Dollhouse: Season Finale + Unaired Pilot + Future of Dollhouse
A warning: This post is about "Epitaph One", the largely-unaired final episode, not "Omega", the one that was last broadcast in most areas.
A second warning: If you're like me, reading this post might dampen you're enthusiasm for the series.
"Epitaph One" is a flash-forward episode set in a post-apocalyptic future, where the Dollhouse technology has gone completely out of control, splitting the remaining human population into "actuals" (people who have not been imprinted), those who have been wiped (people with no apparent personality, like the Dolls but without even the smiling childlike interface), and "butchers" (people who have been imprinted to kill everyone who hasn't).
It follows a group of actuals through the fiery ruins of L.A. to the Dollhouse compound, where they rejoice at having enough food, shelter, real showers, etc. This group is petrified of technology, and uses a wide variety of semi-impenetrable slang. They kill those who have been imprinted, and are making plans to kill the wiped father of a young girl who's with them. During their exploration of the Dollhouse, they discover the chair, observe that its interface is incredibly simple, and begin loading memories into their wiped friend so that they can learn what went on here.
Flashbacks show some early meetings with familiar characters, mostly to show Topher causing the apocalypse by upgrading the original systems in the Dollhouse (imprinting a Doll took two hours and involved analogue cables before him; he immediately makes the leap to five minutes tops, using light and sound -- it's also Alpha's fault, since Topher stated that remote wipes were impossible and dangerous, but that doesn't get a mention) and everything anyone was ever warned about coming true. For example, the head of the company arrives to walk around in Victor's body and explain that they're now going to be selling Actives off to people who can afford to pay for immortality. DeWitt and Topher are both horrified and DeWitt attempts to refuse but apparently has no choice.
The next series of flashbacks shows all the Dolls with their own personalities back, except for Whiskey who is still playing at being Dr. Saunders. The world has already gone to hell, something terrible has happened to November (or multiple Novembers, as Sierra implies), and the term "birthmarking" -- where an actual is tattooed with his or her full original name -- has already been coined. Abruptly, Caroline and Ballard break through the wall and lead all the Dolls to a safe compound, but possibly execute Topher and DeWitt.
Back in the present, the little girl rescued by the actuals turns out to actually be an imprinted person who doesn't know how she ended up in a little girl's body. She intends to use the chair to take over one of the adult actuals and turns a gun on the group. She is overpowered, thanks to the actuals having discovered the birthmark on her wiped "father", a mark that doesn't match what she told them his name was. (This is something of an oversight on her part; you'd think she could have easily checked his back for the tattoo.) Caroline's personality is printed into her, and she proceeds to lead the actuals to the roof, escaping from the now-pursuing butchers.
On their way out, the group passes through the remains of DeWitt's office and we have an extremely heavy-handed moment. Just in case you somehow missed this point throughout the rest of the episode's flashbacks, characters reaffirm for you that this is not what humanity needed and that the whole Dollhouse idea was evil from the get-go. Then they climb out the window into daylight and presumably a safe happy future.
During this episode, a number of things become clear.
1. Only ten years have passed since "Omega". (Really? I mean, really? These characters talk like they can't even imagine what the world might have been like, but they were all living in it! And where the hell has all of this new slang come from? When they meet Whiskey, one of the characters exclaims that she's a "dumb show", which apparently refers to her being Doll-like. And this is just one of the many colorful phrases characters shout at each other during the episode. Half the time I felt like I wasn't supposed to be able to follow what they were talking about, but I found it much easier to believe this level of slang back when I thought we were a few hundred years in the future.)
2. For some reason, Agent Ballard was made Echo's handler. (Really? Why the hell would they do that. My assumption at the end of "Omega" was that Ballard had agreed to be a Doll, which would at least have allowed DeWitt control over him. But no, apparently he's completely autonomous, and capable of having secret conversations with "Caroline" in elevators.)
3. Echo has become semi-immune to imprints -- she can take the information in while retaining her original "Caroline" personality. This is apparently due not to her specialness so much as Alpha's intervention. (This is my interpretation, anyway, of her statement later in the episode that she has a cure for everyone, a safe place etc., "thanks to Alpha".)
4. Joss Whedon isn't really much for subtlety sometimes.
I love Whedon. I really do. And I thought I actually loved this series more than his others. I thought its first episode was a slamdunk, a far cry from the plodding, nigh-unwatchable Firefly pilot. I thought its pacing was excellent and that its first six "slow" episodes were a sign of maturity: none of them are boring, and they all help to establish these characters before we start really turning up the volume. It prevents Dollhouse from being Torchwood's first season -- where the writers were in such a hurry to do "edgy" things that you never actually got to see what any of the characters were like when they weren't being possessed by aliens into having wild sex. The first half of Dollhouse introduces its characters and then moves seamlessly, with confidence, to its climax. It lacks a desperate overeagerness to get to the so-called "good bits", and it's a much more enjoyable ride because of that.
But I was really, really puzzled by "Epitaph One", because suddenly it seemed like I was watching a different show -- and not just because everything had gone all dirty and grungy and post-apocalyptic.
This is what I thought Dollhouse was about: the human spirit. The many different faces we all wear. The things we're all programmed to do. The soul. Echo's evolution throughout the episodes into having -- more and more -- a recognizable core personality in spite of having had that theoretically stripped away from her fit with this. Before becoming a Doll, she was apparently an activist -- environmental, etc. -- who was interested in saving the world; as a Doll, she still really liked helping people. In both big ways and small ways, she enjoyed helping people on her engagements. (This is underlined when she wants to complete a particular engagement where she's just there to have sex with a rich guy -- a rich guy who lost his wife, and wants nothing more than to see her again, on his anniversary, so that he can show her the beautiful little house he bought for them to live in right before her death.)
This is apparently what Joss Whedon thinks Dollhouse is about: technology outpacing morality. Human trafficking. The evils of slavery. Mankind's corruption.
And I'm sorry, but I found the first message a lot more interesting.
I don't need to be told that slavery is evil. I don't need to be told that technology moving too fast is evil. I don't need to be told that rich businessmen have no compunctions about buying and selling and using people.
Do you know why I don't need to be told these things? Because I already have been. Because I've been told these things about a billion times already. They are old news. They are so obvious as a potential theme that I overlooked them, assuming Joss Whedon was too smart for that. Assuming he knew we are too smart for that, and was willing to offer us a gray area of morality.
For most of the series, arguments are presented against the Dollhouse -- and dismissed. Agent Ballard thinks the Dollhouse has kidnapped people or otherwise taken advantage of them, and he is proven wrong when we learn that Dolls enter into five-year contracts willingly, knowing they will become Dolls, knowing they will belong to the Dollhouse for that time, and then wake up five years later as very rich people with no memory of what went on and a clean slate for the crimes they've committed.
Because Caroline, at least, committed crimes. And the Dollhouse was going to be a form of community service, allowing her to make up for those crimes.
Characters suggest that the Dollhouse is pimping out its Dolls despicably; other characters argue that Dolls help people, fulfilling various needs for which there is no other outlet. Dolls are contracted to help the government by spying without knowing they're spying; they are contracted as bodyguards; they are contracted as gentle lovers for extremely lonely people.
And the Dolls themselves are taken care of, looked out for; they're kept in the extremely reassuring luxury spa of the Dollhouse, where they swim laps, enjoy fabulous meals, go to yoga classes, paint, and so on.
But in the final episode, Whedon throws away the pretense of neutrality to abruptly establish that the Dollhouse is, and has always been, nothing but evil. The people who thought they were doing some kind of good are all misguided, at best. Even a spy who tried to get some of the Dolls killed and viewed them as less than people is abruptly made into a hero, a man whose warnings everyone should have heeded, just because he thought the Dollhouse needed more supervision. (By, as DeWitt argues, a clandestine agency with little government oversight? Apparently so.)
And abruptly you have to wonder -- was there ever supposed to be a pretense of neutrality, or were we supposed to find DeWitt and Topher's explanations completely unconvincing from the start?
This question is unceremoniously answered by the pilot, which is nothing like any pilot I've ever seen before.
Instead of being a longer, slower version of the first episode that takes more care to introduce all of its characters, Dollhouse's so-called pilot seems to be an extremely condensed version of the first series. Sierra is already here; Victor is already here; they're already grouping together. Scenes that took half a series to build are just thrown in there.
It's literally just a bunch of clips from the show. Scenes strung together with so much happening so fast that it's impossible to believed this could ever have been intended as a first episode.
And worse yet, all of the neutrality is gone.
In these versions of scenes we were once familiar with, no character misses an opportunity to say how evil the Dollhouse is, and none of the arguments are presented as remotely convincing. Instead of being given pause, characters arguing with Topher and DeWitt just dismiss them as rationalizing, and it's clear we're supposed to agree.
Like "Epitaph One", Whedon delivers his point here with a sledgehammer.
And depresses me even further by making it clear that, somehow, he was never interested in any of these characters. He didn't want us to know or care about Boyd or Topher or DeWitt. He just wanted to get through the events of the first season as fast as he could, apparently so that he could hurry up and tell his -- I'm sorry -- paint-by-numbers post-apocalyptic story, which is where Season Two is headed.
I liked Firefly, too, okay? I'm sorry it got canceled, Joss. But I don't miss it so much that I wanted to see you jettison all the interesting and original ideas in Dollhouse so that you could go back to it.
I mean, really? You're bringing Reavers back? (The Butchers are also a group of men who are now more animal than human, attacking and killing anyone who isn't like them. The only difference I see so far is that we're missing the charming references to being raped to death.)
No, no one's speaking Chinese just yet, but it seems like a distinct possibility for the future -- the Chinese are in control of imprinting now, after all. Who's to say that the Butchers don't speak Chinese?
I don't know what all Season Two will hold, but I know by the end it won't be about Dolls anymore. It'll be about the hell that's coming, and a tiny band of real people leftover who will try to eke out a meager living. Even if you deny the similarities to Firefly, you can't deny how little that sounds like the show we've been watching up 'til now.
A second warning: If you're like me, reading this post might dampen you're enthusiasm for the series.
"Epitaph One" is a flash-forward episode set in a post-apocalyptic future, where the Dollhouse technology has gone completely out of control, splitting the remaining human population into "actuals" (people who have not been imprinted), those who have been wiped (people with no apparent personality, like the Dolls but without even the smiling childlike interface), and "butchers" (people who have been imprinted to kill everyone who hasn't).
It follows a group of actuals through the fiery ruins of L.A. to the Dollhouse compound, where they rejoice at having enough food, shelter, real showers, etc. This group is petrified of technology, and uses a wide variety of semi-impenetrable slang. They kill those who have been imprinted, and are making plans to kill the wiped father of a young girl who's with them. During their exploration of the Dollhouse, they discover the chair, observe that its interface is incredibly simple, and begin loading memories into their wiped friend so that they can learn what went on here.
Flashbacks show some early meetings with familiar characters, mostly to show Topher causing the apocalypse by upgrading the original systems in the Dollhouse (imprinting a Doll took two hours and involved analogue cables before him; he immediately makes the leap to five minutes tops, using light and sound -- it's also Alpha's fault, since Topher stated that remote wipes were impossible and dangerous, but that doesn't get a mention) and everything anyone was ever warned about coming true. For example, the head of the company arrives to walk around in Victor's body and explain that they're now going to be selling Actives off to people who can afford to pay for immortality. DeWitt and Topher are both horrified and DeWitt attempts to refuse but apparently has no choice.
The next series of flashbacks shows all the Dolls with their own personalities back, except for Whiskey who is still playing at being Dr. Saunders. The world has already gone to hell, something terrible has happened to November (or multiple Novembers, as Sierra implies), and the term "birthmarking" -- where an actual is tattooed with his or her full original name -- has already been coined. Abruptly, Caroline and Ballard break through the wall and lead all the Dolls to a safe compound, but possibly execute Topher and DeWitt.
Back in the present, the little girl rescued by the actuals turns out to actually be an imprinted person who doesn't know how she ended up in a little girl's body. She intends to use the chair to take over one of the adult actuals and turns a gun on the group. She is overpowered, thanks to the actuals having discovered the birthmark on her wiped "father", a mark that doesn't match what she told them his name was. (This is something of an oversight on her part; you'd think she could have easily checked his back for the tattoo.) Caroline's personality is printed into her, and she proceeds to lead the actuals to the roof, escaping from the now-pursuing butchers.
On their way out, the group passes through the remains of DeWitt's office and we have an extremely heavy-handed moment. Just in case you somehow missed this point throughout the rest of the episode's flashbacks, characters reaffirm for you that this is not what humanity needed and that the whole Dollhouse idea was evil from the get-go. Then they climb out the window into daylight and presumably a safe happy future.
During this episode, a number of things become clear.
1. Only ten years have passed since "Omega". (Really? I mean, really? These characters talk like they can't even imagine what the world might have been like, but they were all living in it! And where the hell has all of this new slang come from? When they meet Whiskey, one of the characters exclaims that she's a "dumb show", which apparently refers to her being Doll-like. And this is just one of the many colorful phrases characters shout at each other during the episode. Half the time I felt like I wasn't supposed to be able to follow what they were talking about, but I found it much easier to believe this level of slang back when I thought we were a few hundred years in the future.)
2. For some reason, Agent Ballard was made Echo's handler. (Really? Why the hell would they do that. My assumption at the end of "Omega" was that Ballard had agreed to be a Doll, which would at least have allowed DeWitt control over him. But no, apparently he's completely autonomous, and capable of having secret conversations with "Caroline" in elevators.)
3. Echo has become semi-immune to imprints -- she can take the information in while retaining her original "Caroline" personality. This is apparently due not to her specialness so much as Alpha's intervention. (This is my interpretation, anyway, of her statement later in the episode that she has a cure for everyone, a safe place etc., "thanks to Alpha".)
4. Joss Whedon isn't really much for subtlety sometimes.
I love Whedon. I really do. And I thought I actually loved this series more than his others. I thought its first episode was a slamdunk, a far cry from the plodding, nigh-unwatchable Firefly pilot. I thought its pacing was excellent and that its first six "slow" episodes were a sign of maturity: none of them are boring, and they all help to establish these characters before we start really turning up the volume. It prevents Dollhouse from being Torchwood's first season -- where the writers were in such a hurry to do "edgy" things that you never actually got to see what any of the characters were like when they weren't being possessed by aliens into having wild sex. The first half of Dollhouse introduces its characters and then moves seamlessly, with confidence, to its climax. It lacks a desperate overeagerness to get to the so-called "good bits", and it's a much more enjoyable ride because of that.
But I was really, really puzzled by "Epitaph One", because suddenly it seemed like I was watching a different show -- and not just because everything had gone all dirty and grungy and post-apocalyptic.
This is what I thought Dollhouse was about: the human spirit. The many different faces we all wear. The things we're all programmed to do. The soul. Echo's evolution throughout the episodes into having -- more and more -- a recognizable core personality in spite of having had that theoretically stripped away from her fit with this. Before becoming a Doll, she was apparently an activist -- environmental, etc. -- who was interested in saving the world; as a Doll, she still really liked helping people. In both big ways and small ways, she enjoyed helping people on her engagements. (This is underlined when she wants to complete a particular engagement where she's just there to have sex with a rich guy -- a rich guy who lost his wife, and wants nothing more than to see her again, on his anniversary, so that he can show her the beautiful little house he bought for them to live in right before her death.)
This is apparently what Joss Whedon thinks Dollhouse is about: technology outpacing morality. Human trafficking. The evils of slavery. Mankind's corruption.
And I'm sorry, but I found the first message a lot more interesting.
I don't need to be told that slavery is evil. I don't need to be told that technology moving too fast is evil. I don't need to be told that rich businessmen have no compunctions about buying and selling and using people.
Do you know why I don't need to be told these things? Because I already have been. Because I've been told these things about a billion times already. They are old news. They are so obvious as a potential theme that I overlooked them, assuming Joss Whedon was too smart for that. Assuming he knew we are too smart for that, and was willing to offer us a gray area of morality.
For most of the series, arguments are presented against the Dollhouse -- and dismissed. Agent Ballard thinks the Dollhouse has kidnapped people or otherwise taken advantage of them, and he is proven wrong when we learn that Dolls enter into five-year contracts willingly, knowing they will become Dolls, knowing they will belong to the Dollhouse for that time, and then wake up five years later as very rich people with no memory of what went on and a clean slate for the crimes they've committed.
Because Caroline, at least, committed crimes. And the Dollhouse was going to be a form of community service, allowing her to make up for those crimes.
Characters suggest that the Dollhouse is pimping out its Dolls despicably; other characters argue that Dolls help people, fulfilling various needs for which there is no other outlet. Dolls are contracted to help the government by spying without knowing they're spying; they are contracted as bodyguards; they are contracted as gentle lovers for extremely lonely people.
And the Dolls themselves are taken care of, looked out for; they're kept in the extremely reassuring luxury spa of the Dollhouse, where they swim laps, enjoy fabulous meals, go to yoga classes, paint, and so on.
But in the final episode, Whedon throws away the pretense of neutrality to abruptly establish that the Dollhouse is, and has always been, nothing but evil. The people who thought they were doing some kind of good are all misguided, at best. Even a spy who tried to get some of the Dolls killed and viewed them as less than people is abruptly made into a hero, a man whose warnings everyone should have heeded, just because he thought the Dollhouse needed more supervision. (By, as DeWitt argues, a clandestine agency with little government oversight? Apparently so.)
And abruptly you have to wonder -- was there ever supposed to be a pretense of neutrality, or were we supposed to find DeWitt and Topher's explanations completely unconvincing from the start?
This question is unceremoniously answered by the pilot, which is nothing like any pilot I've ever seen before.
Instead of being a longer, slower version of the first episode that takes more care to introduce all of its characters, Dollhouse's so-called pilot seems to be an extremely condensed version of the first series. Sierra is already here; Victor is already here; they're already grouping together. Scenes that took half a series to build are just thrown in there.
It's literally just a bunch of clips from the show. Scenes strung together with so much happening so fast that it's impossible to believed this could ever have been intended as a first episode.
And worse yet, all of the neutrality is gone.
In these versions of scenes we were once familiar with, no character misses an opportunity to say how evil the Dollhouse is, and none of the arguments are presented as remotely convincing. Instead of being given pause, characters arguing with Topher and DeWitt just dismiss them as rationalizing, and it's clear we're supposed to agree.
Like "Epitaph One", Whedon delivers his point here with a sledgehammer.
And depresses me even further by making it clear that, somehow, he was never interested in any of these characters. He didn't want us to know or care about Boyd or Topher or DeWitt. He just wanted to get through the events of the first season as fast as he could, apparently so that he could hurry up and tell his -- I'm sorry -- paint-by-numbers post-apocalyptic story, which is where Season Two is headed.
I liked Firefly, too, okay? I'm sorry it got canceled, Joss. But I don't miss it so much that I wanted to see you jettison all the interesting and original ideas in Dollhouse so that you could go back to it.
I mean, really? You're bringing Reavers back? (The Butchers are also a group of men who are now more animal than human, attacking and killing anyone who isn't like them. The only difference I see so far is that we're missing the charming references to being raped to death.)
No, no one's speaking Chinese just yet, but it seems like a distinct possibility for the future -- the Chinese are in control of imprinting now, after all. Who's to say that the Butchers don't speak Chinese?
I don't know what all Season Two will hold, but I know by the end it won't be about Dolls anymore. It'll be about the hell that's coming, and a tiny band of real people leftover who will try to eke out a meager living. Even if you deny the similarities to Firefly, you can't deny how little that sounds like the show we've been watching up 'til now.