Those are the words that start off Dollhouse, a TV show that's already been talked over ad nauseum by people who have a stake it whether it succeeds or fails. A new show by Joss Whedon has no chance of starting on a level playing field. You have the fans that love everything he does, the fans that love some things he does and have the bar set so high it's almost impossible to hit every time, the antifans who are so incensed by other people loving him that they automatically hate everything he does, and the professional critics who are trying to be objective while also clearly holding him to a high standard. It makes reading Dollhouse forums a lot less fun than reading those of a long-running, high quality show like BSG. Emotions are running pretty high, and the separation between giddy delight and bitter disappointment is razor thin.
I for one am a believer in very little in this world, but I do believe that anything Joss Whedon does has value to it, and the potential to have greatness to it. And I also know that for me, I don't know at the start which will win out, but I'm willing to go along for the ride. I could spend a lot of time worrying about the ratings and whether something will appeal to enough viewers and whether something is a good choice for a marketplace and all that; it's obviously important for a show to live if it is to grow. But I can't do it. I'm in it for the story, for however long that lasts, and I would rather judge it on its internal merits and try not to let external exigencies enter into it.
Anyway, for fun and to give me a chance to look at the details, I'm going to attempt to recap and comment on Ghost.
We start with a security camera look in on two women in an office. Adelle DeWitt, henceforth Madam, is pouring tea for a girl named Caroline, who soon will be Echo, who isn't anybody. Madam says, "Nothing is what it appears to be," which is one of the premises for this show. A lot of those premises are going to be outright stated in this pilot, as so often happens, and it is clunky in places, but you've got to set the scene.
Cut into the room with them. "It seems pretty clear to me." "You're only seeing part of it. I'm talking about a clean slate." "You ever try to clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before." That's what the show will be about. Tabula rasa.
Caroline accuses Madam of loving this, and I think it means they know each other. This is not a business acquaintance conversation. Caroline just wanted to make a difference, like SHE said. The first mystery. At first I wasn't sure I liked introducing Caroline right away; thought maybe just go right to Echo or a persona, but then it turns out that who she was will be important and we have to meet her.
Madam asks what would happen if actions didn't have consequences, which is something else the show will explore. Then we cut to a kind of silly motorcycle race set to rock music. One racer skids and the bike falls on her knee. It's Echo as that Fun Girl you meet and have a magical vacation with, then never see again. The motorcycles finish the race in some banquet room in Chinatown maybe, where the other racer, the client whose name is Matt, has won. They do the big talk thing a bit, cute conversation with cute guy, then they dance to Lady Gaga. FunEcho is wearing the shortest dress in the history of dresses, like she just took off her motorcycle pants and went with it.
They talk some more about how he will always remember the last three days, and FunEcho is, like I'd forget? Which, if you know the concept of the show ahead of time, you know she will. And so does Matt. I'm sure that, even though these people are spending a lot of money for these Actives, not all of them believe that they really don't remember anything, that they don't exist until they're activated. But they will always know on some level that it's a lie, while the Actives won't. To them it's all real.
FunEcho wanders off and Matt talks about Cinderella to his drunk friend. She's back to her pumpkin coach at midnight for her treatment, some sort of posthypnotic suggestion that brings her back to be wiped of this identity. Matt's friend's comment about "dude it's like 5" is silly and obvious, but it still makes me laugh.
Now we're underneath the Dollhouse, and a girl (prob) in a kimono is being helped into another black DollVan while Echo's hander, Boyd Langton, is walking her to the elevator, listening to her blather on about the cool guy she met and whether he's the one. She's flying high and tells him, "You're good people." You can tell he's not so sure about that. He's still got some principles I think. Wonder how he got here.
FunEcho goes on about Matt to everyone while automatically changing to Dollhouse clothes and getting into the scary chair in the Frankenstein lab. "I think I found something real." Think again. I have a feeling you're going to have to look long and hard to find anything real here.
We meet Topher Brink for the first time as he runs the memory wipe. We get a cool flashback of her memories, containing her relationship with Matt, some of what we saw plus the start of it. Then there's other flashes that are hard to figure out but are partially or entirely from Caroline, no slate is clean. There's a school bus, a girl listening to a guy who looks to be a musician, something fuzzy, a little girl being read to by a woman who's not hot enough to be a TV mom, and then a house, and a view upwards from a crib, looking at a woman who looks not unlike Madam DeWitt to me. I think those two are related, but wait to be proved silly. The memory flashes are accompanied by a cool, slightly organic sound, like they're literally sucking the brain out of her head and the neurons are sputtering like shorting wires. I like it.
Echo wakes up with the creepiest blank doll face. "Did I fall asleep?" And wanders out of the room. Topher takes the memories, or imprint, data and goes out of the lab and into his office. Where Boyd is waiting to check on how it went. He obviously cares about his charge. Topher says a bunch of creepy stuff about how he made her a virgin again, and quotes Shakespeare that it's only good or bad if you think it is one or the other. To him, apparently they're great humanitarians, giving people what they want. He and Boyd look over the gorgeous Dollhouse set as they talk about how illegal it all is, and Topher says Echo is living the dream. Yeah, your being-serviced-by-hot-willing-girls-whose-thoughts-don't-matter dreams, creep. "Whose dream," Boyd asks. Whoever is next. This really is a disturbing concept. Not at all sexy but very relevant. It's no mistake that reality shows are referenced later on. This is a step beyond seeing a "real" world that's been crafted just for you on TV, to interacting with a person crafted just for you. We all live in a movie about ourself, what happens when you can make someone else a scripted guest star? In a way that goes beyond marriage, I mean.
Now we get to the main story of the week. A mansion with a young girl in it, talking on the phone to her father in the back of a limo. He looks like a Hispanic Keanu Reeves. She wants to watch a reality show and he tells her it will melt her brains. And we find out soon he's a client of the Dollhouse, so he should know something about that. The girl lies back on the bed and is snatched by kidnappers who stick her in a body bag or something. Credits.
That's a longass teaser/first act. Theme song is by Jonatha Brookes; credits are simple but pretty and relate to the memory flashes in their looks.
We come back to Quianu talking to Madam about the kidnapping. He wants her to provide a professional negotiator to make things go like clockwork. Says his daughter is completely helpless; like a doll? Another pale suit is there, Mr. Dominic, head of security. Madam says Quianu is a valued client and that Actives aren't robots but can do the job. Tells him to enter the rest into the confessional, I think. That must be some twisted name for the process of clients telling the Dollhouse exactly what they want from the doll without having to look anybody in the face. I'm guessing. Then she warns him and the audience not to confuse the Active by talking about what she really is.
Then a few shots of pretty, buff boys and girls working out, doing tai chi, keeping at least the body part of the mind-body package in order. In a scary way, it's not unlike looking at people at a gym, the total focus on the physical that for normal people only lasts as long as the workout. Do dolls think at all as they try to fall asleep, as they eat, as they brush their teeth. Creepy.
Then we're in a darkish med lab with a scarfaced Amy Acker as Dr. Claire Saunders. She's giving Echo a physical and Echo can't remember what fell on her knee. Claire talks to her like she's a kid, and Echo acts like one too, or like someone so numbed on thorazine she's barely there. Dude, can you imagine what these folks would do with mental patients?
As Echo leaves, she sees flashing blue light from Topher's lab o'fun and heads up to investigate. I would guess they're not supposed to feel curiosity at all, so this may be a sign of Echo beginning to become someone. She walks in on a creepy Alliance conditioning River scene with the newest doll, Sierra. She's got some gross electrode/twisted acupuncture needles stuck in her all over as Topher maps her tissue. I don't want to know. But it looks painful. Echo is surprised that someone in the treatment chair is hurting; Topher's pissed off that she's up there and doesn't know how to handle it beyond making a comment that it only hurts because it's her first time. Ewww. Couple that with the virgin moon remark and Topher is my favorite character to hate. He says they're making her better (stronger, faster, we have the technology). Then WTFs Claire who's come looking for Echo.
We look back on Sierra's blue lighted, needle penetrated face as her memories are wiped and replaced, and then fade to the interior mind space of Agent Paul Ballard of the FBI. (Hi, Helo.) He's boxing a tattooed dude in his mind while his bosses are reaming him out over a list of non-FBI-kosher activities. To wit: assaulting a senator, disrupting a 7 year investigation into Russian human traffickers, and trespassing on some guy with the unfortunate name of Princeton Moody's yacht. Hello, if your investigation of modern day sex slavers is taking 7 damn years, your investigation needs some disruption! Then boss man sucker punches Ballard with the fact that he's also divorced.
They do a bunch of exposition intercut with mind boxing about how Ballard's trying to find the Dollhouse, how it doesn't exist because billionaires can already buy what they want, how someone high up in the FBI does think it's real and won't let them close the case. Ballard is Fox Mulder. But probably not a Cylon. Some more thematic dialogue happens as Ballard talks about survival patterns. When you get what you want, you want something else. "If you have everything, you want something else, something more extreme, more specific, perfect." This show will examine what happens when you try to create that perfect thing, from the point of view of the perfect thing. Just like with the Pax, you can't have a perfect world without losing something essential about being human; like with Jasmine, you can't have peace when it means losing the ability to choose; in this case, you can't make another person your perfect anything without taking away their personhood. And the doll can't disappear from a disappointing life and into oblivion, can't retreat from making choices and living with the consequences of her actions without there being a cost. You're the only one who can give away your own agency, but at some point you have to take it back. If there's still a you there.
Ballard also claims that to imprint a person with a new personality means wiping out the old, basically making the Actives the walking dead, "as good as murdered." We'll see.
As the bosses continue to yell at him for believing in this fairy tale, and the other employees in the outer office pretend they can't hear it, Ballard seemingly agrees to back off on the Borodins, but his inner boxer rallies and kayos his opponent.
Back at the Dollhouse, Echo is getting into the creepy chair while Topher continues to be creepy. Creepy, creepy creep. We hear Madam's voice talking about the girl, Davina, and cut to her office as she briefs Boyd about their operation to exchange $5 million for the kid, without trying to bring anyone to justice. Mr.D doesn't like Boyd and tells him to skip any ex-cop heroics.
Cut to sexy librarian Echo, known to herself as Eleanor Penn. She's at the mansion and Quianu is not happy with the choice of operative. He wanted Adama, dammit, not some hot chick with glasses!
Boyd wonders WTF about the glasses too. CreepyChrisTopher says he can convince her brain it can't see well and it's all a part of the imprint. More expo about how it works. They have all these personalitie with all these traits. CreepyChris can amalgamate them, but only in organic ways, not just a mish-mash. His idea, he explains as he watches Sierra on a treadmill with less creepy electrodes, is that competence or achievement has to be balanced with faults. The person running is running both to and from something, and everyone who excels is overcompensating. Basically, sane people aren't geniuses, well-balanced people don't stand ahead of the pack, and people need to have weaknesses to overcome to become strong. Hard to argue that. He stares at Dr. Claire for a bit while talking about people running or hiding from things. Dudes dig scars.
Back to crazy scupture filled mansion where Mr. Sunshine, the kidnapper, is calling. Miss Penn takes control of the sitch by getting disciplinarian on him and offering more money. Some funny there. "You going to rap my knuckles?" "It's unlikely." "You have the money." "It's polite to ask." And Miss Penn and Quianu talk strategy. It's boring, but I do like that they just go whole hog and dedicate themselves to the storyline, even if it's just one day out of many and Echo won't even remember it. But the audience will. Imagine if Sydney was mind-wiped after every assignment. Would that have actually made her life easier?
We now move on to a night club where Ballard is lurking at the bar to spy on the Russians he was told to leave alone. There's a new pimp in town in the form of Enver Gjokaj, or Victor, who's telling some VIP bouncer who doesn't care some no doubt 'anal'ytic story about an immigration officer and a rubber glove.
Back to the mansion. Kidnappers put Davina on the phone. There's a very subtle little sway to the camera that in hindsight is showing that they are in the hold of a boat. Davina tries to tell Poppy clues to where she is, but Miss Penn keeps interrupting so the kidnappers don't panic and kill her. They set up a meet. Quianu is not happy that she wouldn't let his daughter risk her life to tell them she's on a boat, and he goes up to this ridonkulous balcony over the Hollywood Hills or something and bitches about it. He wants Miss Penn to prove herself, that she's the man for the job. Her backstory is that she's Rebecca Locke from The Inside. (Hi Tim Minear!) She was kidnapped, and now she helps people who are kidnapped. "Trust me, I've done this many times." And of course, Quianu knows she hasn't because he doesn't get the Dollhouse. Nothing is what it appears to be goes both ways. He wants her to make him believe the way she does.
Boyd is watching all this on the security feed as Miss Penn tells her story, and Quianu is kind of disgusted/impressed with the depth of it. "Maybe it's all made up," he tests her. "The terrible memories those men put in your head. Why would they do that?" Uh, to give you what you need. But I get the point. Did she really need to be so damaged, CreepyChris? You know he's getting off on it.
Poor Miss Penn doesn't quite get what he's saying, and no doubt she's wondering why she's remembering some blue room with a girl with needles in her face instead of her own ghost. Tabula nonrasa. She freaks out a little and pulls out an inhaler. Asthma is really a necessary part of the imprint?
Back at the club, Victor is ordering champagne for his girlscorts (the best in the house until they stop noticing) as he heads to the loo. BTW, between BSG, Terminator, and this show, I've now seen way too many violent urinal scenes on TV. Ballard puts a gun to his head, asks him to say Dollhouse a lot, and it's obvious he know nothing about it, and then tells him to find out who of the Borodins supplies bodies to the Dollhouse. Then he'll leave them to traffic humans in peace. I like Victor; he's cute.
Now we're at the dock for the exchange. Boyd's on hand with a sniper rifle; CreepyChris is monitoring Echo's vitals from the House. It's going okay until Miss Penn sees one of the kidnappers and freaks out. Yep, he's her ghost. It all goes to hell. She's on her knees, saying that they're not going to give the girl back, Quianu goes for Sunshine and gets shot, Boyd shoots Sunshine, and the boat takes off with the girl. Miss Penn's all "You can't fight a ghost." Which becomes much less weird and much more grim when we find out what that means.
Which we do here, in the DollVan on the way back to the House. Miss Penn PTSDs some more about the gross things the heavy ghost did to her as a kid, but then she regains herself (ha) and she and Boyd work the case together like professional partners. Nice. But then they arrive and Mr.D gets in Boyd's face about the mess at the docks, while Miss Penn is off to quickly get her treatment so she can come back to get the girl. I like how they just have her automatically undressing and going to the creepy chair in whatever persona without thinking about why she's doing it.
Cut to CreepyChris saying the imprint was fine, Echo didn't screw up, Eleanor Penn did. Echo comes in and we cut to Boyd freaking out at Madam that they need Miss Penn to find the girl. Madam just wants distance from the whole PR nightmare. Her valued client was shot so who cares? Boyd says saving the girl is a mission, and I think we just saw how he gets through the day in his job. Madam frostily tells him that it's an engagement (more creepy), not a mission. And he says he's been there long enough to know that she likes to tell herself that "we help people." That gets to her and he runs to stop the wipe. Fake out with him thinking it's Echo, before she asks for her Miss Penn glasses. Try the phone next time, Boyd.
Miss Penn and Boyd figure out who one of the kidnappers is and where they're holed up. Mr.D benches Boyd and goes off in a chopper with her. He plays it straight like a man who's dealt with a lot of Actives; just treats her like the profiler/negotiator she's supposed to be. She convinces him to give her 10 minutes to get the girl.
So she walks up to the house, and her vitals are all fear, all the time. CreepyChris found out that the part of the persona that was abused came from a woman who ended up committing suicide last year. She never got over it. Nice choice, creep.
But our Miss Penn does get in, turns the two kidnappers against her ghost abuser, and manages to get some closure when she had an actual person to confront, as opposed to the ghost and her memories of him. There's a gun fight where the other kidnappers kill the bastard, she saves the girl and goes to leave, and Sierra busts in like an assassin and takes out the other two so the House can return (some of) Quianu's money.
Remember Caroline, who just wanted to make a difference in the world? And Eleanor Penn, who tried to make it so no other girl went through what she did? Well, they both won today. And then disappeared as if they had never been. We morph from Penn carrying Davina to safety to blank-faced Echo leaving the chair behind. So who rescued Davina?
The dolls shower together and get ready for bed. Mr.D and Madam talk about how they pulled it off, then she shows him a folder labeled Alpha, asking how they'll contain this. The dolls get into their beds/coffins/plastic doll cases for sleeping.
Now we go to a TV screen showing Caroline being filmed for her college video yearbook. A naked man is sitting cross-legged on a coffee table watching this, while he puts a picture of Caroline in an envelope for Paul Ballard that says "Keep Looking."
As Caroline talks, we pan back to a dead man in a recliner and then to a dead woman on the floor, then back to naked man.
Caroline says: I'd like to take my place in the world, like Mrs. Dundee (she?) taught us. Global recovery, doctors without borders -- the world is in need of some serious saving. And I want to travel around the world as I save it in a private jet that I pilot and design. What can I say? I want to do everything. Is that too much to ask? She's full of life.
Cut to Echo, lying in her coffin with a dead face as the lid closes and we pull out. The end.
I think there's a lot there. And yeah, the pilot is not real subtle about telling you what's what, but I don't care. I'm fascinated to find out what happened to Caroline to turn her into Echo; what happens to many of us to turn us from vital, energized, caring people into dull, dead inside robots just trying to get through the day without thinking or feeling too much. And I want to learn about the House and its people and more about the world it inhabits. So I'm good to go. I can't wait until next Friday.
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