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

[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.