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Newsadvance.com Dollhouse"Dollhouse" Tv Series - Newsadvance.com ReviewFriday 8 May 2009, by Webmaster If there’s one thing every cult TV fan should know, it’s this: never doubt Joss Whedon. It’s a lesson I’ve recently learned with the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator’s latest series, “Dollhouse.” For those of you who have never watched, here’s a quick primer: the Dollhouse is a highly illegal and underground organization that basically provides living “dolls” for wealthy and powerful clients. These dolls’ personalities are regularly wiped clean, so they can be imprinted with new ones for each new “engagement.” But their system isn’t perfect, and we see those cracks in Echo (Eliza Dushku), a doll who starts to remember former engagements during new ones and puts the entire organization at risk. Echo’s only ally is her handler, Boyd, who quickly becomes a father figure and a constant in her fractured life. Or, in Whedon-speak, he’s totally the Giles to her Buffy. Hot on the Dollhouse’s trail is FBI agent Paul Ballard, whose obsession with the supposed urban legend is something of a joke around the bureau. The pilot, which premiered in February, was confusing and felt more like a mid-season episode than a premiere. It just dropped us right into the middle of the action, with few explanations, and I worried that “Dollhouse” wasn’t going to live up to the hype. But things improved in the second episode, which gave us more background on the Dollhouse and began delving into the show’s mythology — and we all know Whedon can do mythology like nobody’s business. It also made the first mention of rogue doll Alpha, who finally showed his face last week and will play a major role in Friday’s season finale. For me, the real turning point was the episode that revealed the true identity of Ballard’s neighbor and sometime girlfriend Mellie: she was a “sleeper agent” doll working undercover to make sure he didn’t get too close to the truth. I’m not sure what this says about my powers of deduction, but I didn’t see this coming. At all. I thought it was going to be this tragic scene, where Ballard’s ladylove was murdered. Then the phone rang, and, upon hearing two magic sentences, sweet little Mellie turned into a killing machine. And my jaw hit the floor. From then on out, Whedon was on a roll. There was a payoff almost every week, and he seemed determined to not drag anything out. In a matter of episodes, Ballard also discovered the truth about Mellie and, last week, actually found the Dollhouse. We also came face-to-face with the murderous Alpha (Alan Tudyk, who you might recognize from Whedon’s “Firefly”), but we weren’t supposed to know it was him at first. Tudyk showed up as Stephen Kepler, the environmental consultant who designed the Dollhouse. Ballard tracked him down and, in a series of pretty hilarious, perfectly Whedon-esque scenes, forced Kepler to help him break into the Dollhouse. “Carrots. Medicinal carrots,” Kepler, using every excuse in the book, told Ballard when the agent barged into his apartment and was greeted by a living room full of pot plants. “Personal use medicinal carrots that were here when I moved in, and I’m holding it for a friend.” In the spirit of full disclosure, I already knew that Tudyk was Alpha — I just can’t resist a good spoiler — and watched with a sense of impending doom as he crippled the Dollhouse’s security system to find Echo, the object of his obsession. Then, in the blink of an eye, he transformed from Kepler the timid hippie into Alpha, a truly scary and imposing bad guy. The promos for Friday’s episode — which could be the series’ swan song; Fox has yet to renew it — promise big reveals about who Alpha and Echo were before they joined the Dollhouse and why Alpha went rogue. If I know Whedon, he certainly won’t be pulling any punches. |