As a devout fan of Babylon 5, I’ve had more than my share of discussions about it. I’ve told endless people to watch the show, to not give up on the show before they get to the second season — when the show really begins to take shape — and, like any B5 acolyte, I’ve defended the controversial fifth season. Obviously, don’t read any further if you don’t want to be spoiled about Babylon 5.
Glee is one of those shows that comes along and bites me in the ass. I hadn’t heard of it until the day before the pilot was broadcast, and the idea of a drama/musical centred around a high school glee club seemed terrible. But it wasn’t. It was touching, brave, smart, edgy, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed I liked it a lot.
There are a lot of things to like: the members of the glee club can all carry a tune, and the songs they choose are pretty fun to listen to in and of themselves; the peripheral players of the show all have interesting, but not cloying, quirks; and it’s hard to knock a show for telling an underdog story. But above all that, the message the show shouts from the rafters in its pilot is one that most people should learn: we’re all losers.
Jocks and cheerleaders, to me, are losers; they’re generally unimaginative and their ambitions seem childish and ultimately insubstantial. But I’m a loser to those people because I spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer, watching obscure 70′s sci-fi shows and writing a blog. And I’m a loser to a whole other subset of society for completely different reasons. So yeah, we’re all losers. But our victories are our own. So fuck the naysayers and do what you like.
But even without that theme, which runs through the pilot, the show has so much going for it. Lea Michele, who plays the overly talented self-labeled ingenue Rachel, has an amazing singing voice and she manages to make a character reminiscent of the satirical stereotype Reese Witherspoon played in Election not only genuine but incredibly likable and empathetic. Cory Monteith’s Finn is another stereotype turned on its head: he plays the Jock who secretly loves singing to wonderful effect. Cory’s voice is often overpowered by Lea’s Broadway honed one, but it fits the character and presumably he will improve as the show progresses.
The inevitable romantic storylines have already been set into place, as well. Matthew Morrison’s Mr. Shue has an unlikeable wife and an obvious romantic interest in the school germophobe guidance counselor, played by the always amazing Jayma Mays. And Finn and Rachel have already discussed the likelihood that they will end up together, subverting expectations while hanging a lantern in one fell swoop. I don’t think either of these threads will pay off for some time, but you never know.
I like all the characters. Or more accurately, I like the way all the characters are played. From minor roles like Stephen Tobolowsky’s brief appearance as the glee club director turn drug dealer up to the sundry members of the glee club, each role felt well cast and well written. I can’t wait to see how they all progress as the stories continue.
I’m trying to contain my enthusiasm in this discussion, primarily because otherwise the entire thing would devolve into a series of squees and me dancing around my room while singing along (despite my completely tone deaf singing voice) with the musical numbers, but I really am very excited by this show. I lamented the lack of good teen and high school oriented stories on TV a few months ago when Kyle XY was cancelled, and this show looks to fill that void. (Also, I’m totally in love with Lea Michele already. That girl’s got a voice on her.)
This pilot introduced a lot of awesome, and given the pedigree of the man behind the show — he did create Nip/Tuck after all — I’m confident the show will continue to impress me when it finally gets to air its full season in the fall. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch the “Don’t Stop Believing” sequence another 5,000 times.
A few weeks ago, when discussing the sad fate of Kings, a high-concept low-ratings drama on NBC, I said that it was “as dead as Dollhouse.” Clearly, I exaggerated Dollhouse’s demise as Fox has picked it up for a second season.
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.
Lost broke my brain on Wednesday. In the best way possible. If you’re not watching that show, I don’t know what to say to you.
Dollhouse is a hard show to pin down. Through its run — I’m not implying anything by that phrasing, I still hold out hope that it will get a second season — it’s experimented with the implications of the technology at use on the show. It is, in many ways, one of the true science fiction shows remaining. This episode not only tinkered with virtually every form of mind-frakking, but it blew away all my issues with the way last week ended by taking the cliche and playing with it.
After Alpha and Echo headed off into the sunset, it all seemed very blasé as an explanation for the byzantine plans Alpha has concocted to test Echo. This was initially justified by the many personalities of Alpha; rather than Alpha’s goal being the imprinting of Echo with a Bonnie to his Clyde, it was simply the goal of one of his many minds. But that didn’t hold out for long. Alpha’s personalities start to break down and intermingle and the megalomaniac personality that embodies the Alpha mythos starts to once again take hold.
But even then, as revealed through flashback, Alpha is doing all of this because he “saw something” in Echo. Basically he had a crush on her and the psychopathic killer that grew up in his body had many bizarre ways of expressing that. As I was watching those scenes, I was reminded of the obsession that Ballard has with Caroline, and how little of it is based on anything he actually knows about her.
So, for the first half of this finale I was feeling a little let down by it all. First Ballard, and now Alpha; all the men in Echo’s life keep getting killed by candarian demons keep ending up being these cliches of male messiah-complexism. But then the second half won me over; once Alpha had imprinted Echo with all of her past personalities at once, thus creating an Omega to his Alpha, she didn’t follow his path to megalomania.
And all of that was basically getting around to the idea that an Active is more than an object. They’re more than a container. Alpha is not Alpha because he was overloaded by 48 personalities. And Echo did not become Omega because of what Alpha did to her. There’s a fundamental base to each person. You can call it a soul if you like, but it’s there no matter what Topher does. So Alpha was always broken, the composite event merely allowed him to express that brokenness. But as Echo has said before, she’s not broken.
The show is mixing its messages here though, because as the audience is seeing that Alpha went evil because Carl William Kraft was always evil, and Echo stayed sane because Caroline was, new Echo is saying just the opposite. “There’s no me, I’m just a container,” which I think belies the message the show’s trying to put across. And before she can further articulate her thoughts on the subject Alpha gets aggressive again, so it’s hard to see if she’d eventually realise that she is more than a container. Regardless, even if Caroline was hollowed out, little bits remained. So Boo-urns for sending mixed messages, but I suppose it would’ve been a less exciting hour if Echo spent the next five minutes examining the meaning of selfness and the permanence of the soul.
I also enjoyed the Boyd/Ballard hook up, and now that Ballard is working with the Dollhouse, I really hope the second season is greenlit so we can see more of them hanging together and hating on the evils of the Dollhouse while working for it. And speaking of Ballard, what he did in this episode also redeemed a lot of my annoyances regarding him. First off, he awesomely got the FBI to cancel their terrorist alert by telling Tanaka exactly what was going on in that building, and knowing it was just nuts enough to get Tanaka to call off the alert. And then, as the episode ended and he accepted his new position at the Dollhouse — which, by the way, it would be really awesome if he became Echo’s handler next year — under the condition that a certain special Active was given back her old self and her five-year debt paid in full: November.
Yes, Ballard finally realised that the Doll he needed to rescue wasn’t the one once called Caroline, but the one once called Madeline; the one he knew and genuinely cared for. I was really proud of Ballard in that moment. Even if it turns out in the second season (come on FOX, do it for me) that he chose November rather than Echo because he wanted Echo at the Dollhouse with him, he still made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.
This episode also let Ballard be an awesome investigator since he was the one that figured out that who Alpha was before he was Alpha was the missing part of the equation.
One of the most interesting things in this episode was the reveal of Dr Saunders’ past. I’ve always imagined it was a possibility that she was a Doll, and it was broadly hinted at when it was mentioned earlier that she never leaves the Dollhouse, so the reveal wasn’t mind-blowing but it certainly put a twist on all her past interactions. As Whiskey, she was the number one Doll, and it was that popularity that led to Alpha slicing her face, in the hopes of making Echo number one, and in turn led to Alpha going in for a diagnostic and the accidental composite event.
Dr Saunders’ acceptance of her past is intriguing though. Since her first appearance, I’ve found her to be one of the most interesting characters and the way she’s dealt with what should be a soul-shattering experience only adds to that. Seriously, Amy Acker can do no wrong. She needs to have her own show.
The finale was great in ways I didn’t expect. I was disappointed by Alpha, though the problem was that the rest of the season built him up too well; it’s very hard to build up a character to those epic proportions and then successfully reveal them to the audience without disappointing in some way. Luckily, a lot of other directions the show took delighted me. Saunders’ revelation, Ballard’s new employer, and Echo’s awakening (and its persistence based on the closing shot of the season) all elevated Dollhouse to a new level and set up a drastically different, yet reminiscent, world for the second season. Which probably won’t happen.
But liking television comes with that risk. A movie has a set goal to tell the story it wants to tell. They can from time to time establish things that can be explored further in sequels but, for the most part, movies are self-enclosed, much like the Dollhouse. Television has to plan for more. Television has to tell an interesting and self-enclosed story while constantly writing a superstory above it all. If the larger story is flawed or uninteresting, you’ll get very little connection with the audience, but if the individual stories aren’t strong enough the audience won’t come back and get caught up in your universe. It’s a delicate tightrope that television writers have to constantly walk, and it’s something that I thought Dollhouse did very well. And even if the show doesn’t come back, we’ll still have that.
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.
I should be writing my weekly Dollhouse review/recap right now, but the current hysteria over Chuck and its possible cancellation is what tends to preoccupy my televisual thoughts nowadays. I should say this immediately: both Chuck and Dollhouse are deserving of renewal. I’m more heavily invested in Chuck because there have been more episodes and more emotional connections made, but they’re both excellent shows. The key difference between the two is that the fan base of Chuck has galvanized and mobilized, while the fans of Dollhouse do little more than bemoan its impending doom in scattershot fora.
I remember two years ago, when Jericho was a show was less than stellar ratings that looked “on the bubble” just as Chuck is now; there were rumblings that it might not be renewed, but nobody was ardently fighting for its renewal. Not until the season ended with a spectacular climax and CBS announced that the show would not be returning for a second season did the fan base explode with fury and begin sending tonnes (literally) of peanuts to CBS to demand a new season of Jericho.
Miraculously, it worked. No write-in campaign that I know of had been successful in reviving a show since Star Trek in the 60′s, but the dedication of the fans astounded the executives and so they made an abrupt about-face and gave Jericho a second season. Of seven freaking episodes.
In the case of Jericho, the network execs were essentially telling the writers to finish off whatever they had planned. They kept up the pretense of a possible third season, even having the writers create two alternate endings, but everyone could see the writing on the wall. Some might argue that this is the best you can get, but I think what’s happened with Chuck is a sign of the future of fandom.
Chuck has never been more than “on the bubble,” and even in this impoverished state, most experts have been quietly optimistic about its possibilities. But we’ve learned not to take “good enough” for granted. Jericho had higher ratings than Chuck, and it still got cancelled. The fans have learned their lesson, and they will fight for the shows they love, even before the fight has begun. Preemptive war is the tactic du jour in our world now. And one has to hope it will result in greater gains than the Jericho campaigns.
The fans of other shows haven’t learned their lesson yet, or they’ve been conditioned for failure. In fact, most of the ardent supporters of Dollhouse in the early days were the ones virtually promising that it would be cancelled.
At this point, Chuck seems likely to be renewed, but its relative success — whether or not it gets a crappy timeslot, or a truncated run, or substantial network support, etc. — will be the litmus test for this new form of fandom. Bringing the fight to the network before the network knows there’s a fight is a potent tactic. If it works, that is.
Just before Kings was cancelled, the fifth episode aired and I found the initial love affair I had with the show dwindling; the characters weren’t as fully developed as I’d have liked, the stories often resolved themselves too easily, and overall the show didn’t seem as good as it once did.
I think that, should I go back and watch the series anew at a later date, I’d find that the quality had not dissipated but rather the realization that the show is “almost brilliant” had simply been delayed.
In robotics there is a term for that eerie feeling we all get when we see a robot that almost duplicates a perfect human being but has very slight flaws and discrepancies. It’s called the Uncanny Valley. These slight discontinuities jar the mind and make us feel at unease. We don’t feel that unease when looking at a robot like C3PO or R2-D2 or WALL-E because they are not human and the differences are notable and numerous. They become a sort of living cartoon, something we accept as a human analog because we can cobble together empathy based on the few anthropomorphic cues available.
I believe that there is similar valley that exists in the world of television. Most television exists before this valley; the characters are entertaining and endearing, but not wholly real. Then there are the special few shows that exist beyond the valley; those shows have such a well-defined universe, such believable characters, that we are enveloped by the show, taking it in as more than mere entertainment. Kings, unfortunately, existed in the abyss betwixt.
Kings was a show that was too good but not good enough. The early comparisons I made to Carnivàle were a sign that the show was attempting to achieve the greatness that lies beyond the valley; where a show will be talked about and analysed for years after. But it didn’t make it there. Maybe Michael Green didn’t have the writing chops to match Daniel Knauf, or maybe the show would have achieved that greatness over the course of the series. Either way, in my mind, Kings sits somewhere in that valley, reaching for more, and not getting the chance it deserves.
Chuck is a fantastic series. When it started, I put it beside Reaper and said they were pretty much the same show with any given week being a coin toss as to which would be better. In many important ways, that was true of their first seasons, but this year Chuck has rocketed into the stratosphere of awesome. Before, it was simply a show I watched, one among many, but this year it’s become one of my top five favourite shows on television. Unfortunately, the ratings are not that great. I’ve lamented Chuck’s poor ratings before, especially in light of the weak fare it’s put up against most weeks, but it never really hit me that the show might not come back.
But that’s the truth of the situation. Chuck has yet to get a greenlight for a third season, and as much as I hold out hope that NBC will keep one of their few genuinely entertaining shows alive for another year, I know that NBC has done little to warm me to their cause; Surface, The Black Donnellys, Andy Barker, P.I., Journeyman, and The Book of Daniel are all shows that were cancelled too quickly by NBC.
I’m leaving my hovel to venture out into the real world tonight, so I won’t be able to watch Chuck, live and vibrating with excitement as I normally do, tonight. But don’t let me stop you. Watch Chuck. You won’t regret it.
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.
A few months ago, a study came out saying that unhappy people watched more television which prompted me to ask if watching TV makes you unhappy and my answer was, of course, no. In fact, I specifically stated that watching TV actually makes me happier overall.
So the recent study that watching TV relieves loneliness was not a surprise to me. In my previous post, I actually predicted it:
Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.
It didn’t quite take 30 years for TV to shift the data, but my point remains. One of the reasons I enjoy television more than I do movies is that the longer form of storytelling allows stronger connections to the characters. This goes beyond a need for social connectedness, though this study shows that this is clearly a factor, and into the ability of television to ask deeper and more fundamental questions than film.
Movies often seem grander in some respects, but I think that most of that view comes from film’s greater opportunity, not greater ability, to ask these sorts of questions. In two hours, a lot of ideas can be examined but they cannot be explored to any real depth. In addition, in two hours characters can be examined, but they will most likely not change in any appreciable amount. But television dramas have characters that change drastically. A movie could attempt such changes, but it would be seen as absurd by critics; in two hours, for those sorts of changes to occur would break the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.
In addition, movies require a real dramatic thrust and driving action, and so the framing of the characters always relies on that structure, unless you’re doing a very indie film with no expectation of heavy distribution. Television, on the other hand, can explore multiple characters by virtue of their long-term status. In a movie that tells the same high level story as Lost or Kyle XY or other character dramas, you might get some amount of time devoted to side characters, but nowhere near the attention to detail that television offers; with television, you can truly get immersed in a world.
It’s that immersive quality that makes television more capable of not only examining a world and its inhabitants but also touching you with the answers it uncovers.
It was only a few days ago that I published my first review of Kings which was more critical than praising and already the show has been made even deader. NBC has removed Kings from their schedule entirely now, opting to burn off the remaining episodes in the summer.
I’m not too sore about this, to be honest. Not only is most of my outrage over Kings’ poor ratings died away as it’s become clear that nobody was watching, but this week’s episode made me worry about the show’s direction. Michael Green, who was a writer on Heroes previously, has been heading up Kings and doing an admirable job of it, but as a former writer for Heroes I wonder if he’s picked up some of their bad habits.
Heroes focuses far too heavily on plot, to the detriment of its characters; in fact, at this point they’re all vapid caricatures imbued with so little substance it’s hard to care at all about how the story continues. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening on Kings, merely that it’s a distinct possibility and this week’s episode did seem more focused on plot progression than character development. I sincerely hope that my feelings about this week’s episode don’t carry forward and that the show concludes in a satisfying way. I’m just aware that the show could let me down. At least I have a couple months to cushion the blow.
I wasn’t feeling this episode. I don’t know. Maybe I shot my proverbial wad by internally hyping the show to such a level that there was no way it could maintain its momentum for its run. Either way, this episode didn’t rock my world. It jostled it, but that’s about it.
Judgement day1 in Gilboa — like the Presidential pardons of today, but with the occasional split baby — and the episode that spawned from the idea was OK. Prince Jack’s finally starting to develop beyond a mere pawn of others, and his plot to divide Michelle and David was great; it also gave us a chance to see why he’s so troubled by David. He’s younger than Michelle so if she married David, a certifiable war hero, it would be pretty easy to establish them as the new monarchy, preemptively ousting Jack.
That said, this episode had too little conflict. Michelle got her new health care system, David’s brother is getting a cake walk sentence, David’s mother is back on speaking terms with him, the Doctor that knows Silas has an illegitimate son did nothing to take advantage of that. Yes, David and Michelle have been separated rather solidly, and the exiled nephew’s return certainly ruffled some feathers (some from his own closet it seems, given the implication of the high heel his father found in his room), but nothing of real import happened. Even ignoring the lack of real progression of plot — because I’m quite comfortable with a show that explores characters with little plot — the characters didn’t really get a lot of growth either.
I hate to criticise the show, because it really is still way better than most of everything else on TV, but it’s not as good as it could be right now, even accepting the limitations of network television. There were good things, but the less good things were more noticeable. That’s really all I’ve got to say this week. I’m sure the ratings were terrible, but it really doesn’t matter at this point. Kings is deader than Dollhouse.
I’m going to discuss tonight’s episode of Heroes, so avert your eyes if you still give a damn about what happens on that show.
In one of my first rants against Heroes, I pointed out a glaring flaw in the writing of the show: Angela Petrelli is introduced as a distraught widow stealing socks just to feel alive, and yet this year it was revealed that she had coldly assassinated her husband. It was one of the most scathing and unassailable criticisms of the show I had. Well tonight they retconned the hell out of that. Apparently, she stole (or bought, I really was barely paying attention) socks when she needed to see a small action make a big difference or some bullshit (again, barely paying attention). Well, I call shenanigans.
In general, I’m OK with retcons in comics. Not necessarily when Spider-man #220 retcons Spider-man #108, though and here’s why. The stories are far enough apart to know for certain that it wasn’t a planned reveal. Ten issues apart, I’d accept it. But that far apart, it’s just breaking continuity because you’re lazy. The instances I approve of retcons are when a new story is being told from the beginning. So the origin story of Iron Man in Incredible Iron Man can be different, even drastically so, than the one in Iron Man because they’re two separate instances of that character with new stories being told. To allow yourself to tell new stories and explore new ideas, sometimes the details of a character’s past must be adjusted. But in any other instance, I don’t like retcons.
The worst part about this is that I sympathize with the writers in this instance. Bryan Fuller came back to a plodding mess with a bunch of inconsistent continuity hacked together, and he had to at least attempt to reconcile it all. So he had Matt Parkman find out about his child and according to spoilers I’ve read, he’ll get back together with the wife he left for no reason at all but plot expediency. And now he’s tried to change Angela Petrelli’s origin to have a connection to this event at Coyote Hills. Of course, there’s still no reason for everybody going back.
She said it was crucial to fix their current problems to go to Coyote Hills and face the past. But what did it really accomplish? We got that one salient point out of it. Which, I’m still not sure makes any sense. We didn’t really get much else from the episode. Sure there was a bit of backstory filled in; we learned Charles Deveaux actually had a power, though how it connects to his post-mortem conversation with Peter is still unclear; we got a little bit more of Nathan and Peter’s brotherly bickering; we were also told that Claire is actually really awesome and brave, despite her continued idiocy and short-sightednesss. And when it all came down to it, none of those revelations led to their fractured relationships being healed. At least not in any rational way. Instead, it was Sylar posing as Nathan Petrelli that seemed to push them together and let them forget their troubled past.
What I’m trying to say here is, it didn’t work for me. It all seems hamfisted. Admittedly, it almost has to be hamfisted because of what came before it, but that doesn’t make the experience any less distasteful.
Just when I thought I was out… this week’s episode of Dollhouse was too good to not talk about. Luckily, I’m incredibly fickle, so next week’s might send me back into my self-imposed silence. But for now, I have to talk — nay, gush — about this week’s Dollhouse episode.
First things first: the inside man. This episode leads you to believe that the climax will reveal who has been feeding Ballard information via Actives, but when it’s revealed that Dominic was the inside man — not only that, but he was on a mission from the NSA to ensure that the Dollhouse doesn’t fail — we’re left with the initial question. Here’s who I think it is: DeWitt. My theory relies on one thing: Topher didn’t know that DeWitt was Ms Lonely Hearts. Which, to me, means that DeWitt added a secondary protocol to the Roger Imprint that redefined who he was in love with.
In some instances, I’d be willing to accept Topher not knowing what the engagement is in detail, but to define an imprint which professes to the Dollhouse staff love for an octogenarian while secretly loving DeWitt without knowing some of the details seems unlikely. So, the logical conclusion is that the imprint-overrider that Topher found this episode was being used by DeWitt to adjust the Roger imprint, while also sending messages to Ballard. The only other alternative is that there are a bunch of imprint adjusters hooked into the system that Topher failed to notice. Some of you might say that Ivy, Topher’s assistant is still a suspect but Echo’s spy-catcher imprint would’ve detected that because she interrogated her. Of course, if the messages to Ballard continue, we’ll know I was wrong.
Now that I’ve recorded my idiocy so that others can point to it and laugh later on, I’ll talk about some other things. Echo’s growth this episode was great. The idea of a Doll asking to be imprinted is an awesome stepping stone towards full-on self-awareness. That said, I have to wonder how much the early scene where Ivy gives a lackluster opening script greeting to Echo was a part of that. Immediately afterward, Topher begins talking about the effect it can have on a freshly wiped Doll. Later on, she sees Sierra taken to the chair and then leaving the room a hardened spy. Before then, she sees November go into the chair and return as someone who looks at Echo waving at her with confusion. The glimpses of Echo observing and seemingly understanding these conversations and events going on around her were excellent. And the non-chronological storytelling of the episode enhanced this by letting us see Echo at different points in this arc.
Even the first scene, where Echo says that “she made a mistake and now she’s sad” about Dominic’s Attic-ing, which could be missed one first viewing reveals more of Echo’s growth. Echo has looked beyond the obvious and found the hidden answer: DeWitt’s faith in Dominic was misplaced, and that hurt her. And if you subscribe to my theory, she’s hurt in more than one way because she has to give up her Roger imprint because her surreptitious imprint rewriter is now gone.
Sierra’s Alias-esque foray at the NSA was great for the sheer sci-fi spy-action-ness of it. But what was even better was Ballard’s brief appearance this episode. First off, he’s clearly become increasingly paranoid since he discovered the bugs. Which apparently helps when you’re investigating massive conspiracies, because he’s unspooled more about the Dollhouse and its massive scope in this brief separation from Mellie than he had in the preceding months working on the Dollhouse case for the FBI. But when Mellie returns all his paranoia goes away… at least until Mellie switched into imformant mode and tells Paul not to reveal the details of his investigation to Mellie because she’s been sent to spy on him. And now Ballard had to keep up the romance with Mellie, all the while knowing she’s programmed to love him and having to keep pretty much everything from her. Something’s gotta give, people.
Lots happened, and not in the “a lot happened” sort of way last week played out. This time things seem to have actually changed. Not only is Echo’s greatest adversary at the Dollhouse now out of commission, but her increasing awareness is no longer seen as a threat but as an advantage. It’ll be interesting to see how that, and Boyd’s new position as head of security, affect the situation at the Dollhouse next week. The ratings? Who gives a fuck about the ratings at this point? OK fine. They were just as shitty as ever.