Dollhouse 2.1: Vows

[maggie2]

Pretty darned good.  Not sure why I'm not quite to squee.   Last year my heart sank every Saturday morning when I saw that the ratings were bad.  The ratings were bad again today, and my heart did not sink.  I have no idea what's behind my emotional distance.  There was an awful lot to like about Vows.  Spoilery thoughts follow below the cut:

1.  Topher/Whiskey was great, great, great.  The dialogue is so layered, and the emotional situation so poignant that my Geeky little self is thrilled by every bit of it.  Boyd/Whiskey was great, great as well.  Do any of us have any free will at all?  What makes a person a person?  What would it mean if we decided to start engineering human nature?  What sort of persons would the product of that engineering be?  etc. etc. etc.  Bringing drama together with all of that in a way that makes human life viscerally feel like the precarious wonderful thing that it is...  OK, that's me squee-ing.  There's some squee!! 

2.  It seems to me likely that Vows became the Whiskey show because of Acker's scheduling constraints.  It's too bad.  Ideally all of that dense emotional thematic material would have unfolded more gradually.  Echo's evolution playing against Whiskey's evolution would have been a tale to behold.  I think they've done the best they could with the circumstances, but I'd be shocked if Joss wouldn't have vastly preferred to write the season around an Amy Acker who was on board for 13 episodes.

3. The downside of the Whiskey show is that it's a stark reminder of how not viscerally exciting Echo's story is.  Is it just due to the quality of the acting?  Or due to the fact that Caroline/Echo just isn't conceived in any kind of an interesting way?  Both, is my guess. 

4. Vows.  I did like all the lying and the layers to the lying that went on in the confrontation scene between Jamie Bamber's character and Echo.  Having her earnestly and with full depth of meaning say she meant every word of her vows -- nice contrast with the reality that she thinks she's an FBI agent and that that thought is itself yet another lie.  How can we have any trust?  Or rather, how hard is trust in a world where lying is so pervasive and potentially compelling?  As Topher told us, we can never know other people.  We are so essentially alone, and the pervasiveness of lying makes it that much more difficult to make real connections.

5. Vows.  The fake marriage in Echo's assignment juxtaposed against the real vow taken between Echo and Ballard at the end.  That was chilling as heck.  Because that's a promise made between a person and a "person" in the doll state.  And if the doll trusts it, it's because of the imprinting.  How vulnerable would we be to someone if we were constrained to trust what they said but they were not constrained to not abuse that trust?  We saw a brutally bad version of the problem back in Man on the Street.  This is worse because what Ballard is after with Echo/Caroline is creepier.  She's to be a role in his personal drama, and I don't think he sees her *at all* -- but unlike Sierra's handler, Ballard doesn't even begin to see just how thoroughly he's objectified Caroline/Echo. 

6. In general I loved how thoroughly Ballard got called out on all of this:  by Adelle, by Bamber's character, by Boyd.  Adelle deserves to be bitten in the behind by him, though.  She knows what he's about and is trying to use it for her own purposes.

7.  Big thumbs down on Adelle's hair. 

And yet, I'm still not at full-on squee.  I'm guessing that the Caroline/Echo vacuum problem is a real obstacle for me.  Weird to be so excited in one way and so unaffected in another.  But that's pretty much my Dollhouse experience in a nutshell.

Comments

[enisy.livejournal.com]

Claire and Topher absolutely made this episode for me. "Because I don't want to die" -- last season I wasn't huge on the idea of Claire as an Active, but I'm amazed how much more relatable and heartwrenching she is than her counterpart, Echo. I think it has to do with Amy's acting, like you said, and also the characters she has to bounce it off of (Topher and Boyd). I find I like Echo better when she's interacting with Boyd, Claire or Topher, as well, than when she's interacting with Paul or random guest stars.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

You're probably right that Echo comes across flatter because of who she interacts with. But I don't think I've had the feeling that I like Echo better in other situations. She's sweet with Boyd, and that's something...

"Because I don't want to die" -- chills up my spine.

[next_to_normal]

Word to pretty much all of that. Although I was much less squee-ful about the first season, so I was kind of surprised at how much I liked this episode. But it was all because of Whiskey, and Echo was the low point, which doesn't bode well given their respective episode commitments. It's definitely what I needed to want to keep watching, though.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I'm glad the episode worked to keep you on board. I think it's definitely a show worth watching. But, yeah, the fact that we aren't going to get much more Whiskey, but we are going to get a whole lot more Echo is uh... a reason to be concerned.

[snickfic]

2. I didn't realize about Acker's scheduling constraints. It all did feel rather rushed; I'd love to have seen it drawn out more.

3. Yes.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I just read your entry and we are exactly on the same page about Echo/Caroline.

Acker is in a new series on ABC called Happy Town -- ergo limited ability to work in Dollhouse. :(

[angearia.livejournal.com]

And if the doll trusts it, it's because of the imprinting.

For most dolls, this is true. But Echo is the one who turned to Ballard and asked him to help her. She already trusted him before the imprinting. The imprinting is like a false gloss of trust that's covering the deeper real trust that already existed.

I never get squeetastic about season openers. It was a really solid episode, but I know there's more exciting stuff ahead.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Well, I think there's a difference between asking for help and the handler-doll relationship. Even if Echo's "trust" isn't based on imprinting, the imprinting is going to take that trust to a whole other level. Which is a bit problematic, because we know that Paul shouldn't be trusted. He's a seriously messed up dude. (Such that if she does "trust" him, it would be evidence that her judgment as a doll is pretty poor).

The closing scene of the "vow" of imprinting was powerfully grotesque. (Though it could be that Joss was going for something else entirely. My problems with the comics are convincing me that my sensibilities are not anything like Joss's.)

I'll be interested to see if the great things about the show (and there are many) will be able to overcome my serious reservatons about the character at the center of the story. I'm worried that Joss thinks we're supposed to find Caroline "I save people" Echo compelling, and I just don't. Whiskey? Beyond compelling. Echo? Niente. Nada. Nichts. Nothing.

[quinara]

The closing scene of the "vow" of imprinting was powerfully grotesque. (Though it could be that Joss was going for something else entirely. My problems with the comics are convincing me that my sensibilities are not anything like Joss's.)

I wouldn't become too disillusioned - the trust-imprint thing was played as creepy back in The Target (with Boyd looking nervously down at Echo's serene face) and in A Spy in the House of Love (with the handler swap seeming somewhat non-consensual/forced by the purple light on Echo's part). The chair in itself is Not Natural.

Otherwise good points! Especially about all the lying. I'm trying to force myself to not not like Olivia Williams' haircut because I have a thing about short hair always being assumed to be less feminine => less beautiful automatically. But I'm not a great fan of the centre parting...

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I suspect you are right about the handler-doll bonding. If the big complaint is that Echo is dull and that you've got a problem if the only way you can tell people she's "special" is by having all the characters *say* she is special, one could hope that her willingness to "trust" Paul is evidence that she's not *quite* all that.

Don't work too hard on Adelle's hair cut. I've thought a lot of women with short hair had very flattering looks. Hers just isn't. And I think it leapt out at me cause I'm north of 40 and it was so great to see a 40-something woman played as sexy. This is the hair-cut you'd give to the older woman nobody is supposed to notice sexually.

[quinara]

*crosses fingers*

I assumed OW picked the cut herself? Hmm, if she didn't it's definitely an odd character-design change.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on every point. I thought the episode was pretty good, especially the Topher/Whiskey parts that were heartwrenching, you're right though,in that they might have been even better if dragged out for a few episodes.

I pretty much loved Adelle (not her hair) in that episodes and Ballard and how creepy he manages to be, while styling himself as the good guy is great. Loved how Adelle calles him on it, that was amazing.

Echo/Caroline doesn't do much for me either. It's just that with her I see no real inner conflict like the ones Ballard, Topher or Whiskey have. So far she's a shiny hero with Altzheimers. It's still impossible to connect with the character.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

So far she's a shiny hero with Altzheimers.

What a great way of putting it!

random commenter

[rowanda380.livejournal.com]

Amy Acker just stole the show, she was so awesome, the whole thing was pretty awesome!