Similarly, with Chuck the season ended with Chuck obtaining a newer more powerful Intersect which gave him physical capabilities as well; twisting this slightly to make the point, he was now on a level playing field with his pseudo-girlfriend Sarah, who until now had been the kickass super-agent of the relationship. And in the process of obtaining this new Intersect the scope of the story was expanded: the enemy of the last two years had been but one part of a larger machine. The parallels are striking.

That isn’t to say the shows were similar. In fact, the contrast between the two shows was much greater in their second seasons than their first, but the similarities in their arcs are  nonetheless notable.

Chuck and Reaper have followed similar paths on the production side of things as well. They were both affected, and truncated, by the Writer’s Strike and as a result both were “bubble shows” that made it back for a second season by the skin of their teeth. Of course, here their paths diverge slightly. Reaper was given a short season renewal. I’d initially read that it was a 9 episode season, but ultimately 13 aired; Chuck was given a full 22 episode pick up.

So Chuck returned in the fall and spent months developing its identity and fanbase to the point that when it was placed once again on the bubble (albeit as a likely renewal) the fans sprang into action. Reaper, with its shorter season, began airing as a mid-season replacement and didn’t have as much time to grow a fanbase. So, despite continual assertions of inevitable cancellation by TV rating analysts, the fanbase barely materialized and the show was killed, while Chuck’s wildly successful fan-driven campaign resulted in saving the show from the increasingly fickle chopping block.

But following the trend of cancelled shows being picked up by other networks, seen this year with Medium and (potentially) My Name is Earl, the execs behind Reaper were rumoured to be looking for a deal that would have allowed for a third season on a new network. Jenny Wade, who starred on this season of Reaper as a demon and Ben’s Anya-esque girlfriend, posted on twitter of an unofficial deal in the works, a deal that fell through rather quickly. Since then, I’ve been following her and she recently posted a video discussing Reaper. In it she, among other things, defends Tyler Labine and Bret Harrison, the stars of Reaper, from fans who said they gave up on the show. This is the first I’d heard of it, but I decided to hypothesize completely uninformed of the context of the comments.

Tyler Labine was cast in a new pilot which was subsequently greenlit for a season order. I can see how that can be construed as “abandoning” a show, but it’s simply the reality of the industry; in addition, his contract for Reaper almost certainly overrode any other deals and the pilot he filmed was merely “backup.” Bret Harrison is another story; he hasn’t quickly moved onto other roles or anything of that sort so the anger of the fans seems even more unjustified to me. What I think it boils down to, though, is Reaper’s unintended doppleganger: Chuck.

One of the more noted aspects of the Chuck renewal campaign was how vociferously some of the stars of the show encouraged the campaign: namely, Bret Harrison’s Chuck counterpart Zachary Levi. While at a convention in London, he took a group of Chuck fans to a nearby Subway and, following one of the ideas of the fan campaign, started buying five dollar footlongs. Subsequently, he appeared on CNN, and most likely other channels as well, to discuss the campaign and support the show and the renewal campaign. As far as I know, Bret Harrison did none of these things, so I presume that this is at least one aspect of why the fans seem displeased with Harrison. Which (finally) gets to the point of this post: are those sorts of actions the duty of an actor?

I don’t think so. An actor’s duty is to act. Beyond that, every actor does things differently. Acting, in the end, is just a job. To some people, their job is their life, to others it’s not. We’d all like to believe that all the actors in our favourite shows and movies ansolutely love the roles they’re playing, but that’s not always the case. And really, it’s not their job to love their job.

Maybe Zachary Levi really loves Chuck more than Bret Harrison loves Reaper. Or maybe that’s just who Levi is; maybe he will spend a week evangelizing all of his friends when he finds a great rib joint. I don’t know either of them. What I do know is that the both of them did a great job. They performed their roles well, and brought to life their characters. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit.

(Obviously, I care a little; personable and fan-friendly actors are better than the alternative, but I’m not going to chastise an actor for not being an acolyte for their show.)

And ultimately, Zachary Levi talking about Chuck on CNN did not renew the show. Zachary Levi would not have even been on CNN talking Chuck except for one thing: the fans. The fans created the campaign, the fans pushed the narrative, they renewed the show. Anything Zachary Levi did was ancillary, just as anything Bret Harrison could have done would have been. The only thing Zachary Levi did to renew the show was give a great performance, one that engendered such an enthusiastic fanbase. He did his job. And so did Harrison.

Futurama has been renewed for 26 episodes to begin airing around a year from now, and all the voice actors are coming back (presumably along with the writers) to revive the animated show that mixed childish humour and deep and profound musings almost as well as Pixar does in their big screen adventures. I’ll be watching. You should too.

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

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

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

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

After Alpha and Echo headed off into the sunset, it all seemed very blasé as an explanation for the byzantine plans Alpha has concocted to test Echo. This was initially justified by the many personalities of Alpha; rather than Alpha’s goal being the imprinting of Echo with a Bonnie to his Clyde, it was simply the goal of one of his many minds. But that didn’t hold out for long. Alpha’s personalities start to break down and intermingle and the megalomaniac personality that embodies the Alpha mythos starts to once again take hold.

But even then, as revealed through flashback, Alpha is doing all of this because he “saw something” in Echo. Basically he had a crush on her and the psychopathic killer that grew up in his body had many bizarre ways of expressing that. As I was watching those scenes, I was reminded of the obsession that Ballard has with Caroline, and how little of it is based on anything he actually knows about her.

So, for the first half of this finale I was feeling a little let down by it all. First Ballard, and now Alpha; all the men in Echo’s life keep getting killed by candarian demons keep ending up being these cliches of male messiah-complexism. But then the second half won me over; once Alpha had imprinted Echo with all of her past personalities at once, thus creating an Omega to his Alpha, she didn’t follow his path to megalomania.

And all of that was basically getting around to the idea that an Active is more than an object. They’re more than a container. Alpha is not Alpha because he was overloaded by 48 personalities. And Echo did not become Omega because of what Alpha did to her. There’s a fundamental base to each person. You can call it a soul if you like, but it’s there no matter what Topher does. So Alpha was always broken, the composite event merely allowed him to express that brokenness. But as Echo has said before, she’s not broken.

The show is mixing its messages here though, because as the audience is seeing that Alpha went evil because Carl William Kraft was always evil, and Echo stayed sane because Caroline was, new Echo is saying just the opposite. “There’s no me, I’m just a container,” which I think belies the message the show’s trying to put across. And before she can further articulate her thoughts on the subject Alpha gets aggressive again, so it’s hard to see if she’d eventually realise that she is more than a container. Regardless, even if Caroline was hollowed out, little bits remained. So Boo-urns for sending mixed messages, but I suppose it would’ve been a less exciting hour if Echo spent the next five minutes examining the meaning of selfness and the permanence of the soul.

I also enjoyed the Boyd/Ballard hook up, and now that Ballard is working with the Dollhouse, I really hope the second season is greenlit so we can see more of them hanging together and hating on the evils of the Dollhouse while working for it. And speaking of Ballard, what he did in this episode also redeemed a lot of my annoyances regarding him. First off, he awesomely got the FBI to cancel their terrorist alert by telling Tanaka exactly what was going on in that building, and knowing it was just nuts enough to get Tanaka to call off the alert. And then, as the episode ended and he accepted his new position at the Dollhouse — which, by the way, it would be really awesome if he became Echo’s handler next year — under the condition that a certain special Active was given back her old self and her five-year debt paid in full: November.

Yes, Ballard finally realised that the Doll he needed to rescue wasn’t the one once called Caroline, but the one once called Madeline; the one he knew and genuinely cared for. I was really proud of Ballard in that moment. Even if it turns out in the second season (come on FOX, do it for me) that he chose November rather than Echo because he wanted Echo at the Dollhouse with him, he still made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

This episode also let Ballard be an awesome investigator since he was the one that figured out that who Alpha was before he was Alpha was the missing part of the equation.

One of the most interesting things in this episode was the reveal of Dr Saunders’ past. I’ve always imagined it was a possibility that she was a Doll, and it was broadly hinted at when it was mentioned earlier that she never leaves the Dollhouse, so the reveal wasn’t mind-blowing but it certainly put a twist on all her past interactions. As Whiskey, she was the number one Doll, and it was that popularity that led to Alpha slicing her face, in the hopes of making Echo number one, and in turn led to Alpha going in for a diagnostic and the accidental composite event.

Dr Saunders’ acceptance of her past is intriguing though. Since her first appearance, I’ve found her to be one of the most interesting characters and the way she’s dealt with what should be a soul-shattering experience only adds to that. Seriously, Amy Acker can do no wrong. She needs to have her own show.

The finale was great in ways I didn’t expect. I was disappointed by Alpha, though the problem was that the rest of the season built him up too well; it’s very hard to build up a character to those epic proportions and then successfully reveal them to the audience without disappointing in some way. Luckily, a lot of other directions the show took delighted me. Saunders’ revelation, Ballard’s new employer, and Echo’s awakening (and its persistence based on the closing shot of the season) all elevated Dollhouse to a new level and set up a drastically different, yet reminiscent, world for the second season. Which probably won’t happen.

But liking television comes with that risk. A movie has a set goal to tell the story it wants to tell. They can from time to time establish things that can be explored further in sequels but, for the most part, movies are self-enclosed, much like the Dollhouse. Television has to plan for more. Television has to tell an interesting and self-enclosed story while constantly writing a superstory above it all. If the larger story is flawed or uninteresting, you’ll get very little connection with the audience, but if the individual stories aren’t strong enough the audience won’t come back and get caught up in your universe. It’s a delicate tightrope that television writers have to constantly walk, and it’s something that I thought Dollhouse did very well. And even if the show doesn’t come back, we’ll still have that.

As much as Alan Tudyk’s manic portrayal of Alpha pleased me, when he imprinted Echo with a new personality — who? we don’t yet know — and headed off with a kiss it left me worried about how the season will end. I never saw Alpha’s grand plan as being so petty; playing hero for one of the personalities stored in the Dollhouse’s archives is neither nefarious nor lofty. That said, this is a Joss Whedon show we’re talking about so it’s almost guaranteed that it will end up wowing me. So, in the meantime, let’s talk about what I liked.

First off, the Echo-imprint story of the week, which provides the show with its title, with Echo as a teacher trying to touch a troubled student (not like that) was cool. Fixing a person’s emotional problems in software and then fixing the original person in the real world is an interesting extension of the Dollhouse’s technology, but I was way too enthralled by all the intrigue going on in the Dollhouse this episode to really give a damn. So I’m going to completely ignore it; it might be great, but there’s no closure to the thread and I’m not entirely sure that it’ll be picked up in subsequent episodes. So fuck it.

The episode kicks off² with Ballard breaking up with Mellie and packing up his apartment. Which I, for one, am glad to see. Ever since Mellie’s outing as a Doll, I see her pining for Paul as degrading and calculating rather than heartwarming and quixotic. Last week’s episode, when Ballard broke down and used Mellie like an object, finally broke his resolve and so he’s leaving her. Of course, he’s also leaving her in the hopes that she will be taken back to the Dollhouse. Which then happens, thus proving that Ballard actually is a capable investigator; being spoonfed information for the first half of the season was beginning to wear on me so it’s good that he’s discovered the Dollhouse at least partially on his own.

I say partially because he still hasn’t found the Dollhouse, only the door. To get past the door he needs the man that built it. Seeing as his corpse is rotting in Tucson, Alpha playing the role of the builder of the Dollhouse will have to do. Paul’s journey through the Dollhouse is tense, and exciting, but when he finally got to the pod room and he started getting all doe-eyed over Caroline I start zoning out. Hopefully, that thread is abandoned soon, because the more opportunities Ballard has to be in contact with Echo, the more annoying it gets.

A lot of stuff happened, and it mostly seems very meh in light of the revelations stacked into the last few minutes, but one moment that took me by surprise in more ways than one was Enver Gjokaj’s absolutely dead-on impersonation of Laurence Dominic. I mean, it’s so good it’s like they cast one or both of those guys (Reed Diamond and Enver Gjokaj) for this explicit purpose. I will cherish those moments for the rest of my life. OK, not really, but it was really great.

So, I know it feels like I’m giving this episode’s review the short shrift, and in a lot of ways I am. There are a lot of really nice touches in this episode, but that final scene left me with a lot of trepidation about what will happen in the finale. I hope it turns out well, given the likelihood of there being a second season, so I’m just gonna wait it out.

Footnotes

1. There are 13 episodes this season, but the 13th is a standalone that likely won’t even air.
2. Again, I’m ignoring the school teacher stuff, so Ballard’s stuff happened “first” from that perspective.

I hate Medium. I hated it before I’d ever seen it, but watching an episode solidified and justified my prejudice. I have no idea why the ratings for that show are even marginally better than Chuck. I would be more upset by Medium getting a renewal and Chuck getting cancelled than both shows getting cancelled. So, NBC: please please please please choose Chuck. Or at the very least, don’t choose Medium. But seriously, choose Chuck.