"Dollhouse" Reviews: "Meet Jane Doe" and "A Love Supreme"
Well, next week is fall/winter final exams, yet again, and here I am wasting time instead of studying, yet again. Are we seeing a pattern here? In any case, as any reader of this small little piece of cyberspace knows, December is Fox's parting gift to us few, proud Dollhouse fans in that they're letting us have the entire second season. Of course, since Fox is still in it for the money, they're burning through two episodes every Friday night in December to get through the episodes as quickly as possible. Christmas gifts to all Dollhouse fans!
So, these two pick up where “The Left Hand” masterfully left off, and let me just say-whoa! Well played, Mr. Whedon. Well played.
Warning - This is an in-depth review/analysis of the two “Dollhouse” episodes “Meet Jane Doe” and “A Love Supreme” that aired on Fox Friday, December 11th, 2009. Spoilers for every inch of both episodes abound; read at your own choosing.
Meet Jane Doe
“Meet Jane Doe” starts off with poor Echo. She's been dumped into the world for an undisclosed amount of time. She's filthy, she's starving, she doesn't understand how to get money, and she's dumpster diving for food. To top all of this nightmare off for our favorite Active, Echo is suffering from memory flashbacks and imprint recalls that make migraines look like kid rides, essentially finishing the job that Alpha started back in “Omega” last season and waking every piece of Echo up.
Echo goes into a supermarket and tries talking an ATM out of dispensing its money when she sees a poor Spanish woman trying to use food stamps to buy groceries. As the desperate, non-English speaking woman struggles to explain to the unimpressed store clerk, she hasn't eaten food in two days. When she's coldly turned away, Echo tries to help her by stealing her some food. Two cops apprehend them - until Echo remembers that she is, at times, a professional assassin and takes her cop out cold. The Spanish woman is taken into custody.
Now, this is where the episode got confusing, and the confusion wasn't cleared up until the next hour in “A Love Supreme,” so I'll establish what the show didn't make clear: three months passed in between the above scene and the one that's about to take place next. Just so we're clear.
Echo is now clean, and...a nurse? Oh, yes, she has infiltrated a local hospital, apparently still in the small Texas town that she landed in, and agrees to cover for one of her colleagues to go to a local prison to administer the season's flu shots. When she arrives, Echo finds not only the cops that she beat down and evaded, but the Spanish woman. Echo speaks to her in Spanish easily enough, assuring her that there is a plan, and gives her some tablets to eat after seeing that the guards have been abusing her to the point of breaking her ribs. The woman can't complain because she doesn't speak English.
Echo returns to her apartment, apparently, where she is attacked - by Ballard. It is revealed that during the three months that Echo was gone, she managed to remember how to call Ballard, but not his name. He came to take care of her, and has been helping her along the path to becoming her own person these past three months; the prison op is their idea of a test run: if he and Echo can get their Spanish friend out of jail and into freedom where she rightfully belongs, then Echo is on top enough to return to the Dollhouse and finish the job they both started months before.
Here, though, is a lovely bit of exposition on the nature of Echo and Paul's highly complicated relationship, some excellent acting both from Tahmoh Penikett (Ballard) and Eliza Dushku (Echo).
We've touched before - first in “Vows,” the tragic conversation between Whiskey/Dr. Saunders and Topher, and then again in “The Left Hand” between Echo and Daniel Perrin - on the idea that the Actives are becoming their own people, and that 'waking up' their original personalities is a form of murder. It's a disturbing prospect, and a morally sticky one. In Whiskey's case, we don't know who her original personality was, so we have nothing to go upon, only her own words: “I'm scared to die.”
With Echo, however, we know that she was Caroline Farrell, a college student and an activist who wants to save everyone and everything. But we've seen that in the years between her boyfriend's murder by Rossum security and the Dollhouse finally catching up with her, Caroline hardened. Apparently she was best friends with Bennett Halverson, the disturbed techie of the DC Dollhouse, and after an explosion left her trapped under a cinder-block to die in order to get away from security.
Now, Echo brings up to Paul her own fears: “I've been saving this body for her, and the idea that Caroline isn't...” No, Caroline is not what we thought or hoped. Paul Ballard is torn by this because he has come to accept that Echo is not Caroline. In fact, Echo finally asserts this to him aggressively this episode: “I'm not her,” Echo says angrily. “My name is Echo.” Echo is experiencing some serious growing pains, but she is defining herself as a person, and it's fascinating to watch. But is it right to want Echo to not want to give her body back to Caroline, if given the opportunity?
Paul and Echo have been dancing around each other for about half of the season now, and it's gratifying for Echo to tell Paul how she feels. Also, it's extremely in-character for Paul to reject her. Paul Ballard is going through his own internal changes, and he's still emotionally reeling from his conversation with Madeline from last episode. He remembers using “Mellie” even when he knew she was a doll in order to sate his growing obsession with the idea of Caroline. Now that he's face to face with Echo, and he's clearly falling in love with her, and she reciprocates the feeling, he's terrified.
Also, he has a practical fear: Echo is her own person, but that person is somewhat collected from pieces of more than 30 other personalities. Paul is afraid that if he gave in to his feelings and Echo's interest, he would be using her the way he used Mellie, and doing that would destroy him. Echo, for her part, is obviously hurt and insulted that he doesn't trust her to be in love with him herself, not as an imprint. They instead switch to training.
Ordinarily, training montages are a cop-out, but this one was fun and fascinating to watch in equal turns, as well as a bit of a relief from the heavy dialogue; the montage was an opportunity to chew over what you had just watched/heard and absorb it all. Also, there's a very creepy scene in which Paul watches Echo draw two different blueprints at the same time, one with one hand and one with the other, indicating that she somehow has found a way to make both hemispheres of her brain able to work separately without the need of the other.
To not go too deep into the pure action of the episode, they break the woman out, but not without a toll on Echo. Echo, as Paul reveals, is having headaches, and it finally catches up with her when the stress of the situation causes Echo's Spanish-speaking skills to vanish. She forces herself into her Taffy imprint from “Gray Hour” and manages to bust them out, but it clearly hurts her to do it and she admits baldly to the terrified woman that she doesn't know how much longer she can keep it up.
Going back to the Dollhouse...
Adelle DeWitt has had her house taken over by Harding, the cold hard Rossum bastard we've seen three times now this season, the one in “The Public Eye/The Left Hand” who plotted to overthrow DeWitt. She's been made powerless, and the effect shakes her to her core as she fetches drinks for the men in her office and loses any and all say over what is deemed safe for her Actives on their engagements. Her normal support system is gone, however, as Topher has been completely won over to Harding's side - Harding, recognizing Topher's genius, has given him a limitless budget to design something for him.
Boyd, in the meantime, is perfectly aware of where Ballard is and is hiding him from DeWitt, planning to help him and Echo back into the Dollhouse when they are ready to come back. When the Rossum Corporation plans to open a new house in Dubai - we also learn that counting the new Dubai house there are twenty-three Dollhouses the world over - Harding demands that DeWitt pick and choose between her Actives to finish furnishing the new Dubai house. This also pushes Topher away from Harding as Harding explains that Sierra and Victor's “grouping” is common and that it is fixable: by sending Sierra to Dubai.
Topher, for his part, has improved on the disruptor designs from last week to create a remote wipe machine that borrows from Alpha's design. It's basically a ray gun that when fired at any Active in the field will wipe them instantaneously to their “blank slate” doll state. We, the audience, got another treat when Maurissa Tancharoen - wife to Jed Whedon and also a writer/showrunner - again guest starred as Kilo the adorable doll, coming at Topher like a New Yorker with attitude until she is once again knocked unconscious.
When Boyd learns of Harding's plans for Dubai, he informs DeWitt that it is time to take her house back. “And how do you propose I do that?” she snaps angrily. Boyd tells her: “The Adelle I know would never have asked that question.” She takes this to heart, as we see, when she next meets with Topher and Topher finally reveals that he knows Rossum's plans.
With Senator Perrin firmly in their pockets busy being groomed to be the next president of the United States, the Rossum Corporation is having each branch of the Dollhouse design an overarching design. Topher, being the curious little genius that he is, took ten giant leaps forward and finished the design for them in an effort to see what they were planning...and propelled us right into the horrifying, terrifying world of “Epitaph One.”
Now, from the start the showrunners were treating season two like their miracle season, because, let's face it, it was. No one was expecting Dollhouse to get renewed, but it did. Thanks to the season one coda “Epitaph One,” Whedon and Co. had a definite direction to go in for this season: the road to “Epitaph One” and what happens after “Epitaph One” ends. The series finale will be titled “Epitaph Two: The Return,” so we know that we'll get plenty of answers in that one. But, this season has been dancing around “Epitaph One” for the first six episodes, and now it's finally in the limelight.
Rossum has the next president selected already, and they have the plan for their technology available to them now: Topher has designed a device that could be used to wipe any mind, anywhere, anytime, and replace it with a docile Rossum-designed personality. Here is the brilliance of Dollhouse - that horror, that darkness, is fascinating to wrestle with. Especially as Adelle does the unexpected...she turns the plans over to Harding, setting the final wheels in motion to end civilization as we know it and turn it into the post-apocalyptic horror movie that was “Epitaph One.”
Well, DeWitt certainly got what she wanted - Harding left her in charge of her house and her dolls, well-pleased. Topher nearly suffered a breakdown when he discovered what she did (a breakdown he will eventually actually suffer from in the future), and informed DeWitt that she was “the coldest bitch in existence.” DeWitt smashed him across the face and informed him that he would never address her without respect again. Displaying her tenuous regain of power by asserting force over Topher was psychologically weak (Topher's relatively easy to shove around, when you think about it), but it was effective in displaying the changes the stress of her situation have finally begun to bring about within her - as they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and DeWitt holds absolute power over the lives of the dolls within her house. She has admitted in “Belonging” that every member of the Dollhouse staff was chosen because their morals were compromised in some way: including her own.
Before Echo and Paul returned to the Dollhouse, they finally kissed, which is good because I think I'd have gone insane if they hadn't, the way they were dancing around each other. But of course, Paul, being the white knight that he is, got angst-ridden and sent her away with Boyd in order to protect her from his interest. It is worthy of note to say that if Ballard had kissed Echo in the first season, it would have been very dark and unhealthy. The conversation between Echo and Paul where she asserts that she is her own person and not some pale “echo” of Caroline was the final step necessary to having Paul see that she is not the fairy tale princess for him to save - she is an individual, a burgeoning adult, and she is capable of her own thoughts, emotions, and adult complications.
In any case, Ballard does send Echo to the Dollhouse with Boyd, claiming that he found Echo one week earlier and nursed her back to health. Honestly, I found this weak in Ballard's estimation - I know that he is consumed with taking down the Dollhouse, and that he has figured out that Echo is his ally in this. Perhaps it's his own confusion about his feelings for Echo? But, naturally, DeWitt doesn't believe him - how are a regular doll's chances of staying alive in a mind-wiped state outside of the house? DeWitt is no longer the warm, caring semi-mother figure that they assumed she was. She has shown her true, self-protecting colors, and when Echo returns, she orders her locked in solitary in a straight-jacket until they discover the truth about Echo, once and for all.
A Love Supreme
The cold-open of this episode - a new TV lingo term that I've finally learned means the first three or four minutes of set-up before the opening titles/credits appear - is a parched, dry desert with a small metal trailer sitting outside. A man is lamenting about his lost love and how he wasted all of his money on a woman “programmed to love him.” Here's a lovely bit of exposition, as well - for all of how we've focused on the dolls' roll, rather than the clients', in the romantic engagements.
According to this guy, it's real love - or realer love - than you can find. As Adelle DeWitt says in the supremely superior original Dollhouse pilot episode, “Echo:”
“You're a man who can have everything he wants. If what you want is someone dressed up as a cheerleader telling you how big you are, you can hire a hundred women to do that - quite convincingly - for the price of one day with an Active. This is not what you want. This is about what you need. An Active doesn't judge. This will be the purest, most genuine human encounter of your life...and hers. It is a treasure; one I guarantee you will never, never forget.”
While the doll in the situation is still effectively a sexual slave, the client has been told that they were willing volunteers. The man in question became so in love with the imprint of Echo that he was given that he literally spent his entire fortune on repeat engagements until he lost all of his money and ended up in the trailer park, mourning her loss. It's a little sad, a little pathetic, and a little disgusting, but it's not impossible to empathize with his position. His listener merely states: “You know the saddest part? The ending!” This is, of course, Alpha, who promptly slits the man's throat with an enormous knife.
Parts of this episode - particularly Alpha's role in it - remind me of Kill Bill, which is an excellent comparison to make, so score two for two on Dollhouse last night. Anyway, cut to the main credits.
This episode opens up with a lovely little electronica beat that I have to mention first. I haven't been particularly impressed with the overall score for this series, except for the central theme of the actual Dollhouse, which is creepy little music-box overture that is actually quite effective. However, one of the only reasons that we got a second season in the first place is that Joss Whedon demonstrated that he could produce the show on a shoestring budget on top of the low ratings. One of the effects of this, naturally, is to cut the amount of money spent on featuring actual songs and to use more score work. “A Love Supreme” really gave the score-writers a chance to stretch their legs, so to speak, and it shows.
In any case, Eliza Dushku continues to improve markedly on her acting skills from the first season in the first scene. Echo has been strapped into a straight-jacket in a small, square concrete room, and she's shuddering and shaking and twisting herself in circles trying to get free. It's actually convincing enough to feel sorry for her, but the situation quickly gets creepy(er) when Victor comes onto the scene as the smiling psychologist asking questions.
Now, I've said it many times before, but I'll say it again: I really wish that Whedon and Dushku had tailored the lead role for a man, because Enver Gjokaj is a stunning actor. I love Eliza Dushku, and I've found her Echo (mostly) convincing and also fascinating to watch. But Gjokaj isn't just better than Dushku, he's better than every other actor on this show, save perhaps for Olivia Williams (who plays DeWitt, by the way). He's just fantastic - he's been Topher (extremely convincingly), Dominic (also eerily convincing), a British lover named Roger, Lubov the would-be mobster, a college girl named Kiki, a serial killer, and now a psychologist, all with equally convincing and somewhat disturbing results.
In any case, DeWitt, Ballard and Langton are all watching this on the other side of a two-way mirror. Boyd is a mask of nothing, but Ballard is starting to go nuts while DeWitt is still very much with the icy composure she seems to have wrapped around herself like a shield these past few episodes. Ballard accuses her of being as hysterical as a medieval witch-hunter - “If she floats she's a witch, and if she drowns...” he snarls. DeWitt, supremely uninterested, walks out to talk to “Doctor” Victor about his findings. Ballard desperately tries to appeal to Boyd to help free Echo.
Now, here was one of the nicer parts of last night. Boyd blatantly smacks Ballard down to the ground, verbally speaking, when Ballard asks him if he can stand Echo being hurt. Boyd Langton was, pretty much, throughout the first season the voice of moral reason in the Dollhouse. Now, while we know that Langton isn't perfect - in fact, in “Belonging,” he displayed a frightening knowledge of how to both erase bodies and evidence trails, as well as having sketchy contacts that help him erase the evidence of a man's existence - we do know that he cottoned on to Echo being special first and foremost, that he cares about the well-being of the dolls, and that he is one of the only ones that would stand up to DeWitt without fear in order to promote that general well-being.
Don't get me wrong: I quite like the character of Paul Ballard. He has his cases of piggishness and overt moral superiority, but at his core he's a good person. His moments of weakness with Mellie, his obsession with Caroline, and his willingness to admit he was wrong about both make him a much better hero in that he's inherently flawed. No one actually likes their heroes perfect because that perfection makes them boring - witness Buffy's moments of extreme stupidity and/or blind arrogance that nearly got the world destroyed once or twice in Whedon's previous Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It made her more engaging and it's why we root for Paul Ballard - we see pieces of ourselves in him.
However, his question to Boyd was more of a subtextual way of saying, don't you care about Echo anymore? Now that you're the Dollhouse's head of security, is that all you are or are you still partly Echo's handler? Boyd doesn't take this lying down. “It kills me to see her in there the same as you. I stood over that table and I made that promise to protect her just like you did, and I was there first,” Boyd snaps. “Half the reason DeWitt is doing this is to see you squirm so that she can find out what happened. So man up!”
This intensely gratifying exchange is then zoomed into an even more gratifying one in which Victor's psychologist imprint zeroes in on DeWitt and makes her quite uncomfortable. “Really, I don't know what you're looking for,” he asserts. “You must really hate her in some way to put her through all of this. Even she can't internalize this much.” He goes on to say, interestingly enough, that DeWitt and Echo are both similar in how much they keep inside: “Men wear their emotions outside, like their genitals, while women are forced to bottle everything up. You hate her because she can be both the Whore of Babylon and the Sacred Virgin and still be praised, whereas you are either feared or hated for displaying either of those qualities.”
DeWitt is not amused at the accuracy and forces him into the imprinting chair before snapping at Topher whether Echo's brain scans show anything of interest. Nothing at all, says Topher, glaring at her. It seems that a most interesting switch has come of this - where Adelle's morals are deteriorating, and badly, Topher's are growing stronger, to his own eventual detriment. In any case, she allows him to win the staring match and leaves the office dissatisfied, triggering Topher's memories.
Ballard and Langton have both let Topher in on Echo's secret, and Topher is perfectly aware that Echo is unique - her brain scans are all over the charts, unusual even for the average human personality that is fully formed, and he has been keeping this from DeWitt because in his fragile emotional state he's doing all he can to help Echo, Ballard and Langton, perhaps as a belated way of reaching out for friends or because he suspects that they may be able to help him avert or stop the technologically-wrought apocalypse that he sees coming now that DeWitt has handed over the equivalent of a neurological A-bomb to the power-hungry Rossum Corporation.
DeWitt finally relents and allows Echo to be wiped - only to immediately send her out on a romantic engagement, apparently still in order to screw Ballard over. The bitch is back, ladies and gentlemen, and she is here to stay.
Topher has been actually receiving some truly amusing lines and scenes lately, but personally I don't see the return of “that trademark Whedon wit!” that some reviewers have hailed it as. And it's good that it isn't. Dollhouse is different from anything Whedon has ever done. While both Buffy and Angel touched on some serious moral/philosophical issues - particularly Angel - neither of them really hit the philosophical/psychological questions that Dollhouse so readily raises. The “Whedon wit,” as it has been dubbed, is a blistering brand of sarcasm wrapped around nonsensical words and trademark made-up slang. This worked well in Buffy and Firefly - in Buffy because it gave the cast more endearing characterization and in Firefly because it was set so far in an alternate universe that it was funnier because the new slang made sense.
Moving on from my tirade!
Topher finally gets to meet the real Echo, and she jokes with him gently, which is actually almost tragic to watch - Echo still has dark circles under her eyes and bruises on her, and it's somewhat bitter as well. Was it not DeWitt herself who was lamenting not one hour ago, “I can't remember the last time we asked ourselves if an engagement posed a risk to an Active's health?” Now who is it pimping Echo out so soon on such obvious signs of stress and ill health? The mirror self-realization is an ugly thing, and I have a feeling that soon DeWitt will have to face herself and it's not going to be pretty.
Topher doesn't even have to imprint Echo for this engagement; instead, she creepily goes into a Matrix-esque trance and remembers the personality, bringing her to the forefront in a display of acting skill that finally shows us that Eliza Dushku has been using Echo as practice to perfect her imperfect skill set. In any case, she and Ballard go off to their assignment and share a touching moment in the car as Paul finally admits how much he despises acting as her pimp, and Echo tenderly comforts him for once as she assures him that it won't be her, Echo, with the client, it will be an imprint and it'll mean nothin'. It's looking like Ballard is finally beginning to believe that Echo herself is in love with him, and that scares him more than anything.
Echo enters the house to find that the man has been murdered, and suffers a minor breakdown. Since the imprint was “recalled” rather than traditionally imprinted, it takes the combined efforts of Ballard and Boyd to snap her out of it (don't you think it's funny how Dollhouse watchers have such trouble calling Paul Ballard 'Paul' but even though we knew Boyd Langton as 'Langton' for practically the entire first season we all call him 'Boyd?'). Ballard and Langton quickly deduce that the man was staged gruesomely for their benefit, as the state of decomposition has him dead for over a week and the engagement was booked a mere day prior to their finding it.
Echo comes to herself and notices a note in a vase of red roses: “To my #1,” it reads. Since Alpha slashed Whiskey's face up, turning her into the tortured Dr. Claire Saunders, in order to allow Echo to be number one (by the way, Whedon & Co. have confirmed that Amy Acker will be in season two for at least three episodes. We've already seen her in “Vows,” so she'll have to return before the series finale because of the role she played in “Epitaph One,” so anybody who misses her as much as I do can take heart that we will see both her and Miracle Laurie (Madeline/November) before the series ends). We see Ballard and Langton do some cool detective work - and by the way, am I the only one who loves it when both of them do the cop thing together? - to figure out that Alpha is murdering all of Echo's romantic engagements, one by one.
We also find out that Echo married a woman in San Francisco at some point, with Langton commenting that it was “a lovely ceremony.” I'll take a moment aside to say, from the gay perspective, that since we know that Topher can tweak with a body's molecular structure through brain patterns - making Echo lactate in “Instinct,” for instance - the writing crew nicely dodged the nature v. nurture debate on the issue of whether homosexuality is inborn bullet quite nicely, since it's never made apparent whether Topher made her a lesbian personality-wise or physically. Moving back to the story.
Alpha purchased Sierra for a romantic engagement himself, and sent her back to the Dollhouse with a message for Topher - that the next one “ages well.” Through some further police supposition (done quite nicely, I might add), Langton remembers Matt from the first episode, “Ghost,” who also reappeared in “Echoes,” noting that Matt has been purchasing Echo for his birthday celebration every year since Echo arrived at the Dollhouse. This also gives us a timeline for season one which makes sense - Dollhouse does not take place on a weekly basis, because even if Echo was the “number one Active,” even she wouldn't be sent on an engagement once a week. Excellent job, writers, for that little bit of exposition.
They quickly track Alpha down with a full-on SWAT team of crack Dollhouse security staff to find Alpha in a snazzy new suit on a helipad on the roof of a high-rise, with poor Matt chained to a chair with a bomb around his neck. Alan Tudyk played Alpha spectacularly well yet again, making him equally psychotic, playful, sadistic, and endearing all at once - think Dexter meets The Addams Family. Langton desperately says, “Alpha, there is some part of you that knows this isn't right.”
Alpha's response? “There are several parts of me that know this isn't right, none of them that care, and six...six who just find it funny!” He forces Matt to repeat what he told Alpha: that Echo was a “blast.” “I love a good pun,” Alpha says, right before he detonates Matt. Dollhouse certainly hasn't been shy on the gruesome scale this season, from kicking the crap out of Echo till she bled on several occasions, watching Summer Glau slam her own head into a television screen until it bled, watching Topher slice up Dr. Nolan in “Belonging,” watching Nolan attempt to rape Priya and having her stab him to death in “Belonging.” True to form, the camera never panned away from the shot and we had a lovely view of watching the sky rain little pieces of Matt down on Ballard and Langton's heads as Alpha made his getaway.
Meanwhile, DeWitt, still in cold-hard-British-bitch-from-hell mode, has decided that since Ballard won't confess to helping Echo during her three month sojourn from the Dollhouse, Echo must be Alpha's accomplice and so locks her back in her solitary cell. The rest of the dolls get summarily re-wiped, one by one (sadly this hour lacked another brief-though-hilarious cameo from Maurissa Tancharoen as Kilo), while Ballard quietly freaks out about Echo and Boyd attempts to regain control over the situation.
Ballard springs Echo from solitary and has her remember her “Rebecca Mynor” imprint so that she can find Joel Mynor - and we got him back, too, as the ever-lovely Patton Oswalt jumps back into his guest role with gusto, hitting all the right notes once again as we first met him back in the season one game-changer “Man on the Street.” Joel, after his bitter conversation with Ballard and Echo back in season one, has changed his ways and tried to move on from his wife's death - if you'll remember, his morally questionable yet moving story was hiring Echo year after year to be imprinted as his wife so that they could share the experience of him showing her their first house, which the real Rebecca never got to see before she died - and he is engaged to be married to a real girl now.
With Alpha on his tail, though, Mynor allows himself to be dragged back to the Dollhouse, where he is met by DeWitt, who has Topher distract him so that she can grab Echo, throw her back into solitary, and warn both Langton and Ballard that they are on extraordinarily short leashes from here on in. If you'll remember, she had her last chief of security sent to the Attic and the last handler that defied her was brutally slaughtered by the then-sleeper Active November while she was still imprinted as Mellie, Ballard's next door neighbor.
Mynor and Topher have a small conversation over which Mynor laments that he is, indeed, human. It's interesting to compare the Dollhouse to a sort of addiction - he wants to believe that he can have his wife back even though he's come to a point where he knows that he can't. He'd thought he'd put his “addiction” to seeing “Rebecca” again behind him, but now that he's right back in the Dollhouse all he wants to do is have Echo imprinted, even though he's aware that she's different from DeWitt's behavior.
DeWitt, meanwhile, returns to her office only to have Alpha emerge from her bathroom to inform her that she's low on toilet paper. They have a brief and somewhat horrifying conversation. DeWitt informs him truthfully that she's scared out of her mind - to which Alpha scornfully replies that, thanks to her and her goons, that if he ever got 'scared out of his mind' he'd just jump into a different mind, and then a different mind, and then a different mind, ad infinitum - and proceeds to bargain for her life, offering up Mynor's life as well as Echo's in a few brief moments. Whether or not DeWitt's change for the worse is permanent or not seems to be a moot point at this juncture.
Alpha instead forces DeWitt downstairs, to the central doll area, and activates a device much like the remote-wiping signal he designed to wipe Echo while she was on-assignment during “Gray Hour” in season one. This, however, merely activates Alpha's master plan: he 'bugged' Sierra with a virus that got uploaded into the Dollhouse's computer mainframe when she was wiped. Since he knew that protocol dictated that DeWitt re-wipe all of the dolls in the house, all of them 'caught the virus,' which Alpha uses to switch them into mindless combat mode, unleashing the full fury of years worth of muscle-memory implants of martial arts and street-fighting skills, and the dolls quickly make short work of the furniture, the handlers, the security team, and each other.
Echo, hearing the call but able to resist it, knows that Alpha has returned and shatters the security camera inside her cell, using the metal ring to slice into the glass of the two-way mirror so that she can wrap her hands in her clothing and shatter it in order to get out. It's lucky that there was a “Gray Hour,” because in the last two episodes Echo has called on her “Taffy” imprinted skills to break out of at least three different situations.
DeWitt flees into Saunders' old office and barricades the door shut, while Ballard and Langton battle their way through the dolls. It's looking quite a bit like the “House of Leaves” scene in Kill Bill - and here I'll insert a quick note: Whedon obviously knows and loves the fact that he has a cult audience in Dollhouse, so he doesn't spare us on the amazing references - the “Star Trek” ref from “The Public Eye/The Left Hand,” the cylons from “Battlestar Galactica” reference this last episode, Topher using the word “frakking” from BSG, the Matrix-like memory recalls from Echo, the Kill Bill shoutouts from “A Love Supreme.” One word: awesome.
Sierra, who was pretty much absent this episode, picked up a guard and slammed his head repeatedly against the wall until he passed out and walked on, looking pretty damn pleased with herself, until Topher runs by and zaps her with his disruptor, which seems to be the fastest way to 'shut down' the dolls. Ballard runs to Topher's office to secure Mynor, again playing the white knight, and again playing the fool to Alpha's ultimate plan as Victor steps out from behind the door and tranquilizes Paul. Alpha, his real quarry attained, shoves Mynor out the door and straps Paul into the chair.
It's then that we see Alpha's true endgame. Since the beginning, Alpha has been completely obsessed with Echo. We know from “Omega” that Alpha's original personality, Karl Craft, was only one-tick shy of being a serial killer, and that he suffered from a god complex. We don't know how much of Craft's original personality Alpha has maintained, but his obsession with carving his name into his victims' faces was something he started as Craft.
In any case, it's basic criminal psychology that serial killers believe that they are better than everyone else, a higher order of being. In Alpha's case, he refers to himself as a literal god, or an ubermensch. He has 36 distinct personalities that live inside of him,at times taking him over. He is faster, stronger, and smarter than the average human being thanks to that. Since Echo is like him - she was evolving while inside the Dollhouse, he fell into a sick, obsessed and selfish sort of love with her; that selfsame “love” is what led him to attempting to destroy Whiskey with pruning shears in order to let Echo be number one. When he took Echo to his “kingdom,” however, and put her on par with himself - the Omega to his Alpha - she surprised him by beating the hell out of him and informing him from the sane perspective that he didn't understand anything, and that they were not gods, but mere mortals, perhaps more screwed up than any other being alive, not meant to exist.
Alpha has since been driven by thoughts of both revenge and a stalker-esque obsession with Echo, and he reveals that he camped outside of Echo and Paul's little sanctuary during their three month leave from the Dollhouse. There he watched Echo fall in love with Paul, watched them kiss, and it finally drove him completely 'round the twist. Because Paul didn't sleep with her, he knows Paul feels for her - that's actually, interestingly enough, a real psychological study: denying oneself of the sexual drive for higher order feelings such as love is a sign of true human emotion - and so he hooks Paul up to the machine and tries to find why Echo loves him.
He then tortures Paul so badly through that same machine that he renders him brain dead and pushes his near-lifeless body to the floor.
I had to pause at this point while re-watching this episode, because it was actually quite emotional to watch as well as completely unexpected, but nevertheless, Paul is, for all intents and purposes, a human vegetable. When Echo sprints up the stairs to find Paul and stumbles across his body, she crumples. I'll again say that in these last few episodes, Eliza Dushku has really started getting good, and in “Meet Jane Doe” especially, Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard) has slam dunked Ballard's role.
We finally see Echo lose it as well, and we finally see an extended fight scene between Echo and Alpha, which we didn't get enough of in “Omega.” It was spectacularly played out as Alpha quickly lost it when he still didn't understand why Echo was in love with Paul, and Echo telling him that Paul was “ten times the man you are, and you're not even one man.” They slam each other all over Topher's office, ending with Echo completely losing it and pile-driving Alpha through Topher's circular windows, leaving them on the Dollhouse floor. “We are gods, above them, meant to have a love supreme,” Alpha pleads with her.
When she poises over Alpha to slam his head in with a rock, though, we get another horrifying shock: Alpha took Paul's mind and imprinted it on himself so that Echo would love him. Paul, too strong for Alpha, takes over Alpha's body long enough to beg Echo to kill him so that he won't have to live on in the body of a deranged serial killer. It was very effectively done by voicing over Alan Tudyk's voice with Tahmoh's so that we really got to hear what Echo heard, and see her internal struggle, and see her finally collapse into tears because she can't kill Paul, in any form.
Alpha, taking back possession of his body, jerks away from her and runs away from the Dollhouse feeling god only knows what. It was actually nice sci-fi hearkening back to the classic The Dark Phoenix Saga from X-Men when Jean manages to take control of herself long enough to beg Wolverine to kill her before she kills anyone else. Then, as now, Wolverine couldn't do it (and we actually do know that that scene inspired this one because Whedon has stated before that he's a huge Dark Phoenix fan, a plotline that would later inspire the Wicked Willow storyline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's sixth season).
Wrapping up, Ballard is left on life support in the Dollhouse, and Echo keeps watch over his bed. When Mynor comes by to say goodbye, Echo briefly dons part of Rebecca's personality to urge him to be happy, and to move on from her death, which is ultimately what the real Rebecca would have wanted. Echo then returns to standing sentinel over Paul in mourning, while DeWitt watches her suspiciously.
Final Grades
“Meet Jane Doe” = 9/10
“A Love Supreme” = 11/10
Ultimately, it was just an A+ night.
Final Thoughts
It's hard to watch how good Dollhouse is getting, it really is. I first started Dollhouse extremely interested in the philosophical premise. The first five episodes were dicey enough for me to even question why I was watching it, but it quickly started firing with enough power to get me through the first season after the sixth episode. Now, though, we're finally seeing Dollhouse's true potential reached too late to save the series. On the other hand, as I've stated before, I can't see how Dollhouse could last longer than five or so seasons, anyway, without wearing out its welcome, so perhaps its good that it will build a crescendo up to a crowning glory of a series finale without too many errors.
I was amazed at the strength of my desire for Echo and Ballard to end up together. During the first season, he was so caught up in this idealized image of Caroline that he was tearing himself up inside trying to free her. Now, though, the darkness is fading to light and it's becoming a much healthier thing for both of them. Seeing them kiss - truly kiss - was as heartbreaking as it was gratifying. I was almost in tears when Alpha strapped Paul to the chair, because the synopsis for this week said that someone was going to be permanently erased...I just never suspected that it would be Paul.
Thank god for judiciously used guest stars! On Bones this week Zooey Deschanel finally guested on her sister Emily's show, and she was on for all of seven minutes. It was rather sad, actually. On Dollhouse this year, the only guest star we've had that was underused was Michael Hogan in “Belle Chose.” We've had Keith Carradine guest starring four times (and chillingly so) as Harding, DeWitt's nemesis. We've had Jamie Bamber as Echo's would-be husband, Ray Wise in just the right dose as Stewart Lipman, Summer Glau as the twisted Bennett Halverson, and now Patton Oswalt and Alan Tudyk as Joel Mynor and Alpha, respectively, who both lived up to their fantastic potential.
DeWitt's transformation into the likeable monster she's become was done in a hurry, but Olivia Williams pulled it off spectacularly, so it wasn't unbelievable. We've had a huge upswing in acting talent from the cast members that were lacking - mostly Fran Kranz as Topher and Eliza Dushku as Echo, but also Dichen Lachman as Sierra (I'm sorry, I know she's a fan favorite, but until “Man on the Street” I didn't warm up to her at all). Now that I'm officially a Tahmoh Penikett's eight-pack abs addict, I'm even more excited for the upcoming SyFy 2010 miniseries Riverworld.
Ultimately, the time jumps are somewhat confusing, but they are also a handy way of speeding us relentlessly and excitingly and terrifyingly toward the end of this unique and impressive series. I can't wait until next week!
Coming Next Week
This is the last of the Dollhouse double-headers this year. Dollhouse will then return in January to air the final three episodes on their normal Friday night time slot, with the series finale to air either January 22nd or 23rd, I'll have to check.
“Stop-Loss” - When Victor's contract with the Dollhouse expires, he must deal with his traumatic memories of being a soldier while struggling to reintegrate into regular life, even as he struggles with haunting memories of Sierra. Meanwhile, the Dollhouse staff struggles to keep Ballard alive.
“The Attic” - When DeWitt finally deems Echo too dangerous, Echo's friends' worst fears are realized as Echo is finally consigned to the mysterious Attic. While DeWitt struggles with her own moral dilemmas, Echo must fight for freedom from the heart of the Dollhouse conspiracy.
So, these two pick up where “The Left Hand” masterfully left off, and let me just say-whoa! Well played, Mr. Whedon. Well played.
Warning - This is an in-depth review/analysis of the two “Dollhouse” episodes “Meet Jane Doe” and “A Love Supreme” that aired on Fox Friday, December 11th, 2009. Spoilers for every inch of both episodes abound; read at your own choosing.
Meet Jane Doe
“Meet Jane Doe” starts off with poor Echo. She's been dumped into the world for an undisclosed amount of time. She's filthy, she's starving, she doesn't understand how to get money, and she's dumpster diving for food. To top all of this nightmare off for our favorite Active, Echo is suffering from memory flashbacks and imprint recalls that make migraines look like kid rides, essentially finishing the job that Alpha started back in “Omega” last season and waking every piece of Echo up.
Echo goes into a supermarket and tries talking an ATM out of dispensing its money when she sees a poor Spanish woman trying to use food stamps to buy groceries. As the desperate, non-English speaking woman struggles to explain to the unimpressed store clerk, she hasn't eaten food in two days. When she's coldly turned away, Echo tries to help her by stealing her some food. Two cops apprehend them - until Echo remembers that she is, at times, a professional assassin and takes her cop out cold. The Spanish woman is taken into custody.
Now, this is where the episode got confusing, and the confusion wasn't cleared up until the next hour in “A Love Supreme,” so I'll establish what the show didn't make clear: three months passed in between the above scene and the one that's about to take place next. Just so we're clear.
Echo is now clean, and...a nurse? Oh, yes, she has infiltrated a local hospital, apparently still in the small Texas town that she landed in, and agrees to cover for one of her colleagues to go to a local prison to administer the season's flu shots. When she arrives, Echo finds not only the cops that she beat down and evaded, but the Spanish woman. Echo speaks to her in Spanish easily enough, assuring her that there is a plan, and gives her some tablets to eat after seeing that the guards have been abusing her to the point of breaking her ribs. The woman can't complain because she doesn't speak English.
Echo returns to her apartment, apparently, where she is attacked - by Ballard. It is revealed that during the three months that Echo was gone, she managed to remember how to call Ballard, but not his name. He came to take care of her, and has been helping her along the path to becoming her own person these past three months; the prison op is their idea of a test run: if he and Echo can get their Spanish friend out of jail and into freedom where she rightfully belongs, then Echo is on top enough to return to the Dollhouse and finish the job they both started months before.
Here, though, is a lovely bit of exposition on the nature of Echo and Paul's highly complicated relationship, some excellent acting both from Tahmoh Penikett (Ballard) and Eliza Dushku (Echo).
We've touched before - first in “Vows,” the tragic conversation between Whiskey/Dr. Saunders and Topher, and then again in “The Left Hand” between Echo and Daniel Perrin - on the idea that the Actives are becoming their own people, and that 'waking up' their original personalities is a form of murder. It's a disturbing prospect, and a morally sticky one. In Whiskey's case, we don't know who her original personality was, so we have nothing to go upon, only her own words: “I'm scared to die.”
With Echo, however, we know that she was Caroline Farrell, a college student and an activist who wants to save everyone and everything. But we've seen that in the years between her boyfriend's murder by Rossum security and the Dollhouse finally catching up with her, Caroline hardened. Apparently she was best friends with Bennett Halverson, the disturbed techie of the DC Dollhouse, and after an explosion left her trapped under a cinder-block to die in order to get away from security.
Now, Echo brings up to Paul her own fears: “I've been saving this body for her, and the idea that Caroline isn't...” No, Caroline is not what we thought or hoped. Paul Ballard is torn by this because he has come to accept that Echo is not Caroline. In fact, Echo finally asserts this to him aggressively this episode: “I'm not her,” Echo says angrily. “My name is Echo.” Echo is experiencing some serious growing pains, but she is defining herself as a person, and it's fascinating to watch. But is it right to want Echo to not want to give her body back to Caroline, if given the opportunity?
Paul and Echo have been dancing around each other for about half of the season now, and it's gratifying for Echo to tell Paul how she feels. Also, it's extremely in-character for Paul to reject her. Paul Ballard is going through his own internal changes, and he's still emotionally reeling from his conversation with Madeline from last episode. He remembers using “Mellie” even when he knew she was a doll in order to sate his growing obsession with the idea of Caroline. Now that he's face to face with Echo, and he's clearly falling in love with her, and she reciprocates the feeling, he's terrified.
Also, he has a practical fear: Echo is her own person, but that person is somewhat collected from pieces of more than 30 other personalities. Paul is afraid that if he gave in to his feelings and Echo's interest, he would be using her the way he used Mellie, and doing that would destroy him. Echo, for her part, is obviously hurt and insulted that he doesn't trust her to be in love with him herself, not as an imprint. They instead switch to training.
Ordinarily, training montages are a cop-out, but this one was fun and fascinating to watch in equal turns, as well as a bit of a relief from the heavy dialogue; the montage was an opportunity to chew over what you had just watched/heard and absorb it all. Also, there's a very creepy scene in which Paul watches Echo draw two different blueprints at the same time, one with one hand and one with the other, indicating that she somehow has found a way to make both hemispheres of her brain able to work separately without the need of the other.
To not go too deep into the pure action of the episode, they break the woman out, but not without a toll on Echo. Echo, as Paul reveals, is having headaches, and it finally catches up with her when the stress of the situation causes Echo's Spanish-speaking skills to vanish. She forces herself into her Taffy imprint from “Gray Hour” and manages to bust them out, but it clearly hurts her to do it and she admits baldly to the terrified woman that she doesn't know how much longer she can keep it up.
Going back to the Dollhouse...
Adelle DeWitt has had her house taken over by Harding, the cold hard Rossum bastard we've seen three times now this season, the one in “The Public Eye/The Left Hand” who plotted to overthrow DeWitt. She's been made powerless, and the effect shakes her to her core as she fetches drinks for the men in her office and loses any and all say over what is deemed safe for her Actives on their engagements. Her normal support system is gone, however, as Topher has been completely won over to Harding's side - Harding, recognizing Topher's genius, has given him a limitless budget to design something for him.
Boyd, in the meantime, is perfectly aware of where Ballard is and is hiding him from DeWitt, planning to help him and Echo back into the Dollhouse when they are ready to come back. When the Rossum Corporation plans to open a new house in Dubai - we also learn that counting the new Dubai house there are twenty-three Dollhouses the world over - Harding demands that DeWitt pick and choose between her Actives to finish furnishing the new Dubai house. This also pushes Topher away from Harding as Harding explains that Sierra and Victor's “grouping” is common and that it is fixable: by sending Sierra to Dubai.
Topher, for his part, has improved on the disruptor designs from last week to create a remote wipe machine that borrows from Alpha's design. It's basically a ray gun that when fired at any Active in the field will wipe them instantaneously to their “blank slate” doll state. We, the audience, got another treat when Maurissa Tancharoen - wife to Jed Whedon and also a writer/showrunner - again guest starred as Kilo the adorable doll, coming at Topher like a New Yorker with attitude until she is once again knocked unconscious.
When Boyd learns of Harding's plans for Dubai, he informs DeWitt that it is time to take her house back. “And how do you propose I do that?” she snaps angrily. Boyd tells her: “The Adelle I know would never have asked that question.” She takes this to heart, as we see, when she next meets with Topher and Topher finally reveals that he knows Rossum's plans.
With Senator Perrin firmly in their pockets busy being groomed to be the next president of the United States, the Rossum Corporation is having each branch of the Dollhouse design an overarching design. Topher, being the curious little genius that he is, took ten giant leaps forward and finished the design for them in an effort to see what they were planning...and propelled us right into the horrifying, terrifying world of “Epitaph One.”
Now, from the start the showrunners were treating season two like their miracle season, because, let's face it, it was. No one was expecting Dollhouse to get renewed, but it did. Thanks to the season one coda “Epitaph One,” Whedon and Co. had a definite direction to go in for this season: the road to “Epitaph One” and what happens after “Epitaph One” ends. The series finale will be titled “Epitaph Two: The Return,” so we know that we'll get plenty of answers in that one. But, this season has been dancing around “Epitaph One” for the first six episodes, and now it's finally in the limelight.
Rossum has the next president selected already, and they have the plan for their technology available to them now: Topher has designed a device that could be used to wipe any mind, anywhere, anytime, and replace it with a docile Rossum-designed personality. Here is the brilliance of Dollhouse - that horror, that darkness, is fascinating to wrestle with. Especially as Adelle does the unexpected...she turns the plans over to Harding, setting the final wheels in motion to end civilization as we know it and turn it into the post-apocalyptic horror movie that was “Epitaph One.”
Well, DeWitt certainly got what she wanted - Harding left her in charge of her house and her dolls, well-pleased. Topher nearly suffered a breakdown when he discovered what she did (a breakdown he will eventually actually suffer from in the future), and informed DeWitt that she was “the coldest bitch in existence.” DeWitt smashed him across the face and informed him that he would never address her without respect again. Displaying her tenuous regain of power by asserting force over Topher was psychologically weak (Topher's relatively easy to shove around, when you think about it), but it was effective in displaying the changes the stress of her situation have finally begun to bring about within her - as they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and DeWitt holds absolute power over the lives of the dolls within her house. She has admitted in “Belonging” that every member of the Dollhouse staff was chosen because their morals were compromised in some way: including her own.
Before Echo and Paul returned to the Dollhouse, they finally kissed, which is good because I think I'd have gone insane if they hadn't, the way they were dancing around each other. But of course, Paul, being the white knight that he is, got angst-ridden and sent her away with Boyd in order to protect her from his interest. It is worthy of note to say that if Ballard had kissed Echo in the first season, it would have been very dark and unhealthy. The conversation between Echo and Paul where she asserts that she is her own person and not some pale “echo” of Caroline was the final step necessary to having Paul see that she is not the fairy tale princess for him to save - she is an individual, a burgeoning adult, and she is capable of her own thoughts, emotions, and adult complications.
In any case, Ballard does send Echo to the Dollhouse with Boyd, claiming that he found Echo one week earlier and nursed her back to health. Honestly, I found this weak in Ballard's estimation - I know that he is consumed with taking down the Dollhouse, and that he has figured out that Echo is his ally in this. Perhaps it's his own confusion about his feelings for Echo? But, naturally, DeWitt doesn't believe him - how are a regular doll's chances of staying alive in a mind-wiped state outside of the house? DeWitt is no longer the warm, caring semi-mother figure that they assumed she was. She has shown her true, self-protecting colors, and when Echo returns, she orders her locked in solitary in a straight-jacket until they discover the truth about Echo, once and for all.
A Love Supreme
The cold-open of this episode - a new TV lingo term that I've finally learned means the first three or four minutes of set-up before the opening titles/credits appear - is a parched, dry desert with a small metal trailer sitting outside. A man is lamenting about his lost love and how he wasted all of his money on a woman “programmed to love him.” Here's a lovely bit of exposition, as well - for all of how we've focused on the dolls' roll, rather than the clients', in the romantic engagements.
According to this guy, it's real love - or realer love - than you can find. As Adelle DeWitt says in the supremely superior original Dollhouse pilot episode, “Echo:”
“You're a man who can have everything he wants. If what you want is someone dressed up as a cheerleader telling you how big you are, you can hire a hundred women to do that - quite convincingly - for the price of one day with an Active. This is not what you want. This is about what you need. An Active doesn't judge. This will be the purest, most genuine human encounter of your life...and hers. It is a treasure; one I guarantee you will never, never forget.”
While the doll in the situation is still effectively a sexual slave, the client has been told that they were willing volunteers. The man in question became so in love with the imprint of Echo that he was given that he literally spent his entire fortune on repeat engagements until he lost all of his money and ended up in the trailer park, mourning her loss. It's a little sad, a little pathetic, and a little disgusting, but it's not impossible to empathize with his position. His listener merely states: “You know the saddest part? The ending!” This is, of course, Alpha, who promptly slits the man's throat with an enormous knife.
Parts of this episode - particularly Alpha's role in it - remind me of Kill Bill, which is an excellent comparison to make, so score two for two on Dollhouse last night. Anyway, cut to the main credits.
This episode opens up with a lovely little electronica beat that I have to mention first. I haven't been particularly impressed with the overall score for this series, except for the central theme of the actual Dollhouse, which is creepy little music-box overture that is actually quite effective. However, one of the only reasons that we got a second season in the first place is that Joss Whedon demonstrated that he could produce the show on a shoestring budget on top of the low ratings. One of the effects of this, naturally, is to cut the amount of money spent on featuring actual songs and to use more score work. “A Love Supreme” really gave the score-writers a chance to stretch their legs, so to speak, and it shows.
In any case, Eliza Dushku continues to improve markedly on her acting skills from the first season in the first scene. Echo has been strapped into a straight-jacket in a small, square concrete room, and she's shuddering and shaking and twisting herself in circles trying to get free. It's actually convincing enough to feel sorry for her, but the situation quickly gets creepy(er) when Victor comes onto the scene as the smiling psychologist asking questions.
Now, I've said it many times before, but I'll say it again: I really wish that Whedon and Dushku had tailored the lead role for a man, because Enver Gjokaj is a stunning actor. I love Eliza Dushku, and I've found her Echo (mostly) convincing and also fascinating to watch. But Gjokaj isn't just better than Dushku, he's better than every other actor on this show, save perhaps for Olivia Williams (who plays DeWitt, by the way). He's just fantastic - he's been Topher (extremely convincingly), Dominic (also eerily convincing), a British lover named Roger, Lubov the would-be mobster, a college girl named Kiki, a serial killer, and now a psychologist, all with equally convincing and somewhat disturbing results.
In any case, DeWitt, Ballard and Langton are all watching this on the other side of a two-way mirror. Boyd is a mask of nothing, but Ballard is starting to go nuts while DeWitt is still very much with the icy composure she seems to have wrapped around herself like a shield these past few episodes. Ballard accuses her of being as hysterical as a medieval witch-hunter - “If she floats she's a witch, and if she drowns...” he snarls. DeWitt, supremely uninterested, walks out to talk to “Doctor” Victor about his findings. Ballard desperately tries to appeal to Boyd to help free Echo.
Now, here was one of the nicer parts of last night. Boyd blatantly smacks Ballard down to the ground, verbally speaking, when Ballard asks him if he can stand Echo being hurt. Boyd Langton was, pretty much, throughout the first season the voice of moral reason in the Dollhouse. Now, while we know that Langton isn't perfect - in fact, in “Belonging,” he displayed a frightening knowledge of how to both erase bodies and evidence trails, as well as having sketchy contacts that help him erase the evidence of a man's existence - we do know that he cottoned on to Echo being special first and foremost, that he cares about the well-being of the dolls, and that he is one of the only ones that would stand up to DeWitt without fear in order to promote that general well-being.
Don't get me wrong: I quite like the character of Paul Ballard. He has his cases of piggishness and overt moral superiority, but at his core he's a good person. His moments of weakness with Mellie, his obsession with Caroline, and his willingness to admit he was wrong about both make him a much better hero in that he's inherently flawed. No one actually likes their heroes perfect because that perfection makes them boring - witness Buffy's moments of extreme stupidity and/or blind arrogance that nearly got the world destroyed once or twice in Whedon's previous Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It made her more engaging and it's why we root for Paul Ballard - we see pieces of ourselves in him.
However, his question to Boyd was more of a subtextual way of saying, don't you care about Echo anymore? Now that you're the Dollhouse's head of security, is that all you are or are you still partly Echo's handler? Boyd doesn't take this lying down. “It kills me to see her in there the same as you. I stood over that table and I made that promise to protect her just like you did, and I was there first,” Boyd snaps. “Half the reason DeWitt is doing this is to see you squirm so that she can find out what happened. So man up!”
This intensely gratifying exchange is then zoomed into an even more gratifying one in which Victor's psychologist imprint zeroes in on DeWitt and makes her quite uncomfortable. “Really, I don't know what you're looking for,” he asserts. “You must really hate her in some way to put her through all of this. Even she can't internalize this much.” He goes on to say, interestingly enough, that DeWitt and Echo are both similar in how much they keep inside: “Men wear their emotions outside, like their genitals, while women are forced to bottle everything up. You hate her because she can be both the Whore of Babylon and the Sacred Virgin and still be praised, whereas you are either feared or hated for displaying either of those qualities.”
DeWitt is not amused at the accuracy and forces him into the imprinting chair before snapping at Topher whether Echo's brain scans show anything of interest. Nothing at all, says Topher, glaring at her. It seems that a most interesting switch has come of this - where Adelle's morals are deteriorating, and badly, Topher's are growing stronger, to his own eventual detriment. In any case, she allows him to win the staring match and leaves the office dissatisfied, triggering Topher's memories.
Ballard and Langton have both let Topher in on Echo's secret, and Topher is perfectly aware that Echo is unique - her brain scans are all over the charts, unusual even for the average human personality that is fully formed, and he has been keeping this from DeWitt because in his fragile emotional state he's doing all he can to help Echo, Ballard and Langton, perhaps as a belated way of reaching out for friends or because he suspects that they may be able to help him avert or stop the technologically-wrought apocalypse that he sees coming now that DeWitt has handed over the equivalent of a neurological A-bomb to the power-hungry Rossum Corporation.
DeWitt finally relents and allows Echo to be wiped - only to immediately send her out on a romantic engagement, apparently still in order to screw Ballard over. The bitch is back, ladies and gentlemen, and she is here to stay.
Topher has been actually receiving some truly amusing lines and scenes lately, but personally I don't see the return of “that trademark Whedon wit!” that some reviewers have hailed it as. And it's good that it isn't. Dollhouse is different from anything Whedon has ever done. While both Buffy and Angel touched on some serious moral/philosophical issues - particularly Angel - neither of them really hit the philosophical/psychological questions that Dollhouse so readily raises. The “Whedon wit,” as it has been dubbed, is a blistering brand of sarcasm wrapped around nonsensical words and trademark made-up slang. This worked well in Buffy and Firefly - in Buffy because it gave the cast more endearing characterization and in Firefly because it was set so far in an alternate universe that it was funnier because the new slang made sense.
Moving on from my tirade!
Topher finally gets to meet the real Echo, and she jokes with him gently, which is actually almost tragic to watch - Echo still has dark circles under her eyes and bruises on her, and it's somewhat bitter as well. Was it not DeWitt herself who was lamenting not one hour ago, “I can't remember the last time we asked ourselves if an engagement posed a risk to an Active's health?” Now who is it pimping Echo out so soon on such obvious signs of stress and ill health? The mirror self-realization is an ugly thing, and I have a feeling that soon DeWitt will have to face herself and it's not going to be pretty.
Topher doesn't even have to imprint Echo for this engagement; instead, she creepily goes into a Matrix-esque trance and remembers the personality, bringing her to the forefront in a display of acting skill that finally shows us that Eliza Dushku has been using Echo as practice to perfect her imperfect skill set. In any case, she and Ballard go off to their assignment and share a touching moment in the car as Paul finally admits how much he despises acting as her pimp, and Echo tenderly comforts him for once as she assures him that it won't be her, Echo, with the client, it will be an imprint and it'll mean nothin'. It's looking like Ballard is finally beginning to believe that Echo herself is in love with him, and that scares him more than anything.
Echo enters the house to find that the man has been murdered, and suffers a minor breakdown. Since the imprint was “recalled” rather than traditionally imprinted, it takes the combined efforts of Ballard and Boyd to snap her out of it (don't you think it's funny how Dollhouse watchers have such trouble calling Paul Ballard 'Paul' but even though we knew Boyd Langton as 'Langton' for practically the entire first season we all call him 'Boyd?'). Ballard and Langton quickly deduce that the man was staged gruesomely for their benefit, as the state of decomposition has him dead for over a week and the engagement was booked a mere day prior to their finding it.
Echo comes to herself and notices a note in a vase of red roses: “To my #1,” it reads. Since Alpha slashed Whiskey's face up, turning her into the tortured Dr. Claire Saunders, in order to allow Echo to be number one (by the way, Whedon & Co. have confirmed that Amy Acker will be in season two for at least three episodes. We've already seen her in “Vows,” so she'll have to return before the series finale because of the role she played in “Epitaph One,” so anybody who misses her as much as I do can take heart that we will see both her and Miracle Laurie (Madeline/November) before the series ends). We see Ballard and Langton do some cool detective work - and by the way, am I the only one who loves it when both of them do the cop thing together? - to figure out that Alpha is murdering all of Echo's romantic engagements, one by one.
We also find out that Echo married a woman in San Francisco at some point, with Langton commenting that it was “a lovely ceremony.” I'll take a moment aside to say, from the gay perspective, that since we know that Topher can tweak with a body's molecular structure through brain patterns - making Echo lactate in “Instinct,” for instance - the writing crew nicely dodged the nature v. nurture debate on the issue of whether homosexuality is inborn bullet quite nicely, since it's never made apparent whether Topher made her a lesbian personality-wise or physically. Moving back to the story.
Alpha purchased Sierra for a romantic engagement himself, and sent her back to the Dollhouse with a message for Topher - that the next one “ages well.” Through some further police supposition (done quite nicely, I might add), Langton remembers Matt from the first episode, “Ghost,” who also reappeared in “Echoes,” noting that Matt has been purchasing Echo for his birthday celebration every year since Echo arrived at the Dollhouse. This also gives us a timeline for season one which makes sense - Dollhouse does not take place on a weekly basis, because even if Echo was the “number one Active,” even she wouldn't be sent on an engagement once a week. Excellent job, writers, for that little bit of exposition.
They quickly track Alpha down with a full-on SWAT team of crack Dollhouse security staff to find Alpha in a snazzy new suit on a helipad on the roof of a high-rise, with poor Matt chained to a chair with a bomb around his neck. Alan Tudyk played Alpha spectacularly well yet again, making him equally psychotic, playful, sadistic, and endearing all at once - think Dexter meets The Addams Family. Langton desperately says, “Alpha, there is some part of you that knows this isn't right.”
Alpha's response? “There are several parts of me that know this isn't right, none of them that care, and six...six who just find it funny!” He forces Matt to repeat what he told Alpha: that Echo was a “blast.” “I love a good pun,” Alpha says, right before he detonates Matt. Dollhouse certainly hasn't been shy on the gruesome scale this season, from kicking the crap out of Echo till she bled on several occasions, watching Summer Glau slam her own head into a television screen until it bled, watching Topher slice up Dr. Nolan in “Belonging,” watching Nolan attempt to rape Priya and having her stab him to death in “Belonging.” True to form, the camera never panned away from the shot and we had a lovely view of watching the sky rain little pieces of Matt down on Ballard and Langton's heads as Alpha made his getaway.
Meanwhile, DeWitt, still in cold-hard-British-bitch-from-hell mode, has decided that since Ballard won't confess to helping Echo during her three month sojourn from the Dollhouse, Echo must be Alpha's accomplice and so locks her back in her solitary cell. The rest of the dolls get summarily re-wiped, one by one (sadly this hour lacked another brief-though-hilarious cameo from Maurissa Tancharoen as Kilo), while Ballard quietly freaks out about Echo and Boyd attempts to regain control over the situation.
Ballard springs Echo from solitary and has her remember her “Rebecca Mynor” imprint so that she can find Joel Mynor - and we got him back, too, as the ever-lovely Patton Oswalt jumps back into his guest role with gusto, hitting all the right notes once again as we first met him back in the season one game-changer “Man on the Street.” Joel, after his bitter conversation with Ballard and Echo back in season one, has changed his ways and tried to move on from his wife's death - if you'll remember, his morally questionable yet moving story was hiring Echo year after year to be imprinted as his wife so that they could share the experience of him showing her their first house, which the real Rebecca never got to see before she died - and he is engaged to be married to a real girl now.
With Alpha on his tail, though, Mynor allows himself to be dragged back to the Dollhouse, where he is met by DeWitt, who has Topher distract him so that she can grab Echo, throw her back into solitary, and warn both Langton and Ballard that they are on extraordinarily short leashes from here on in. If you'll remember, she had her last chief of security sent to the Attic and the last handler that defied her was brutally slaughtered by the then-sleeper Active November while she was still imprinted as Mellie, Ballard's next door neighbor.
Mynor and Topher have a small conversation over which Mynor laments that he is, indeed, human. It's interesting to compare the Dollhouse to a sort of addiction - he wants to believe that he can have his wife back even though he's come to a point where he knows that he can't. He'd thought he'd put his “addiction” to seeing “Rebecca” again behind him, but now that he's right back in the Dollhouse all he wants to do is have Echo imprinted, even though he's aware that she's different from DeWitt's behavior.
DeWitt, meanwhile, returns to her office only to have Alpha emerge from her bathroom to inform her that she's low on toilet paper. They have a brief and somewhat horrifying conversation. DeWitt informs him truthfully that she's scared out of her mind - to which Alpha scornfully replies that, thanks to her and her goons, that if he ever got 'scared out of his mind' he'd just jump into a different mind, and then a different mind, and then a different mind, ad infinitum - and proceeds to bargain for her life, offering up Mynor's life as well as Echo's in a few brief moments. Whether or not DeWitt's change for the worse is permanent or not seems to be a moot point at this juncture.
Alpha instead forces DeWitt downstairs, to the central doll area, and activates a device much like the remote-wiping signal he designed to wipe Echo while she was on-assignment during “Gray Hour” in season one. This, however, merely activates Alpha's master plan: he 'bugged' Sierra with a virus that got uploaded into the Dollhouse's computer mainframe when she was wiped. Since he knew that protocol dictated that DeWitt re-wipe all of the dolls in the house, all of them 'caught the virus,' which Alpha uses to switch them into mindless combat mode, unleashing the full fury of years worth of muscle-memory implants of martial arts and street-fighting skills, and the dolls quickly make short work of the furniture, the handlers, the security team, and each other.
Echo, hearing the call but able to resist it, knows that Alpha has returned and shatters the security camera inside her cell, using the metal ring to slice into the glass of the two-way mirror so that she can wrap her hands in her clothing and shatter it in order to get out. It's lucky that there was a “Gray Hour,” because in the last two episodes Echo has called on her “Taffy” imprinted skills to break out of at least three different situations.
DeWitt flees into Saunders' old office and barricades the door shut, while Ballard and Langton battle their way through the dolls. It's looking quite a bit like the “House of Leaves” scene in Kill Bill - and here I'll insert a quick note: Whedon obviously knows and loves the fact that he has a cult audience in Dollhouse, so he doesn't spare us on the amazing references - the “Star Trek” ref from “The Public Eye/The Left Hand,” the cylons from “Battlestar Galactica” reference this last episode, Topher using the word “frakking” from BSG, the Matrix-like memory recalls from Echo, the Kill Bill shoutouts from “A Love Supreme.” One word: awesome.
Sierra, who was pretty much absent this episode, picked up a guard and slammed his head repeatedly against the wall until he passed out and walked on, looking pretty damn pleased with herself, until Topher runs by and zaps her with his disruptor, which seems to be the fastest way to 'shut down' the dolls. Ballard runs to Topher's office to secure Mynor, again playing the white knight, and again playing the fool to Alpha's ultimate plan as Victor steps out from behind the door and tranquilizes Paul. Alpha, his real quarry attained, shoves Mynor out the door and straps Paul into the chair.
It's then that we see Alpha's true endgame. Since the beginning, Alpha has been completely obsessed with Echo. We know from “Omega” that Alpha's original personality, Karl Craft, was only one-tick shy of being a serial killer, and that he suffered from a god complex. We don't know how much of Craft's original personality Alpha has maintained, but his obsession with carving his name into his victims' faces was something he started as Craft.
In any case, it's basic criminal psychology that serial killers believe that they are better than everyone else, a higher order of being. In Alpha's case, he refers to himself as a literal god, or an ubermensch. He has 36 distinct personalities that live inside of him,at times taking him over. He is faster, stronger, and smarter than the average human being thanks to that. Since Echo is like him - she was evolving while inside the Dollhouse, he fell into a sick, obsessed and selfish sort of love with her; that selfsame “love” is what led him to attempting to destroy Whiskey with pruning shears in order to let Echo be number one. When he took Echo to his “kingdom,” however, and put her on par with himself - the Omega to his Alpha - she surprised him by beating the hell out of him and informing him from the sane perspective that he didn't understand anything, and that they were not gods, but mere mortals, perhaps more screwed up than any other being alive, not meant to exist.
Alpha has since been driven by thoughts of both revenge and a stalker-esque obsession with Echo, and he reveals that he camped outside of Echo and Paul's little sanctuary during their three month leave from the Dollhouse. There he watched Echo fall in love with Paul, watched them kiss, and it finally drove him completely 'round the twist. Because Paul didn't sleep with her, he knows Paul feels for her - that's actually, interestingly enough, a real psychological study: denying oneself of the sexual drive for higher order feelings such as love is a sign of true human emotion - and so he hooks Paul up to the machine and tries to find why Echo loves him.
He then tortures Paul so badly through that same machine that he renders him brain dead and pushes his near-lifeless body to the floor.
I had to pause at this point while re-watching this episode, because it was actually quite emotional to watch as well as completely unexpected, but nevertheless, Paul is, for all intents and purposes, a human vegetable. When Echo sprints up the stairs to find Paul and stumbles across his body, she crumples. I'll again say that in these last few episodes, Eliza Dushku has really started getting good, and in “Meet Jane Doe” especially, Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard) has slam dunked Ballard's role.
We finally see Echo lose it as well, and we finally see an extended fight scene between Echo and Alpha, which we didn't get enough of in “Omega.” It was spectacularly played out as Alpha quickly lost it when he still didn't understand why Echo was in love with Paul, and Echo telling him that Paul was “ten times the man you are, and you're not even one man.” They slam each other all over Topher's office, ending with Echo completely losing it and pile-driving Alpha through Topher's circular windows, leaving them on the Dollhouse floor. “We are gods, above them, meant to have a love supreme,” Alpha pleads with her.
When she poises over Alpha to slam his head in with a rock, though, we get another horrifying shock: Alpha took Paul's mind and imprinted it on himself so that Echo would love him. Paul, too strong for Alpha, takes over Alpha's body long enough to beg Echo to kill him so that he won't have to live on in the body of a deranged serial killer. It was very effectively done by voicing over Alan Tudyk's voice with Tahmoh's so that we really got to hear what Echo heard, and see her internal struggle, and see her finally collapse into tears because she can't kill Paul, in any form.
Alpha, taking back possession of his body, jerks away from her and runs away from the Dollhouse feeling god only knows what. It was actually nice sci-fi hearkening back to the classic The Dark Phoenix Saga from X-Men when Jean manages to take control of herself long enough to beg Wolverine to kill her before she kills anyone else. Then, as now, Wolverine couldn't do it (and we actually do know that that scene inspired this one because Whedon has stated before that he's a huge Dark Phoenix fan, a plotline that would later inspire the Wicked Willow storyline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's sixth season).
Wrapping up, Ballard is left on life support in the Dollhouse, and Echo keeps watch over his bed. When Mynor comes by to say goodbye, Echo briefly dons part of Rebecca's personality to urge him to be happy, and to move on from her death, which is ultimately what the real Rebecca would have wanted. Echo then returns to standing sentinel over Paul in mourning, while DeWitt watches her suspiciously.
Final Grades
“Meet Jane Doe” = 9/10
“A Love Supreme” = 11/10
Ultimately, it was just an A+ night.
Final Thoughts
It's hard to watch how good Dollhouse is getting, it really is. I first started Dollhouse extremely interested in the philosophical premise. The first five episodes were dicey enough for me to even question why I was watching it, but it quickly started firing with enough power to get me through the first season after the sixth episode. Now, though, we're finally seeing Dollhouse's true potential reached too late to save the series. On the other hand, as I've stated before, I can't see how Dollhouse could last longer than five or so seasons, anyway, without wearing out its welcome, so perhaps its good that it will build a crescendo up to a crowning glory of a series finale without too many errors.
I was amazed at the strength of my desire for Echo and Ballard to end up together. During the first season, he was so caught up in this idealized image of Caroline that he was tearing himself up inside trying to free her. Now, though, the darkness is fading to light and it's becoming a much healthier thing for both of them. Seeing them kiss - truly kiss - was as heartbreaking as it was gratifying. I was almost in tears when Alpha strapped Paul to the chair, because the synopsis for this week said that someone was going to be permanently erased...I just never suspected that it would be Paul.
Thank god for judiciously used guest stars! On Bones this week Zooey Deschanel finally guested on her sister Emily's show, and she was on for all of seven minutes. It was rather sad, actually. On Dollhouse this year, the only guest star we've had that was underused was Michael Hogan in “Belle Chose.” We've had Keith Carradine guest starring four times (and chillingly so) as Harding, DeWitt's nemesis. We've had Jamie Bamber as Echo's would-be husband, Ray Wise in just the right dose as Stewart Lipman, Summer Glau as the twisted Bennett Halverson, and now Patton Oswalt and Alan Tudyk as Joel Mynor and Alpha, respectively, who both lived up to their fantastic potential.
DeWitt's transformation into the likeable monster she's become was done in a hurry, but Olivia Williams pulled it off spectacularly, so it wasn't unbelievable. We've had a huge upswing in acting talent from the cast members that were lacking - mostly Fran Kranz as Topher and Eliza Dushku as Echo, but also Dichen Lachman as Sierra (I'm sorry, I know she's a fan favorite, but until “Man on the Street” I didn't warm up to her at all). Now that I'm officially a Tahmoh Penikett's eight-pack abs addict, I'm even more excited for the upcoming SyFy 2010 miniseries Riverworld.
Ultimately, the time jumps are somewhat confusing, but they are also a handy way of speeding us relentlessly and excitingly and terrifyingly toward the end of this unique and impressive series. I can't wait until next week!
Coming Next Week
This is the last of the Dollhouse double-headers this year. Dollhouse will then return in January to air the final three episodes on their normal Friday night time slot, with the series finale to air either January 22nd or 23rd, I'll have to check.
“Stop-Loss” - When Victor's contract with the Dollhouse expires, he must deal with his traumatic memories of being a soldier while struggling to reintegrate into regular life, even as he struggles with haunting memories of Sierra. Meanwhile, the Dollhouse staff struggles to keep Ballard alive.
“The Attic” - When DeWitt finally deems Echo too dangerous, Echo's friends' worst fears are realized as Echo is finally consigned to the mysterious Attic. While DeWitt struggles with her own moral dilemmas, Echo must fight for freedom from the heart of the Dollhouse conspiracy.