You never get past it, it just becomes a part of you: Dollhouse thoughts

Having been kicked out of my non-blogging funk by the !Peter Watts! madness, I thought I'd get back to talking about Dollhouse. Many spoilers, etc.

So many highs, so many lows.

I've been talking about the show a lot with my girlfriend, She Who Is Awesome, and we've come to slightly different conclusions. I like Dollhouse a lot, in spite of its flaws. She's been feeling more ambivalent about it. In fact, before last night's back-to-back episodes of "Meet Jane Doe" and "A Love Supreme," she was pretty much not even going to buy the DVD of the second season.

I see her point. Dollhouse has been wildly uneven, even compared with the first and second seasons of Buffy and Angel. And Firefly, when looked at in proper order is remarkably low on filler episodes and/or craptastic ones.

So here are my complaints about Dollhouse's second season, in particular:

• Slow start. Boy, it didn't exactly get going at a good pace. It felt like we were back in client-of-the-week mode there.

• Lack of focus. After the slam-bang ending to the previous season, plus "Epitaph One," it felt like the show was on track. It wasn't a hint of what was going on, it was a friggin' roadmap. And it was a map to very cool places. The fact that we didn't immediately jump into the "Epitaph One" storyline was a bit of a letdown.

• Echo? What Echo? This is only partly a complaint. Having a blank slate as your main character is, well, kind of a weird choice. But in the first few episodes, and even in some of the better, later ones of the season, Echo is either marginalized or bounces back and forth between various states. It doesn't feel like a linear evolution from doll to fully realized person. In fact, in the first three or four episodes, it sometimes felt like they were being shown out of order, with Echo farther along in earlier shows than later ones.

But I think these flaws are compensated for by both the good that's made it onto the screen, and by the potential the writers are finally starting to mine.

Ah, potential. It's been the show's bete noir in some ways. Defenders like myself point out what an awesome, mindblowing concept the show is playing with. Those of a more critical bent point out that the potential has often been squandered in favour of "Echo's a dominatrix" jokes.

But the potential, and the way it's being realized, is the core of my defense of Dollhouse. In SF novels, you often see a single idea worked out in full, with all its myriad implications fleshed out. In TV SF? Not so much. Remember that transporter malfunction on ST:TNG that turned Picard, Guinan, Ro, et al into teenagers? Fountain of youth, or single-episode plot device never to be mentioned again? Just Star Trek alone will give you hundreds of dropped SFnal threads.

Dollhouse, however, is rigorously working out the implications of its technology. We start with programmable dolls, the Swiss army knives of the doll world. Since then we've seen post-imprinting dolls, multi-persona dolls, dolls with their own persona, upgraded. We've seen the awesome "Epitaph One," which dragged everything to its dystopian conclusion. We're seeing the technology advance, from slow imprinting to faster, all the way to distance imprinting and wiping, and how that changes the balance of power between those who control the technology, and those who are its victims.

Perfect television? No. But Dollhouse is arguably the most well thought out SF premise on television in the past several decades.

"Caroline"

This little review of Echo, the original pilot for Dollhouse, contains spoilers. Back away now and nobody gets spoiled.

I never read the script for the original pilot that was floating around out there. I guess it's part of my own spoiler-averse nature to avoid reading a script like that. Besides, what-might-have-been is profitless when it comes to TV. We have what the creator ultimately gave us, network bungling or not. So when I sat down to watch Echo last night, it was with the view that I was seeing an experiment, an early draft put down on film, an alternate world version of the characters.

Boy, I was not wrong about the alternate world part.

The basic plot sysnopsis is this: we get a whole big chunk of exposition right up front, with DeWitt narrating as we see Echo go through several missions: a pro bono drying out a young woman, a jealousy-inducing date at a wedding, and as a negotiator in a million dollar drug deal. Once that's out of the way – and we're talking a good long part of the episode here – we get into the main plot, which is once again Ballard's search for the Dollhouse and its attempts to throw him off.

They're not exactly subtle on this first draft of the plan. They have Victor/Lubov send him astray, and when the Caroline photo draws him right back in, they try to use Echo for the same project. When that fails, she tries to kill him, twice. Meanwhile, Topher is worried about the actives already, especially Echo. Apparently she's already developing somehow, and he has several talks about the issue with Boyd, and an awkward confrontation with Dr. Saunders.

DeWitt and Mr. Dominic, however, are notable mostly by their near total absence. DeWitt seems in control when dealing with the client and serving up spoonfuls of exposition near the opening of the show, but when we see her later she's being yelled at by her superiors over the phone (re: Ballard) or ordering his failed killing. She's less of a mighty and mysterious ice queen here.

In fact, while DeWitt is one of the major ensemble cast members by the latter part of the first season, in this pilot I'd have to say there are two protagonists: Ballard and Topher. Yeah, Topher. He gets a lot of screen time, and he's actively moving a chunk of plot forward. Echo/Caroline, on the other hand, feels sidelined.

A lot of things feel rushed, including the Doll/handler relationship, the imprinting process itself, and the question about where they get their "volunteers."

After watching Echo, my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful, said that Ghost, the in-continuity pilot, was better structured. In many ways, I have to agree. There was more show and less tell, we saw the original Caroline before she was wiped, and we saw Alpha rather than simply hearing him mentioned. Of course, Ghost is saddled with a boring procedural kidnapping plot weighing it down.

I'm going to say that Echo is not a great pilot, not in the way that Serenity was for Firefly for example. It's flawed in more interesting ways than Ghost, however.

Ghost gives viewers a straightforward explanation of the show's central idea, and introduces the characters and their traits fairly well. Echo is all over the place. It's like an excited puppy, fun and cute and really packed with energy, but scattered. It feels like Joss Whedon had been sitting on his cool ideas for so long he couldn't not let them out all at once. Fly, my monkeys, fly! He takes the show almost to the place it was at the end of the first season in less than sixty minutes, but the ride is a little rough.

So I'm going to say something weird here: I understand why Fox ordered a second pilot. This pilot would have snagged me, but it is weird and frenetic and talky. Ghost is not a better pilot, but it's a much more conventional one. It has the kind of flaws that networks seem to think make for good TV. Echo has the kind of flaws that might signal greatness if the writer can rein him or herself in.

And having seen Whedon's other work, and the latter half of the season, I'd say greatness is still possible.

Oh, season two, where are you when I need you?

"I hope we find me alive"

Warning: for the purists out there who have not yet put their money down for the Dollhouse DVD set, this contains spoilers for the final episode, Epitaph One. Reading any further will sour your enjoyment not only of the episode, but of life itself. Food will be as ashes in your mouth, and your lamentations will drive nearby squirrels to commit seppuku.

Okay, the lightweights are gone? Good.

Like everyone else, I heard the basic plot outline of Epitaph One months ago: Felicia Day (Mag) and an intrepid band of survivors whose names I never quite picked up, are trying to survive in the far-off future of 2019 after Dollhouse technology has made everything go kerblooey.

The basic plot is this: the survivors stumble into the Dollhouse while taking a shortcut through the sewers, trying to avoid the signals that can turn you into a reaver killer angry person. Realizing it is the origin point for "the tech" that's driven the world into its current zombie apocalypse/rise of the machines state, they use a mindwiped refugee they're dragging around as a template for a series of memories they find programmed into the chair. So we get a series of sequential flashbacks, showing events both before the first episodes of Dollhouse, and later, possibly up to just a year or two before 2019. Meanwhile, someone is killing off the survivors one by one, and a spooky, Dollish Whiskey, sans facial scars, shows up to offer them some help.

This is another Dollhouse episode that feels far, far longer than its actual running time (in a good way). There's a lot going on here, and each flashback is crammed with both exposition and character development. In general, it's extremely well done, and if it were just a vehicle for a "Days of Future Past" style storyline, it would get an A+ just on that score. But the main plot thread isn't bad either, even if it does revolve around the "and then there were none" contrivance of having the survivors killed off one by one. This is another way the show is good: who is killing the characters should be an obvious twist, but I didn't have even five minutes when the show slowed down to let me actually try to puzzle it out.

So this brings the number of really good Dollhouse episodes up to seven, meaning the first season was more than 50 per cent awesome after all! Hooray!

Up next, a review of the original pilot, and some of the special features.

Summer reading for Dollhouse fans

Ahhhhhhhh... Dollhouse has been renewed. I admit, I didn't think it would happen, while my girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) always kept the faith. It'll be nice to see some more episodes, hopefully of the interesting variety, and not of the "Echo has an assignment as X" style.

But what to do for the next five or six months before we get another fix of Dollhouse? We go to the library and the video store, of course. For my fellow Dollhouse fans, a selection of stories that cover the same themes: body swapping, identity, reality when the mind is a commodity.

• Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. I've already mentioned this one, but both this book and its sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, explore the possibility of wholesale body swapping and immortality through cloning and downloading. It's dark, grim, noirish post-cyberpunk with lots of sex and violence. The politics become more explicit with the follow up books, but they never take over the story.

• The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, and Last Call,  by Tim Powers. Again, body swapping and dark quests for immortality, but in Powers case using magic. The best of the bunch is probably The Anubis Gates, although my favourite will always be On Stranger Tides for its sword fightin', piratical ways. Far, far superior to any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

• Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas. A year before The Matrix came out and everyone started talking about bullet time, there was a much quieter, much better film that covered the same territory and then some. Dark City is about a man who wakes up next to a murdered woman, seemingly her killer. But he can't remember anything. He flees through a shifting city that never sees dawn, and in which people are swapped from home to home and role to role much like... dolls in a dollhouse? With its synthetic personalities, it's the closest analogue to Dollhouse you can find. Plus, a chance to see Keifer Sutherland before he got all annoying as a torture-monkey on 24.

• Diaspora, by Greg Egan. This staggeringly brain-twisting novel concerns both AI and uploaded personalities. In similarly-themed short stories, Egan has also explored creating multiple copies of oneself, in some cases to undertake suicidal scientific research, such as travelling into a black hole.

• The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A mad scientist kidnaps children in order to harvest their dreams and save him from his nightmares. A steampunk setting with clones, blind radar-enabled cultists, and Ron Perlman with a bizarre hairstyle, speaking French.

"I know who I am."

It seems like the consensus around Omega, the penultimate-but-last-to-air episode of Dollhouse, is that it wasn't quite as good as last week's stellar outing. I'd agree, but I'd like to see the parts of this episode that were left on the cutting room floor before making a final decision.

Spoilers ahoy.

From last week's cliffhanger, everyone's running around like chickens with their minds wiped. It only takes DeWitt, Boyd, Ballard, Topher and Whiskey/Saunders to put together Alpha's whole scheme, but by then Echo's gone, and all the data wedges containing her previous imprints, including her original Caroline persona.

The plot threads play out, with flashbacks showing how Alpha changed from being just another doll to letting threads of his original personality slip through – something we've seen all season with Echo, and even with Victor.

Boyd and Ballard wind up teaming up, buddy-cop style, to hunt down Alpha. Dr. Saunders finds proof that she's a doll, and we see that her face was carved up even before Alpha went totally batshit. (About five minutes before, but still.)

Alpha pours more than 30 personalities into Echo's mind using his homebrew imprinting chair, and she promptly (and not particularly surprisingly) beans him in the head with a pipe. Alpha, it turns out, was a psycho on his way to serial killer status before he ever became a doll, while we know that Echo/Caroline has deep reserves of empathy and personal strength. She tries to save the hapless waitress Alpha's kidnapped and loaded up with Caroline's mind. She fails, but between her efforts and those of Ballard, she does save her original Caroline wedge. Alpha scampers like a bunny.

Of course, there was also that plot thread in which November and Sierra were made into badass bounty hunters to help chase down Alpha, too. And they just... what? Went for coffee instead? We never see them after they're imprinted.

That's the main problem with this episode. There's at least five minutes, maybe more, that didn't make it onto the screen, and I think that contributes to the anticlimactic nature of the ending. There's no final throwdown with Alpha; he simply disappears after dropping the Caroline wedge. I suspect the edits are also partly responsible for the suddenness with which Ballard finds himself working at the Dollhouse as a contractor to track down Alpha. His turnabout on Mellie/November doesn't seem warranted based on what we saw.

Criticism aside (please, please, Fox, release an extended version of this on the DVDs!) there's a lot to like about this episode. Among other things, we see three different reactions to a doll realizing its true nature. Alpha becomes an egomaniac. Echo just feels empty, despite having so many personalities to choose from, and rejects the artifice of her personas. Whiskey/Saunders reacts partly with despair, and partly with a strange acceptance. I think that last is the most interesting. Saunders as Saunders knows that the dolls are often fleeing something horrible. She must know that she is there for some similar reason. Does she think that being Saunders, a good person and a healer, is preferable to the alternatives? Or is she just broken down?

Plenty of fodder for the next season. Now let's just hope we get there.

ETA: It's just before midnight Pacific time, and the Dollhouse DVD is number 18 and climbing on Amazon's bestsellers list. Not too shabby. A few tens of thousands of sales might be the only thing now to convince Fox not the axe the show.

"My prince"

Briar Rose, last night's episode of Dollhouse, could best be described as kick ass. But before we go any further...

SPOILERS!

Oh, sorry I shouted there. No, don't worry. I'm just excited because it turns out that freakin' Wash is Alpha! 

Yeah, I did not see that happening. I watched the ep with three others, and our surprised gasps at the reveal would have sent a barometer spinning. We knew Alan Tudyk was in the episode, from the trailers. We knew that Alpha was in the episode. Did we put those two things together? No. Because he's Wash! He plays with dinosaurs and gets speared! He doesn't slice people up and kick ass!

Well played, Ms. Espenson and Mr. Whedon. Well played.

Aside from that, it was also a taut and well-written episode on just about every level. The bit where Echo is trying to help the sexually abused kid, which could have been cringe-inducing in so many ways, turned out to be well written and well acted. It dealt with its awful subject matter head on and without histrionics – the moment where Echo talks about how she would plan escapes and then give up was very well done. It also introduced the Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty theme, which would have its own twist at the end of the hour.

We got to delve deeper into the creepy and messed up psyche of Agent Ballard as well, when he refuses to rescue November/Mellie. Why? It's not really been spelled out well, but I'm thinking he doesn't consider Mellie a real person, and he's been too personally hurt by that. He's built a tower in his mind, and at the top there's a real princess named Caroline. 

But that gets at one of the central questions Dollhouse asks. Mellie is undoubtedly a synthetic person, programmed to love Ballard. But what she feels is plainly no less real to her. That's the crux of it; Ballard doesn't think Mellie is real, so she doesn't count. Caroline does. I don't think he's right. The Dollhouse committed a moral crime when it created Mellie and fixated her on Ballard, but Millie herself is a victim as surely as the young girl in the group home. She couldn't run away either. They'll find you, after all. They're bigger and stronger.

Then there's the ongoing plot about Dr. Saunders, who I'm now almost certain is a doll named Whiskey. I don't think Mr. Dominic wanted a drink at all, there. Alpha seems to know it too. I'm almost certain that "Saunders" is either the memories of a dead person, or is a synthetic persona. When Alpha escaped, he sliced up Whiskey and left her alive, probably killed the doctor. The Dollhouse looked at their dead doc, and their doll who wouldn't be going on too many more tricks dates and said "Waste not, want not."

Problems with the episode? I'm just going to mention the implausibility of Alpha and Ballard's easy access to the Dollhouse. Come on, people, no alarms in the only external systems access point? Not even a lock on the grate, for Christ's sake!

Let's review, shall we?

The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear Plexiglas visors, not face concealing ones.

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

Come on! It's number two on the list, right there! DeWitt, you are not doing your homework. The guys at the Centre are going to be pissed.

Not as pissed as I am when the show is cancelled, though. One to go, and one extra episode on the DVD boxed set with Felicia Day. Then, that's all she wrote.

"You're dead"

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

Dollhouse's latest episode, Haunted, didn't do much for me on the level of basic plot. The idea was good – someone who's brain has been scanned comes back from the dead to solve their own murder. But the execution felt like an episode of Murder She Wrote more than anything as cool as the last couple of episodes.

Really, the best part of the main plot was Boyd's comment that this really means the end of the world. If the rich can buy themselves new bodies when they die, what's to stop them from going on and on forever, erasing the poor but young once every twenty or thirty years? 

I don't normally mentally re-write episodes, but last night I was fervently hoping that the murder would turn out to have been a suicide. If you knew that a friend would bring you back, and temporarily store you in the body of a super-healthy 25-year-old, wouldn't you be tempted to kill yourself and then hijack the new body? Sadly, no.

Side note: anyone interested in these plots from a more SFnal perspective should read some of the British SF that's come out over the past few years. Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod have both written several stories over the past few decades about downloadable, copy on demand minds. However, the best of the British brain-scanners is probably Richard Morgan and his Takeshi Kovacs series. Altered Carbon, the first in the loosely connected trilogy, is about an ex-soldier and ex-con who has to investigate a millionaire's apparent suicide. The millionaire – backed up from a copy – doesn't believe he killed himself. It's a world where the rich are immortal, and where bodies can be swapped around like cars. No synthetic personalities, but it's a very good, very grim look at similar technology.

Back to Dollhouse. The episode's saving grace was its two sub-plots. Predictably, Agent Ballard can't stop himself from abusing the privileges of the Dollhouse. It's also becoming clear just how vile the programming of Millie was; she's his willing slave without even being aware of it.

Topher's creation of a friend for his birthday was even more interesting. This seems like it was intended to showcase the positive side of the Dollhouse. What if you are alone, and strange, and no one gets you? Who do you turn to? Topher made a friend (someone who was probably 80 to 90 per cent based on himself) for his birthday. It was both heartwarming and creepy at the same time. I'm so glad they didn't have sex.

Not too many episodes left now. Fox is apparently going to announce the show's cancellation or renewal mid-May.

"We're pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way."

Everyone got to say what was on their mind about the Dollhouse this week, but no one asked Mr. Dominic the pertinent question before packing him off to the attic: was the chip in the chair his?

This week's episode (A Spy in the House of Love, nice title) played with time a little bit, starting off with blood on a window and looping back several times to watch as actives were imprinted and sent out on their various internal missions.

Yeah, yeah. Spoilers.

Every mission turned out to be internal this week. Sierra was made into a super spy, Echo became a top interrogator/sleuth, November/Mellie continued working for the Dollhouse, but was also having her strings pulled by the mysterious insider. Even Victor turned out to be working for the Dollhouse, sent off on his tenth Miss Lonely Hearts engagement with (dum dum DUM!) DeWitt. 

The plot all starts with Topher, tearing down the chair after Echo/Caroline pumped it full of lead last week, and he discovers the chip that has the grubby fingerprints of a spy all over it. Except not literally. Because that would have made for a shorter episode. I imagine gloves were involved.

Anyway, our core four actives are all dolled up and sent out. Sierra's picked for the infiltration, apparently because she resembles an NSA employee, and they suspect the NSA is behind the chipping. Echo comes to Topher and asks to be imprinted, because she's a keener that way. So now it's a race between the two dolls to see which one can come up with the spy faster.

Meanwhile, DeWitt is enjoying a weekend with Victor, who's been Britishified and knows all about the Dollhouse, so he's the perfect confessor/lover for DeWitt. 

About their little tryst: first, I'm going to indulge in a little, wee rant on fencing. No, no, FUCKING NO! 

Dear TV Writers: You cannot write fencing scenes. You do not know how to fence. You have not even seen it done, so you have no fucking idea what you are doing. People do not fence bare armed and faced. That's a good way to get covered with welts and lose an eye. Second, fencing gear is standardized, your tight-fitting corset thingies with low collars are not appropriate; you'd actually be better off wearing street clothes than those ridiculous garments. Third, you cannot cut anyone with a fencing foil. They are blunt of edge, as are epees and sabres. See above, re: welts. Fourth, while it is clear that some fight arranger spent five minutes teaching both actors how to stand (feet shoulder-width apart, right foot forward, left foot back and at right angles) this does not mean that we will forgive them for their jumping around like drugged frogs. You cannot change positions while fencing, and you do not cross blades and glare at one another. Such antics are best left in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Ahem. Sorry about that. Just a little pet peeve of mine. Now, on to the more serious question raised by DeWitt's vacation.

I'm just going to ask: how is this different from what Sierra's handler, or any of Echo's or the others' clients do to them? How is it different from what the Dollhouse did to Mellie, by setting her up to artificially fall for Ballard? Informed consent is utterly absent from any of these couplings. Rape may be the only appropriate word, and Boyd is the one who comes closest to articulating that. If he and the doctor are both so cynical about the Dollhouse (although in different ways, as she says) why are they there?

Oh yeah, and there was a plot, too. 

Ballard welcomes Mellie back home with paranoia and door locks, and she tries to calm him down from his pursuit of the Dollhouse. It looks like he's following the money. Suddenly Mellie's gone, and Agent Helo's faced with the old My Girlfriend is a Cylon deal again. She tells him to keep investigating the Dollhouse's true purpose – and not to tell Mellie anything or act like anything's up. Adding another layer of creepy to the layer cake the show has already been stacking together.

So Sierra Aliases her way into NSA headquarters and sends back the info that the mole is Topher's assistant Ivy. But Echo's sussed out that the info was planted: Dominic was way too relaxed when he heard the news that Sierra had succeeded. He's the mole. There's some nice kung fu (much better then last week's, but it's no Chinese restaurant kitchen knife fight) and Dominic goes down. He's off to the attic, which is apparently a place where your every thought is just out of reach – a permanent state of mental fog. No wonder he tries to kill himself and gives DeWitt a flesh wound. Thus leading to the blood on the window.

The best moment in the episode, the one that sent a little chill through my spine, was when Echo and Dominic were alone for a moment in the back of one of the black vans. He's beaten, but he looks at her and says she'll erase them all, in the end.

Overall, another top episode for the show. Christ, if this gets cancelled, I'm going to be really pissed. Much more than I would have been if it had gone away after five episodes.

"Echo?"

The April 3 episode of Dollhouse, "Needs," was another in the good column for me. I have a few quibbles, but this felt like a solid mid-range example of a high quality show. 

It's pretty clear now that we've been watching two shows. The first ran for five episodes and was a high-concept show about a girl who got a new personality every week. Fox loved that show, but its execution was sort of half-assed. Plots were often pulled out of the Big Bin O' TV Clichés, and while they were often filmed with verve and had a few nice twists, they were still nothing to inspire cultish adoration.

Then this second show started up. It's an ensemble drama, about people in a secret business where zombified volunteers get new personalities every week. Some of them have been brainwiped, some of them are doing the wiping, and some are trying to figure it all out. It's a much better program, because it can attack its subject matter from multiple angles.

My few little problems with "Needs"? Spoilers, hereafter.

First, while I liked the idea that they need to give the dolls some emotional closure, it seemed like the way they went about it was pretty dangerous. I don't know that the handler with broken shins and the one who was strangled half to death will appreciate DeWitt going with that plan. They should talk to their union reps.

Related to the broken shins, that fight scene was not nearly as well shot as the kitchen kung fu fight from a few weeks back. It was jerky and hard to follow. However, the final fire extinguisher to the knees moment went over well. I was watching the show with about 20 people (Go Browncoats!) and a collective "OHHHH!" was heard after the impact.

We also found out that Sierra was apparently not a willing conscript to the Dollhouse way of life, even if the rest of them were. Seriously, why did the show decide she'd be a perpetual rape victim? If she gets shoved in a refrigerator just to make Victor upset, I will not be happy.

Which leads to my final quibble. Sierra strongly implied that she didn't achieve closure at all: she wants to go back and get some real revenge. I doubt that Echo/Caroline can ever quiet whatever it is inside her that makes her want to set people free. And Victor? You don't get over being in love. Not just like that. So their little vacation may have given them some temporary closure, but for at least three out of four, I doubt they'll stay quiet for long. I'm not sure if this is a real complaint or not, because it may be intentional on the part of the writers.

On the plus side, it's always nice to see Amy Acker back, and her character represents another weird paternalistic face of the Dollhouse. 

So far we've seen DeWitt as this arch, patrician figure who seems to feel that what they're doing is in the dolls' best interests (despite seemingly knowing that Sierra was kidnapped?), a means justify the ends philosophy. Mr. Dominic sees them as pets, or machines; he's effectively dehumanized them. Topher doesn't think about it much, and when he's forced to he babbles and can't justify himself at all.

The doctor, on the other hand, wants to protect the dolls from the big bad world. She obviously feels it would be better for them not to remember things. As I'm sure she might wish for herself.

Outside the world of Dollhouse, the TV show, things are not going well. It was low in the ratings again. But I want to know something more basic: is Dollhouse profitable?

Battlestar Galactica had fewer viewers than Dollhouse for every episode it aired after the mini-series. It seems to have averaged around 2.5 million viewers a week. Meanwhile, Dollhouse has been averaging between 3.5 and 4 million viewers. I know the costs for maintaining an entire network are different from those involved in running a cable channel. But BSG also involved a very large cast, lots of specially constructed sets, explosions and a whack of CGI. Dollhouse, on the other hand, is cheap like borscht. It has fight scenes and gunfire, but only a handful of sets. No CGI. No elaborate prosthetic makeupe. No wirework. It's the cheapest show Joss Whedon has ever made. 

So here's the thing. I don't want to know if Dollhouse is beating its competition. I want to know if it's actually just breaking even or turning a profit for Fox. And I'd kind of like to know if it could do the same, say, at a cable channel whose name means venereal disease in Polish.

"Good night, folks."

I was saddened yesterday to learn that Andy Hallett, who played Lorne on Angel for four seasons, died of heart disease. He was just 33.

As one of the people who brought the funny in a big way, he'll be missed.

Have you seen my drawer of inappropriate starches?

Everyone's inappropriate drawers get opened in this week's episode of Dollhouse, Echoes. Wow, that's a metaphor you won't see too many other places.

Many, many, many spoilers. Shoo. Go and get the ep on iTunes if you haven't seen it.

This was another episode that was actually good. Damn good. (I've seen reaction that suggests some liked it better than last week's. Me, I prefer episodes that have kung fu kitchen fighting, but your mileage may vary.) It had everything I want – a mixture of use of the dolls, behind the scenes stuff at the Dollhouse, science fiction stuff, drugs, comedy. 

So our plot starts with a college kid hallucinating in a lab. When his friends come in and try to help him, they get the giggles. He smashes his head against a plate glass window until he's dead. Okay, show, you've got my attention.

We also learn a little more about Caroline becoming Echo. DeWitt had apparently pursued her for about two years before she finally pinned her down and convinced her to sign a five-year deal to become a doll.

From there, we segue into a plot about a stolen memory drug – clearly the drug that killed Kid A in our opening sequence – nabbed from the Rossum corporation. Ah, I believe we have a nerdkenning there. Topher says the dolls will be immune to its effects because of the way their memory has been blocked. So a big old herd of dolls is sent out, (as with flock of birds and pod of whales, may I suggest an amnesia of dolls?) with Victor in charge as an "NSA" agent, Sierra as a "CDC doctor," and Dominic as their surly minder. They'll check out the university campus where Rossum's lab is located, where the drug is apparently spreading among the student population.

Is Echo with them? Why no, she's off for a date/prostitution engagement with the young millionaire from way back in episode one. As Alice, she is a very innocent young thing, who likes wearing six inch heels and thigh-high lace stockings. Thanks for driving home the skeeviness of the whole operation there, guys. Of course, she's just tied her client to the bed when she catches a news report about the mess over at the university. She suddenly has to go. She's remembering...

And that's where the whole thing comes together. Boyd trails Echo to the campus, where he quickly becomes infected with the hallucinogen. It's spreading by touch, which we soon learn as Topher and DeWitt both also become infected. And it does affect dolls, it just does so in a different way, giving them flashbacks, memory glitches to either their previous lives as false personalities, or to their real lives. Echo remembers Caroline, and remembers her boyfriend being shot by Rossum guards. Sierra remembers being raped. November remembers being Mellie, and almost remembers being a killer assassin while she's three feet from DeWitt. Victor remembers being a soldier somewhere in the Middle East.

Everything gets tied up, more or less, with just a few loose ends flying around regarding the dolls and the imperfect nature of their brainwipes.

One of the most important developments of this episode is that the drug affects dolls and regular humans differently. So we now know (say to 90 per cent certainty) that Boyd, Dominic, DeWitt and Topher are not dolls. Because they were just hilariously tripping.

We're also getting more about the links between the Dollhouse and outside organizations. Rossum is supposed to be the biggest pharmaceutical firm in the world. But after meeting its CEO, DeWitt remarks off-handedly to Topher that it's CEO is more or less the runner up for her job. Rossum is a junior partner of the Dollhouse, and apparently one of their research divisions.

So that's two pretty damn good episodes, five that are a bit shaky. The average is improving.

"There are three flowers in a vase..."

OhmygodholyshitchristonacrutchwowiezowiejesusmurphyholycowthatwasAWESOME!

Warning: many, many spoilers for "Man on the street."

Ah, it's like the gods of television heard my prayer last week. I said Dollhouse was promising, very promising, but it needed to actually do something to live up to that promise or it would stagnate. We'd had five episodes in a row in which Echo and/or the other dolls went on jobs, and there was a bit of behind the scenes machinations/mytharc stuff, but mostly they were one offs. The best of the bunch, to my mind, was the heist episode. And even that one was just pretty good for a Joss Whedon show.

This week, as Boyd pounded one of his fellow handlers through a plate glass window, I looked at my watch, thinking so much had already happened, the episode must almost be finished. We were just 30 minutes in. Still to come was the kung fu kitchen fight, the revelation of multiple dollhouses, the further revelation of a spy within this Dollhouse, the further further revelation that Agent Helo's next door neighbour is, in fact, a cylon doll. Which I totally called, by the way. Anyone who doubted me? You all owe me a Coke.

This is what Dollhouse can do well. It can turn everything we know about the world upside down. Anyone could be anything. I've speculated before about how many of the Dollhouse employees are actually actives. Boyd? Mr. Dominic? DeWitt? Topher? We don't know. Although Whedon himself has suggested, in an interview with TV Without Pity, that it won't just degenerate into PKDian weirdness.

"Yes, we talked about that – the different possibilities that we could tweak, the pasts that people have, and how many layers of unreality you can have in somebody's identity. And, to an extent, we get very excited. We have to pull ourselves back and say, "If we make this a lie within a lie within a lie within a lie, people are just going to start slapping us."

This whole episode gives me hope that this can be the show I want it to be: a mix of well-thought-out SFnal ideas, character, and kick ass fight scenes. So I'm totally on board now.

"I prefer man-reaction"

You know, I don't have a lot of time to sit around and watch TV. I've got a stack of library books I could be reading. I'm getting the complete collection of Yes, Minister on DVD from the library. I'm twitching from worrying about possible future unemployment (like we all are).  So I don't watch a lot of pretty good TV. It's got to be great or so godawful it's funny.

So Dollhouse had another pretty good episode last night. I'm just waiting for great to kick in.

The actual episode, True Believer, has Faith Echo being blinded and turned into a religious fanatic named Esther (seriously, aren't there any religious fanatics named Britney or Tiffany?) so she could be a human camera for the ATF. Echo infiltrates cult with ease, and practically trips over all the guns they've got stockpiled there. So the ATF decides to barge in before Boyd can safely extract her, and complications ensue. Echo/Esther Meanwhile, Victor has a thing for Sierra, and we get yet more evidence that the whole brain-wipe thing is not quite as effective as Topher claims. At the end of the episode, we get the now-obligatory hint that Echo is remembering things from her engagements.

And that's the real problem with this episode. It's at least the third or fourth time we've had this hint. And while that's entertaining for an episode or two, waiting for the payoff is getting more frustrating. I don't know if the fault is in the writers room or with the Fox executives meddling, but I need this show to start moving forward right away. Echo needs to wake up. Sierra and Victor, too. They need to become real characters. Because the one-off episode plots are only fair to middling. They're executed better than average, but I've seen heists, and hostage rescues, and bodyguarding pop stars, and the most dangerous game, and I've definitely seen cults before. A lot. Those fairly mundane plots are not what this show could be good at. This show can be about paranoia and identity on a really, really weird and awesome level. 

Whedon's made it deliberately harder for himself in some ways with Dollhouse. With all three of his previous series, he built a core group of likeable, funny characters who acted as a family unit. Even a bad one-off episode from Buffy or Angel is watchable because of the humour and character moments, not to mention the ongoing plots. But with Dollhouse, the plot demands a group of people who are somewhat alienated from one another. The dolls are being forcibly denied that kind of bonding (although they're trying, like bison). The rest of the characters are functionally villains or outsiders. Whedon's definitely trying something different, something less viewer-friendly than his previous outings, and it's always good to see a creator stretching himself. Because the alternative would be repetition and boredom.

So, it's been five episodes. Which calls to mind the Five Ep Rule I instituted after episode two, ie, you should give every show by a respected creator at least five episodes to get off the ground.

So the judgement is, this show has a shitload of potential. But so far, that's about all it has. And that potential will keep me watching for a while longer. Hey, it's still better written than the average action/SF show that does plots like this. (Have you tried to watch Knight Rider? It's like gargling with broken glass and hydrochloric acid.) I love that this is an SF story about neurology and identity. I don't love that it's going nowhere fast right now. 

If it dies right now, Dollhouse will be the least among Joss Whedon's TV shows. If it gets moving in some direction, it could be better than Buffy or Angel. 

No such thing as a blank slate

Well, that was a pretty good episode. Last week's Dollhouse, with the stalker fan and the pop star, was burdened with a forgettable plot. This week's episode, "Gray Hour" (yeah, spoilers) went with a much more interesting heist story. What can I say, I'm a sucker for heist plots anyway.

Most notably, this episode felt like it was balanced well between the competing strands of narrative, character and central premise that supports the show. We got a good one-off episode, with double crosses and the traditional screw ups that accompany any heist plot. We got back story seamlessly interwoven into that plot, with Topher and DeWitt having their little chat about Alpha, and DeWitt's boss making a phone appearance. We got the SFnal side, with Alpha remotely wiping Echo, and with Taffy being replicated across two dolls to try and clean up the mess. And we finally got to see Echo developing as a character.

That last was always the big concern – how would we ever care about someone who's different every week? But this episode's main arc began and ended with the focus on Echo, not a persona. They may wipe her memories (seemingly imperfectly) and they may program her, but there's something under there all the same. Echo sits with the same people every day. Echo wants to be better, to do well, and shows some strength and judgement when trapped in the vault. All the wipes are doing, maybe, is holding Echo back from becoming a real personality of her own.

I can't help but wonder where this could go if the show gets a long enough run. If Echo becomes a fully realized person, can she ever re-integrate with Caroline, her original personality? Or would recreating Caroline (presumably stored somewhere on one of Topher's cassettes) wipe out Echo? And would Echo allow that?

My only complaint with this hour of TV: How the hell did Echo and the injured techie get out the back door? I watched my tape again this morning, and I can't figure it out. If they could go out the back way, why didn't they do it earlier? That's a fairly important plot thread that got dropped there.

New twists, old themes

Spoilers, if you're taping Dollhouse.

So, I enjoyed the Feb. 27 episode of Dollhouse, but I'm wondering if we're going to get an old plot served up for every show.

Protecting the starlet from the obsessed fan is not exactly new. Even the fan who wants to die at the hands of said fan has been done before – the one that comes to mind is in John Varley's excellent novel Steel Beach.

That said, there was a return of snappy dialogue, a couple of nice mini-twists, and the growing sense, verbalized this time by the Dollhouse masters, that Echo is developing a personality. And that personal growth is what led to serial slasher Alpha. 

In other Dollhouse news, the frenzy of worship for the show and the backlash against are both reaching insane fanboy levels normally only possible when discussing  who's more badass, Boba Fett or Wolverine?

Check out this interview question to Stephen DeKnight from io9, following the broadcast of the second episode.

Are you stoked that everybody's singling out your episode as one of the series' best, with the bow-hunting and the most dangerous gaming?

Okaaaaay...

On the other hand, there's this little commentary from the Penny Arcade guys. I admit, the cartoon was pretty funny, but keep in mind that this was also written after seeing two episodes of the show. If that. 

New rule: if a respected creator of one of your favourite shows (Deadwood, Veronica Mars, The Wire, Buffy) has a new program out, you give it five episodes. You don't praise it unduly before that, you don't dismiss it as garbage. Individual episodes may be bad or good, but you give it a chance. It's the Five Ep Rule. Respect it.

Seriously, go back and watch the actual pilot of Buffy. Watch it and try to imagine you've never seen another episode. High concept, but how high a rating would you give it out of ten? (Me, I'm thinking seven. Six is possible, for having a happy ending after Xander just staked his alleged friend Jesse.) Television is a serial medium. You don't rate a show based on any one episode, or even two or three.

Also note that this is probably a moot discussion. Fox's decision to tie Dollhouse to the anthill that is the Friday night time slot means we're probably just previewing the show to see if we'll want to buy Dollhouse: The Complete Series next Christmas.

The most dangerous, er, passtime? Hobby?

Normally "most dangerous game" episodes leave a bad taste in my mouth. They remind me of Bloodlust, which was made into an MST3K episode, or about bad episodes of bad syndicated action shows. Usually there are Rube Goldberg man-traps in the woods that are improbably fashioned out of half a dozen coconuts and some conveniently-placed vines. They're just silly.

So after the initial rush of last night's tautly paced Dollhouse ep was over, I thought to myself, did I really like this? Could I like a plot that's essentially been a cliché since 1937?

The answer is yes. I mostly liked the pilot ep of Dollhouse, but I found the main kidnapping plot to be a little stale. I didn't figure Joss would try to sell his fourth TV show by having a 12-year-old girl murdered by a pedophile, so she was pretty safe. It was just a matter of how they would get from A to B, and what little character moments would crop up along the way. Focusing most of those moments on the father of the girl, who I suspect we'll never see again, dissipated some of their force. It was good (compare it to any episode of any cop procedural with a similar plot) but it wasn't great.

This week's episode had constant turnabout. I really didn't see the manhunt thing coming, which may or may not be mostly because I'm a little slow to see plot twists, especially when I'm enjoying a show. We got some damn good dialogue, which suggested that this was not the first time the hunter has done this, not by a long shot. That he's a serial killer who found the Dollhouse perfect for his needs adds another layer of creepy to the show.

This week's episode also focused its character moments on our core cast. Echo is waking up, thanks to the hallucinogenic drink, likely supplied for that purpose by Alpha. Her handler, Boyd, moves from cynical indifference to seeing Echo as a person. Topher and the doctor are traumatized by Alpha's attack. And Alpha is... well, what is he?

My current speculation, utterly free of spoilers, is that he knows Echo/Caroline - or one of the pieces of his mind does. Just as Echo's composite kidnapping negotiator personality was shocked when it ran into someone it remembered, Alpha knows her. Now he wants to wake her up, too. How does he know her? From her early, cheerful college days or her later desperate stage? From her childhood? Were those her parents he killed at the end of the pilot? All questions that will be answered later.

Much like this question: how many people in the Dollhouse are permanent actives? Seriously, is Boyd really a cop, or is he an active with one set of programming instructions? He's pretty tough, skilled and knowledgeable. When you have that level of technology, why not use it to create your personnel? 

How about Topher? Dr. Saunders? Adelle DeWitt? Lawrence Dominic? That girl across the hall from Agent Ballard?

Well, she's definitely an active. They might as well have written it above her head in big flashing letters. Not so subtle, Stephen DeKnight.

Man, I'm going to look stupid if that's a red herring.