Anticipating DOLLHOUSE

I was kind of hoping the whole show would be set in the future now!

So, I really liked the season premiere but... I'm totally confused? Didn't the season finale last season end with Wash liberating Echo from the Dollhouse? I feel like I missed a season in between or something?

Love this show but the credits are like reading the Jumble puzzle or something:

ELIZA DUSHKU
TAHMOH PENIKETT
DICHEN LACHMAN
FRAN KRANZ
ENVER GJOKAJ

It's unusually hard to match up names with faces!

Ira Glass interviewing Joss Whedon: "Does Dollhouse feel like a Joss Whedon show to you?"

mordy: Did you miss episode 12? it ended with her having this merge of 37 or so personalities and being rescued by Boyd and Ballard. The effects of the supermerge are still taking their toll apparently. Ballard made a deal to work with the Dollhouse to free Mellie/November from her contract.

If you get a chance you really gotta try to see the unaired episode 13, it's fantastic.

I liked seeing Lee Adama get his ass kicked by Echo. And I enjoyed seeing him play a mean character, that was kind of fun. They've set up a lot of interesting plot points in this one episode, I'm really excited for this season.

Oh. Hmm. I guess 12 is the last one I saw. Did they air 13 way after 12? Or did I just miss it?

13 wasn't aired, it was just on the dvd I think. It is easily located at all of the torrent sites.

still haven't seen any of s02. but s01 was excellent. only one or two 'mission' strands was dud. most of them tied in with the bigger plot nicely.

surprised at the hateration upthread. maybe it works better on dvd. i never got into buffy and folk seem to have expectations of joss whedon (campness + comedy banter?) im unaware of.

i will say it has the worst theme music in history.

The theme music sets it up to be some kind of episodic soft porn cable series, and tbh I am sometimes disappointed that this is not the case.

On the bright side even the worst episode of Dollhouse has never featured Matt LeBlanc.

Okay the most recent episode was pretty awesome. Except it wasn't supposed to be on, according to my local schedule. And now Fox is taking it off for a month, beginning the slow but inevitable process of killing a show that's just reaching it's stride.

True, last week's was pretty excellent. I can't blame Fox all that much though - the ratings have really been abysmal. (In other words, blame America first!) OTOH, at least for us fans the show is really picking up, we're getting Summer Glau, and when it comes back in December we're gonna get two a night.

i am disappointed that november is going to be a dud tv month and this is the sign of impending cancellation when the show is getting better every week.

I can't blame Fox all that much though - the ratings have really been abysmal.

Well, yeah, but they also stuck it on Friday night, which is apparently a death sentence. But credit due for actually giving them a second season, hopefully the on-demand/online viewership will be high enough to keep it on... for maybe one more season? Please?

If you want to depress yourself, take a look at these numbers -- Ghost Whisperer does over double the numbers for Dollhouse, which comes in waaaaay down the list for the night. It's also beaten regularly by Smallville, even the original Law and Order... Basically I'm having flashbacks of Terminator, which also had a really excellent climb in quality during the second season but it was too late.

This show really was not worth the chances I gave it. It's like Whedon figured it'd be cancelled, so he wrote something super shitty. I have no interest in any of the characters, the plot, the setting, anything. Anything at all.

Cancelled

Inevitable. I'm really crossing my fingers, now, though - maybe they'll go all out and do the final episodes with the same vigor as "Epitaph One".

Hey, this two part thing was pretty good. This is the first Summer Glau thing I've seen in a while where she doesn't act like a weird automaton.

she was acting like a weird automaton until she met topher, i didn't know whether to be more annoyed at her or joss for replicating exactly the mannerisms that annoyed me on firefly.

victor was a fantastic topher though. that was great.

Yeah, Victor/Topher was the single best piece of showoffy-acting-stemming-from-central-conceit-of-show in the show's entire run.

The episode was bad when it was all Mission Impossible get into the safehouse but pretty excellent otherwise! Happy that they're going back and complicating Caroline's backstory.

almost makes you believe they planned to have Caroline be an annoying personality from the start... but probably not.

have to admit i still <3 summer glau, this role was total nerd bait as well (as topher pointed out to himself)

I had to actually start paying attention because I thought they were using the guy who plays Topher to do "his" voice as Victor. But no, the impersonation was just that good.

YES!!! The Topher/Victor paring got nonstop giggles from me; I guess if it was done repeatedly it could get old, but in those two episodes I laughed every time.

girls in this show are weird - is this "acting"? - bring it on chick and mad scientist chick both act like deaf ppl who can hear again.

latest episode "the attic" was p rad tho basically all shows ever in one show - sad to read its been canceled already

yeah that was a great episode, you sure can tell it's been canceled because it's picking up speed like crazy all of a sudden. i lol'd at the "2010 i think, depends on how long we've been off the air" line.

omfg!

X1000000

Man, this show is so awesome now that it's almost over.

Sad thing is that this season was scripted before it was really cancelled. Maybe they knew and it's burning through all its potential fast, but maybe this actually had some legs.

Loving this. But yeah, it's hard to imagine they meant for the plot to roll out this fast. It's kind of like when somebody accidentally drops a match on the fireworks boat and the whole show goes off in a minute.

Typical Joss, disappoint people early on to keep expectations low and make it a slow build, alienating everyone who expected something good and keeping only the die-hard hopers. He's like the difficult kid who doesn't want you to know that he wants you to like him.

That is a good turn of phrase, Laurel.

Man, Whedon really loves his surprise out-of-nowhere deaths, doesn't he? Surprisingly upbeat ending, bittersweet. Everybody did a good job. I'm guessing they cut the budget from "The Hollow Men" so the money could go to this episode, which was probably the right decision. Ah well, I'll miss this show.

Loved the ending...pretty good episode all round. I was wondering, did they actually air that unaired pilot? I was surprised to see them work Felicia Day/Scott Farkas (forget his real name, I just know red hair, yellow eyes) characters now into the story. Carolyn & Topher in this ep were great too.

And yeah, Joss = always with the killing. smh...

Also someone tell me if I'm crazy but I'm pretty sure Felicia Day did appear (without lines) in one or two S1 episodes as a Doll in miscellaneous shots, and they somewhat sidestepped that in Epitaph One. Conveniently, she's also stuck in the Dollhouse at the end of this episode. If I'm connecting the dots accurately, it's pretty clever and amusing, a strange way to play it.

Enjoyed the finale but can't honestly say it made a lick of sense. E.G. if Echo is free in the future then Harding, etc. presumably don't have access to her spinal fluid so what's their source for the vaccine? Why would Rossum imprint killzombie programs onto so many people, instead of, like, "obey Rossum" programs? Or if it wasn't Rossum (and several things said suggest it wasn't) then who was it, and why wouldn't they just reimprint people after the great unwipe? Also, if the kid was imprinted with Caroline, why did she have the medical skills that Echo, not Caroline had?

I don't think it was Rossum, it was some form of global warfare - pretty sure they said China launched an attack on the US which caused it, which happened after who knows what sort of Active warfare had been going on. It would make sense if Rossum had something to do with the dumbshow (lol Day of the Dead) imprinting, since it looks like it's what they wanted to do with Topher in the end. Plus we don't know what kind of remote imprinting technology they had a hold of in 2020 - nothing quite as good as the wipe gun that Topher made, I'm guessing, but we know the sound/phone tech existed at least.

Rossum execs had already been backing themselves up into multiple bodies - too bad they didn't redo the scene from Epitaph One with Victor taken over by an exec explaining the plan, but according to an interview with one of the writers they couldn't fit it in due to Olivia Williams' hair being different lol, it should take place sometime around or after the Attic episode. So they already had the tech for that. I'm surprised Whiskey wasn't in the last episode - maybe she died at the end of Epitaph One. (Btw, seeing a glimpse of chilled out future Alpha was pretty cool.)

The kid wasn't imprinted w/Caroline, it was a more recent backup of Echo since she had all the post-zombie holocaust memories. But this was one of those sticky naming issues they had since they changed around certain details since the end of season 1, how "Caroline" was the savior and all that. I suspect they had the same idea they had back then to have super-Echo be the hero and not the original Caroline, since they were already kinda moving towards that at the end of S1.

Loved how the "previously on 'Dollhouse'" stuff was from an episode that never actually aired. If that's not fanservice, I don't know what is.

Okay wait is there a way to watch that previously unaired ep on teh internets??? It's got to be somewhere...

It's on torrent sites that have the first season dvds... I think that's it.

That's where I got it from. Try here.

It's on iTunes for $2.99, throw a Joss some cash!

It is! You used to only get it if you bought the full season.

just saw the episode last night and did a countdown of characters in joss shows who have died and left major characters bereft and feeling guilty for their inadequacies and faults. we came up with nine - 4 from dollhouse, 2 from buffy, 1 from firefly, 1 from dr. horrible, and...can't remember the other one, but probably from buffy as well, 2 seems awfully small.

Doyle / Angel
Cordeila / Angel
Darla /Angel

Though I don't know if all 3 fit the qualifiers.

yeah, i think we determined darla from angel but not the other two, that must be it. i haven't actually been able to sit through angel though, so this was based on another friend's judgment.

don't forget
Fred /Angel