission actually is and what the Dollhouse has in store for Ballard. At first glance, the information given to Ballard was to set him up to be killed by the mob, but who’s to say what the real intention was. Ballard’s plots are all so minor and insubstantial right now, it’s hard to put any effort into examining them, but I’m sure as the show progresses he’ll get closer to the Dollhouse and more integrated with the rest of the show’s stories.

The show’s improving. This week’s episode wasn’t as good as last week’s for the same reason the pilot was a little lackluster: the main story wasn’t that enthralling. But the show is getting better. The characterizations are getting richer, the long-term stories are getting layered in wonderfully, and the dialogue is getting smoother and Joss-ier. So freaking watch it, because the ratings are not good people.

From what I’ve read online, this was originally scripted as the seventh episode of the season. Some of the direct correlations between scenes in the pilot and this one make that statement suspect but it does explains why there’s so much exposition regarding the mythology mysteries, answers which normally would have taken half a season to unfold. But if if truly was the seventh originally, I can see why they bumped this episode up because it was an amazing hour of television.

Last week’s main story was a little lackluster, despite the interesting implications of what happened in it. This week was more exciting, less cerebral. The sort of exciting adventure the show needed to let its audience see a less restrained side. Not that this was a light-hearted romp; an episode where a seemingly innocent adrenaline junkie’s weekend date — with the crazed survivalist Richard O’Connell played brilliantly by Matt Keeslar — for Echo turns into her running for her life from the same man determined to find out if she’s worthy of living, if she can escape his manhunt, isn’t something to dance around about. But there’s much more levity in this episode, and the dialogue has become much smoother. The growing pains the pilot suffered from are almost completely gone here.

While this week’s main story was by far the more interesting half of the episode, the flashbacks in the Dollhouse to the events of a few months ago were excellent as well. The naked man who ended last week’s episode is Alpha; an Active, presumably one of the earliest versions of the Actives given his name, who, either at least partially retained his implanted personalities despite mind wipes after missions or was implanted by an unknown party with a personality and skills he shouldn’t have, broke free killing almost everyone in the Dollhouse and disappearing. He spared Dr Saunders her death, instead slicing her face leaving her scarred and damaged, and left Echo alive and unharmed surrounded by the dead bodies of her fellow Actives.

In this back story, we also learn of the imprinting process Boyd, Harry Lennix’s character, went through with Echo which made her unconditionally trust him in any circumstance. This trust is ingrained in her via key phrases which she reacts to in a preprogrammed manner. Which is why when, in the midst of the hunt, Echo ignores Boyd’s invocation of the key phrase and instead takes charge of the situation and going up against O’Connell on her own Boyd is perturbed. As would the Dollhouse if Boyd mentioned it, but it seems like the paternal connection he has with Echo will encourage a few helpful omissions from his report.

Alpha is said to have been killed after his escape by the Dollhouse, but we know he hasn’t and his message to Ballard was received this week while Paul was examining the crime scene from last week’s episode, much to the chagrin of the detectives actually assigned to the case. (Ballard has a few scenes this episode and they’re all fairly unrelated to the rest of the action on screen which is why it’s possible they were taken from whatever was originally the second episode and injected into this one to make the continuity stick.) Now that Ballard has a face to connect to the Dollhouse, albeit a face that doesn’t exist according to the FBI database, he will be even more determined. There’s a nice scene in there where Ballard’s attractive and clearly into him neighbour tries to offer him a nice home cooked dinner and gets shot down via the obliviousness and doggedness of the agent. It’s a little heavy-handed at getting it’s point across, but it’s still better than the kickboxing scene from the pilot.

The beauty of Joss Whedon’s work, as I noted when discussing the Buffy episode Doppelgangland, is his ability to combine stand-alone story lines with ongoing arc threads and this episode is an brilliant example of this. O’Connell’s actions originate from him and the conflicts he introduces are resolved within the span of the episode but the mystery of his origin’s, which were meticulously constructed by someone else (most likely Alpha), add to the overall arc. Similarly, the back story related to Boyd’s introduction to Echo not only allows some exposition regarding the process and Active and their handler go through together but also develops the long-term relationship between the two characters which is built upon by the main action of the episode.

If this episode is a sign of what’s to come from Dollhouse, then consider me in it for the long haul. However long that may be.

Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s new show on the network he swore to never work with again, premiered Friday night to not-great ratings and to not-great reviews, but I think what we’re asking ourselves right now is “what did Blair think of it?” If you really want to hear about it, either read this longish review or, if you want to hurt my feelings, skip to the end.

The opening scene where Eliza Dushku’s character Echo signs up to become an “active” — a reprogrammable human willing and able to be whoever and do whatever the client requests — at the Dollhouse — the eponymous organization behind this booming industry — was definitely there for the mythology builders. It quickly established that the reasons Echo joined the Dollhouse will be a part of the mythology of the show while preparing the viewers by asking the question “what if actions didn’t have consequences?”

The first consequence-less action we’re shown is a perfect weekend between Echo, playing the flirty and fun twenty-something role, and some dude with too much money. It’s interesting that they chose to introduce people to Echo as a high-end prostitute, but it’s also obvious they chose it to demonstrate that actives are completely blank slates when they’re not “active.” Switching from Echo’s peppy and sexy dance moves with a bright smile on her face to the doll-like emptiness of the actives is both a quick way to demonstrate the answer to the opening scene’s question and also gives Dushku a chance to stretch her acting muscles, which is really what this show is all about.

After she’s returned to the Dollhouse and “reset” there’s a short scene of awkward exposition with a brief foray into the philosophical questions this show will undoubtedly ask week to week, when Topher, the tech behind the mind-wipes played by Fran Kranz, says “[Echo's] living the dream” to which her morally conflicted handler, played by Harry Lennix, responds “whose dream?” It’s a simple scene but it sets up Topher as the Xander of the Dollhouse, and establishes the conflict at the heart of Echo’s handler. I keep wanting to use the phrase “effectively introduces” because most of the scenes are explicitly designed to introduce these concepts and characters to the audience without being too weighed down by clunky dialogue.

Following this, the requisite Monster of the Week is introduced as a little girl is kidnapped out of her bedroom in a pretty effectively creepy scene. Then the credit sequence plays which is interesting but not quite interesting enough to want to watch each week. I’ve previously talked about my annoyance with the lack of interesting and evocative credit sequences in modern television. HBO and Showtime excel at this but the networks apparently aren’t willing to give up a full one or two minutes for credits the way cable stations are.

After another scene which establishes what the client of the week needs out of the Dollhouse, a hostage negotiator to handle the payment of the ransom for his daughter, we’re blessed with a scene between Echo and the staff doctor, Dr Saunders, played by the always beautiful Amy Acker. Acker plays this scene very peculiarly, with a strange cadence to her delivery. She seems guarded in her interactions, which may be as a result of the two or three large scars across her face, which do nothing to make you forget that Amy Acker is gorgeous.

Echo then walks in on the creation of an Active, a procedure which is more painful and invasive than the typical “treatments” she’s used to. Echo’s dialogue in this scene is a little too child-like for my tastes, actually all of her scenes in the Dollhouse have this problem. Hopefully her growing awareness of what she is will solve this problem, but for now we may be cursed with obnoxiously written child-like dialogue from the inactive Actives.

By now all the set-up for the episode, and most of the set-up for the series, is in place so it seems like a good time to introduce Paul Ballard, the FBI agent tasked with finding the Dollhouse, played by Tahmoh Penikett. Long story short: he’s very dedicated, to the detriment of the rest of his life, hence the ungraceful reference to his divorce. Oh, and in this scene Tahmoh has a weird shape to his lips that I never noticed on BSG so I hope it’s just a fluke of the scene and not something he’s actively applied to his character’s appearance. Because me no likey.

After all this set-up, we’re over a third of the way through the episode, already an extended 50 minute episode, so the story proper begins with Echo arriving at the client’s house as Eleanor Penn, an expert negotiator who’s handled these sorts of payouts time and again. At least she thinks she has. There’s a couple scenes of her establishing her dominance and her overall awesomeness, and an interstitial exposition scene from Topher about the techniques of implantation. The personalities the Actives are implanted with come from real people, which implies another mythology question that will be answered over time.

I’m not in love with the main story of this episode because, quite frankly, the story of someone who helps kidnappers get their money without police complications isn’t a particularly thrilling idea. There are some interesting tidbits though; in particular, one of the real people who was the basis for Eleanor Penn was kidnapped herself as a child and sexually and physically abused which makes the client, who’s aware of where Eleanor Penn came from, ask what would make those men put such terrible memories in her mind. An interesting question, and one that won’t be forgotten on this show.

Meanwhile, in the world of Paul Ballard he manages to find a Russian mob member who might be able to get him information about the Dollhouse. Though, the mobster looks remarkably like the third male Active in the promo photo above, so I’m thinking that might be a dead end.

After this little interlude, we return to the adventure’s of Ms Penn who’s about to hand over the money in exchange for the girl when one of the men in the team of kidnappers sparks a deep memory in her. He’s the man who took her years ago. Wait, what? Yeah. This episode doesn’t handle it very well, but the question is still floating there to be asked.

After a few scenes of Echo heading back for her “treatment,” which unbeknownst to her is when she will return to being Echo, the Dollhouse ultimately decides to allow her to remain as Ms Penn long enough to get the girl back from the kidnappers despite the complications of the mission. The girl is saved by Echo, and the kidnappers are all unhesitatingly shot down by another Active, Sierra, the one being created in the earlier scene and the other female Active in the photo above. There’s another interesting snippet here. The real person who was taken by the kidnapper years ago killed herself a few years earlier because she was haunted by the memory of that monster for the rest of her life. But here, her memory gets closure. The kidnapper is killed and before he did she gets a chance to stand up to him and face her greatest fear. Is this catharsis equivalent to the real thing? Is the recording of this woman’s memory resolving her deep-set issues in some way resolving them for the original person. It’s an interesting question and an idea I hadn’t thought of when first thinking about the premise of this show. It may be a ridiculous question and one that only I asked but it caught my attention regardless.

Finally, to close of the show we have another mythology building scene. A nude man is seen from behind preparing an envelope for Agent Ballard encouraging his hunt for the Dollhouse while watching a video of a pre-Active Echo discussing her post-graduation goals. The camera moves back to show the room he’s quietly resting in has several dead and bloody bodies in it. Who is this man? Why does he want to encourage, and aid, Ballard’s search for the Dollhouse? And why does he have a video of Echo before she was Echo? There’s a lot in that scene to be explored in later episodes.

This review was much longer than it probably needed to be, but I felt that a pseudo-scene-by-scene write-up was necessary to get at the numerous themes and ideas being introduced throughout this pilot. Should I keep up these episode reviews of Dollhouse, which is unlikely given my post frequency,  they’ll likely gloss over most of the details. As for this episode, the one thing I liked was that while the exposition wasn’t handled with excellence it was usually paired with a mythology or character development chaser that made it more palatable.

Overall, I’m excited about this show. I want to see what happens when Echo begins to remember things she shouldn’t. I want to see Ballard’s investigation progress. I want to see more of the history of the Dollhouse; how it came to be; how people become Actives; what kind of person donates their personality to the Dollhouse and why. Most of all, I want to see more Amy Acker. If this show gets a second season, I hope she’s upgraded from recurring to regular cast. She brought such intrigue and mystery to her two scenes and I can’t wait to see why her character is the way she is.

But then again, given the massive Joss Whedon marathon I undertook a little over a year ago, I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that I’ll be watching this show to the (most likely bitter) end.