Last week, when Prison Break took over Dollhouse’s time slot and its ratings were even worse than Dollhouse’s, I thought that maybe — just maybe — Dollhouse had a chance of renewal. But then the ratings for this week came in and Dollhouse hit yet another series low and underperformed compared to the Prison Break episode that aired earlier that night. So Dollhouse looks truly, and unequivocally, dead. But let’s not dwell, let’s follow the show into the dark.

This week, the main story was that of a dead Dollhouse client. She planned regular brain scans with the Dollhouse and a plan to revive her in a Doll for a brief period of time after her death. To solve her own murder. Talk about paranoid.

Well, I guess not in this instance.

Echo takes on the role, and while the murder mystery is relatively interesting, it’s not too hard to unravel the clues, and the best part about that entire story thread is the idea that the Dollhouse can offer eternal life, as Topher says, “if they really like you.”

This eternal life troubles Boyd greatly, who seems to be playing the role that the professorial dude from Man on the Street played. As he said then, if the Dollhouse’s technology existed, “as a species, we will cease to matter.” Boyd, not having caught on to the ultimate implications of the Dollhouse until now, says of the eternal life he’s discovered the Dollhouse can offer that it’s “the beginning of the end,” and while his claim that morality doesn’t exist without the fear of death seems a little juvenile to be coming from a Joss Whedon show, the idea that humanity would be altered at a fundamental level if immortality, in any form, was invented remains true.

Heady issues were being tossed around right and left this week, with all three plots examining the Dollhouse in a new and exciting way. First, the just discussed immortality. Second, Topher loads Sierra up with a friend personality. Because Topher has no friends. Which is sad, really. But all of the scenes of Topher and Sierra geeking out are all so fun and airy, that the implication doesn’t hit you until Adelle’s monologue about the need to feel connected, to have friends, to evade loneliness however you can.

Finally, we get Paul Ballard’s sad little tale. He’s fucked, both literally and figuratively, by the Dollhouse this week. He’s unable to break it off with Mellie lest he reignite the Dollhouse’s investigations, but unwilling to invest in a relationship with her. Ultimately, Mellie offers herself up to Paul with no expectations. She doesn’t care that he doesn’t like her, so long as he continues to let he be in his presence. It’s incredibly debasing, and emphasizes that Mellie’s so called love for Paul is nothing more than a programmed parameter. After this monologue, a switch seems to click in Paul’s mind, and he no longer sees Mellie as a person, but as an object. And in that moment, he sinks to his baser instincts and fucks her. The next morning in the shower, as the water fails to clean the filth from his body he tells Mellie that he’s found a new Dollhouse client, but he doesn’t say that it’s him. Paul’s scenes were the shortest and the least frequent but I thought they packed the biggest punch, despite the discussion of immortality in the A plot.

This week’s Dollhouse was all over the place in the best sort of way; none of the stories really had anything to do with each other, and the ideas they were exploring were all mostly independent, but they were all beautifully explored while servicing the growth of the characters along the way. Which is the way good television works.

I wrote a while ago about how guilty pleasures are stupid and that we should all just admit if we like something even if we know it’s stupid. This week, Prison Break kicked off its fourth season, and there is no better example currently on TV of a show so bad it’s good.

When Prison Break started, I didn’t start watching because I wanted to watch a bad show. I thought the idea behind the show was intriguing and, let’s be honest, an engineer playing superhero isn’t a common occurrence. The first season was great for its first half and good for the rest. But after that the show got worse. Some people ridiculed the second season because they were no longer in prison, so the name no longer applied. But that’s a facetious argument at best. The people on Lost aren’t all lost, either physically or emotionally, that doesn’t mean the show’s name should be changed.

But that doesn’t mean the show didn’t get ridiculous. And yet, as the show degenerated rather than giving up on the show I continued to watch but with glee over the absurdities found in every new moment. By that point, half the fun of any given episode was reading the recaps over at television without pity, where not a single logical flaw or absurdity is forgiven.

The real problem here is that other entertainment media don’t seem to have this problem with “guilty pleasures.” Reality TV made the term necessary in the television world because no other medium has such bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping trash. Plan Nine from Outer Space is not seen as a “guilty pleasure” but rather it’s loved and revered for being one of the most unintentionally terrible and incompetent movies ever made.

So let’s make this clear; there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. There are simply things we like (and often love) in spite of their flaws. Would you call your brother a guilty pleasure because he has an addiction? Would you call your wife a guilty pleasure because she cracks her knuckles? Humans are passionate creatures who love and hate for reasons ranging from the sublime to the petty. It’s one of the reasons hatred and bigotry exists, and its one of the reasons adultery and polygamy exist. It is a core aspect of our humanity. Ignorance may be bliss but calling our less noble loves and passions “guilty pleasures” belittles them and simultaneously gives them power over us. Looking at the uglier aspects of our psyche, even when manifested as the enjoyment of bad television, is necessary to self-improvement.

Awareness of our surroundings through highly attuned senses and through opportunistic pattern recognition led us to the top of the Darwinian food chain. But now our society exists outside of those confines and so beyond this awareness we require self-awareness: an understanding of our internal flaws. Whether we succumb to or rage against them, our flaws drive us as much as anything else. Ignoring them is as smart as ignoring the oncoming wolf or lion 10,000 years ago.

So, am I pushing the point too hard? Guily pleasures don’t exist. Love comes in many forms and is formed by many things. Being aware of that is a good thing and ignoring it or pretending it isn’t true by calling things guilty pleasures is a bad thing. It weakens you and makes certain your ongoing ignorance of yourself.