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.

I’ve got to be honest: the season finale of Lost is on the air right now, so I’m not inclined to take very detailed looks at these two episodes.  I’m going to put in the due diligence, though, so here goes.

In “Omega,” the finale of the first (and possibly only) season of Dollhouse, we find out a bit more of what the deal is with Alpha.  About half of the episode consists of flashbacks to Alpha’s rampage that left Saunders scarred; the rest of the episode splits time between Alpha trying to create a new mate (Omega) in the body of Caroline and the Dollhouse’s attempts to track them down.

This was a good episode, but it wasn’t entirely satisfactory.  Some of it may have played better on paper than it does in fact: much of the confrontation between Alpha and Omega/Echo/Caroline (sheesh!) seems silly and ill-advised.  The location shooting at the factory or wherever they are has an incredibly hollow feel to it, and has no visual appeal whatsoever; zero, zip, nada, zilch.  You never want that, but a season finale is definitely the wrong place for it.  I also detested the choice of wardrobe that Echo wore; the old flannel shirt and jean shorts thing isn’t hot, it’s just trashy, and while I get that that was the point, it was quite unappealing visually.

I also can’t say I was a fan of the way Alpha’s shifts between different personalities was executed.  Now, Alan Tudyk is a very good actor, and each one of his different takes on the character was outstanding … but by throwing flash edits into the mix, so that you’re literally cutting briefly when his personality changes each time, it makes it seem as if you’re having to cut around the performance in order to create the semblance of some sort of unity.  Yes, I know that the intended effect is one of disorientation and tension, but that wasn’t the effect it had on me; it made it seem like the editors weren’t confident in Tudyk’s ability to telegraph the transitions between different personalities.  That was ill-judged, in my opinion.

I’m also not quite sure what to think of the choice Eliza Dushku made to not do something similar to Tudyk’s performance in her scenes as Omega.  I might have liked to see something a little more manic.  On the other hand, isn’t it kinda cool that Echo/Caroline seems to be able to process all of these personalities and retain some semblance of normalcy?  I think it works, from a character standpoint, and I also like the authority that Dushku brings to these scenes; she feels very much in control, at least of herself.  I continue to think that she’s a better actress than she’s getting credit for being.

Lest it sound like I’m totally bagging on this episode, I’d better talk briefly about what I liked.  As I just hinted, I liked — “loved” might not be wrong to say — the fact that Omega didn’t go nuts because her core, original personality (her soul, according to Ballard) is fundamentally stable.  That’s a nice wrinkle, and that part of the story helps make up a bit for how unsuccessful the rest of the scenes in Alpha’s hideouts tend to be.

The Saunders/Whiskey storyline was satisfying.  It hadn’t occurred to me to think that “Saunders” was an Active, but it makes perfect sense.  Amy Acker is particularly good in this episode.  Why hasn’t someone figured out how to build a show around her yet?

The episode’s beginning — in which a customer’s Natural Born Killers fantasy goes horribly awry — was suitably horrific, and it’s also believable: I totally buy that someone would pay for that type of experience, and that it would be approved so long as the Dollhouse felt it could control the situation.

I also enjoyed Ballard’s new allegiance with the Dollhouse.  I’m not 100% sold on it, in terms of its believability — Ballard has been so obsessed with bringing the thing down, I’m not sure I can buy him even considering working with them — but Tahmoh Penikett has such great chemistry with Olivia Williams, Harry Lennix, and Fran Kranz that it’s easy to see why Whedon would want to push the show in that direction.

All in all, it was a good finale, but only good; definitely not great.  It was clearly an attempt to resolve many of the plot threads from the season, but I don’t think it was entirely successful in actually doing so.

There is one remaining episode, “Epitaph One,” which will apparently make its debut on DVD.  From there, who knows.  According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Fox network has been meeting with the Fox studio (they;re not entirely the same entity, it seems) to try and figure out how to make a second season a financial reality.  That’s encouraging news.

Moving on to Fringe, I was also disappointed a bit in this show’s season finale, “There’s More Than One of Everything.”  I’ll say this for Dollhouse, it at least tried to wrap up the first season.  The producers of Fringe seem a lot more interested in setting up the second season, and more or less forgot to provide a compelling episode to hang that setup upon.

The main thrust of the episode involves David Robert Jones, who shot Nina at the end of last week’s episode; we find out that he did this so he could steal an ultra-powerful energy cell out of Nina’s cyborg arm.  He uses this energy cell to punch a hole between the dimensions, through which he apparently plans to journey for nefarious reasons.  He does all this wrapped in Invisible Man bandages, which makes for some good, creepy shots.

I’m most disapointed by how little last week’s Observer-takes-Walter plotline yields this week.  Turns out, the Observer takes Walter to the cemetery (Peter Bishop 1979-1985!), and then to the beach and the old family beachhouse.  There, Walter finds a device he created that is capable of sealing holes between the dimensions.  Now, this is obviously an important device, but it doesn’t really feel that important for some reason.

Nina manages to convince Olivia, Broyles, and Charlie that William Bell is actually in one of these other dimensions, which can be accessed through thin spots between the worlds.  For anyone who’s read The Dark Tower, this might sound like a thinny; for anyone who’s read The Talisman or Black House, the title of the episode might remind you of Twinners.  (While we’re on that subject, how awesome a Speedy Parker would Lance Reddick make?)  I’m not crying foul; Abrams and company are on record as enormous Stephen King fans.

The final scene, in which Olivia side-steps into another world and meets Walter Bell, is pretty damn cool.  Nimoy is great, performing with far more energy than he does in Star Trek; you almost sense that he feels the opportunity at hand to put a solid asterisk on his career with a great role in a new hit show.  The episode ends with a pullback revealing that Bell’s office is in the a World Trade Center!  It’s a great end to a mediocre episode; a great end to a good first season.

But I’m not entirely on the Fringe bandwagon yet, truth be told.  The show is swimming in potential, but it hasn’t paid off enough of that potential for me to be a huge fan yet.  Hopefully, the second season will accomplish that goal.