Dollhouse

For the seventh episode of Dollhouse, we get a special treat: an amazing amount of backstory about Echo and a completely stoned Dollhouse staff. Both were highly satisfying pieces of television, and I found myself laughing hard at the antics of the usually intense Laurence Dominic and Adelle DeWitt.

Quick Recap

A student ingests an experimental drug at Freemount College and ends up killing himself by repeatedly banging his head off a window. The incident occurs at Rossum House, which is owned by the Dollhouse's parent organisation. When it becomes clear other students have taken the drug, DeWitt is asked to provide Actives to lock down the college and sedate the drug users.

Man On The Street is the episode Dollhouse watchers have been waiting for. In between interview footage of people talking about the urban legend of the Dollhouse, Ballard finally tracks down Echo at her latest assignment (that was easy, wasn't it?) and Langton exposes a handler interfering with Sierra. Oh yeah, and there was that little bombshell about there being a Dollhouse in virtually every major city.

I laughed out loud when the interviewer described the Dollhouse as "a Big Foot for the big city". The idea that this urban legend is real, and the Dolls are running around amongst 'real people' incites a range of emotions from the public. Some are disgusted, others are outraged at the human trafficking, others like the idea of ordering someone to perfectly fulfil their fantasies and a few want to know how they can sign up!

There's no doubt that Dollhouse is improving incrementally with each passing week.

In True Believer, Echo is imprinted as a blind woman and sent to infiltrate a religious cult that's under investigation. She has a potentially dangerous operation to redirect all her visual inputs to the Government agency monitoring her, which has the unfortunate effect of blinding her for the duration of the assignment.

Oh, and by the way, the irony of the Dollhouse doing work for the Government while the FBI are trying to confirm the existence of the Dollhouse did not escape my attention.

In other news, Victor/Lubov is getting a boner for his fellow Doll, Sierra. Unfortunately, it's Topher who discovers this, resulting in a whole lot of juvenile crap about him not being able to say erection and substituting 'man-reaction' instead. Seriously, this guy rewires people's brains?

Four episodes in, and Dollhouse is hitting interesting waters. "Gray Hour" sees Echo tooled up as a bank robber in an Ocean's Eleven style attempt to steal some aready-stolen artworks.

Ho-hum, you say, recycling a recycled Hollywood story for fun and profit? Well, it gets better. Echo's posing as a prostitute among a party of three men, when hotel security ask them to take their party to their room. Fair enough, they accept the bribe of two champaigne bottles and loudly leave the bar. Except five minutes later, Echo's character comes running down the corridor with a bleeding lip to the safety of the security guy. He takes her to a secure room, and according with hotel policy tries to bribe her to keep the incident under wraps. She repays him with a knee in the face and a period of unconsciousness.

Alright, third episode and a third personality for Echo in Dollhouse. This time, she's a sassy backing singer for the Britney Spears of this fictional universe. Echo takes the guise of 'Jordan', tasked with befriending Rayna, a sexy popstrel who's got a stalker problem.

So, the peeps at the Dollhouse task Echo with being BFFs with Rayna, but give new 'Doll' Sierra (which is a type of Ford car in the UK, by the way - I'm waiting for a Doll called Mondeo) a secondary task of being Rayna's greatest fan. However, as the plot unfolds, Echo discovers that Rayna is actually in touch with her stalker and is, in fact, more than happy to end her career onstage with a bullet in her head.

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse series is an interesting piece of work. What seems to be a mish-mash of sci-fi ideas dating back to when Arnold Schwarznegger's character first got his brain reprogrammed in Total Recall all those years ago.

That's what happens in the Dollhouse. Beautiful people come in and have their brains erased resulting in a seemingly peaceful state that is also unsettlingly like a bovine dumbness. At least that's the look I read from Eliza Dushku's eyes when I watch this. Their handlers hire the 'dolls' out, programmed with a personality to suit their discerning needs. It's kind of like brainwashing meets whorehouse from what I can see.