Dollhouse: The Target

I’m disappointed to announce that it is two episodes in and I’m still not on the Dollhouse bandwagon. If it weren’t a Whedon show it might be fine, but after the intellectual brilliance and emotional resonance of Firefly, I was expecting Dollhouse to be first-rate and it has yet to rise above competence.

None of the characters are vibrant or fascinating. Agent Ballard seems really flat to me. Echo and Langton come closest to jumping off the screen, but we don’t know anything about Echo yet because she is essentially a robot. We don’t know about Langton’s past or why he came to the Dollhouse. I understand that the mandate here is to present the characters and slowly parcel out information about their complicated pasts, and that’s a valid narrative strategy, but only if the characters are interesting enough in the first place to make viewers want to learn more about them. That has not been the case thus far for me.

Plus I just don’t really understand the logic of the concept. Why would there be a need for such an organization that programs people to exist? Where would the funding come from? Are these people just evil or is there more to it? Where do they find their operatives? Where do they find their clients?

Speaking of clients, the one this week is an outdoorsman/survivalist dude that wants his equal. So he goes to the Dollhouse and head honcho Adelle DeWitt frowns and makes sultry glances with her eyes and gives him Echo. Suddenly Echo and Mr. Client are whitewater rafting and rock climbing and hunting and fornicating and it all seems hunky-dory until the dude pulls out a bow and tells Echo she has five minutes to run before he comes after her. Now maybe this is just me, but I don’t think the best way to get a second date is to pull out a bow and threaten homicide.

So Echo runs through the wilderness trying to stay alive as the bad guy stalks her. Langton tries to get to her to help her, while DeWitt and her lackey fume about how their client turned out to be a psychopath and faked his whole identity and references. You just can’t trust anyone these days. But that’s the whole episode essentially, Echo running and trying to survive, then turning the tables on her hunter-the hunted becomes the hunter as the saying goes. You can see this whole thing done better countless other times. Go watch William Friedkin’s The Hunted or any of the Rambo films. It’s the same thing but done way better.

The episode also intersperses flashbacks from about six months ago that show Alpha becoming self-aware or getting PMSed or whatever and slaughtering half the Dollhouse operatives and staff. But he deliberately leaves Echo alive so that must mean something. What I don’t know. There’s also the expected revelation at the end that there are residual memories leftover in Echo, that the wipes don’t completely work. I’m still going to stick with it out of loyalty. The show is entertaining, but it has yet to raise the bar like it should.

Season 1, Episode 2: The Target (originally aired February 20, 2009)

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Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro