Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing

Here's the formula for determining whether you'll like Joss Whedon's take on Much Ado About Nothing.  If you like Joss Whedon, there's a good chance you'll like it.  If you aren't one of the faithful, you may not;  the widespread good reviews this is getting may be proving me wrong, but this feels Whedony enough to me that I could imagine those who aren't part of the cult being turned off by it.  There's a further test, though;  if you like Joss Whedon, I'd guess there's still a fair chance that you care enough about Shakespeare to have definite views on how he should be filmed, and then, maybe you like this, maybe you don't. 

I'm part of the cult, I guess, and I do care about Shakespeare, but I think my standards for a Shakespearean production are probably fairly lenient.  Basically, I want the actors to sound like they know what they're saying.  I want the language respected, and for me that means I want it spoken like it means something.  This film meets that standard, by and large;  only Spencer Treat Clark as Borachio sounds overwhelmed by the diction.  Everyone else delivers their lines so that you can sense the intelligence that wrote them, as well as the feelings of the characters who are supposed to be feeling them.

I think that's probably the film's strength:  that it puts the language front and center.  Even the decision to film in black and white, whatever motivated it, has the effect (for me) of deemphasizing spectacle (something the modern setting already does) in favor of language. 

On the other hand, I didn't find myself laughing at most of the jokes in what is, really, a very funny play.  I did laugh during this film, but more at the jokes Whedon inserts - little bits of non-scriptural business, camera work, etc. (what he does with the line "even if she were an Ethiope" is classic Whedon).  For the most part I found myself appreciating the jokes, thinking about them, rather than reacting to them.

I'm not going to say this is necessarily a bad thing.  But it does make me appreciate the Branagh adaptation of twenty years ago even more than I already did;  for all its flaws (and it has a few), it approaches the humor with a naïve brio that makes it work more or less as I imagine it might have worked in Shakespeare's day.  At least, I laugh at that film quite frequently. 

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 26: "Epitaph Two: Return"

“The world still needs heroes, kid.”

The incredulous, mocking laughter with which everybody greeted this pronouncement of Paul’s was one of the best – most Whedonesque – moments in the series. That was Buffy and Willow laughing at Xander, Angel and Cordy laughing at Wesley, Mal laughing at everybody (and everybody laughing at Mal)…

Joss spent two truncated seasons largely avoiding or subverting the most obvious Whedonesqueries. It was only right that he allow them now, Here At The End Of All Things. We’re glad he’s with us.

Yes, the end was a little too facile. Topher saved the world awfully easily. And two minutes after the final credits rolled you realized there’s no way the world’s going to stay saved. But I think the facileness of it is beside the point. This episode wasn’t here to really end the saga of the tech. It was here to give us emotional closure on some of the characters. And it was here to show us how awesome the series could have gotten if it had lived out its natural life.

On point one:

Topher. Inventing a salvation device may be an easy way out, but it gave us an excuse to watch Topher for this last hour, observe him in his utterly broken state. He’s emotionally devastated – and more than that, he’s enslaved by Rossum. He’s been forced to understand a little of what he did to the dolls. Epitaph Two was Topher’s passion. And he died with a smile on his face, remembering love and companionship, in a burst of light. A beautiful moment.

Carolinecho. When Paul got shot in the head it hit me like a punch to the gut – a classic Mutant Enemy moment, handled in classic Joss fashion. Unexpected, barely seen, rushed past before we have time to process it, only to increase the emotional whammy when it does hit. Carolinecho’s breakdown was Eliza Dushku’s finest moment in the series. And it all set up that beautiful – there’s no other word for it – that beautiful ending, with Paul and Caroline being reunited in Echo’s head. A resolution that satisfies both as freaky sci-fi (a department in which this show has consistently delivered) and as eerily resonant romantic metaphor. It’s a kind of togetherness that only Carolinecho can experience – it’s strangely, poetically, right. I can’t imagine a better image to close the show on than she and Paul lying down together alone, as one – made one flesh.

Alpha. I liked that they didn’t even bother trying to explain how he became a good guy. He just worked through his issues, I guess. Evolved. Who cares? Like we have time for that now. The point is that Joss knows we all love Alan Tudyk and would all get a warm glow out of seeing him get to be a good guy for once in Dollhouse. But it didn’t seem wrong – you can imagine that if they’d had another few seasons to work it out, this is the right place for Alpha to end up. And it’s right that Carolinecho’s final happiness is a gift from Alpha – from the very start of the show he’d been trying to bring Paul and Caroline together, and from the very start of the story he’d been trying to give Echo a gift.

On point two:

Back to Alpha. Seeing where they made him end up, we realized just how much they could have done with this character if they’d had another few seasons to work it out. And that goes for so much of what we saw in this episode.

I started this second season apprehensive that nothing would really be able to make up for the lack of suspense introduced by “Epitaph One.” I stand by that, sort of: they made this season work, in the end, but I still think that in an ideal world where Dollhouse is a well-deserved hit and Mutant Enemy know from early on that they’ll get a second season, maybe they don’t show “Epitaph One,” and they keep us in suspense for a good four or five more seasons.

That being said, what “Epitaph Two” tells us is that if the show had really taken off in this second season, slipping into that unreal world of popularity that reflects quality, Mutant Enemy had more than enough ideas to fuel three or four more seasons of incredible stories.

Alpha’s evolution is one. But there are so many more. The transformation of Tucson into Neuropolis. Adelle’s little colony there on its outskirts. Priya’s gradual estrangement from Tony (how nicely they planted the seeds for that in “The Hollow Men,” when he accepted the upgrade and she didn’t). Tony’s transformation into a mental Mad Max. The whole post-apocalyptic society his gang evokes – not just the chaos we glimpsed in “Epitaph One,” but a tentative new order arising, too, of people who are finding a way to survive and to thrive. Not to mention the wars themselves.

This show could have been epic.

It was epic.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 25: "The Hollow Men"

“You guys are my family.” I’m convinced that one of the reasons this show never took off was because a lot of Whedonites wouldn’t embrace it in the absence of a Scoobyesque, Fireflyesque ad hoc family at the center of it. That’s what they wanted: but this show was never about that. It was never Us Good Guys Against the World: it was always about What Is Us, and How Do We Know? And if you never got that, here’s Joss to give you another chance. The bad guy is the one who doesn’t want to save the whole world, just his family. Us Good Guys. It sounds so sick when he says it…

First things first. The episode felt rushed, there’s no denying. A lot of the season has, as every so often, and increasingly after the cancellation, they woke up and realized, shit, we’d better move things along here. All along there have been developments – not just in the characters but the tech, the ideas – that I’ve felt could have used whole seasons to incubate properly. But we didn’t have that time. Given the constraints they were working under, I’ve felt that generally Mutant Enemy has done a fine job of unfolding the concepts and deploying the characters for maximum s/f mindfuck effect. This episode was no exception.

So Echo’s blood is what’s so special about her? It’s her spinal fluid they need, not her mind? Yeah, this one could have benefited from a half-season arc to set it up. My initial reaction was a “hunh?” But this was immediately followed by a “well, but.” Well, but it does fit in quite nicely with the show’s themes. The most basic question it’s asking, or debating, or having its various interests debate, is identity. Where does it come from? How deep does it run? Rossum believes that personality is severable from the body; it’s duplicable, manipulable, and transferable. The ongoing evolution of Echo was a challenge to that: her existence gave us hope that identity ran deeper than a wipe. But why? How? Did we really want to believe it was just a matter of willpower? That Echo was able to overcome the tech because Caroline was just so cool? Maybe we do want to believe that, but I think it’s a cop-out on the serious questions. So situating her specialness not in her will but in her body: that works for me. It addresses the identity question – not just identity in the sense of “hi, I’m Caroline,” but identity in the sense of sameness, that body and mind are inseparable. It works that in the end it’s the physicality of Carolinecho that matters. (At least, if Boyd's right. And he may not be: and that ambiguity, as well, is a good thing right here.)

(Not to say that this doesn’t introduce some problems. For example, if it is the body and not the mind, then what about Alpha? Why aren’t they making the vaccine out of him? And why does Mellie suddenly sprout the ability to overcome her sleeper programming – that’s presented as an act of pure will.)

That vaccine business. Pure Joss Whedon, in the way it crumbles the moral ground from beneath our feet, even as we’re jumping up and down on it for joy at the triumph of our heroes. It’s evil for Boyd to take away Carolinecho’s freedom so he can harvest her spinal fluid (and what an awesome horror-movie contraption he straps her into!). But isn’t it just as evil for all of our heroes to thwart his efforts to make a vaccine that will – it’s not wrong just because he says it – save everyone? I suppose not – if they/we really believe that they could destroy all the tech by blowing up a Boyd grenade (a deeply satisfying moment, to be sure). But if they believe that, they’re deluded, as Joss immediately made clear.

There are still loose ends, and I don’t know if we’re going to get a chance to pull them at this point. Whiskey’s background/her ties to Topher. Alpha. November’s background. We’re getting the big questions answered, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain if we don’t get everything tied up. But that’s what I want.

The Eliot shout-out in the title: a not-inappropriate nod to a high-cultural context. Technology introducing new kinds of hollowness to contemporary life (there seems to be no end to the ways in which we can make things worse for ourselves), and of course the show has imagined a way in which people can be made almost literally hollow. Was it not a deeply existential shock, as well as a great emotional payoff, when Topher remote-wiped Boyd? Boyd goes from being the Big Bad, a dangerous guy with dangerous ideas and the will to carry them out, to being – nothing. Mentally hollowed out. Was I the only one to feel a little bit sorry for the guy when they rig him with explosives and tell him to kill himself? What are they punishing there? Boyd’s gone – does it make moral sense to mortify his empty flesh?

Apropos of not much of anything, here’s another bit of high poetry that I ran across recently and thought might apply to the Dollhouse. Here’s what Macbeth says to the doctor when his wife shows signs of madness:

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?”

Rossum’s answer:

“Why, yes, we can.”

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 23: "Getting Closer"

10 reasons I love Joss Whedon:

1. Boyd was the last person we suspected. Therefore he should have been the first person we suspected. And he was still the last person we suspected.

2. Even after all he’s seen – after all he’s done – Topher still isn’t ready to believe he’s helped bring about the apocalypse.

3. He acknowledges the Matrix connections, through the mouth of one of the characters.

4. Ballard’s an imprint now. Of himself. Which is to say: he’s both himself and an imprint. Well, aren’t we all? Isn’t that this show’s scariest question?

5. In the flashbacks to Caroline and Bennett’s friendships, Bennett keeps making noises about wishing she were different, wishing she were Caroline, and Caroline alters her to make her…herself, but moreso. More real than real. At the very beginning, the first layer of subtext this show presented was the idea that women are subjected to unreasonable demands by society, that they’re programmed to internalize everything from unrealistic body images to fear of feminism. In these flashbacks, these moments from before anybody really knows there’s a Dollhouse, we’re taken back to that idea.

6. Boyd’s complicity in everything raises the possibility that Echo’s great awakening was always just another Rossum machination – that you can never really wake up. It’s only honest to acknowledge the possibility that raging against the machine will only ever, in the end, strengthen the machine. That’s why the machine lets you do it.

7. All this hard s/f intellectualism pingponging around, and still it all seems to come back to the squishiest, stickiest of things: love. Topher’s love for Bennett, how it humanizes him, and sets Saunders off. Mellie’s (not November’s) love for Ballard, and his inability to keep himself from meeting it with doe eyes. Echo’s love for Ballard, and his inability to meet it with anything but raised eyebrows. Bennett’s love for Caroline, and how its frustration sends Bennett over to the Dark Side. And how all this focus on the squishy in no way feels like a cop-out on the hard: from the very beginning we’ve been asked to think that maybe love/lust proceeds from someplace so deep no mind-wipe can really reach it. That’s a romantic notion if we think it’s love we’re talking about, but an almost cynically hard-headed one if we think it’s lust we’re talking about, animal instinct.

8. As so often happens in Mutant Enemy productions, but this one most of all, we reach the end of an installment, slam through a big reveal or two, gasp when the music swells, and sit back satisfied that we know what’s going on, finally. And then, gradually, as we begin to persuade our hearts to climb down out of our mouths, we start to say, hey wait, why would Boyd program Saunders to kill Bennett when she’s trying to reconstruct Caroline if he’s only going to come back and preside over Caroline’s awakening himself? Like, do we really understand anything at all now? And if we don’t, how clever of Joss was it to make us feel like we did?

9. Have we finally seen a crack in the future? In Epitaph One we see Victor programmed with Ambrose’s personality, and acting and dressing a lot like the middle-aged man we’d met as Ambrose, the man we just saw shot and killed. Now it’s possible, and even likely, that the man we know as Ambrose was only ever just a doll-projection of the real Ambrose, who we’ve never seen. But that would make the not-Ambrose the first not-young, not-particularly-fit doll we’ve seen. That, or we finally have an indication that Epitaph One isn’t chiselled in stone.

10. We get a great big sloppy misty-eyed moment when we realize Boyd and Saunders have been together, just like we always hoped they would be. Then it’s taken away when she goes sleeper and he goes Big Bad. We get a great big sloppy mist-eyed moment when we see Bennett and Topher finally falling in love. Then it’s taken away when… Actually this isn’t something I love Joss for. I hate him for it. But I love to hate him for it.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 23: "The Attic"

Those Matrix comparisons are looking more and more apt. Matrix posited a world in which man’s creations escaped his control, enslaved mankind, using their bodies as a power source; consciousness, for the Machines, was an obstacle to be overcome. Hence the Matrix, the ultimate distraction. Keep ‘em fat and happy, give ‘em bread and circuses, McD’s and CNN. Dollhouse is, in essence, looking at that vision of the future and saying, “how naïve. You think the Enemy is going to be content to leave consciousness alone and unexploited? Furthermore, you think the Enemy is going to be a Them – Machines? The Enemy is, has only ever been, and always will be: us.” (Victor fighting himself in an Afghanistan of the mind.)

That’s one dimension the Attic moves in. The image of the Corporation feeding on humanity itself – just like in the Japanese programmer’s nightmare, wherein he’s constantly consuming himself (a distant echo of workaholism, I guess, but also a mighty hint of the Attic’s true purpose). Now connect this understanding of Attic-as-center-of-productivity with our previous understanding of the Attic as a prison, a warehouse for broken (i.e., disobedient) dolls. What does this suggest about the role of prisons in society? Exploitative much? Last episode we looked at the military-industrial complex (manufacturing endless wars to fuel manufacturing, one product of which is people who fit a certain mold); maybe now we’re looking at the prison-industrial complex.

But the Attic is also metaphysical. Dollhouse doesn’t wear its spiritualism on its sleeve like Matrix, but it’s just as sophisticated in its engagement with discourses of enlightenment, transcendence, ghosts in machines. The Attic is Hell: this is repeated a number of times. Echo, the Heroine in the making, must pass through Hell. And she doesn’t just pass through it: she starts busting things up. She harrows it, releasing at least two of its captives. She dies, rises from the dead, then raises two of her friends from the dead. This is some serious hero-construction here.

*

Where do we end? With the new League of Justice gathered in DeWitt’s office, ready to take on the world-destroyers. Now we finally know that DeWitt is on our side, and probably always was. In fact, I think this scene is hinting at just how far back DeWitt’s plans go. We know that DeWitt sent Echo into the Attic hoping she’d learn something. But I think DeWitt brought Caroline into the Dollhouse in the first place for the same reason. Notice how this last scene starts: closeup on Echo with that red wall in the background. It’s the same room we started the whole series in, where Caroline signed the contract with DeWitt. It’s such a similar setup that we might for a moment think we’ve flashed back to that moment in time. After all, we’ve just learned that Caroline knows the founders of the Attic: we’ve just had Caroline’s presence invoked, and it’s just about to be invoked again. Maybe DeWitt’s original bargain with Caroline was part of a scheme they both had to bring down Rossum.

*

At last I can say I’m fully hooked on this series again. Probably alone among Dollhouse fans, I never felt the second season quite equalled the first (scattered moments such as “Belonging” aside). But these last two episodes really had me in the chair. What's changed? I'm not sure. There's still not much in the way of a hint that the future of "Epitaph One" can be averted - I suppose we still could be told it was All a Dream, one of Clyde's nightmares, but I don't (want to) expect that. So there's still not much big-s Suspense. Rather, I think it's that the show had me emotionally invested in its characters this time and last: Priya (no coincidence, I think, that my previous favorite ep of the season was "Belonging"), Victor, Echo, even DeWitt in her alcoholic stupor.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 22: "Stop-Loss"

This might be my favorite episode of the season so far. The Love Supreme is, of course, the one that proceeds from deepest within, transcending any superficialities of personality: Victor and Sierra have it.

And what does it inspire? Grouping, in their doll-state: a primal reflection of the deep commitment that mature love inspires, commitment that can lead to a life-sharing so thorough that the people involved can feel part of one another. Lenono. So isn’t it interesting that this kind of grouping is what enables Victor/Anthony to resist the groupthink of Mind Whisper?

Dollhouse has always been about the individual and the collective, the question of whether the collective can/should/does demand the individual surrender her autonomy. Doll technology is, by its very existence, an affront to the notion of personal autonomy: it threatens to dissolve us all into a sea of undifferentiated tools of Rossum. What this episode does (unexpectedly, I might add: the first time in a while they’ve blindsided me with subtext: cool) is present the possibility that we might be dissolved into a sea of undifferentiated consciousness, not only our individual autonomy gone, but our individuality itself.

Mutant Enemy gives this to us in the context of a Supersoldier plot. It’s a familiar device, not only from sci-fi and comic books, X-Files and X-Men, but also Buffy Season 4: if it comes a little out of the blue here, it certainly fits in with Rossum. Is anybody surprised they have a military contracting wing?

And it fits in perfectly with Dollhouse’s themes. The military is only the most obvious way in which the modern state tries to mold, remake, define, standardize, not to mention control, its citizenry. The rhetoric is inescapable and callused: the individual recruit is turned into a fighting machine, or a part in a larger fighting machine. Intentionally dehumanized: see Full Metal Jacket. Cannon fodder, human bullets: the soldier is the emblem for how the modern state sees its people: as resources, tools, component parts. That the soldiers themselves might have the best of intentions and the deepest of personal tragedies doesn’t change things: we can weep for Victor, even as we recoil in horror from the group to which he devotes himself.

Does anybody really leave the Dollhouse? No, or at least not more easily than soldiers can leave the army in these days of endless war, of stop-loss programs. (There’s a lot to notice in this episode vis-à-vis recent military history. Boyd’s mention of Blackwater is just the start. Note Victor, Echo, Sierra in their black hoods. Remind you of anything?)

Grouping. Perhaps it’s inevitable: perhaps it’s unavoidable. The only way for Anthony to resist one group (Scytheon) is to take refuge in another (Victor-Sierra). It’s not so different from the position all the non-dolls are put in. They have to choose sides. Nobody can stand alone. And who’s the only hope? Echo, who consitutes a group in herself. She embraces that, masters it, succeeds in integrating her many selves into a whole, just as she succeeds in dominating the military groupthink she voluntarily adds to her inner matrix.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 21: "A Love Supreme"

Alpha’s back. And he’s more fun than ever, now that he’s gone Beau Brummel. And yet it feels like an odd time for him to come back – with only a few episodes left in the whole series, isn’t this just a distraction? Shouldn’t we get on with How the World Ends? And yet again, when he taunts Echo it serves nicely to bring Ballard’s behavior in the previous episode into focus. Was Ballard’s gentlemanly reticence an expression of love? Or disdain for composite humans?

Perhaps Alpha’s recurrence is just a way to shake things up again. Last episode we got a realignment of the key players in the Dollhouse: by the end we had Ballard, Boyd, and Echo on one side, fighting to bring down Rossum, and DeWitt on the other, now committed to Rossum, with Topher kind of caught in the middle. In this episode we get, for a little while, Topher joining Echo’s cabal – but then by the end DeWitt is made aware of Echo’s situation, too. And for a moment we think they’re all back on the same side. But then… The last shot of the episode is a closeup on DeWitt’s face, with some inscrutable expression on it. Where does she go from here?

Pause on the moment when Topher’s brought into the conspiracy. What does he say when he sees Echo calling up an imprint on her own? “I’m obsolete.” He’s speaking as a programmer – but he could be speaking for everyone in the face of the technology he’s helped introduce. The old-fashioned single-minded, single-bodied human is obsolete. And soon to be endangered.

More on the Matrix echoes we noted last time. That series was about hacking the System that keeps us all under control, and then about Neo learning how to hack reality. Dollhouse is about hacking the brain, which is our own individual reality. And it’s less sanguine about the whole idea of hacking than Matrix was: there the hacker was a hero, the anarchist who can bring down the Machine. Here the hacker is all too easily co-opted by the Machine, and the hack is the ultimate means of control. …In this episode we have perhaps the closest parallel yet, when it’s suggested that Dollhouse tech has turned humanity, collectively, into a computer. Alpha introduces a virus into the house’s computer, but it manifests itself in the dolls – they go all Agent Smith on their handlers.

There’s something being said about knowledge here, I think. Topher and Rossum have hacked the brain, i.e., they’ve bashed their way in, to a point where they can manipulate it, make it do what they want. They understand it – they’ve unlocked its mysteries – and that understanding gives them control. But that understanding does something else – it changes, somehow, the object of knowledge. Because somebody now knows how the brain works, and how to work it, all possessors of brains have now become objects of control – we’re no longer autonomous agents, but, potentially at least, someone else’s uncomplaining tools.

It’s a scary-sci-fi trope, right, the Scientist who Delved Too Deep, the New New Prometheus. Topher may have the best of intentions (and sometimes it seems like he might), but in the end his development and use of technology is no less reckless than Alpha’s. But being a truism doesn’t make it any less true. Knowledge is power. Power can be used to help people – but as Adelle reminded us in the last episode, power’s primary imperative is always to gain more power. Power doesn’t serve anybody: we all serve power.

And then, as in Matrix, we have the Hero. In this case the Heroine. Someone who’s learned to transcend the programming, do the impossible – someone who, we know, will lead the freed to a safe zone, a Zion. Is Echo the One? She denied it strenuously in “Omega” – she retains her slave-name, which underlines her status as a double, not a unique entity. But she’s embracing that nonuniqueness as her essence, her own identity. So she’s not the One, but she is the Many – she contains multitudes.

What’s the Love Supreme? Alpha’s obsession with Echo? Echo’s love for Ballard, which prevents her from killing Alpha even though Ballard begged her to? Or is it the unconditional, pure love that Echo is able to give each and every client? She can be what everyone needs her to be – which is one way to think of a Savior.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 20: "Meet Jane Doe"

1. Ballard once knowingly slept with a doll, and he couldn’t forgive himself for it. Now Echo throws herself at him, and he refuses. In his mind, sleeping with Echo would be just like sleeping with November: wrong, because it’s using somebody’s body without her permission. But is he right? Echo doesn’t think so. She asserts that she is someone in her own right, an agency, not just a placeholder for Caroline (“Jane Doe” isn’t just a stand-in for a name, it’s also a name). This means she has the right to sleep with Ballard if she wants to: she is qualified to make that decision. Ballard can’t bring himself to agree, and that’s because he still can’t accept Echo for what she is. In his mind she’s something unnatural that will one day have to be put to sleep so that Caroline can wake up. It’s a great science-fictiony dilemma – but note how Mutant Enemy give it to us through echoing Ballard’s earlier encounter. We as viewers are being asked to remember the earlier episode, and what it meant, and note how things have changed, and what that means: we’re expected to notice the parallels, and the productive deviations. This is called subtlety.

2. Keith Carradine is a marvel as Harding. He projects evil, sure, but what evil: he plays the character with a casual, almost avuncular air that constantly throws the viewer off balance. You know he’s evil, and he never disappoints, but he never telegraphs his evil. He plays Harding as a man completely comfortable with his own evil.

3. Topher. Well, he finally did it this time. Now we know that it really is all, all his fault. And Adelle is, of course, right when she accuses him of partially faking his horror at this new tech. He didn’t make detailed schematics because he wanted to destroy them: he made them because he wanted to make them.

4. Adelle. Her betrayal of Topher, turning the plans for the Doomsday Device over to Harding, is a key moment in the series. It comes as a shock, because somehow we’ve been lulled into liking her. More than that, we’ve allowed ourselves to start thinking of her as on the side of good – she’s against Harding, so she must be alright at heart, right? But what’s happened now? Is she really just selling out to save herself, as she tells Harding? Or was she ever really opposed to Rossum’s aims in the first place? Or is she, as her eyes seems to suggest in her final confrontation with Topher, doing this to protect him somehow? What’s her relationship with Topher anyway? There’s more there than meets the eye.

5. Echo. There’s something Matrixy about seeing her Rolodex through her imprints in search of one that knows how to ride a motorcycle. Of course there’s a lot of Matrix in Dollhouse: you could write a thesis on how Dollhouse reflects/refracts/riffs on that movie’s key themes and motifs.

6. I have to say, though… Rushing forward three months in time. It sapped a lot of tension out of the episode for me. A lot of developments (Harding’s ascent, Topher’s adoption of Bennett’s chair design, the decision to imprint dolls as scientists, etc.) were thrown at us all at once, rather than the three or four episodes it would have taken to introduce all this stuff properly. Nothing was given time to breathe. I’m not saying each episode has to take place in a day, but still: maybe Aristotle was onto something with that unity of time business. I do feel the cracks are starting to show in Season 2, in terms of M.E. rushing toward a conclusion.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 19: "The Left Hand"

To pick up where we left off: are we supposed to sympathize with the desire to escape self-recrimination at any cost, or condemn it? This is the third episode in a row in which this desire has been foregrounded. Sierra returns to the Dollhouse to escape the knowledge that she killed Nolan. Daniel returns to the Dollhouse to escape the knowledge that he killed his wife/handler. And in between, Madeline says she doesn’t know how she’s going to live with the knowledge that she killed Hearn. What is all this telling us?

One key might be in Madeline’s background, about which we still don’t know much. In “Needs” we see her kneeling in front of a grave. Presumably grief drove her to the Dollhouse. But grief over what: death, or having caused death? My initial suspicion was the latter, and I still may be wrong, but more and more I’m suspecting I was right. If so, get this: she killed, and to forget it she joined the Dollhouse. They helped her forget; during her forgetting, they made her kill again. Forgetting her mistake quite literally allowed her to make the same mistake again. And forgetting that she had anything to forget led her to make another mistake (one she has to be allowed to make, if she’s to be free, she reminds Ballard), one that leads her back into the clutches of further forgetting.

So no, we’re not supposed to be able to forget what we’ve done. Absolution, a clean slate, shouldn’t be that easy. The only way to grow is to know ourselves, remember our mistakes. Wiping our memories doesn’t change who we are. Alpha and Caroline both demonstrate that.

Why does the show keep coming back to this theme? I think it has to do with Caroline. In “Echoes” we learn that she got her boyfriend shot and, probably, killed. We’re left to assume that this has something to do with her decision to accept the Dollhouse’s devil’s bargain. We haven’t yet learned all that happened between her boyfriend’s shooting and her entrance into the Dollhouse; with this episode we begin to learn a little, that she and Bennett had some kind of co-conspiratorial friendship. We’re still being encouraged to wonder about Caroline’s past, and specifically about why exactly she’s here. Remember how the whole series started: with us witnessing Caroline signing away her body/her self. That’s the biggest mystery hanging over the series. What does guilt have to do with it?

Why exactly she’s here. Except that, as of the end of this episode, she’s no longer there. Huge development. (BTW, I like the Incredible Hulk-style piano under the shot of her wandering alone through crowded city streets. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry – Perrin’s handler discovered that.)

Enver Gjokaj is a god. His mimicry of Fran Kranz in this episode is dead-on, and provides for one of the great Jossian this-should-not-be moments of the series. It’s wrong in all the right ways when Victor/Topher and Topher/Topher meet. Laughing at each other’s jokes. It’s hilariously meta, but at the same time horrifying: it’s the show’s most direct demonstration yet of the potential of this technology to disrupt our humanity. Dislocate and destroy it.

Equally mesmerizing are the Topher-Bennett scenes. Nerd love in full twitchy bloom. And of course as sincere as their mutual-admiration society is, they’re still each trying to sucker-punch the other. The left hand (John Cassavetes’? or Ursula LeGuin's?) doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. But if you’re some people, you don’t even know which is which (again: who’s Perrin parodying?).

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 18: "The Public Eye"

Once again we see Topher inventing, for the best of reasons, tech that we, having seen Episode 13, know will bring the worst of consequences. This time it’s the psychic raygun that temporarily immobilizes dolls. He calls it a “disruptor,” and hastily points out that it’s a Star Trek reference – TOS, to be exact. A little in-joke for the Whedonites, perhaps: if you’ve watched the interviews on the Firefly discs you know how insistent Joss was that his space opera was a reaction against the later Star Treks – “no holodecks,” he points out, more than once. Joss seems to hold that particular TNG innovation in particular scorn.

On the other hand, what’s the Dollhouse but a twisted, flesh-and-blood inversion of the holodeck idea?

But enough with elaborating the subtext. This episode is about moving forward with the plot, hurtling toward a summation. And not a moment too soon, because in the month between the broadcast of Episodes 17 and 18, Dollhouse was cancelled. How I feel about that should be easy to guess: bummed, not surprised. Glad we got a second season, but apprehensive that ending after two seasons might actually make the show feel more truncated than ending after one… We’ll see.

So a lot happens here.

We find out that Perrin is a Manchurian candidate. No huge surprise there; but it’s nice how they’ve made him a little dig at a recent real-life politician who was also the scion of a powerful political family, but a screw-up in his personal life, until suddenly he got serious and became, look at at that, a president who many nevertheless thought was merely a puppet, a front for shadowy forces.

We find out that not all Dollhouses are necessarily working toward the same goal; we also find out that other Dollhouses have different internal dynamics (not to mention décor schemes). We meet the programmer of the DC house, Bennett (who has always wanted to meet Topher’s tech – she says, fondling his disruptor). It’s nice to see Summer Glau rejoin the Whedonverse, as Bennett – she gives Topher’s opposite number a mysterious, not to say neurotic, aura that promises great things, and interesting parallels and counterpoints to Topher himself. Remember Joss’s fascination with the Dangerous Geek – she’s one, too. We end with her torturing Echo/Caroline – revealing the sadism inherent in Dollhouse technology.

We find out that November does indeed have residual programming. “No one ever leaves here,” accuses Agent Ballard. And then he does – nice move. We can see that he still hates himself for sleeping with Mellie even after realizing she was a doll. Madeline accuses him of being a Dollhouse client – “So that was your fantasy? I was your Girl Friday who you slept with the other six days?” – and he denies it, insists he didn’t know she was a doll. But that’s only partially true; and surely he also realizes by now that even if he never asked November to be programmed to do what Mellie did, the Dollhouse programmed her that way because they knew it would work on him. And it did. November was Ballard’s fantasy, even if he didn’t know it at first. And now Madeline forces him to confront his complicity in the whole thing. That’s why he leaves. And now, at long last, the potential in the character of Ballard is being realized. They even made the kick-boxing training, with which they first introduced him to us, pay off in this episode.

Payoffs. That’s what it has to be about from now till the end of the series. You get the feeling that a lot of these characters are like sleepers, preloaded with programming that hasn’t yet revealed itself. Boyd. Whiskey. Victor. Alpha. And now Bennett. And, still I think, November: she doesn’t know how she’s going to live with the knowledge that she killed a man. Sierra said that last time. Did November say that once before?

Why do people become dolls? With Sierra’s first stint we have one answer: they’re manipulated into it. That’s the subtext to the conversation between Perrin and Echo/Bree in the car, where he says she’s been manipulated into serving the powerful and she thinks he’s talking about her job as a prostitute, and she assures him she likes her job. We know he’s right, and even if she wasn’t a doll, but only a prostitute, wouldn’t he still be right? But with Sierra’s second stint we have another answer: they might choose to become dolls to avoid living with guilt. Is that November’s story? Caroline’s?

And are we supposed to sympathize with the desire to escape self-recrimination at any cost, or condemn it?

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 17: "Belonging"

At long last we know the full background of one of the Dolls: how she came to be a doll, and why (I’m not convinced we know Caroline’s full story yet). And the surprising thing is, that wasn’t even the most exciting thing about this episode.

It was welcome, though. That tantalizing scene we got between Sierra and Nolan in Episode 8 (“Needs”): we get everything it promised us. Nolan was using the Dollhouse as a date-rape drug; also as revenge, and sick entertainment. We get closure on him; in Priya’s desperate plea to be cleansed of the memory of what she did to him, we also get a hint of why some of the other dolls might have agreed to their contracts. Memories (like Victor’s: is he there to “recover” from post-traumatic stress disorder?), guilts (November, and now Sierra), they’d do anything rather than have to live with (which is it for Echo?). Notice the view we get of Priya right after she kills Nolan? She stands up, and we see her in silhouette against her old painting of the bird. It turns out that it’s not Nolan who’s the big black shadow threatening her avian freedom: it’s she herself.

We also get the answer to the real question Episode 8 left us with, which is: how much did DeWitt and Topher knew about Nolan and Sierra? The answer is, not much. They thought she was crazy, and under his care: they thought they were helping her. When they realize they were wrong, they’re horrified.

It’s a well-named episode, because this is the one where everybody has to answer the old labor movement question: which side are you on? (And of course one way to read Dollhouse is as a metaphor for capitalism: we’ve got owners and workers, management and labor, exploiters and exploited. Somebody among the workers has awakened to their plight, and is going to try to organize them.)

It’s all about belonging: deciding which side you belong to, or trying to make others your possessions. Nolan uses his connections with the Dollhouse, and his knowledge of neurochemistry, to try to make Priya belong to him. When his plot is exposed, Topher tries to free Priya; but in the end, her attempt to assert her autonomy results in her signing herself over to the Dollhouse, some parts of her permanently. She belongs to the Dollhouse in a deeper way than she did before.

Topher and Adelle have to choose sides, too. Adelle thinks this house belongs to her, and that she can run it as she sees fit. The Rossum corporation makes it clear to her that she’s wrong: she belongs to them. Either she toes the line or she goes to the Attic. She, in turn, tries to make Topher play ball, saying he has no choice: she even reminds him that he’s in this job because he has no morals, and therefore belongs in/to the Dollhouse. He chooses differently, but his choice goes so wrong that, like Priya/Sierra, his dependence on the Dollhouse is only strengthened. Rossum’s grip tightens, and our characters begin to feel it: they can choose to accept it, like Adelle, or be made to accept it, like Topher, but either way, they’re owned.

Adelle thinks everybody in the Dollhouse is owned by the Dollhouse. We know she’s wrong: Echo is free, in her mind. And, as of this episode, we begin to see where Boyd stands as well. All season long we’ve been able to see that Dollhouse discipline, that Panopticon watchfulness, has been slipping: Echo’s constantly displaying signs of wakefulness, Sierra and Victor are plainly in love. Saunders’s alienation (then flight), combined with Boyd’s indifference, explained it: but now Boyd has taken a side. He knows Echo is awake, and he’s chosen to abet her in whatever she’s planning. We always suspected he was a good guy; now we know.

At the same time, we also now know he can supervise the cover-up of a murder, and the dismemberment of a body, without batting an eye. Boyd’s a little bit scary now. Ex-cop? Is that all?

All of this to think about, and so little time in the episode to think about it, because you were too busy feeling it all. It was probably the deepest episode yet, emotionally: just wrenching. Topher is more and more becoming the emotional center of the story, as we watch him wrestle with his conscience. Here we see him, really for the first time, begin to sense that what he’s doing might go horribly wrong. “Epitaphs” tells us both that it will and that Topher does have enough of a soul to be driven mad by his role in it; now we see that soul emerging in the present.

How cool is it, by the way, that it’s a book that reveals that Echo is awake? It could only be a book. The point is that she has broken out of the eternally-refreshed now state of the Doll: she’s engaged in a long-term, multisession learning project, one that implies progression, directionality, awareness of past, present, and future…it couldn’t have been a newspaper, or a blog, for example. Or, more to the point, a typical TV show, where each episode stands alone, allowing you to pretend that last week’s episode never happened. It could, however, have been something like Dollhouse…

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 16: Belle Chose

Key scene: Paul takes Echo to wardrobe, and has to sit in the waiting room reading magazines with another handler. Any boyfriend or husband recognizes the feeling: killing time outside a dressing room in the women’s wear department, trying not to look totally emasculated among the silks and satins. What magazine is the other handler reading? Lock and Load. And what does he say to Ballard? I’d never do this for my wife.

Let’s not forget to notice that this is a joke. And this episode has a lot of them. This joke happens to be, oh, just a little sexist. But of course, that’s the point of this episode. Paul in the waiting room whistling dixie is a throwaway moment, but then again it’s also setting up the central question of this episode? What is it that makes (some) men do things for women they don’t want to do? More to the point, what is it that makes (some) men feel they have to do things for women they don’t want to do?

Ask these men (as this episode does, this episode in which Joss and company say, screw it: sex is what we’re talking about, so let’s talk about sex) and the answer would be…well, something like the title of this episode. La belle chose. Google it. “Pretty thing.” Chaucer’s term for the vagina. The thing women have and men want, and because women know men want it they have power over the men. Eddie Murphy had a routine about it; some men have worked it into a counternarrative to feminist critiques of the phallocracy.

But Dollhouse isn’t interested in decrying vaginal tyranny. Nothing’s that simple. Dollhouse is interested in looking at what happens when some men start to resent the power they perceive the pretty things to be exercising over them. You react to a loss of control by trying to assert control.

Terry feels emasculated by the strong women in his family. There are hints of abuse, but they’re ambiguous: what’s important is that in his mind, he’s not getting enough attention or cooperation from the women. They have something he needs and they won’t give it to him: he can’t control the means of meeting his own needs, meaning he can’t control those needs themselves. So he tries to simulate control by abducting women, drugging them, dressing them, and posing them. Making believe. Playing with them like dolls in a…

Dollhouse, of course. Just like the slightly smarmy dresser in the Dollhouse, who asserts that his power to mold external reality is mightier than Topher’s power to mold internal reality. But more importantly, just like any (male) Dollhouse client. We’re getting right down to the nitty-gritty here of sexual power dynamics. Insecure men seeking the feeling of power, paying through the nose (old phallic symbol there) to get what they want in such a way as allows them to pretend it’s being given freely.

The professor (btw, as someone in academics, I have to point out how ludicrous it is to think that a professor in the humanities, a Chaucerian of all things, could ever afford to hire a Doll – or was this one of Adelle’s pro bono things?), as much as the serial killer, takes us there. He wants to sleep with one of his students, but either can’t make it happen or is afraid of the consequences, so he hires a Doll: skeevy enough. But the skeeviness goes deeper. He’s the client: it’s his fantasy. He could have made Kiki a brilliant budding medievalist who genuinely (thinks she) has the hots for middle-aged intellectuals. Instead he makes her an airhead, and worse, an impressionable one – a teachable bimbo, who laps up his talk about the self-aware Wife of Bath who knows what she wants and how to get it. He wants her not only to be willing to sleep with him for an A, but also to feel that by doing so, she’s empowering herself. What’s in this guy’s head? Does he really believe any of this? Is he trying to avenge himself on campus feminists? Is he indulging a fantasy of himself as a true educator? And, more importantly, does this mean that everything he says about the Wife of Bath and female sexual empowerment is bullshit?

Terry would say it’s women who have the power. The prof would say that too, or at least say that Chaucer says that. What does Dollhouse say? Dollhouse would say (I think) that that’s the wrong question, because it posits an unreal situation. Look at the end result: Terry’s killing women, the prof is sexually exploiting them. If la belle chose has a great potential incentive power, in the reality men react to this by asserting real and coercive power in the form of red pens and croquet mallets. Not to mention money. So in the end who’s really in control? (Terry still blames the victims, though: she made me do it.)

All of this has been floating around in the miasmic subtext of Dollhouse since the beginning, but never has it been crystallized so clearly, or so much around the idea of the male id. This one was really calculated to make the fellas feel uncomfortable.

(And what does a fella do when he’s made uncomfortable? When his manhood is threatened? He does what the guy in the club tried to do to Kiki/Victor. But Dollhouse can always sucker-punch faster than you can. That’s why I love it.)

So this was one of the two or three best episodes of the series so far. Real suspense, deep ideas, oddball humor. Starting to link up to the future in interesting ways – we’re rooting for Topher to invent a new way to do a remote wipe even though we know this is precisely what will destroy the future.

And: Ballard. Finally, finally, finally I’m starting to see him make sense in a Dollhouse context. He’s a Quantico-trained cop, a good guy, law and order all the way. But look how naturally he takes to the new rules of interrogation. He can do whatever he wants to the bad guys. He can threaten to kill a suspect. He can kill a suspect – he can switch off Terry’s life support. He’s free. It’s evil, but it’s an evil he can live with. And how scary is that?

As scary as the fact that we know switching off Terry’s life support won’t do a damn bit of good. Terry’s in Echo now, in the matrix – he’s immortal. He’s the ghost in the shell. A serial killer is now part of Echo’s mix. “Goodness gracious” is right.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 15: Instinct

So this episode ends with Echo telling Ballard that she not only remembers all her imprints, but feels them, feels all the things they did, all the things the Dollhouse made them do and want to do.

She says this as she’s coming down from an episode of near-homicidal violence driven by a maternal protectiveness she feels toward a child not her own, triggered by Dollhouse manipulation. Not just brain manipulation but, as Topher brags, body manipulation (as if the two are not one): they’ve made Echo’s body act as if it had just born a baby. She’s lactating, for God’s sake. And she’s willing to kill to get this baby back. Until she’s talked down, made to realize that what she’s feeling, what her body is telling her, is not real. She has to accept that not only her brain but her own body, her own deepest nature as a woman, has been mobilized against her, to deceive and betray her. She’s alienated from her own body.

And she accepts it, as just one more violation the Dollhouse has perpetrated on her person, one more indignity she must endure if she’s going to bring them down. But she’s not happy about it. Notice how closely the final scene of this episode parallels the final scene of the previous episode: she and Ballard gazing out on an artificial environment (the Dollhouse there, here a playground), talking about real things, her memories and what she wants to do about it. In “Vows” she’s confident, even defiant, and she’s talking about what she knows, what she’s aware of. Here she’s talking about what she feels, and she sounds weary, and almost broken.

For the first time I, as a viewer, really begin to feel the tragedy of her situation. Echo has never really moved me. November moved me. Whiskey moved me. But Echo: maybe this says more about me than the show, but Echo was always interesting to me, rather than affecting. But this: this moved me.

This is what the second season has done best so far: bring the emotion. They’re still working the subtext hard, but even with all the talk about undeniable human instincts in this episode I don’t think they’re taking the subtext of the tech anywhere we absolutely hadn’t considered based on last season. They’re marching in place in that regard: but with Whiskey last episode and Echo here, they’re taking time to make us feel the human cost of this technology.

Other things:

November’s back. And suddenly we’re forced to ask, along with her, does the Dollhouse ever let anybody go? Why would they? How could they? Do we really believe DeWitt hasn’t had her imprinted with a sleeper program? For that matter, do we really believe she has her original memories back complete? She thinks her baby died of cancer, and that all the Dollhouse did was take away the grief. Is that really what happened? How would she know?

Topher’s teachable moment. Once again he outsmarts himself, but when Paul figures out the problem, Topher is surprisingly quick to acknowledge it. “I learned!” he says. Give him his due: he really does love knowledge.

Curious how in “Vows” they have Echo getting married and in “Instinct” they have her mothering a newborn. It might be accidental, but it seems to me that they’re starting out this season by taking her through young-adult rites of passage. If this is a composite bildungsroman, they’re giving her all the important experiences. As opposed to last season: there she was a midwife, helping but not participating.

Senator Perrin. So far I’m a little disappointed in this character. I liked Alexis Denisof in Buffy and Angel. I liked him a lot. But he comes across as rather lightweight here. I appreciate the character, though: the Senator with a Bee up his Bonnet is such a staple of comic books (think the X-Men films) that it’s kind of fun to see Whedon deploy it here.

Isn’t it nice how subtly they’re being in developing Victor and Sierra’s relationship? Just glimpses here and there, nothing much said, but it means the world if you know what you're seeing; a nice nod to people who were paying attention last season, and in the off-season. In all Mutant Enemy is being pretty unforgiving of any new viewers who might be wandering in now, wondering what the fuss was about: there’s been a little bring-‘em-up-to-speed dialogue, but not a whole lot.

We know what we know.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 14: Vows

My big question after Ep 13 was, if you’ll recall, whether/how Mutant Enemy were going to keep it interesting, now that they’d told us How It Was All Going To End. We get a partial answer right here, which is: by writing tense, fast-moving episodes with interesting character development. This was one, and it kept me glued to my Hulu. But it wasn’t a complete wipe: at the end, when Echo gave her speech laying out her quest, I was brought right back into the world of “Epitaph One,” and I found myself thinking, “yeah, good luck with that.”

So it remains to be seen if the (brilliant, harrowing) vision of the future we were given over the summer makes it harder to watch the present unfold. Harder to care.

Moments. Sierra, programmed to think she’s English, telling Ivy she doesn’t like Orientals: the rich, evil irony of that exchange, and the sucker-punch of the subtext, that we’re all programmed to hate ourselves, reject ourselves, neglect our own best interests, in so many ways. Ballard, thinking he’s using Echo for good, being reminded by her handler that now he’s a client; the short pause while we realize, along with Ballard, that he’s hereby completed his moral fall, even if it is for good reasons. He’s both a pimp and a john now (in a philanthropic way). DeWitt, touching Victor’s scars to check the doctors’ work, then letting her clinical touch turn into a caress without realizing it.

Vows. What vows? The wedding vows Echo takes, in her persona as agent infiltrating the arms dealer’s inner circle; vows that Ballard thinks take her into morally repugnant territory, and that Boyd thinks constitute a dangerous long-term assignment. That’s the obvious one. Ballard and Boyd are both right, of course, which tells us something about how this episode wants us to think about vows.

There’s Echo’s vow at the end to find Caroline, to find “all of them” – meaning, all of the people she’s been? Or the real people that belong to all the other dolls, at whom she’s gazing as she says this? Does she even know?

Then there’s the real killer, the as-yet undefined vow that governs both Topher and Whiskey – she doesn’t know him, and he doesn’t completely know her, that’s the deal, he says – in as moving a moment as this character has given us (at least in the present). Clearly they have some connection, clearly he wishes she could remember it, clearly he’s too scared or bound by his vow to make her remember it, and clearly it’s killing him. And she – as the broken consciousness that we can no longer accurately call Saunders, but can’t quite call anything else – so she’s, what, Saunders/not-Saunders? – knows that to break this vow, to remember who she really is, would kill her. Because she’s not herself. Saunders both is and isn’t whoever Whiskey was, whoever took that vow.

Vows. What are vows? Expressions of will, most of all: not merely a will to do something, but a will to see something done, a will to will a certain desired reality into existence. They’re a kind of speech act. But doesn’t will presuppose subjectivity? Someone to do the willing? A willing someone? If a doll makes a vow, has a vow been made? Can Echo make a vow?

(And dig: there’s a religious tradition in which the Vow is huge. We’ve already noted the Buddhist overtones of Dollhouse samsara; now note how much of a bodhisattva figure Echo is, achieving her own enlightenment, but electing not to enter into nirvana, vowing to stay behind until she’s helped other sentient beings achieve enlightenment.)

Can any of us make a vow? Do any of us have a firm enough grasp on this reality to will another one into being? We’re reminded, with a wicked drip of sarcasm, that nobody’s much better off than a doll, especially (but not only) in a world in which doll technology exists. Ballard tells DeWitt of his suspicions of Boyd, saying he doesn’t know why Boyd is here, though he knows why he himself is there. “I know what I know,” he says. Do you? she says. [it was Topher who said this, not Ballard, you idiot! -ed.]

Do we? “Epitaph One” has already told us that, even if we do now, we won’t for long.

What are we going to have in Season 2 of Dollhouse? The pathos of watching people thinking their problems amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world? Of watching people who ought to know better hastening toward their own destruction? Well, maybe that’s not inappropriate right now…

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 13: Epitaph One

“Epitaph One” is a fascinating piece of work because of the moment in which it was made. Dollhouse hadn’t yet been renewed when this episode was written and filmed; even the DVD commentary track was recorded before the network had made its decision. And as we all remember, nobody expected the show to be renewed.

So for Mutant Enemy, this episode was a chance to wrap it all up, in case a wrap-up was needed. They got to make a Serenity the fans wouldn’t have to wait three years for.

And that’s what “Epitaph One” plays like, really: a resolution, just in case. It jumps ten years into the future to show us where the Dollhouse technology is going to lead. War, and not just war: total social disintegration, people preying on each other for bodies, people turning into mindless killers. It’s zombies, body snatchers, vampires. All of which, of course, is a logical progression from the technology posited in the first twelve episodes (in retrospect, I begin to think that “Gray Hour” and “Haunted” may have been the most important episodes of the first season). We saw this coming: now we see what it looks like when it’s come.

But of course that’s not all we want to know. Merely telling us that the Dollhouse destroyed the world doesn’t give us closure (selfish us!). We want to know what happens to our characters. Caroline, Victor, Sierra, Paul, Topher, and the rest of the gang. “Epitaph One” tells us that, too. Not in great detail – we don’t know everything that happens to everyone. But we know enough to get emotional payoffs for most of them.

We see Caroline breaking free of the Dollhouse and her programming. We see Victor and Sierra doing the same, and having a relationship. We see Ballard finally getting to help Caroline; we also get hints that they’ve had some sort of relationship, that it went wrong, and that they’ve come to a sort of rapprochement. We see Boyd taking off on his own; we also see that he and Saunders have something together. Most of all we see Topher and DeWitt get their comeuppance.

This is all very satisfying. Topher huddled in a pod, surrounded by toys and equations, mind shattered by guilt over what he’s helped bring about: this is one of the great images of the series so far. The Dangerous Geek Gets His.

And so we can say of “Epitaph One” what we say about Serenity: it’s not as good as a second season would have been, it feels rushed, too many tantalizing ideas given too short shrift, but it does give us some closure, and it is better than nothing.

But, wow. Dollhouse was renewed. We get a second season. At least a second one.

Now what? Has Joss put himself in a hole, narratively? We know what happens to all these people. Again, not every detail, but enough to go on. Enough, one would think, to rob the second season of a lot of its suspense. To take a character I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, we know that Topher is going to remain arrogant and clueless about what his work really does until it’s too late. We know that eventually he’s going to discover enough of a conscience to make him miserable, but that’ll be too late, too. We know he’ll get punished; we’ve seen him get punished. What’s really left to do with this character?

You could say the same thing about Caroline. We know she breaks free of her programming. We know she finally masters herself. We know she frees all the lab animals and leads them toward safety. What more do we need to know about her?

Let me be clear about what I mean to say. I’m thrilled Dollhouse was renewed. And I’m thrilled to have “Epitaph One.” What I think is that the decision to jump into the future and tell us how it all ends, in “Epitaph One,” creates a big narrative challenge for Joss for the second season. He’ll have to find some way to continue to create suspense around these characters when we think we know how things turn out for them. I don’t think merely filling in the blanks between 2009 and 2019 will be enough. I can’t imagine what will be enough.

That’s why I don’t work for Mutant Enemy: I don’t have their imagination. I’m confident that Joss will make it work for him. I just wanted to point out that it’s a challenge. With “Epitaph One” he wrote himself into a corner. I can’t wait to see how he writes his way out of it.

Most of all I’m astounded by the audacity it took to write himself into that corner – when the first season was already nearly done in by the narrative risks it took. Dollhouse started out by dispensing with the typical TV drama requirement that a show center around a strong central character: Echo was no character at all, an empty center. Now, it seems they’re ready to start toying with another convention of storytelling, that we move forward through plot twists toward a resolution. We’ve already got the resolution, it seems. What’s left?

We’ll see.

And ain’t it cool to be able to say that?

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 0: Echo (original pilot)

Disclaimers/subject position confessions, updated: in between the airing of Episode 12 and my viewing this pilot (and Episode 13) on DVD, I watched Firefly, Serenity, and Dr. Horrible. I’ve now seen all the Joss, and am a little better qualified, maybe, to analyze Dollhouse in the context of his other work.

The obvious continuity between Buffy/Angel and Firefly/Serenity was that both works were centered around big, unruly, loving conglomerations of misfits: Surrogate Families. Both works explored the dynamics of these families, and held these families up as shelters from the storm of the wide, wild world. You could have said, on the basis of those two works, that this was Joss’s Big Theme. It wasn’t much in evidence in Dr. Horrible (although you might observe that Dr. H’s longing to join the ELE was a reflection of the yearning to belong to a surrogate family), but maybe that was an outlier.

But when you include Dr. Horrible, and look at it, Buffy/Angel, and Firefly/Serenity together, then you (may) start to see something else emerge as a candidate for Joss’s Big Theme: the Dangerous Geek. He’s obviously got a soft spot for the geek, no doubt stemming in part from his own sense of himself as one (in the special features for Dollhouse, Joss as much as says “Topher – c’est moi”). Not to mention that a large swath of his audience probably self-identifies as Geekish. I do. But Joss’s love for the geek (and by “geek” I mean someone whose expertise at something is only matched by his pop culture knowledge, both of which are only trumped by his social awkwardness) is consistently tempered by a sense that the geek can be dangerous. In Buffy/Angel we got Andrew/Jonathan/Warren. In Dr. Horrible we got Dr. Horrible. In Firefly/Serenity, we didn’t really get much meditation on geekhood, although there was potential in the character of Mr. Universe that one can imagine Joss exploiting if there had been a second season.

How does this relate to Dollhouse? I think a lot of fans were expecting another surrogate-family show, when what Joss had in mind was another dangerous-geek show.

Dr. Horrible should have been the tip-off. As I say, we already got dangerous geeks in Buffy, but Dr. Horrible was different in one important way. Of the three geeks in Buffy, one was plainly dangerous and not at all charming (Warren), while one was pathetic/charming and not very dangerous (Jonathan), and one was so weak that you didn’t know which way he was going to go – and in the end he was redeemed. In Serenity, Mr. Universe was mostly cool and just a little bit creepy (the lovebot idea should have been very creepy, but the movie didn’t get time to develop it), and not at all dangerous except to the bad guys.

But Dr. Horrible – he’s truly horrible. At first we don’t think he is. This is the genius of the show (which I think is pretty genius; but not as genius as the commentary track on the DVD). He’s so cute in his pathetic little fantasies, and particularly in his attraction to The Girl, that you’re rooting for him all the way up until the moment he kills her. At this point he becomes truly horrible, joins the ELE, and commits lots more crimes. The end. A really sobering moment (besides being a great classic Superhero Origin Story). Cutesy scare-quote “evil” is still evil, dammit. Is what I take away from it.

Enter Topher (c’est moi).

But how does he enter? In the show as aired, Topher’s arc is a lot like Dr. Horrible’s: he’s charming in his geekiness, so cute that it takes a while to notice his creepy side, and even longer to notice that his creepy side indicates actual moral bankruptcy. When we do start to realize this, toward the end of the season, it’s a powerful thing, because we’ve at least sort of liked this guy all the way along.

The original pilot doesn’t play it like that. Topher comes in and right off the bat he’s giving this big speech about how it doesn’t matter if we program the dolls, because we’re all programmed ourselves – culminating in his big declaration of nihilism: “I don’t care – morality is programming, too.” Topher is defined for us right away as someone who has no moral qualms about what he’s doing, in fact seems to have no morals at all. It makes him a good deal less sympathetic: by the end of his first big scene, he’s as dislikable as Topher-as-aired was at the end of the season. His arc is done (as in, "stick a fork in it").

Now, I obviously have no idea what Joss would have done with the character had Fox allowed him to proceed with this pilot and launch the series from there. That’s alternate-universe stuff. What I do know is that in Dollhouse as it was made, Topher’s character arc, from cute to reprehensible – and I want to reiterate that it’s not really Topher’s arc, because he doesn’t change: it’s the arc of how we perceive Topher – has big ramifications for the story. Just as we come to realize how nasty Topher is (on one level), we come to realize just how dangerous the Dollhouse is (on many levels). In other words, this arc makes for a big payoff: dramatically, emotionally, intellectually.

The original pilot doesn’t seem to allow for that. We know right away that Topher’s not a good guy (so maybe Joss was planning to redeem him?), and we even get intimations of the Dollhouse’s dangerous side right up front, too. We’re starting so far into the concept that it’s hard to imagine how it would have developed.

So the Dangerous Geek theme is somewhat neutralized, in the original pilot: rather, it’s there in spades, but robbed of some of its power, because the geek is robbed of most of his charm. What do we get instead?

More nods toward the Surrogate Family theme. The original pilot makes a lot more of intra-Dollhouse relationships than the early as-aired episodes do. There’s Topher’s many scenes with Boyd, in which their man-friendship is repeatedly invoked and denied; there’s Topher’s odd antipathy to Dr. Saunders, and his fear of the higher-ups; and there’s the Echo/Sierra/Victor trio already getting together and setting off alarm bells. And, perhaps most significantly, we have Topher’s observation that anyone who lives in the Dollhouse, handlers included, is really a Doll; combined with DeWitt’s closing remark that “we’re all in this together,” I think it indicates that this pilot was working hard to convince us that these characters are a community whose relationships we’re going to be exploring.

That’s not there in the season as it aired. Instead, we got what seems like a willful exploding of the Surrogate Family idea, starting with Echo/Caroline herself. The early episodes hammer home how empty the dolls are, including Echo, and how dead they even are to each other. We got Boyd introduced as someone new to the Dollhouse, whose relationship to Topher is professional, not man-friendly. Topher’s relationship to Saunders, too, is recast as professional. Over the course of the season, clearly relationships form and become a focus of the show, but it’s not that way at first. At first, it’s all elaboration of the concept, the Dangerous Geek and All His Works.

All of this is by way of saying that I thought the original pilot is interesting, a great DVD special feature, but not superior to what Joss eventually came up with for the series as it aired. By now every Dollhouse fan has long known that Joss came up with this pilot for Fox, they shot it down, and he responded by turning the first five episodes of the season into standalone engagement-of-the-week episodes that everybody was encouraged to think of as five pilots. A lot of fans seem to have been disappointed in these first five episodes, and Joss himself in various interviews has essentially refused to defend them, but I will: I think they’re better than the original pilot.

I think “Echo” is too much telling, not enough showing. It explains how doll engagements work, through dialog and montage; but the aired episodes show how they work, through action. Much more effective. “Echo” lays a lot of the subtext out for you in some pretty talky scenes (not that I have anything against protracted dialogue); the aired episodes are still pretty on-the-nose, but sufficiently less so to allow the viewer to hit upon a lot of the subtext her/himself. Again, more effective. And, above all, I think the aired episodes do a much better job of building moral ambiguity into the Dollhouse.

Which is not to say the original pilot doesn’t have its moments. I like how openly it deals with the prostitution angle of the Dollhouse. Not only in DeWitt’s discussion with a potential client, but in the wonderful irony of seeing Echo scolding Danica (the girl from Crib Death, Iowa) for letting Eddy pimp her out, when in fact the Dollhouse is pimping Echo out.

There’s also the wonderful pivot from Victor saying he’d like to be a carefree doll, “Doris freaking Day,” to Sierra in a rather Doris Day-like outfit, her head bleeding, looking anything but carefree.

And most of all there’s Echo telling Danica, “I am you, dumbass.” This is awesome primarily for meta reasons, since the actress who played Iowa Girl, Ashley Johnson, reappears in the aired Episode 12 as Wendy, who becomes imprinted with Caroline’s personality. In other words, in the pilot, Eliza says to Ashley, “I am you.” In Episode 12, we have Ashley confronting Eliza, and essentially saying, “I am you.” But in both cases, it’s actually Caroline saying it. But it’s also, in both cases, a programmed girl confronting a non-programmed girl, a powerful girl confronting a weak girl, a self-aware girl confronting a deluded girl, an original confronting an echo: and which is which? It’s a neat little knot of confused identity. I don’t know if Whedon brought Johnson back for Episode 12 with this in mind, but it’s a brilliant piece of metanarrative. That right there: that’s Dollhouse.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 12: Omega

What do we know?

1. I think we can start to put together a timeline.

At some point, a few years before we follow Boyd into the Dollhouse, the Rossum Corp. develops the Dollhouse technology, i.e. the ability to wipe, extract, and implant personalities. They use convicts as test subjects. The tests go well, they feel, and so they commercialize the technology, launching the Dollhouse. One (at least) of the convict test subjects is employed as a doll-for-hire now: Carl Craft. Craft was a serial killer in the making, arrested after slashing up a woman’s face, but before killing her. As a doll, he’s known as Alpha.

Some unspecified number of months or years later, Alpha is sent on an engagement for which he’s paired with another doll, Whiskey. The client’s wishes have something to do with being taken along on a crime spree by a pair of Natural Born Killers, but Alpha and Whiskey go a little off their brief and start torturing the client. As he’s pleading for his life, the client tells Alpha that he (Alpha) isn’t real.

Not long thereafter, Alpha begins to develop a self-consciousness that survives the wipes. He has man reactions to a new doll, Echo. In a misguided display of chivalry, he slashes Whiskey’s face, so that Echo can be the new #1 doll. Dollhouse staff subdue him, and put him in the chair. Topher, in an effort to discover which if any of Alpha’s previous imprints might have left a residue that could explain this, begins cycling through these imprints while Alpha is in the chair. Meanwhile, Alpha attacks his handler, Topher loses control of the program, and all of Alpha’s previous personalities are downloaded into him at once. This is his composite event. He kills his handler, Dr. Saunders (the real one) when the doctor strays into the lab, and a few other staff members. He then smashes his own personality backup, i.e., the Carl Craft persona.

I think it’s also at this time that he kills others in Echo’s sleeping chamber, leaving her alive. I.e., the massacre that happened just before the show starts is the same one that we see beginning in this episode’s flashbacks.

I think. That makes the timeline weird, because the flashbacks are labeled “a few years ago,” and I don’t think they cover years of time, and I don’t think the series itself has covered years of time, meaning the total elapsed time from the NBK engagement to the present can’t be more than a year or so. It’s possible that Alpha went away for a while, came back and killed some people, and then went away again, but in this episode Topher and Adelle are both acting like Alpha’s violent eruption was the killing spree, i.e. their only encounter with composite Alpha before he came back in Episode 11 to take Echo. Ergo, the blood on the floor in Episode 1 is from the flashbacks we’re seeing in this episode.

In the aftermath of that massacre, the Dollhouse staff see an opportunity to fill a sudden vacancy in their ranks while simultaneously getting some use out of the broken doll Whiskey: they imprint her with a modified Dr. Saunders persona and make her the doctor.

At this point, Boyd joins the staff. Why? We don’t know for sure, but in Episode 12 he hints that it had to do with a girl – “there’s always a girl” – and watching the way Ballard joins the team, we begin to suspect that Boyd is there for similar reasons. Either he joined as the price of freeing someone, or he joined so he could protect someone; in any case, he’s morally opposed to the Dollhouse, but willing to work with it (within it) for what he sees as a greater good.

Alpha’s still out there, thinking his many and varied thoughts and sitting around watching videos of Caroline. Meanwhile, in a process we’ve been witnessing, Echo fumbles toward awakening. Alpha decides, for some reason, to involve Agent Ballard. He feeds Ballard’s Dollhouse obsession by furnishing him clues about Caroline. Eventually he’s got Ballard where he wants him, and he uses Ballard to help him gain access to the Dollhouse.

Why does Alpha need Ballard’s help to get in? This is unclear. Did Alpha not remember where the Dollhouse was? Possible, but unlikely. I hope this becomes clear in a future episode (if there are any), because at the moment it’s a puzzle. In any case, he enlists Ballard, and with him enters the Dollhouse. While Ballard is fighting Boyd, Alpha takes Echo. But first he imprints Echo with the persona Whiskey had inhabited in the NBK engagement. Why? As Alpha says, he needed Echo to be bold and violent so they could make their escape. From what we later learn about Craft, we can also wonder if Alpha isn’t most comfortable with that kind of persona, and indeed if being imprinted with such a persona wasn’t what spurred his awakening – it was too close to Craft’s real self. Lots of interesting questions to ponder with that…

All of that brings us up to this episode. Wherein we discover that Alpha considers himself an ubermensch, the next step in human evolution: a god. And he wants a goddess. Bride of Frankenstein stuff. So he tries to recreate his own composite event with Echo: by downloading all her previous personas into her head at once, he tries to make her a being like himself, and he renames her Omega. (Why? In Revelations, God calls himself the alpha and omega – i.e., the a-to-z, the whole shebang.)

He has the hard drive containing the Caroline persona, and he inputs this into the body of Wendy, a girl they’ve kidnapped. His plan is for Omega, who he presumes will be psycho like himself, to kill the girl containing Caroline, and then to smash the hard drive, thus freeing herself from her puny mortal single-self past once and for all, as Alpha has done for himself. But Omega isn’t interested. She attacks Alpha. His dreams smashed (along with his testes), he reverts to Craft’s original impulses: he threatens to go on a killing spree, slashing up women’s faces. Alpha kills Wendy. Echo chases Alpha.

He gets away. But Echo and Ballard rescue the Caroline hard drive. But Echo chooses not to be free: we see her undergoing a wipe, and assume that she has volunteered to return to the Dollhouse. Why? Because she wants to fulfill her contract? Because she wants to work to bring down the Dollhouse from within? Because she feels it will be the safest place to continue working on her enlightenment? We don’t know. But the last thing the supposedly-wiped Echo says before we fade to black is “Caroline.” She’s not a blank slate.

Meanwhile Ballard has, like Boyd before him, decided to join the Dollhouse as a contractor. His price is Mellie/November’s freedom, with full payment.

Do I have this straight?

2. This show may not be back. Cancellation is hanging over Dollhouse like the sword of Damocles, and I fear the fox’s teeth are too sharp for the horse-hair. If it doesn’t come back, we still have Episode 13 to look forward to on DVD, and a satisfying climax to Season 1. But if it does come back, we have a lot of tantalizing loose threads to pull us onward.

Let’s start with Mellie/November. Surely she’s going to realize, once she gets out, that five years haven’t passed. That she got released early, and that maybe that nice man who wouldn’t tell her his name had something to do with it. We haven’t necessarily seen the last of her.

Ballard and Boyd, meanwhile, have the makings of a good partnership. I never saw it coming, especially when they were slugging it out in Episode 11 (although in retrospect maybe that should have been the tip-off), but when they started cooperating in the last half hour of this episode, it really worked. The characters have enough contrast in attitude, personality, and method to make an attractive screen pairing, without (so far) descending into buddy-cop silliness.

Topher and Whiskey. Episode 12 dropped clear hints that they have some kind of past together. No idea what it is. Would love to find out.

Then of course we have Caroline’s background (still a mystery), Echo’s awakening (still, perhaps, unconsummated), and Alpha’s revenge (he’s still out there). Not to mention Sierra’s past (as a doll sold into slavery) and Victor’s future (as a damaged doll).

Lots of possibilities for a second season.

3. How great was it that the engagement that seems to have started it all for Alpha was inspired by Natural Born Killers? I say “inspired by” although of course that film isn’t mentioned by name. But it seems all too obvious that the client, Lars, was inspired by that film, and there’s the brilliance, because remember all the controversy about that movie and the murders it supposedly inspired? Remember how that movie itself was posing as a critique of the way the media sensationalizes violence, even as it sensationalized violence? Lars thinks it’s all a game, and of course he’s right: “Bobby” and “Crystal” aren’t real. But they’re real enough to (almost) kill him. And to (possibly) inspire another killer (Craft) to slash his way out of virtuality into reality. The cycle of media-inspired-violence/ violence-inspired-media/ fantasy-unable-to-distinguish-between-them here is too tight to completely unroll, and it’s perfect for Dollhouse’s critique of contemporary America.

Of course Natural Born Killers isn’t the only film referenced in the Bobby and Crystal scene. The use of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” links it to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. But since I haven’t seen that movie yet (I feel guilty about that, all of a sudden), I can’t say what that means.

4. We finally know where Dollhouse stands on the question of a soul. Soul is the word for it, too. Ballard, trying to profile Alpha, tells Topher he doesn’t think all their technology can erase a person’s soul. Topher gives a snarky little laugh, and with all we’ve seen in twelve episodes, we might catch ourselves laughing along with him, but we’d be wrong. I mean, what else do you call the thing that remains in Alpha after the Craft persona has been destroyed, hard drive and all, the thing that reasserts itself through the interference of dozens of other imprints and makes him want to slash women’s faces? The same thing that makes Echo, under the weight of thirty-eight imprints, and with her own personality as Caroline physically inhabiting another body, not want to slash anybody up? It’s well established that consciousness is interchangeable, but we’re forced to realize here what Boyd has been suspecting all along and what Paul instinctively assumes: there’s something in a human being, some core of identity, that’s too deep to be extracted. Bodies and souls are not completely interchangeable. Identity is not a set of Legos. You are you, and that includes proclivities to good and evil.

This is why I found this episode, this ending, so satisfying despite the fact that much of the show’s narrative remains open-ended. We don’t know what happens to any of these characters, and we still don’t know why most of them are doing what they’re doing, and most of all we still don’t understand completely what the hell’s going on.

But Dollhouse isn’t about the story. It’s about what it’s about: what in Buffy we called the subtext. Dollhouse is, as I’ve said before, science fiction of the highest order, in which ideas and their implications are the real engine driving the story. Plot events are just the means by which those ideas are expressed. And here at the end of Episode 12, we can see the fundamental questions of Dollhouse (human identity, the nature of consciousness and personality, freedom and control) all coming into sharp focus. We’re not given answers, but we’re given questions, clearly expressed. It’s exciting, to me.

5. Which is not to say that Dollhouse is lacking in narrative interest, intriguing characters, witty dialogue, or any of the other species of goodness we’ve come to expect of Joss Whedon.

It’s true that I’m connecting with Dollhouse on a completely different level than that on which I connected with Buffy. So far there’s nobody in this show whose personal trials could move me to tears the way Willow’s did in Season 6 of Buffy, or whose death would bum me out as much as Doyle’s did in Season 1 of Angel. But there’s potential there, should they get a chance to realize it: Boyd, Ballard, Whiskey, even (with his poignant last scene with Whiskey) Topher.

And this show displays the same utter mastery of tone that Whedon’s early triumphs did. The way Alpha’s monologues in this episode manage to be both psychotic and cute (“I’m not bluffing – well, he is, but the rest of us aren’t!”), the way humor punctuates even the tensest of moments (pointing the gun at the hard drive and saying “I’ll blow your brains out” – funny), his way of overcooking dialogue to just the right degree. “I want my brain back! I want back in my brain!” Things like this just should not be said. I love that he has characters say them. The writing, in other words, is excellent.

In short, I’ve found it entertaining in ways that I expected, as well as a whole lot of ways I hadn’t. Above all it’s intelligent, which I had expected. It’s easily the best thing on TV right now. I hope to Omega it doesn’t get canceled.

Blogging the Dollhouse: Episode 11: Briar Rose

“We’re all functional – interchangeable?”

That’s the million-dollar question this week on Dollhouse. Kepler praises the Dollhouse’s womblike self-containment, efficiency, and security, and says it’s the future. Ballard asks if that means in the future we’ll all be functional and interchangeable. Kepler says we already are. Man.

But Ballard’s not the only character asking that of us this week. Episode 11 is one big game of role-switching and doubling. Even more so than usual, in this world of constantly shifting identities.

Consider the Briar Rose motif. Unsubtle, it seems at first. It’s introduced as a story Echo reads to a troubled girl named Susan, who suffered through a long dark night of her own, awaiting rescue. But of course we immediately think of Caroline’s imprisonment and forced sleep within the Echo non-persona, and how Caroline, too, needs rescuing – more precisely, needs awakening. And then we cut to Ballard, who’s trying to do just that.

Unsubtle – if they’d left it at that. But who’s Sleeping Beauty and who’s the Prince rescuer? Even before we get to the episode finale in the Dollhouse, these roles are blurred, because we have Echo trying to save Susan; and how does she try to save Susan? By convincing her that Briar Rose, Sleeping Beauty, actually saved herself: willed the Prince into existence and proximity. And who is Echo in this situation? A persona tailored to Susan’s needs, of course – willed into being by Susan, in a sense. But not just that: as Topher helpfully explains to Ivy, Echo’s persona on this mission is that of a girl just like Susan, but older and more psychologically healed. Echo is Susan here: a projection of Susan’s mind, both in the sense that she’s projected by Susan and in the sense that she’s a projection, by Topher, of what Susan will, or could, be. Either way, Echo is there to save Susan. How? By prodding her into an awakening of sorts: a confrontation with her psychological pain. It’ll be violent, Echo warns the caretaker as she departs. Much as Echo’s own awakening will (we anticipate) be violent.

Echo herself is the Prince. But then, of course, Ballard is too. He comes riding to the rescue, effecting a (surprisingly easy) penetration of the Dollhouse and a third contact with Echo. But this easy identification of Ballard is soon thwarted, as Boyd accosts him and they brawl, and – all of a sudden – we realize we don’t know who to root for. Boyd is still, for all of his complicity in the Dollhouse, a good guy, we sense (and I say it’s some canny casting and subtle writing that keeps us feeling this way despite Boyd’s character being given a back seat in recent episodes), while Ballard, for all his determination to bring down the Dollhouse and extract Caroline, is hard to like.

Boyd was supposed to be Caroline’s Prince Rescuer. And we still feel he might be best suited for the job, and even that he might still be planning to do it, if Ballard doesn’t screw things up. Hell, he even seems like he wants to save Ballard, before Ballard clocks him one too many times. Who’s Prince Charming again?

Neither, as it turns out: it’s Alpha. By the time we realize that, of course, he – by which I mean his body, played by Alan Tudyk – has gone through one identity shift before our very eyes, when Kepler reveals himself to be Alpha. But then Alpha puts Echo in the chair, does something mad-scientisty to her, and she wakes up and kisses him. Exeunt. Who’s the prince now?

But, more importantly, who did he rescue? Physically, Echo. But all this time we’ve figured it was Caroline that Alpha was after: it was clues about Caroline (not Echo) that Alpha was feeding Ballard, after all. But what did he do to Echo when he put her in the chair? Awaken Caroline? Or imprint her with someone else? Who’s really walking out of the Dollhouse with Alpha at the end of this episode?

I gather a lot of fans didn’t think much of the previous episode, but after this episode, I’m more convinced than before that it’s pivotal. It was essential that we have it pointed out to us that the Dollhouse’s technology can revive the dead: can grant a kind of immortality. And it does it by making bodies interchangeable. The Dollhouse’s business makes personalities, identities, souls interchangeable, but the flip side of that is true, too: as the identity of body and soul is canceled, bodies become interchangeable, too. Each is reduced to its basic functionality: a body is just a vehicle for the personality; a personality is just an operating system for the body.

You want proof? When they decide they need to question Dominic, why do they bring him back in Victor’s body? Because they can, and because it’s easier that way. Presumably the attic is somewhat inaccessible, they’re in a hurry, and for their purposes, they don’t need Dominic’s body, just his mind. So they put it in Victor. Dominic has been reduced to his component parts. When they need his body, they can use it; same with his mind.

And then there’s Dr. Saunders. I can’t take credit for this insight (I read it on the intertubes), but consider this: Dominic/Victor, in his panicked state, looks at her and says, “Whiskey.” Is he calling for a dram of Glenfidditch? Or is he addressing Dr. Saunders by a doll name? Whiskey would be the correct W-name for the NATO alphabet code the Dollhouse seems to be using. Then, too, Alpha confronts Saunders first of all, and asks her if she’d always wanted to be a doctor, and when she says yes, he tells her that’s a lie. What if Saunders is a doll permanently imprinted with the doctor persona? Why? Because in his last visit Alpha mutilated the doll Whiskey so badly that she couldn’t be sent on engagements? Maybe he even killed the previous doctor? Maybe the Saunders persona was the previous doctor?

“We’re all functional – interchangeable.” Except: does Alpha (as opposed to Kepler) really believe that? He marks his victims – with what? is it too much to think it’s an alpha? - whatever it is, he tells Saunders that it comes out unique each time. And that it's a gift. Is he making the dolls individuals? (If Saunders is a doll being used as Dr. Saunders because she’s too damaged to be useful otherwise, then the end result of Alpha’s assault is that she’s given a permanent identity, even if it’s borrowed.) Is he a radicalized version of Ballard’s revulsion at the idea of people being reduced to interchangeable functionalities – revulsion at human commodification?

Should we be rooting for Alpha?