Dollhouse, 1x00, "Echo" (Unaired Pilot)

Episode Title: Echo
Writer: Joss Whedon

Director: David Solomon

Grade: A

I finally got to watch this, and I certainly think it was better than the aired Pilot. It felt like a much more confident and cohesive hour of television to me.

I noticed that Ballard’s divorce is discussed with Echo in this episode, whereas it was cut from the re-tooled pilot and we don’t find out until, I believe, “Man on the Street.” I think there was also a bit less information about why their relationship went downhill in that episode than what Paul told Echo here. Maybe they decided to play out that storyline on a much smaller scale with Mellie? Knowing what happened with his wife, I can’t help but feel there’s some resonance between his divorce and what happened with Mellie, it's just not something viewers would be aware of without knowledge of the original pilot or without doing a lot of speculative thinking about why Ballard and his wife divorced. And the intriguing possibility that the Dollhouse programmed Mellie to object to his work like his wife did goes out the window because Echo never got that information out of him in the canon Dollverse. (It's still possible that Adelle knew, but there's no concrete proof.)

That said, I didn't think the Ballard/Echo stuff was great as-written, but I do think meeting her (and getting SHOT by her) so early on would have made his obsession with Caroline more resonant, and possibly both more twisted and more understandable.

I also noticed a very direct mention of Echo growing and developing in spite of the wipes, which was one of the biggest issues with season one as a whole—the writing initially implied that this concept is what “compositing” consists of, but then they seemingly retconned it so that compositing was an accidental fuckup by Topher, and this accruing of personality despite the wipes is something else entirely (presumably, at least, since the end of the finale implied that they’re far from finished with that aspect of Echo’s development).

Finally, I thought Topher and Claire Saunders were both a bit different in terms of their individual characters and their relationship with each other. Topher was even more of an amoral douchebag here, and I have to say I'm glad they mellowed him a bit. His distaste for Saunders seemed much more sincere here, too, whereas it seemed feigned in the aired pilot. I also found Claire to be a bit softer and less sure of herself than she was in the version we got, and she didn’t seem to dislike Topher nearly as much as she did in the aired pilot and throughout the first season. It’s almost as if their attitudes for each other were flip-flopped for the re-tooled pilot we ended up with.