Dollhouse: Needs
By fred | April 5, 2009
(S01E08) This was a very interesting episode, one that had me feeling both happy, and worried about the future of this show. I think everyone agrees that the first episodes of the show weren’t really the best ones, and that it is most likely due to the network, again, interfering with the creative process, wanting something that nobody else wanted and that only ended up hurting the show.
But now that Whedon and his crew have been able to get control back, the past few episodes have showed improvement, things got better, in more than one ways. This episode clearly continued to go down that road, making it one of the best episode of the show I feel. All along I had that feeling that what was going on seemed pretty darn cool, that something was up, yet I couldn’t really figure it out.
Seeing all the dolls wake up and wonder what the hell is going on, where they are, was awesome. Remember that Whedon humor touch people complained was missing back in the first episodes? It was all there, with the talk about aliens and whatnot, and lines such as “I like pancakes. – We’re all gonna die.”
But as this escape went on, it became obvious than something was wrong, they weren’t really escaping. Everything was way too easy, they kept acting odd, regrouping and looking confused, asking questions, all that “unnoticed” by anyone. It even made the idea that them imprinted with such personalities as a way to test the dollhouse security look wrong, because no handler seemed to see anything, and the dolls were clearly allowed to leave.
The final explanation, letting them get closure from their recent “memory breaks” so that they could close any open loops they had and be “fixed,” restored to their initial state of mind, was a very good explanation, and I liked that it come from Dr Saunders, who isn’t all evl and wanted to help the dolls not go to the attic, and yet is still working here, so she can’t be all good — unless she is the one inside.
I’m not sure it made sense for everything, especially Sierra as I fail to see how she got closure by knowing the man who enslaved her into the dollhouse is still out there, free, having fun, and that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon, how that could be what she was after?
I guess the idea was that all the needed was to know what happened to her, but it seems a little too easy, no? It’s like the “closure=sedative” bit, which I found a little convenient as well. But this episode was very interesting, even if we knew that escape wasn’t for real, while not having the whole purpose of it figured out, we still could enjoy the way it went down and the little tidbits of information we got out of it, from the doll’s past for instance.
I never believe Adelle when she says everyone volunteered to join the dollhouse, nor that of the end of their contract they are released into the world freely (I’d be guessing for they’re simply going to the attic, whatever that actually means), but I like the idea that this place is really evil, and that those people are all very nasty, not only in their ultimate motives but also their day to day actions and the way they treat human lives. After all, that’s the whole premise of the dollhouse: people having the power and technology to turn human beings into unaware slaves, and much like Topher, rip all humanity from them to see them as nothing else than (disposable) toys.
But where I got conflicted is thinking about what’s coming next. As I was watching this episode, and loving how great it was because it centered back on a more serialized plot, and because it wasn’t as much an Echo show as it was about an ensemble, and all of the (four) broken dolls, I couldn’t help but fear that by the end they would go where they eventually went : a tabula rasa.
The dolls have been fixed, they don’t remember anything anymore, and we can go back to a weekly assignment after the other. But I’m just not sure I’m any interested in seeing that (again). I’m not sure that I care to see the show returning to an old formula of self-contained episode all centered around Echo and Echo only. The changes introduced in the past episodes were all for the better, the more serialized approach and to enlarge the focus to other dolls than just Echo.
I just really hope this wasn’t temporary, a one-time thing before going back to the more traditional model that, quite frankly, doesn’t work all that well here, with that premise. I want to believe, though, that they’ll manage to keep going in the right direction.
What did everybody else think?
