Dollhouse 1x06: Man on the Street
WHEE!! Dude, that was ACE! I haven't seen anyone else's reviews (haven't been online all day), but my thoughts are behind the cut.
We didn't really have an Engagement of the Week this week (EOTW? I might use that), but were presented with various situations in and out of the house. The first was Joel Miner (sp?), for whom Echo was playing his wife Rebecca, coming to meet him at a house that Joel had meant to show his actual wife before she died, proving to her that he'd finally made it. This was interrupted by Ballard, who assaulted a load of security guys and then had a chat with Joel (he kind of cocked the whole thing up by freezing when he saw Caroline). Joel pointed out that Ballard has as big a fantasy as he does - to find Caroline and have her fall into his arms after being saved. Ballard kind of takes this and tries to reject it, making moves on Mellie instead etc.
This is intercut with the revelation that Sierra is being abused inside the house, with Victor being the main suspect. Boyd investigates and discovers it is her handler (didn't catch his name). DeWitt tells Boyd to never act on his own again, but gives him a bonus anyway. (Boyd: "I don't want a bonus." DeWitt: "I need to give you one." Interesting bit of dialogue. I love DeWitt more and more.) DeWitt tells the handler he has a chance to redeem himself - he's to kill Mellie, who's found out too much about the Dollhouse from Ballard. He goes when Ballard is getting post-coital munchies (Chinese) and attacks her, not apparently sexually as far as we got which was a bloody relief (*shiver*). Turns out however that Mellie is a sleeper doll/agent - DeWitt phones her during the attack and comes over the answer-phone ("There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is green.") and Mellie gains +50 hand-to-hand, getting the handler off her and cracking his neck on the edge of a coffee table. ("There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is yellow.")
Topher has programmed Echo in the meantime to be a precision-psycho, with a little abuse of power to make his intern get some food. Brief moment of pseudo-exposition about the incompatibility of certain traits (rage/precision etc.), but Topher sorts it. Echo goes to hassle Ballard at the Chinese (Boyd is not on the case because he's still in his "cooling down" period for punching Sierra's handler through a window). She tells Ballard a message, apparently from some sort of underground group inside the Dollhouse, saying they have a person on the inside and that Ballard is going about everything the wrong way - there are global Dollhouses, and their purpose is not just to deal in fantasies. He needs to find out what that purpose is. She then sets Ballard up to look like he's shot a cop and tells him that Mellie is being targeted for her knowledge. Ballard runs home.
Another great exchange at the end = Dominic: "You played a good hand." DeWitt: "I played a bad hand very well. There is a distinction." Then we see Sierra sharing a book with Victor (whom she was freaked out by earlier in the episode) and are told that as much of her experience has been wiped as possible. DeWitt goes to see Echo, who is painting a picture of what looks like a reference to Joel and Rebecca outside there house. She tells DeWitt that it's not finished. DeWitt asks her whether Echo would like it to be finished, and we then see the engagement of Joel and Rebecca replaying generally happily. (They're going to have sex though, we know this from previously in the episode. As Joel says, it is a fantasy.)
Super super super clever episode. I'm a bit cheesed that Sierra was made into such a victim, but very glad that Victor wasn't the culprit, despite his reactions towards her. Rape is not natural and I was glad to see that Victor's attraction to Sierra was shown to be simply that - he wanted to be with her, to have her sit with them at lunch - his reaction to Echo's "I like to be alone sometimes" was not "Well, I want to be with Sierra so etc.", but "Maybe she didn't see us." The scene was cut after Sierra started screaming with Victor's hand on her arm, but I do think Victor would have accepted Sierra wanting to be alone if she'd said so (I freaking hope).
And of course with Sierra we get thrown into the quagmire of what the dolls are doing. Because it's different, it appears consensual. Are the dolls being raped by being programmed to want to be with people? Yes, pretty much. People are having their personality suppressed and being used for sexual activity. Hello, drugged-rape.
But at the same time I do believe that the people who exist within engagements do exist (say Rebecca in Joel's instance). At the time that the doll is fully them they aren't being raped. The problem is that they are never fully removed from Echo (to take her as the "base" for that body), as we saw in the painting and as we've seen in the series (Jenny the Action Hero was still there too). When she's engaged as someone there are n other people who have been wiped from her body for the encounter to take place - they are being abused. And when Rebecca is 'wiped', having become part of Echo, she is starting a cycle of abuse as well.
I don't think Caroline is any more important than any of the other people Echo becomes, even though it's only for a day, and I think that's where Ballard's view is flawed. The horrifying thing about the Dollhouse is not that one personality gets 'wiped', it's the repeated imprinting and wiping which traps more and more people in its system (as little dregs, but dregs are important).
Of course, there's conflict there, as we saw in the repeated engagement, because as much as the other personality-dregs inside Echo might not have any urge to engage with Joel, the bits of Echo that are Rebecca still do. What happens in that situation? DeWitt seemed to make a call that Echo should be allowed to re-engage in something part of her wanted done, but are we to take Echo's apparent yearning for completion as an actual desire to see Joel again, drink champagne with him, shag him in his rose-strewn bed? Besides, completion is never going to come - Joel re-enacts the scene every year, and it's not as if Rebecca isn't going to want to go on from seeing the house to living in the house to carrying on with her life. Everyone who 'gets their treatment' lacks closure, or so we've seen so far - Echo, in whatever role, is always rabbiting on to Boyd about what she wants to do next. What does DeWitt's granting of the request mean?
I think I've stopped making sense with my ramblings. Oh well, anyway, DeWitt rocks my world for being completely in control of her evil corporation. The female characters in the show are such (at the moment) that I'm comfortable with one of them being the evil one, as long as she can do it competently. If any squidgy 'feminine' feelings mean that she comes round to the side of good I'll be bloody pissed off. She's starting to be in the same field as Lilah, and that's a very good thing in my book. Continue, Olivia Williams, and excel!!
ED's acting was stellar in this episode - her pretty-wife-of-nerd was hilarious (and so different to everything else so far). The pyscho at the end was pretty much named Faith in my head, but I don't know if it was the choreography/lack of wires or acting, but the fight with Ballard felt really as though it wasn't being aided by mystical powers. It wasn't a Buffy fight, and that was cool.
Oh yeah, I think I'm supposed to speculate whether there really is an inside man working with Alpha (Topher? He controls everything after all...), or whether it's a set-up by DeWitt et al. to make Ballard harmless. That's not overly my gig though, so give me more story, dude!
Final Note: Global Dollhouse? If the HQ is British I'm going to start thinking Joss doesn't like us as much as he says he does. :( (Hee...)
We didn't really have an Engagement of the Week this week (EOTW? I might use that), but were presented with various situations in and out of the house. The first was Joel Miner (sp?), for whom Echo was playing his wife Rebecca, coming to meet him at a house that Joel had meant to show his actual wife before she died, proving to her that he'd finally made it. This was interrupted by Ballard, who assaulted a load of security guys and then had a chat with Joel (he kind of cocked the whole thing up by freezing when he saw Caroline). Joel pointed out that Ballard has as big a fantasy as he does - to find Caroline and have her fall into his arms after being saved. Ballard kind of takes this and tries to reject it, making moves on Mellie instead etc.
This is intercut with the revelation that Sierra is being abused inside the house, with Victor being the main suspect. Boyd investigates and discovers it is her handler (didn't catch his name). DeWitt tells Boyd to never act on his own again, but gives him a bonus anyway. (Boyd: "I don't want a bonus." DeWitt: "I need to give you one." Interesting bit of dialogue. I love DeWitt more and more.) DeWitt tells the handler he has a chance to redeem himself - he's to kill Mellie, who's found out too much about the Dollhouse from Ballard. He goes when Ballard is getting post-coital munchies (Chinese) and attacks her, not apparently sexually as far as we got which was a bloody relief (*shiver*). Turns out however that Mellie is a sleeper doll/agent - DeWitt phones her during the attack and comes over the answer-phone ("There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is green.") and Mellie gains +50 hand-to-hand, getting the handler off her and cracking his neck on the edge of a coffee table. ("There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is yellow.")
Topher has programmed Echo in the meantime to be a precision-psycho, with a little abuse of power to make his intern get some food. Brief moment of pseudo-exposition about the incompatibility of certain traits (rage/precision etc.), but Topher sorts it. Echo goes to hassle Ballard at the Chinese (Boyd is not on the case because he's still in his "cooling down" period for punching Sierra's handler through a window). She tells Ballard a message, apparently from some sort of underground group inside the Dollhouse, saying they have a person on the inside and that Ballard is going about everything the wrong way - there are global Dollhouses, and their purpose is not just to deal in fantasies. He needs to find out what that purpose is. She then sets Ballard up to look like he's shot a cop and tells him that Mellie is being targeted for her knowledge. Ballard runs home.
Another great exchange at the end = Dominic: "You played a good hand." DeWitt: "I played a bad hand very well. There is a distinction." Then we see Sierra sharing a book with Victor (whom she was freaked out by earlier in the episode) and are told that as much of her experience has been wiped as possible. DeWitt goes to see Echo, who is painting a picture of what looks like a reference to Joel and Rebecca outside there house. She tells DeWitt that it's not finished. DeWitt asks her whether Echo would like it to be finished, and we then see the engagement of Joel and Rebecca replaying generally happily. (They're going to have sex though, we know this from previously in the episode. As Joel says, it is a fantasy.)
Super super super clever episode. I'm a bit cheesed that Sierra was made into such a victim, but very glad that Victor wasn't the culprit, despite his reactions towards her. Rape is not natural and I was glad to see that Victor's attraction to Sierra was shown to be simply that - he wanted to be with her, to have her sit with them at lunch - his reaction to Echo's "I like to be alone sometimes" was not "Well, I want to be with Sierra so etc.", but "Maybe she didn't see us." The scene was cut after Sierra started screaming with Victor's hand on her arm, but I do think Victor would have accepted Sierra wanting to be alone if she'd said so (I freaking hope).
And of course with Sierra we get thrown into the quagmire of what the dolls are doing. Because it's different, it appears consensual. Are the dolls being raped by being programmed to want to be with people? Yes, pretty much. People are having their personality suppressed and being used for sexual activity. Hello, drugged-rape.
But at the same time I do believe that the people who exist within engagements do exist (say Rebecca in Joel's instance). At the time that the doll is fully them they aren't being raped. The problem is that they are never fully removed from Echo (to take her as the "base" for that body), as we saw in the painting and as we've seen in the series (Jenny the Action Hero was still there too). When she's engaged as someone there are n other people who have been wiped from her body for the encounter to take place - they are being abused. And when Rebecca is 'wiped', having become part of Echo, she is starting a cycle of abuse as well.
I don't think Caroline is any more important than any of the other people Echo becomes, even though it's only for a day, and I think that's where Ballard's view is flawed. The horrifying thing about the Dollhouse is not that one personality gets 'wiped', it's the repeated imprinting and wiping which traps more and more people in its system (as little dregs, but dregs are important).
Of course, there's conflict there, as we saw in the repeated engagement, because as much as the other personality-dregs inside Echo might not have any urge to engage with Joel, the bits of Echo that are Rebecca still do. What happens in that situation? DeWitt seemed to make a call that Echo should be allowed to re-engage in something part of her wanted done, but are we to take Echo's apparent yearning for completion as an actual desire to see Joel again, drink champagne with him, shag him in his rose-strewn bed? Besides, completion is never going to come - Joel re-enacts the scene every year, and it's not as if Rebecca isn't going to want to go on from seeing the house to living in the house to carrying on with her life. Everyone who 'gets their treatment' lacks closure, or so we've seen so far - Echo, in whatever role, is always rabbiting on to Boyd about what she wants to do next. What does DeWitt's granting of the request mean?
I think I've stopped making sense with my ramblings. Oh well, anyway, DeWitt rocks my world for being completely in control of her evil corporation. The female characters in the show are such (at the moment) that I'm comfortable with one of them being the evil one, as long as she can do it competently. If any squidgy 'feminine' feelings mean that she comes round to the side of good I'll be bloody pissed off. She's starting to be in the same field as Lilah, and that's a very good thing in my book. Continue, Olivia Williams, and excel!!
ED's acting was stellar in this episode - her pretty-wife-of-nerd was hilarious (and so different to everything else so far). The pyscho at the end was pretty much named Faith in my head, but I don't know if it was the choreography/lack of wires or acting, but the fight with Ballard felt really as though it wasn't being aided by mystical powers. It wasn't a Buffy fight, and that was cool.
Oh yeah, I think I'm supposed to speculate whether there really is an inside man working with Alpha (Topher? He controls everything after all...), or whether it's a set-up by DeWitt et al. to make Ballard harmless. That's not overly my gig though, so give me more story, dude!
Final Note: Global Dollhouse? If the HQ is British I'm going to start thinking Joss doesn't like us as much as he says he does. :( (Hee...)