Dollhouse

The first four episodes of season one did it no favours, being nothing more than an adult Joe90 and playing up the sexy futuristic whorehouse in a way that obscured the heart of the story. Things started getting interesting when the technology started going wrong. It's hard to care about a main character who changes every week, who seems happy sleeping with rich LA men, whose only problems lay in minor tussles during engagements and whose origins remained clouded. Without knowing how Echo ended up in the Dollhouse it was hard to feel sympathy.

When the technology started glitching and Echo began to grow a personality the stories became more interesting. And not just Echo, but Siera and Victor too. And Topher and DeWitt. Suddenly everyone transcended the cardboard characters that they originally appeared to be, although this transformation didn't really shine until season two.

The Alpha plot of season one was a traditional good guy gone bad, turned psycho, story. At times it felt cliched, a bit too traditional. Once again though, over time, its true purpose was revealed: Alpha was a plot device to unleash Echo.

Come season two suddenly everything made more sense, hung together more, asked more questions, felt more risky and felt like Dollhouse had not only discovered what it intended to be, but had the convictions to stick to it. (Or maybe by that time the TV executives had given up on it and stopped meddling?) It doesn't matter, season two was really enjoyable Science Fiction, the technology moving from a plot enabler, to the core of the story and the cause of the apocalypse.

The timeboxed limit of twenty-six episodes in the end helped Dollhouse. Much fuss is made about cancellation of TV shows in the US, but the best shows are complete stories, with constraints, not never ending soap operas. In the UK a complete six part story is the norm, and even successful shows like Life On Mars try and wrap things up after a couples of series of eight. So in twenty six episodes of Dollhouse we got a full story, from nascent technology to all hell breaking loose. I'd argue that the story would have been better with even fewer episodes. The end brings focus. As the final few episodes of Dollhouse proved: dense, exciting, unexpected deaths (very Joss Whedon) and unexpected plot twists. It took chances with hive mind dream worlds inside mainframe computers. It pulled out a plot thread and revealed it winding through everything we had seen. It showed us an apocalypse. 

(Let's for a moment forget about Epitaph Two, which provided an optimistic ending via a big reset button. It was a stylish pilot episode for a season that couldn't be made: Alpha as a good guy, Victor as a cyborg, Little Safe House On The Prairie, Topher crazy, Adele gentle. Thirteen episodes of that could have been good, trying to tie up the plot in one episode was a stretch too far.)

As you can tell, I liked Dollhouse a lot. It got better with time and the complications of the plot, when it turned from the early black and white into murky grey.

Complete.