I’ve spoken before about how overrated I think House is, but I was arguing in favour of Chuck, a show with a very different structure. Chuck operates in a more serialized storytelling realm, whereas House is a procedural. The thing that chafes me about House is the show offers up the appearance of serialization, but quietly hits the reset button regularly. For every time House crosses a line or has a moment of growth and/or realization, there’s another instance not long after returning him to his default state.

Getting rid of his limp a few seasons ago only to have it return because he can’t be a good doctor without it was one of the stupidest decisions the show ever made. The limp, House’s acerbic misanthropic personality, the dangerous risks he takes on a regular basis, all of these things are crutches. It was an interesting set-up for the show, but to play the audience with the appearance of growth for House but failing to follow through and soften his character over time is basically the writers being afraid to mess with their formula. I understand that to a degree, but that doesn’t mean I accept it. The writers should be able to do better. They should be able to keep the show interesting and compelling without keeping their characters essentially stagnant.

An excellent counterexample to House is Numb3rs, a show that seems to me to be consistently underrated. It’s your basic procedural on the surface, but the characters are always growing and changing. Sometimes, a character goes away, other times they’ll return, relationships will be born, the aftermaths of their orders are reflected on, and they’re not afraid to tell a story where the FBI is the bad guy, or the villain we knew wasn’t the villain at all. It’s all around a great show, and for the geek in me it’s much more interesting than House because each week mathematics is used in some way to analyse the crime and help solve the case.

The point I’m trying to make here, something I didn’t in my previous attack on House, is that despite my dislike of House’s faux-serialized format, there are procedural shows I enjoy and Numb3rs is one of them.

Dollhouse is a hard show to pin down. Through its run — I’m not implying anything by that phrasing, I still hold out hope that it will get a second season — it’s experimented with the implications of the technology at use on the show. It is, in many ways, one of the true science fiction shows remaining. This episode not only tinkered with virtually every form of mind-frakking, but it blew away all my issues with the way last week ended by taking the cliche and playing with it.

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.

Just when I thought I was out… this week’s episode of Dollhouse was too good to not talk about. Luckily, I’m incredibly fickle, so next week’s might send me back into my self-imposed silence. But for now, I have to talk — nay, gush — about this week’s Dollhouse episode.

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.

Up until now, Dollhouse has been a good show. Even a great show at times. But it wasn’t a Joss Whedon show. The first five episodes were hindered by network interference, but with this episode Whedon finally got out from under the thrall of Fox’s “creative consultancy” and Dollhouse finally became a Joss Whedon show. Before now, you could see inklings of Whedonism in the show — Lubov’s “Sweet Home Georgia” line from a couple weeks ago, in particular — but this episode brought it all together; there was intrigue, philosophical pondering, humour, and plot twists galore. More (a lot more) after the break.

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