Dollhouse: A Look Back – Part Two

Stage Fright
In this episode, Echo is imprinted to save a troubled young singer.  Not my favorite of the series.  Although who knew that Eliza Dushku could sing as well as she did?  (Please note that if she has sung on some project I am completely unaware of it.)  Probably the most interesting thing going on in this episode is Echo trying to save Sierra.  Continuing the slow process of her becoming a person.  Also the first big reveal about various characters being Dolls happen.  The first being Paul’s informant really being Victor, although there would be a few more coming.  This was still pretty big when it happened, poor Paul was almost surrounded by Dolls before he even became an employee of the L.A. Dollhouse.

But with this, I can talk about Victor who is something of a fan favorite.  I think a lot of it comes from the actor’s amazing ability to mimic the other characters.  The first was Mr. Dominic and later Topher, he is so good at Topher that you almost become convinced that the technology actually exists.  Then there is his relationship with Sierra, probably the best relationship on the show and given Whedon’s track record a chance to break the all the fan’s hearts.

Gray Hour
The show began to seriously improve at this point in the series.  Echo is imprinted as a thief and gets wiped by Alpha, the season’s Big Bad.  This is the most time we spent with Echo the Doll.  She is still nowhere near the full capacity that Echo will become, but the hints are there.

Now is a good of time as any to discuss Echo herself.  Echo is the star of the show, but we don’t really get to see that at first.  Her body was the star for the most part.  This was one of the weaknesses of the show at first and one that turned off a lot of viewers.  In fact if you ever read any complaints about the show, this is one of them.  The other is something I’ll get to in a moment.  Now if they had continued, this would have been addressed, but they chose to go away.  The show was like Quantum Leap, but without Sam for awhile.  Maybe they should have made us more concerned for Echo more, but Fox’s plan for five pilots killed that.  Once again, the original pilot does this.  But that is in the past and we can’t do anything about that now.

As for the other complaint about the show, it mainly concerns Eliza Dushku.  Her performance on the show is very subtle.  Unlike Enver Gjokaj, she never did much variation on her imprinted characters and never got a chance to do impressions of the other actors.  For the most part, she was meant to be the dreamgirl for some rich creep.  Now there is a lot of subtle differences between the different characters, this is plainly seen when Echo switches between imprints on the show now.  In fact of all the characters she has done on the show, Echo as a full person is the most interesting to see performed.  But I hate to see her attacked for not doing impressions.  On some level there had to been some similarity among the imprints for the audience to care about her.  If it were someone completely different every week, no one would care about her.  Now if you don’t like that, go fuck yourself and die in a pit.  Also learn to spell her name correctly, it isn’t hard to look up.

Tomorrow, I will look at True Believer and Man on the Street, the point where the show went from good to amazing.