Loaded Couch Potatoes

Improbably, Joss Whedon’s newest baby, Dollhouse, got picked up for a second season, despite not being watched by more than about a hotel-room’s worth of people, and being liked by only two of them.  When even your fans don’t like your show all that much, you know you’ve got issues.

And yet, here’s a second season!

Yay!

Beware of spoilers ahead.

Speaking as one of those two people who actually liked the bulk of the first season, I was beyond thrilled when Fox decided to try and atone for Firefly by bringing Dollhouse back for a second go-round.  Primarily, I hoped Whedon would find a way to not squander the opportunity, and based on “Vows,” the second-season premiere, I think I’m gonna have to say that he mostly did just that.

Found a way, that is; not squandered the opportunity.  I suck at sentence construction sometimes, and there went one.  What’s that you say, “go back and change it”?  No can do.

Anybody who has ever been a fan of one of Whedon’s other shows — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and the aforementioned Firefly – knows that one of his greatest strengths is in assembling a great cast of characters to bounce off of each other.  The series struggled a bit with this during its first season; all the pieces were in place, but nobody seemed to be moving them about very well for most of the season.

That began to change at some point, and in tonight’s season premiere, it is far and away the best element.  There are numerous excellent interactions between the characters: Boyd has great scenes with DeWitt, Ballard, and Saunders (that last one is particularly great); Topher also has a great scene with Saunders; Echo has good scenes with Ballard and with Saunders/Whiskey; DeWitt has a fine moment with Victor; Sierra — and God almighty does Dichen Lachman look good in this scene — has a great scene with Ivy in which she has an anti-Asian racist imprint.

Unless I missed it, it’s not immediately clear how much time has passed since Alpha went on his rampage at the end of the first season.  Clearly some time, probably several months, have passed, but the ramifications of that incident are still being felt in some ways.  Boyd is still very suspicious of Ballard; part of this is clearly due to his promotion to head of security, but part of him is doubtless also resentful of not being Echo’s handler anymore, and is maybe even a little jealous of Ballard’s proximity to her.

Not that Ballard is Echo’s handler, either.  No, they’ve got a more complicated relationship than that.  Apparently, Ballard’s deal with the Dollhouse is that he’s allowed to be a client, renting out Echo to use as a weapon in taking down criminals he wasn’t able to take down while at the FBI. 

This is an unexpected turn of events, and Whedon — who’s in the director’s chair tonight, and also wrote the screenplay — gets in at least one terrific reversal-of-expectations moment when he reveals that this is what’s going on with Echo’s engagement.  Initially, we’re led to believe that her engagement this week — she’s getting married to Apollo Jamie Bamber — is just another example of a kinky rich dude paying for his ya-yas.

Echo, in her guise as Mrs. Apollo, walks into the back room of a shop at one point, to find Ballard sitting there waiting on her; she greets him with a cordial, “How’s it goin’, partner,” or something like that.

Now, if you’ve seen “Epitaph One,” you know that at some point in the future, Echo/Caroline develops the ability to retain her own personality while she’s also imprinted with another, and you also know that she and Ballard end up working together.  So my first thought upon hearing her switch into a different tone of voice and call Ballard her partner was that this plot element was already starting.  Instead, it’s then revealed that Echo’s real current imprint is of an FBI agent Ballard is partnered with; she’s gone undercover, seduced an arms dealer, and is on a long-con sort of engagement designed to take him down.

So, what you’ve got here is a person named Caroline, memory wiped and turned all tabula rasa in the form of an active designated Echo, imprinted with the personality of an FBI agent who in turn is pretending to be somebody else.  Um, that’s, like, pretty fucking deep.

Even deeper: Echo isn’t really Echo anymore.  She’s still dealing with occasional flashes of memory of other engagements, so in some ways, she’s still a bit of that superintelligence — or whatever you want to call it — that Alpha made her into last season.  But only Ballard knows this, so in a sense Echo isn’t Echo anymore; she’s somebody else pretending, at times, to be Echo.

This isn’t as confusing as it sounds.  I wouldn’t say confusing; I’d lean closer, this episoe, to “compelling.”

Also compelling is the sad case of Whiskey, who seems to be well on her way to the loony bin.  She’s fucking with Topher’s mind, trying to repay him for creating her.  Not at all happy with knowing she’s a fake person, she’s doing things like putting rats in cabinets for him to discover, and showing up to sppon with him and give him morning wood.  She’s supposedly trying to conquer her own self-loathing through conquering an object of external loathing, but it doesn’t work too well … or does it?

She’s been designed to want to never leave the Dollhouse, but at episode’s end, she runs away in a convertible, headed for a new role on a new series on a different network.  (Amy Acker has a role on ABC’s upcoming Happy Town, alongside Sam Neill and Steven Weber; however, she will be appearing on Dollhouse again at some point, or so “Epitaph One” assures me.)

The performances are all pretty great this week.  Starting at the top, I know a lot of people don’t like Eliza Dushku, but when she’s playing within her range, she can be really good, and she’s really good in this episode.  Whedon had to play to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s strengths and avoid her weaknesses on Buffy, and it worked; if he can keep doing that here with Dushku, it’ll work out fine.

Amy Acker is particularly good in her role; she’s got a sort of crazed, doomed, defeated thing going on, to the extent that she even professes to want to keep her scars.  Acker, as Angel fans know, gives good crazy.  That fucking Happy Town had better be quite  a show; she’s going to missed on this one.

I was also impressed this week by Fran Kranz.  Topher, as a character, was a bit of a hemorrhoid during the first season, but starting with “Epitaph One” and continuing into “Vows,” he’s growing into an interesting character.  Kranz is obviously up to the challenge, too, and that pleases me.

Everyone else is good, including Jamie Bamber, who is largely wasted, true, but it’s nice to see him anyways.

There’s also a new character introduced, Senator Perrin, played by Angel‘s Alexis Denisof.  Perrin is seen on television publicly declaring a private war against the Rossum Corporation for holding out technology that could benefit Alzheimer’s patients.  Both Langton and Ballard suspect each other of having tipped Perrin off about the Dollhouse(s); this can lead nowhere good.

I’m pleased to see Denisof back in the Whedonverse, and I can only hope that Dollhouse can stick around long enough to properly take advantage of his tremendous talents.

If the rest of the season is as improved as this first episode, then I suspect that might well come to pass.