Dollhouse: Instinct

Last night’s Dollhouse was clever and intriguing, well-acted and well-produced, but ultimately cold and uninvolving on an emotional level. In other words, it was a typical mixed bag. For some people, cleverness is enough. But I’d rather have a dumb and obvious plot that managed to make me care than a labyrinthine one that didn’t. That’s just me.

Echo’s engagement this week is to be a mother. We see her in her nice house, married to her seemingly nice husband, breast-feeding and doting over her baby. The baby didn’t seem nice to me, but what can I say, babies make my skin crawl. Thank god I never was one.

The only problem: the husband is not warm toward Echo (I forget what her cover name was) or his baby. He keeps avoiding them by going to work and staying out and making clandestine, shifty phone calls. Is he having an affair or is he a criminal or both? Echo thinks the former, but we of course know that this is all too simple and there has to be something else going on. There is…sort of.

Obviously we know that Echo really isn’t the baby’s mother, even though she believes wholeheartedly that she is. And the reason she believes wholeheartedly is of course because Topher programmed her to feel that way. But he didn’t just do his normal programming voodoo. Nope, as he tells Ballard early on in the show, he has just recently come up with some new genius ways of programming the mind. He has programmed Echo not only to be a mother for this engagement, but he has endowed her with a maternal instinct on an actual biological level. Her mind and her body believe that she is the baby’s mother. And that gets her into trouble.

The husband hired the Dollhouse to send him an Active to be the baby’s mother and to bond with the baby, because the real mother, his former wife, died in childbirth. As a result, the client has never bonded with his child because he blamed the baby for his wife’s death. He was going to give the drooling tyke up for adoption, but saw the Dollhouse as his last remaining alternative. Of course how a suburbanite father would know about the Dollhouse and be able to afford them is never addressed.

But anyway, the client starts having second thoughts and regretting having hired Echo. Echo, who is already paranoid about her “husband” having an affair, overhears him on the phone talking to the Dollhouse people telling them to come take her away and he will get rid of the baby. She freaks out, thinking that her husband wants to kill her and her baby. So she takes the baby on the run, believing it to be hers and believing her husband to want to kill it. Naturally, this creates a problem for both the Dollhouse and the father.

Ballard, who remember is now working as her handler at the Dollhouse, intercepts her at one point and Topher wipes her memory back at the Dollhouse. But her maternal instinct, since he embedded it in her on a biological level, remains. So she flees the Dollhouse and goes after what she believes to be her son, even though she has no memory of who she is or who the baby is. Still with me? Don’t worry, I almost got confused too.

So from here we get some chases in the rain and scary lightning flashes in houses and…you know the drill. It’s diverting, it’s clever, but I just didn’t really care. The B storyline involves Adelle going to visit November, who was released from her contract at the Dollhouse last season when Ballard traded his freedom for hers. She’s back to being human again and is enjoying the money she made during her five years of service for the Dollhouse, the details of which were wiped from her memory.

We also get a scene towards the end with Echo and Ballard talking to each other about their plans to take down the Dollhouse together. Echo explains that it is hard existing as she does, now that she retains the memories and feelings of all of her personalities. He offers to tell Topher and make it so that things go back to normal and she forgets everything, so she won’t feel sad anymore. She tells him that feeling nothing would be worse than feeling sad.

But here’s the main problem: while the setup of Ballard and Echo secretly working together to take down the Dollhouse is cool, Echo really doesn’t have the right to want to take the Dollhouse down. After all, she volunteered to be an Active. We don’t know why and neither does she, but we know that she did. No one held a gun to her head. She chose to work for the Dollhouse through her own volition. And I think that was a fundamental mistake in the conception of the show.

The fact that the participants are all willing (at least that we know) makes the Dollhouse corporation seem less evil and the whole morality of the show is unclear. While on a basic philosophical level, the idea of the Dollhouse is offensive. But in reality, they aren’t really evil because they didn’t kidnap anyone or force them to do anything against their will. So why should we be rooting for them to fall? That’s a rhetorical question by the way.

Season 2, Episode 2:  Instinct (originally aired October 2, 2009)

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Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro