Doll House: The Awakening

I just can’t decide what to think about Dollhouse. There are parts of it that I find very interesting and I am beginning to become more interested in the back story of each of the characters. The idea that Echo willingly agreed to become a doll makes everyone who works in the dollhouse seem a little less depraved allowing me to begin to like some of the a little, though I still don’t trust them.

This episode of dollhouse saw 5 of the dolls waking up with their original personalities but none of their memories.  I was a little disappointed to find out why but this didn’t last long because it never felt like it was going to change the show, but in a way it did because understanding why they were at the dollhouse helped considerably. That Echo wants to help people is of course an interesting reason for her to be a main character but it was one of the least interesting.

Victor is in love, which we already knew but it was still good to see them keep that thread going but it’s really the other two women who grew a lot in this episode. Sierra, so it seems, is the only one of the main cast dolls who didn’t enter the dollhouse willingly. Instead she turned down a propesition from a man who then kidnapped her and sold her into slavery in the dollhouse. We don’t know how much the dollhouse knows about this only that it was effort for him and with other bad things that have happened to her I really want to see things go well for her.

Finally there is November, or Mellie who appears to have joined the dollhouse because she lost a child. It’s very hard to feel truly bad about the dollhouse in this case. She is generally happy now something that likly wouldn’t be true otherwise.

All I really know about this episode is that it made the entire concept of the Dollhouse and the show itself a bit more complicated which is a good thing because while black and white can work in the right show on dollhouse it simply felt like everything and everyone was corrupt except the completely helpless people and that just isn’t much fun to watch for very long.

So all in all Dollhouse isn’t nearly as close to getting removed from my DRV as it was but I’m still not convinced.

Dollhouse: Man on the Street

Until now one of the major things that I felt that Dollhouse was missing was paranoia. The basic premise of Dollhouse is one which is filled with room for paranoia. How can we know that anyone on this show is really who they say, or even who they believe themselves to be?

If this technology really works then why use real people inside the dollhouse? How do we know that the doctor, or the scientists or even the woman who runs the dollhouse hasn’t been created with this technology to be exactly what they need. A person with the skills and moral ambiguity that they need to be the perfect dollhouse employee.

This of course might add a bit more instability to the dollhouses since it appears the technology isn’t perfect but it also appears that if you leave them in personality longer that there would be less glitches. This is why would have a few “actives” who you changed regularly and kept in a safe docile state the rest of the time surrounded by other “inactives’ who had their changed only once, perhaps with a single personality rather than the mix of personalities that they use on the actives, basically cloning a single person’s mind.

This episode goes even farther than simply distrusting the people inside the dollhouse though. With the ability to make people into anything you can have sleeper agents. Perhaps they can even kidnap someone, copy their mind, make a few quick adjustments and then replace the same person except with a few adjustments.

So now you can’t trust the people in the Dollhouse, you can’t trust people outside the Dollhouse, but there is one final person who you can’t trust. Yourself. if you were an active you would, by definition, believe you were who you were. In some ways you would even be that person except controlled by others. What are you beyond your personality and memories?

In addition to all of that we also find out that this isn’t the only dollhouse, and more importantly that the fulfillment of dreams isn’t their goal, only their business. That means that they exist for some other, probably more nefarious reason.

We were told that this was going to be a “game changing” show and for me it certainly was. For the first time since Dollhouse has been on the air I really want to see what happens next week. I guess that means it’s time for Fox to cancel it.

Dollhouse

I’m trying very hard to care about the characters of dollhouse but after several weeks of watching there just isn’t anyone i really care about and this episode didn’t help.

I’m not even sure if i’m supposed to care about any of them. Echo really is an empty vessel and though I can empathise with her predicament a little the truth is that I don’t really care about anything she does.

Then there are the people in the dollhouse. Some of them are portrayed as good people, but every one of them is helping to exploit the dolls. They are not just allowing evil to happen by ignoring it but activly helping it. From the doctors to the scientists to her handler, some may seem like nicer people than others but they are all helping this.

That only leaves the FBI agent who is tracking her. I should care about this character. I like the actor, and he’s doing the right thing. I just don’t care. There is no jepordy for this character. If he fails he’s lost nothing and if he succeeds he’ll feel good about it but that’s about it.

With all of that we come to the story. Echo is a blind, religious girl sent into a cult in this episode to help rescue people  from teh cult. There are numerous things that just don’t make all that much sense in this but the real problem is that I just don’t really care. the people in the cult didn’t even ask for help and though we’re told that the cult leader is a bad guy there isn’t a lot of signs of that until the government starts to bother him.

Overall I still want to like dollhouse. I think there are interesting ideas here and opportunites for a good show but it really needs to move on. Have Echo escape, or chose to stay even though she knows that they did, or something else, but move the overall plot out of where it’s at because until you do that I can’t imagine that I’m going to care.

Dolhouse: The Target

With low premier ratings and Joss Whedon talking about how he’s going to focus on the Internet the future doesn’t look great for dollhouse but this episode was good. There were a couple old friends on the show for fans of Joss.
Amy Acker from Angel is playing the a doctor on dollhouse. I missed the first fifteen minutes of last weeks episode so i don’t know if she was on then but seeing her was a treat. Mark Sheppard for Firefly was also on the show, a little less sleazy than in other roles you may have seen him on.
That leads me to a question, have Mark Sheppard and Tahmoh Penikett had lines together before?
I know that this episode is supposed to be an improvement over last weeks but I can’t say I really agree. There were good parts and I’m interested in Alpha, but I didn’t really like the psychopath hunting people angle. Perhaps I’ve simply seen to much science fiction but it felt old. I’m still assuming that these early shows are setting up the feel of the show and they can start being more different later but for now it doesn’t feel all that solid.