This Week in Dollhouse

I've decided to pull a Craig and tell you what I think about a specific show every week. Dollhouse has improved markedly since the pilot, and though it's still an obviously flawed show, it does leave me full of thoughts, which I will now share.

First, quick thoughts on the last two weeks' episodes:

The Target



(Fancy Hulu embed!)

The pilot was so bad that I was only going to give the show one more chance, but the next episode was good enough to earn more viewing weeks from me. There's a twist in it, so don't read the next paragraph if you don't want spoilers.

Supposedly, Echo has been hired to be an outdoorsy girlfriend for some dude (the dude tells British boss lady about how jaded he's become by lousy women before, giving a little bit more credibility to why he'd be hiring a "perfect" Doll). But then! It turns out that he wants to hunt and kill her. At first, I thought he was just doing it for sport, like on that episode of Gilligan's Island, but apparently he was part of some larger, mysterious plot against Echo.

The best thing about this episode was that it focused on the relationship between Echo and her handler, Boyd. As it turns out, Boyd is AWESOME. Boyd is now my favorite. They also flashed back to how Amy Acker's character got her scars, which was nice if surprisingly quick.

The best thing: Echo and Boyd saving and trusting each other. Awwww.

The stupidest thing: Maybe just that they showed this episode so early--the order has been messed with, and it really seems like this one should have been later on, just because of how many questions it seemed to answer and the development of the promised "Echo starts to remember stuff" element of the show.

Stage Fright



This has been my favorite so far. There was finally a reasonable motivation for somebody to hire a Doll: someone is trying to kill a famous, diva-y singer. Her manager wants to protect her, but she hates having bodyguards all up in her business. He goes to the Dollhouse and gets Echo, who is programmed to be a backup singer, but she also has programming that makes her fiercely protective of the singer. The singer doesn't realize Echo is a bodyguard because neither does Echo. That's kind of brilliant.

The best thing: Echo hits Fake-yonce with a folding chair. It was great.

The stupidest thing: Fake-yonce's terrible, heavy-handed speech about how she has no real personality of her own and that she was just created by a factory. WE GET IT. HER LIFE PARALLLELS THAT OF A DOLL.

And, this week, Gray Hour.



This week was not as good as last week, but it was still all right. Spoilerish: Echo leads a team that robs some sort of art museum (or something) but then! In the middle of a cell phone call to Boyd, she hears some weird interference and it wipes her programming. That means she's ina high-intensity, dangerous situation as Blank Echo, who's totally innocent and useless. That element was pretty interesting.

It was still beset by too much heavy-handed dialog about identity and stuff. This keeps happening. It's kind of like how everybody on House keeps telling House that he hates people and he's miserable. In both situations . . . well, for one thing, we get it. For another thing, nobody would ever talk like that.

The best thing: Echo's Doll friend Sierra getting programmed with Echo's robber programming so she could try to fix Echo's mess. It was fun to see both actresses playing the same character.

The stupidest thing: The episode began with Echo as a midwife delivering some baby somewhere with no explanation of who these people were or why they used Echo instead of a real, much less expensive midwife. Nothing to do with anything. Ridiculous use of a Doll.


Overall, Eliza Dushku is still not the best actress (in the world or even on this particular show. The woman who plays Echo's friend Doll, Sierra, is actually pretty rockin'). She's gotten better at playing blank Echo, but pretty much all her programmed characters are . . . Eliza Dushku.

Another problem is that there's this other storyline about some FBI guy trying to expose the Dollhouse. You notice I didn't mention this FBI guy in any of those episode summaries? That's because he adds nothing to the show (well, some ladies apparently think he's grade-A eye candy. He's not my type). All of his scenes feel like they come from a different show, and not a good one. He's not very interesting, and he's not very smart (one week he went to a sketchy location alone and--surprise!--got shot by some Russian mobsters. He should have seen that coming. Moron). I don't root for him and I don't see a reason to.

Finally, the premise is still fairly shaky. However, as I had hoped, the stories that the premise produces can be entertaining enough that I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. As long as that keeps happening, I'll keep watching.