Loaded Couch Potatoes

Honk Mahfah reviews “Haunted,” the latest episode of Dollhouse.  Expect to be spoiled.

After several mythology-heavy episodes, Dollhouse returns to the (mostly) stand-alone format of the season’s first five episodes.  You’re forgiven if you took that news with some concern, but don’t you worry your little head about it none, little missy; this here episode is jest fine.

Why did I just begin typing in a Buford voice?  I’m not entirely sure, but I think I might be buzzing a little thanks to this here episode I jest watched.

Now, this was not a great episode, not like “Spy in the House of Love” or “Needs” or “Man on the Street.”  But of all the standalone episodes this season, “Haunted” is far and away the best of the lot … and that suggests to me that Whedon and company have now figured out what the show is.  If they’ve gotten to the point at which a stand-alone episode can be this good, then they have clearly nailed down the concepts and concerns that lie behind the idea of the Actives/Dolls.  For a while, that didn’t seem to be true, and even after “Man on the Street,” it didn’t seem to be totally true of “Echoes.”

But here, we get a confident, compelling stand-alone. If that’s not cause to get a little giddy and start typing like I’ve got Boss Hogg stuck beneath my fingernails, well, then you and I ain’t on the same page.

The episode opens with a brief scene of a wealthy woman going for a ride on one of her horses; when her husband and his friends see the horse, suddenly riderless, they know something is wrong, and we cut to a shot of Adelle watching Echo coming up from the imprinting process.  “Margaret,” she says, “I hate to be the one to tell you … you’re dead.”

One of the stronger elements of “Man on the Street” was the notion that a client could use the Actives as a means of maintaining a relationship with a deceased loved one.  “Spy in the House of Love” may or may not have featured DeWitt doing the same thing.  Here, the idea begins to receive a fuller, more complicated treatment, and it’s now obvious to me that this is a story conceit so rife with potential that I don’t even want to think about it.  If I do, the potential cancellation of this series is going to cause that Boss Hogg voice inside me to want to take over and start commanding my body to buy several shotguns and a roll of duct tape and start Googling the home addresses of various Fox executives.  That way lies an unwanted prison marriage, so better not.

Margaret’s personality — which, Adelle says, took a year and a half of “regular, painful brainscans” — is imprinted into Echo, and she uses the opportunity to attend her own funeral.  As she points out, who wouldn’t want to do that?  It’s a seemingly universal desire, though I suspect it’s one that a great many of us would balk at following through on.  Margaret doesn’t.  However, that’s not her real goal; no, she at some point became convinced that she would be murdered, probably for her money, so she’s back from the dead, “haunting” her old house in an attempt to determine who it was that killed her.

Now, on many a lesser show, this would be a laugh-out-loud concept, so terrible that it wouldn’t just jump a shark, it would shit napalm onto it while hollering “Who Let the Dogs Out” as it passed overhead.  But here, it works pretty well, and even elicits some genuine emotion.  It’s uncomfortable watching Margaret/Echo have to sit through hearing her children and brother talk poorly of her behind her dead back.  Scenes like that play on fears we must all have at some point or another, and it’s that identification that keeps this episode (and series) from tipping over into ludicrousness.  The resolution of this plot is irrelevant, and for the few minutes that that becomes front-and-center, the episode becomes a bit boring.  What’s interesting here is the emotion, and the philosophical/moral/spiritual implications of the idea of personality imprinting.

Speaking up for some of those concerns, as usual, is Boyd, who is aghast to learn that the Dollhouse is trafficking in what amounts to ticketed eternal life.  DeWitt assures him that Margaret’s is a temporary situation, but her own plotline from the previous episode suggests otherwise.  One of the b-stories involves Topher, who is performing a “diagnostic” on one of the Actives, and that plotline also suggests otherwise.  Topher is actually reuniting with … well, with who?  It’s not clear.  A best friend, perhaps, although I’m going to guess it’s with a brother or sister.  DeWitt is aware of this; she tells Boyd that she permits Topher to run one of these “diagnostics” once each year.

Topher’s friend has been imprinted into (onto?) Sierra, and you might think that there would be some sort of kinky, inappropriate touching going on there, but apparently not.  That doesn’t appear to be what Topher needs. Ballard, on the other hand…?  Well, he took a turn for the darker this episode.

Obviously struggling with the knowledge that Mellie is actually a Doll, he gets a set of her fingerprints and takes them to a former colleague at the FBI.  They run the prints, and the computer search initially pops up a whole series of aliases, several of which are mugshots.  Then, the identities all self-erase themselves from the system.  “What just happened?” Ballard asks; “I just started to believe you,” his friend answers.

Back at home, Mellie, despondent over Ballard’s recent disinterest in her, basically tells Paul that he can treat her like a dog, just so long as he lets her stay around.  Ballard takes the opportunity to indulge in what we can assume is some intense hate-fucking.  It seems to please her, but Ballard looks positively disgusted with himself.   Mellie asks him if he’s going to spend the day trying to find another Dollhouse client.  “I found one,” he says; he’s found one in himself.

This is an interesting moment.  On the one hand, it indicates that Ballard has just achieved a certain level of sympathy for how the Dollhouse functions; after all, he just engaged in some emotional purging, and probably some dark wish fulfillment, so he has to now know why the Dollhouse is able to stay in demand.  On the other hand, he now presumably knows a bit about the depravity and cruelty and darkness that can result from that demand, and he is disgusted with himself for rolling around in that muck.  I’d guess that he is now more determined than ever to find the Dollhouse.

Where that’ll end up going, I have no idea.  But what’s interesting about Paul’s dark turn in this episode is how the other two parts of the story refute his ideas about the Dollhouse.  Leaving aside any spiritual qualms you might have about the idea of resurrection through stored mental patterns, it seems to me hard to argue that any part of what Margaret did was a bad thing.  She was able to find a sort of peace; she was able to find her murderer and bring him to justice; and she was able to reconcile some of the bad blood that her unwitting distantness had engendered in her husband, daughter, and brother.  Presumably, it also allowed Adelle to cope better with her friend’s untimely death.  None of this seems bad or evil to me.  Same with Topher; whoever that was Sierra was imprinted with, Topher obviously just wanted to use that time to share beer and chips, play laser tag, and enjoy companionship in a totally non-creepy, asexual way.

So for the first time, we’re not entirely in sympathy with Ballard.  If he’s successful in his efforts to bring down the Dollhouse, he may or may not be stopping some bad things, but he’ll also definitely be stopping some good things.  It’s a complicated thing, this Dollhouse.

The acting from the regular cast is excellent this week.  I’m still not convinced that Dushku is a versatile enough actress to be playing a part like Echo — the writers haven’t given me too many opportunities to make that call — but she’s very good this week.  She suggests the primness, the slight obliviousness of a very wealthy woman.  She has a good chemistry with Olivia Williams; the two actually seem like old friends.  She is also very funny when her son tries to kiss “Julia.”

Fran Kranz plays up Topher’s childlike qualities, and he does a good job of it.  I’m actually starting to like Topher; he’s seeming more like a Whedon character every episode.  Dichen Lachman is typically awesome in her scenes with him; she’s a superstar waiting to happen, mark my words.  Enver Gjokaj might be, also; he plays Victor imprinted as a horse-trainer/spy, and his southern drawl is easy, believable, and the probable actual inspiration for the weird dialect I was typing in there for an already-regretted while.

Tahmoh Penikett is great as Ballard.  In a sense, he’s currently covering some of the same ground he covered on Battlestar Galactica once Helo found out Sharon was a Cylon.  I would guess that those similarities aren’t lost on either him or on Whedon.  But Penikett was great at it there, and he’s great at it here, too.  Miracle Laurie also continues to impress as Mellie/November.

An enjoyable episode, and one that proves — to me, if to no one else — that this show has now really found its freshman stride.  Hopefully, it’ll get the opportunity Firefly didn’t: to also experience the second-season surge that typically accompanies Whedon shows.