Writers: Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tanchroen, and Andrew Chambliss
Grade: B
The first time I watched this, I thought there were a few nice moments, but overall, I wasn’t thrilled with it. For some reason, I liked it much better on the second viewing.
There’s plenty of bad stuff to complain about: Ballard became a Whedon cliché with the sudden unsentimental death. Alpha was redeemed somewhere along the way and we have no firm idea how or why. Whiskey apparently disappeared into thin air—I guess we can assume that the gas filling up the Dollhouse the last time we saw her (timeline-wise) killed her, but a passing mention from Alpha about finding her body would have been nice. If it was there, I missed it. Laurence Dominic also disappeared without a trace.
And they killed my precious Topher! It was a good death, but ouch, I loved him so. Definitely one of Whedon’s best characters of all time, and he and Adelle are the only reason I’d ever buy the DVDs and re-watch this series (their character arcs are also the only ones that came through intact). I’ll be checking Fran Kranz’s IMDb page at least once a month in the hopes of him getting a new gig on a decent show.
I’m also really sad that we were left hanging with the Topher/Whiskey backstory. It seemed like there was more to it than what we got, but Whedon and co. knew they weren’t going to be able to use Amy Acker enough to explore it, and they wanted Topher to have something resembling a love story, so we got Topher/Bennett.
On the plus side, Eliza rocked Echo’s violent mourning scene with Priya. I didn’t even care about the Echo/Paul pairing until this episode. Amazing that all it took to sell it in the end was a charming dinner table exchange, one significant personal exchange about Echo having all those personalities in her head but being the loneliest person he knows, and a well-acted grieving breakdown. I have mixed feelings about Echo’s conclusion… it’s quite bittersweet that she ends up with Paul as one of the many personas pinging around in her head. On the one hand, there’s no replacement for the physical presence of the person you love, but on the other hand, having them only in your head is a lot less lonely than not having them at all.
Some of the negatives from above can also be fanwanked to a fairly satisfying degree. For example, regarding Alpha’s rehabilitation, in “A Love Supreme,” Alpha says something about most of his personalities not caring about how wrong blowing people up is, and a few even finding it funny. Paul entered his consciousness shortly after that, at the end of that episode. I kind of hate the idea of one new Mr. White Knight personality getting all the others in line, and I didn’t enjoy having to put together that Paul, the paragon of ethical behavior (sarcasm!), was responsible for Alpha turning over a new leaf. That’s probably what the writers were going for, though.
I was also initially confused about why Alpha couldn’t stay in the Dollhouse with Echo and avoid the pulse reset signal altogether in order to hang onto his sanity, and conversely, if he was so evolved that he might be able to hang onto his evolved self after experiencing the pulse reset, why couldn’t Echo? Then I started thinking about some of the science that Topher threw at us this season: in "Belle Chose," he says that serial killers don't use the portion of their brain that controls empathy and compassion and prevents them from "disemboweling puppies." It's thus logical to assume that Alpha's mental healing process burned new pathways into those parts of the brain that had previously been dormant, and I don't think Topher's signal would necessarily undo that physical change to his brain. So he will reset to the original Karl Kraft, but he should be more physiologically equipped toward sanity (and empathy) than he was originally.
After thinking through all of that, it doesn't seem like quite such an illogical plot hole that he was willing to leave and take the risk of reverting, yet Echo wanted to stay and keep her composite self.
That theory also makes Paul’s death a slightly less bitter pill to swallow. Alpha fried Paul’s brain in “A Love Supreme,” so if he’d chosen to stay aboveground, the signal would have wiped the rearranged architecture Topher created for him, thus rendering him a vegetable again. Still, there’s no reason he couldn’t have chosen to stay underground with Caroline, Priya, and Tony, which pushes him back into “pointless shocking death” territory.
Overall, I don’t feel like the mythology ever came together and made sense—it was just a big mess because everything they wanted to do thematically wasn’t given any time to develop and breathe. Almost everything from “Meet Jane Doe” onward felt largely artless and pointless to me because it was so rushed. The Boyd reveal, for example, might have been good if given a better setup, but ultimately, it never clicked for me.
I’m still glad I saw it through because Topher and Adelle were worth it. I hope that Whedon doesn’t give up on TV altogether, and that next time, he tries working with USA or TNT or some other channel with a bit less performance pressure and more moderate expectations.
Other Stuff
-The casting for T was so spot on. He had Priya’s eyes and skin tone, and Tony’s hair color and face shape (not so much the bone structure, but the outline of the face was very similar).
-I complained that someone in the previous episode should have saved some of crazy Boyd’s antidote, and in this episode, mini-Caroline mentions that the Tucson Rossum HQ is where the resistance got the “vaccine.” Would have been nice to have some indication in the previous episode that Echo bothered to save some of that spinal fluid cocktail, because they blew that place to bits—I can’t imagine there was any vaccine left to find.
Quotes
Paul: “World still needs heroes, kid.”
Echo: “… Did youreally just say that?”
Paul: “What? I was being… inspirational.”
Echo: “You are so corny.”
Paul: “You’re… fat.”
Alpha: “Victor! Why would someone do something so horrible to your face?!”
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