For I have learned to love it. Well, I pretty much fell head-over-heels half-way through the first season, at exactly the moment Joss said it would get good. Really, TV stations, learn to trust the man. Sure, Dollhouse isn’t up there with Buffy yet, or Firefly (which probably hit the ground faster than any other of Whedon’s series’, if you watch it in the right order). I wouldn’t be surprised if I never watch Season 1, episodes 1-5 again though. The new start really does jump right in. It doesn’t matter if you’ve not seen ‘Epitaph One’ (though you should, because it’s great) – which is as it should be, since it didn’t air on TV, and just shoots off about three months from where ‘Omega’ ended. As pretty much the whole Dollhouse-related section of the internet has already declared, the Topher/Saunders stuff is the best storyline, although I am also intrigued by the Boyd/Ballard dynamic, since they are both clearly more concerned about Echo than they are about anyone else – and I suspect Boyd sees a lot of himself in Ballard and in what Ballard is doing. He *is* ex-cop, after all. Ex-Cop/Ex-Fed, getting involved in morally shady underground stuff, for what reasons? Somone asked Boyd ‘why?’ in Season One – and that’s not gotten answered yet.
“What “Dollhouse” is about theme-wise is fascinating, and what “Dollhouse” is about story-wise is only sometimes interesting.
What episodes like “Man on the Street” and, especially, the unaired “Epitaph One”(*) showed was that the dramatic meat of the series wasn’t in Echo’s missions, or even in Ballard’s attempt to take down the Dollhouse and save Caroline, but in those much larger questions of identity, and of the moral implications of being able to erase a person and make them into someone else entirely.”
– Alan Seppinwall gets it right on his blog
However,the Echo-Mission storyline didn’t grate this week, it fused nicely, because the questions of identity and moral implications are steadily becoming part of her storyline as the programming misfires on her. Given the last scenes of the episode, Dollhouse is really looking to bring the big themes and Echo’s ‘plot of the week’ stuff together. Huzzah, indeed.
I also join pretty much everyone else on the Dollhouse-internet in declaring this the line of the episode: ““My whole existence was constructed by a sociopath in a sweater vest. What do you suppose I should do?”
The best moment though, was Topher telling Saunders how he made her: “I made you question. I made you fight for your beliefs. I didn’t make you hate me. You chose to.” I loved that – he created her to fulfil a function, and made her a certain kind of person to do so – but she’s taken on the traits and is expressing them in specific ways. Speaking as someone who couldn’t stand Amy Acker as Fred in Angel, I am suprised at how sorry I am that her character’s only going to be in three episodes of Dollhouse this season. Maybe they’ll cancel her other show?
