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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 [↩]

I tried to keep this one short, but it’s still touching on 900 words. The gist, though, is that I liked it, but I was hoping for more.

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.

Fridays’s episode of Dollhouse was yet another in a string of strong episodes bring the show to its rushed but still enthralling conclusion.

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.

This fabulous episode cemented for me a thought I’ve had for the entire season: Epitaph One should not exist.

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.

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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 finished Dracula last night — around three in the morning so technically it was November but I still count it as completing the book according to the Infinite Summer schedule — and I thought it was a really great book. Not one of The Greats, but a good story with a decent amount of emotion and pathos underpinning the basic plot.

To cap off this month of reading Dracula, I’m writing up this post to talk about a few of the interesting things I found about Dracula, as well as try to find some connection between it and Infinite Jest.

Vampire Lore

In truth, I’ve never seen a Dracula story in all my years of Vampire stories, so I wasn’t sure how much of the traditional Vampire lore we are familiar with came from Dracula. It turns out that it was a surprising amount. I look to Whedon lore before others so they are the standard against which I compare and the comparison is mostly favorable.

Vampire’s require an invitation to enter buildings; killing a vampire does turn them to dust, though only if they are so old as their natural bodies would be dust by then; to become a vampire you have to be drained of blood and then drink the Vampire’s blood, though you do not have to be drained to death and the effect is permanent: once this procedure occurs, no matter when you die you will become a vampire, provided your sire remains among the undead; a vampire, or someone on the way to vampirism, also has a special psychic link with their sire, something not made explicit with Whedon but the master/sire relationship is strong there as well; you lose your soul when you become a vampire; and finally, vampires show no reflection in mirrors.

However there are a few notable differences: vampire’s also cast no shadow; they can turn to mist or creatures of the night; from my reading of the book, their fangs are not retractable; their physical powers seem to be limited to strength, with no enhancement to vision of hearing; vampires must rest on holy land, that of a church or a graveyard; to be immersed in water is death for a Stoker vampire, and while on the sea a vampire can control the weather; and most importantly, they can walk the streets by day, though their powers are linked to the night and they are unusable in the day.

Novel Structure

The novel is structured as a collection of diaries, memos, letters, and news articles. There are two interesting side-effects of this. The first is that all the characters correspond with each other but with varying levels of delay. So while Lucy has already died, we read Mina’s letters of joy to her, and later on experience her sorrow at learning of Lucy’s death, undeath, and destruction. These delayed emotions play to the reader well, I thought, giving a level of sympathy to the characters, and also establishing a world of hidden truths that can only be noticed when seeing the story in its entirety, something the writers of these individual pieces cannot enjoy — well actually they do, which brings me to the second point.

Around half-way through the novel, the two main stories collide with Mina and Van Helsing discussing her husband’s strange story out of Transylvania and Van Helsing telling of Lucy’s sordid end. At this point, Mina begins to collect the various diaries and articles, essentially creating all the previous sections of the novel for the group of Vampire hunters to use as a tool for finding and killing Dracula. From this point on in the novel, the diaries continue and they are all shaped by the open sharing of all the diaries in uncaptured scenes. This is a very meta-y type of storytelling, almost post-modern in construction, something that perhaps inspired the Infinite Summer people to read Dracula.

Gayness

This isn’t actually a real thing, but rather a construction of modern minds, I think. Still, as I read this book, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if everybody was banging everybody else, regardless of gender, with the heaps of praise and love they throw on each other. I mean, some of the early letters between Mina and Lucy are almost lascivious, they talk about sleeping together, dressing each other, long walks on the beach, it’s kind of ridiculous. The man on man action isn’t quite as explicit, but I found more than a few moments in the novel where it seems like the men were moments away from a gay-ass tongue bath.

Feminism

Mina Harker is a really bad-ass woman. She’s the one who first puts all the diaries together, she’s the one who figures out where Dracula is living, what some of his motives are. She determines that the psychic link between her and Dracula, one created when she is forced to drink his blood in a siring ceremony, can be exploited to find Dracula’s location. She’s basically the smartest one of the bunch. She’s also pretty tough:

When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a fainting disposition.

That sounds like a line from a fucking superhero. Later on, when she’s done all the Batman-esque super-sleuthing for the men, and it is time to go to Dracula’s lair and kill him, the men tell her to go to bed because ‘we are men, and we are able to bear’ and she quietly accepts it, but only because she fears they will remove her entirely from the venture if she protests on this; she isn’t some pussy glad to be away from all the danger, she’s afraid they’ll put her further away from it.

Dracula has a weird sort of feminism to it. Throughout the novel, Mina is praised by Van Helsing for her bravery, her wit, her sharp detective skills, pretty much everything. But he still says things like ‘she has a man’s brain’ as though it were a compliment. It’s struggling to establish a female lead as at least close to an equal, but falls slightly short. Still, I’m impressed that the novel was so willing to have even a remotely powerful female lead.

Horror

This is not the scariest novel I’ve ever read — there are moments in Stephen King’s Misery that almost made we sweat with horror — but it still managed to evoke real terror at times. In particular, the section which recounts the face-off against the vampire Lucy is great: so far as I can tell, it has the very first instance of the phrase ‘if looks could kill,’ a cliche now perhaps, but surely a terrifying description, and one that struck me with the instant I read it as well.

Infinite Jest Connections

The connections to Infinite Jest are mostly tangential or internal fabrications, but there are some interesting ones. There are a few explicit references to Hamlet early on, but those seem purely incidental. And I’ve already mentioned the self-referential writing which seems a very modern conceit for a novel written over a century ago, and one reminiscent of the Infinite Jest film inside Wallace’s novel.

Another particularly compelling connection comes from the closing chapters of Dracula. In them, Mina Harker is racing toward Dracula’s castle with Van Helsing hoping to consecrate his resting place in order to refuse him safe harbor from their hunt. In the superstitious Carpathian mountains, the scar upon Mina’s forehead — a burn from the placing of Holy Water on her flesh — causes their journey ill will from the villagers; in order to avoid these hassles, she takes to wearing a veil to hide her deformity. If that’s not an Infinite Jest connection, I don’t know what is.

Actual closing thoughts

Overall, I’m glad I read Dracula. I’ve always liked Vampire stories, so it seemed like I had to read it eventually and the month deadline really helped with that — I read over 140 pages yesterday to ensure I would finish it according to the schedule. Beyond that though, it opened me up to a very different writing style. I’ve mostly avoided classical novels for fear of being bogged down by archaic language, but I found Dracula to be fairly readable, which makes me more willing to read other classic novels I’ve put off for too long. So go read a classic or something.

One of the strengths of JM Straczynski having planned the five year story of Babylon 5 was that he laid lots of interesting nuggets of foreshadowing into the earlier seasons. Plot devices used in one-off episodes in the early episodes could play a huge part in culminating events years later. It works so well because you likely won’t notice those hints the first time through, and when you return to the show for a second viewing, the relationships and significance of the events lets the foreshadowing impact you with even more force.

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.

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. [↩]

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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There’s a lot of complaining about Dollhouse going on out there in the interwebs. People on my twitter feed incessantly talk about giving up on the show, but I just don’t understand at all. The show is not bad. It might not be as amazing as Firefly was, though most people didn’t really know that until after the show was canceled because nobody watched the freaking thing, but to pretend like it is some arduous task to watch the show is absurd. Buffy wasn’t great in its first season, nor was Angel. Joss Whedon, from my experience, usually gives you good before you get great. And this show is good.

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.

NOTE: I apologize for the length of this recap/review; I’m still experimenting with the format I’m most comfortable with for doing these sorts of posts.

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.

Well, the idea of an episode where Echo plays a backup singer/secret bodyguard wasn’t immediately appealing to me, the show managed to ask a few interesting questions and keep me entertained during those scenes while furthering the mythology of the show. The real accomplishment was, of course, having legitimately good original pop songs. When Chuck had its rockstar-in-trouble episode a couple weeks ago they had to fake it but this show busted a full-fledged dance number out to kick off the hour.

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.

This post discusses some relatively old developments in the Buffy “Season 8″ comic which I haven’t kept up with in recent months so forgive me for being outdated and for spoiling you at the same time.

Is a recent interview with Joss Whedon, Joss claimed that he had heard no complaints about Buffy’s foray into homosexuality, or perhaps simply bisexuality, or perhaps even simplest sexual experimentation.

Really Joss?

I’ve got a few complaints. First of all, it didn’t flow naturally. I’m working off of old memories now, but I don’t remember that cut to Buffy sprawled out covered in sheets next to a fellow slayer making a heck of a lot of sense. It works in that we all know that Buffy gets horny when she slays. But if that were the case, then why did her experimentation not happen when slaying with Faith years ago?

Another argument I’ve had with myself is that Buffy, in that universe, was still basically the age of a college student and that’s a time ripe with experimentation. But it’s not that age that induces experimentation, but the maturity and independence of that time. And Buffy has had to be incredibly mature for years. Her times for experimentation are over. One of my biggest complaints with Season 7 of Buffy was that Buffy still acted like a petulant child a lot of the time. She should have been more mature, because she was more mature. The same applies here.

Overall, I just don’t think the situation was handled very well. I’m sure they could have done a lesbian storyline with Buffy smartly, but to me there were simply too many things that didn’t add up or make sense in the greater scheme. I’m not alone either. There were quite a few people who didn’t like the direction the story took on forums, some of them being quite hyperbolic about the whole thing, but most citing their issues with the story in reasonable terms. It didn’t ruin Buffy for me, it didn’t ruin the comic for me, it didn’t even ruin the storyline for me, but to say there were no complaints is a little presumptuous.

When I finished my epic Buffy/Angel marathon, I felt a wave of deep satisfaction wash over me. I felt more energized than I had in months. Not only that, but I finished with a few days to spare in my Christmas break from school. So I decided to kill off the last few days of my free time by making my marathon fully-fledged. No, I didn’t watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie — though in retrospect it would’ve been interesting, despite the departures from Joss Whedon’s script that the film takes — I watched all of Firefly. Firefly was Joss Whedon’s love child, and it was his devotion to that show to which many fans attribute the lower quality of some later seasons of Buffy and Angel. I, of course, believe that they never lost their quality, but do admit that Joss’ touch was less prevalent.

Another thing that most people seem to generally agree on is that Firefly is the best of the three Whedon shows. I tend to disagree on that as well.

Firefly has a great cast and thanks to some great writing they managed to form a familiar and familial bond in the short time they had with each other (the show was canceled before its first 13 episode season had even completed airing) but I don’t think that’s a particularly exceptional task when it comes to Joss Whedon. I don’t think that just because it was Joss Whedon who created this show that its achievements are lessened, I just don’t think that in the grand scheme of things, Firefly told the stories it wanted to tell.

It managed to get across some great stories about family, commitment, friendship, and didn’t shy away from hating on big government. In many ways, the merging of government and corporate seen in Firefly was more fully fleshed out in the final season of Angel — not coincidentally after Firefly had been canned — and it was hardly visible in Firefly; the only reason it’s known is because of obsessive fans hunting for clues for future arcs in the severely truncated run time.

Are Firefly’s episodes great? Yes. I wouldn’t deny that. In fact, the few episodes that aired may have been better than most of the episodes of Buffy or Angel, but I’m into shows for the long haul. It’s the season long stories and the growth of the characters that keeps me coming back. If Buffy had ended in the first season, the few people who grew attached to the show in that time would have enjoyed the show but what would they think of Xander? Xander is probably the most noble person on that show and his personal journey is the most deeply touching and haunting. Without the time it takes to develop that kind of depth, the character is fun but empty. I like the fun, but the empty? Not so much.

In the end, it comes down to distance. To use a lame car analogy, Firefly might be able to drive faster than Buffy or Angel, but it didn’t get as far as them so it’s immediately a lesser series. So, while I fully believe that Firefly would have been a better series if given the time, it wasn’t given that time. It’s still a great show, but because it was so short — more specifically, so unexpectedly short — it falls short.