Dollhouse

SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have been watching Dollhouse. Don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen episode four yet.

It’s a bittersweet week – by far the best episode this season (and certainly among the top ever), mingled with the possibility it’s the last we might see for a while. But before we get to that latter point, we should revel in the former for a while…

This week at the Dollhouse

After the mention was made of Sierra having been put in the Dollhouse by a bad man in Needs (s1e8), it’s been a story begging to be told in full. And this week it was. We saw that before the Dollhouse she was Priya, a freespirited artist, drugged by the evil Dr Kennard who was in love with her. He convinced the Dollhouse she was a paranoid schizophrenic and gave her to the Dollhouse.

When Topher and DeWitt discovered this, they tried to stop Dr Kennard using the Dollhouse, or Sierra, but were overruled by the Rossum Corporation – with Dr Kennard given Sierra on permanent loan. This turned out not to be very permanent, when, after Topher imprinted her with her old personality, she killed him. This was a lot more permanent.

Why this episode was completely brilliant

So many reasons – the fact that it was so Sierra and Victor heavy weighs heavy. And also that Dichen Lachman as the pre-Dollhouse Priya, the doll, and the imprinted original personality, was brilliant.

It’s obviously not something that can be done every week, but the examination of how people get brought into the Dollhouse was immeasurably more powerful a subject than another of Echo’s adventures. Added to that, the continued development of Topher and DeWitt and their excursions into being people with consciences is too. Topher may not ever be a truly sympathetic character, but this mixture of suddenly starting to tell right from wrong and his growing sense that he’s losing control of his creations brings us closer to understanding how he might move from season one’s sarcastic cold-hearted science wonk to being the closed-off headcase we saw in epitaph one.

In everything, the writing, the performances, the questions raised and answers given, it was head and shoulders above every episode so far this season, and arguably better than most in season one, as well.

Which is why it’s very sad – if this is the kind of material we’ve been waiting for and where this is all going – if these 13 episodes will be the last made. Fox have committed to airing all of season two in America – but this was the last episode to air in its regular timeslot (it’s going off the air for a few weeks, and then they’ll show the rest in back-to-back double episodes in December). What does that mean for the UK airings? We’re still waiting on confirmation from SciFi, but it seems unlikely that they’d show the episodes so far in advance of the US airings; I’ll update this post when I get an answer from them about it.

Thoughts

• So it’s definitely not just Echo having brain slips and loopholes in memory: Victor remembers who he was originally, and Sierra, even when imprinted with her old personality, knew that she was in love with Victor.

• Echo reads books. And now has an all-access pass to the Dollhouse doors.

• Boyd has an uncanny calmness when dealing with the disposal of dead bodies. • Where is Ballard? And Dr Whiskey Saunders? I miss Dr Saunders. Ballard not so much, but it would be nice to know where he was.