Dollhouse: Gray Hour

Echo’s engagement this week seems at first to be relatively easy: be the best hooker she can be for a couple of rich, rowdy party boys at a posh hotel. But soon the twist comes that being a hooker was a ruse, as she and the party boys are really a team of thieves working to steal a section of the Parthenon for an unspecified client. They get access to the posh hotel’s vault (which for some reason has all kinds of stolen goods) and this art expert guy on the team verifies that they have found what they came for.

But apparently there is no honor among thieves, because the art expert guy steals the Parthenon piece and locks Echo and Co. in the vault. Now they have thirty minutes or so until the security guys come back to lay down the law. Echo calls Boyd and tells him that she can get them out of the vault, but that he has to intercept the turncoat and make sure the client gets the goods, because otherwise it doesn’t matter if they get out or not. Boyd intercepts the traitor and Echo is about to go to work on getting the vault open when she gets a phone call. She answers the phone and hears a weird crackling noise and then she goes catatonic. Ooh that can’t be good.

Yes, apparently Echo has been “remote wiped” and when the Dollhouse folks realize this, they have a little impromptu hyperventilating session. The pompous head labbie guy whose name I can never remember starts pouting indignantly that there is no way this could have happened, that the technology isn’t possible, that he couldn’t have seen it coming, that it isn’t his fault. That’s when everyone realizes that only one force could be behind this, and that’s Alpha, the former Active who became self-aware and went nuttier than Joaquin Phoenix. Of course we the audience still have no idea who Alpha is or what he’s after. I’m sure all will be revealed in time, but is it worth watching religiously until we find out? So far I say no.

Miss DeWitt has another Active programmed to try to talk to Echo, who might as well be a newborn baby, and take her through how to break through the vault without setting off the alarms. So the rest of the episode consists of that, interspersed with more of Agent Ballard trying to unearth new Dollhouse leads and confronting Dimitri, his confidential informant who was responsible for almost getting him killed last week.

The problem with all of this comes back to the show’s central concept, unfortunately. How are we supposed to identify and connect with a protagonist we know nothing about who changes every week and doesn’t develop? She’s more like a robot, not a person, and not even a robot with self-awareness like a Terminator so we can chart her progression. There is no one to really get behind and root for like there’s no tomorrow on Dollhouse, which was certainly not the case on Firefly.

On Firefly, viewers were invested in not just Malcolm Reynolds’ struggles but everyone on the ship, and the interpersonal relationships were so complex and interesting. And the show was fun and funny. Dollhouse is never funny, the characters aren’t interesting, and it really all is just a mess. There’s no dispute that creator Joss Whedon is an enormously talented guy, and maybe this thing just got neutered in the development process or something, but this show really doesn’t live up to expectations. There’s an insightful article that better details the ins and outs of why the show doesn’t work by Chelsea Summers you can find here: http://prettydumbthings.typepad.com/chelseagirl/2009/03/on-the-dollhouse-dilemma-and-joss-whedons-body-of-work.html

Blame it all on Fox. If they hadn’t made the colossal bonehead move of canceling Firefly years ago, we wouldn’t be in this situation. They are eternally on the Bad List.

Season 1, Episode 4: Gray Hour (originally aired March 6, 2009)

For more on Dollhouse, click here.

Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro