As I look back on the grand experiment that was my weekly reviews of Dollhouse, I find myself still struggling with the proper format of these reviews. Based on my blog’s tracking stats, I’ve found more people visit the reviews which were more in-depth and detailed, but at the same time that could simply be a side-effect of the sheer volume of words in those reviews. By quoting specific lines and describing most of the scenes to a reasonable level of detail it becomes much more reasonable for someone searching for those things online — something I often do, to gauge if my opinion of certain scenes is reflected by the online audience — to find my site.

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?

This review took a lot longer to come out, not because I had trouble writing it, but because I got distracted by the Save Chuck campaign and by reading the Death Note manga (which is fucktastically good, by the way) during every spare moment of time. I’m not really sure how I feel about this week’s episode of Dollhouse. I want to hold out on judgement until next week, since this episode was all about the set-up for next week’s finale¹, but in reality the entire season has been leading up to next week. I think this entire episode was wonderful, until the last few moments and those I’m still not sure about.

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.

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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 should be writing my weekly Dollhouse review/recap right now, but the current hysteria over Chuck and its possible cancellation is what tends to preoccupy my televisual thoughts nowadays. I should say this immediately: both Chuck and Dollhouse are deserving of renewal. I’m more heavily invested in Chuck because there have been more episodes and more emotional connections made, but they’re both excellent shows. The key difference between the two is that the fan base of Chuck has galvanized and mobilized, while the fans of Dollhouse do little more than bemoan its impending doom in scattershot fora.

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.