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.

And if the people in the photo below don’t look familiar, well, that’ll give you an indication of the sort of crazy this episode brings.

In some ways, I’m not quite sure what to make of “Epitaph One.”  I enjoyed it, and would happily watch it again (something I plan to do whenever I’m able to afford the DVDs), but it also frustrated me at times.

Spoilers definitely lurk ahead, so proceed with caution.

The setup is that the bulk of the episode takes place in the year 2019, after some sort of apocalyptic war has broken out and devastated much of Los Angeles, and possibly America, and possibly the world.  The fan blades are definitely poo-spackled.

A group of survivors somehow find the Dollhouse — our Dollhouse — and get inside.  It’s abandoned, or so they think.  Here, things started to get a bit confusing for me.  These survivors have no idea of what the place is that they’ve found, and yet they seem to recignize the imprint chair for what it is.  I’m going to assume that I simply wasn’t paying close enough attention, and that’s plausible enough; maybe a second viewing will clear up some of those type issues I had.

Intercut with the flash-forward-to-2019 story is a series of flashbacks, most of which still constitute flash-forwards relative to where the story left off in the previous episode.  Christ, I know exactly what I meant when I typed that and it still sounds confusing, ’cause, well, it is.

From what I recall, the one scene that is genuinely a flashback involves seeing Topher’s first day on the job, and learning that not only did he not get along with Dominic right from the get-go, but that he was also responsible for developing some serious upgrades to the existing Dollhouse tech as of his hiring.

If I recall correctly, all the other non-2019 scenes take the story forward from the end of 1×12.  We see all of the main Dollhouse cast in one or more of these flash”back” scenes, and boy howdy, do we find out some interesting stuff.  For example: Echo at some point becomes able to retain what I assume to be Caroline’s personality while she is imprinted; Dominic isn’t dead, but gets out of the attic at some point and then later returns with a gun to properly chastise DeWitt for what’s happening out in the world; Boyd, who apparently gets romantic with Saunders 2.0, flees the Dollhouse; November — a November, at least — has had something bad happen to her; Caroline and Ballard become gun-totin’ pals in badassery, and possibly something more; Topher goes insane, possibly from guilt over what his tech has done to the world; and so forth.

It’s pretty gnarly stuff, and really, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

This is ambitious, heady stuff, and it’s clearly trying to serve a dual purpose: it’s insurance against a first-season cancellation, acting as an impromptu series finale; and it’s also a proof-of-concept episode, designed to show executives the type of direction the story was headed in.

Clearly, the series got a second season, so the proof-of-concept aspect must have worked.

So now, here’s the downside: we know where the series is headed, and while the journey in getting there seems like it could be interesting, it doesn’t change the fact that a great deal of the mystique of the show has now been permanently altered.  I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but I’m not sure it’s a good thing, either.

If that sounds wishy-washy to you, well, that’s indicative of my reaction to the episode as a whole.  Years from now, it might well strike me as one of the best things ever made, or it might feel like little more than a failed experiment.  Only time is going to really answer the question.

The cast is typically strong, with Fran Kranz making a bigger impression on me than he ever has in the past; Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman deliver their typically awesome work, as does Olivia Williams; Reed Diamond is always a welcome presence, as is Amy Acker.

Making the biggest impressions amongst the guest cast: Felicia Day, who is given little to do other than react, but she reacts capably and is very attractive, so score.  Backing her up is Zack Ward, playing a hardass named Zone.  Ward might look familiar.  Does this help?

He had yellow eyes … so help me God, yellow eyes.

And as it turns out, Ward is pretty good at playing a hardass.  Who’d a-thunk it?

I’m curious to see whether the second season of the show picks up any of these threads, or if Whedon will now hang back a while and see how long the train can run before he starts steering the story in the directions “Epitaph One” points toward.

Here’s hoping the series is able to hang around long enough for Whedon to get his way … and if the episodes Fox chooses to air are in the vicinity of being this good, minus some of the confusuion factor, then it just might happen.

HitFix has elaborated, offering up some possibly spoilery details of who and what Glau will be playing.

The second season of Dollhouse begins on Fox on September 25.

This will mark a reunion of sorts for Bamber with his former Battlestar cast member Tahmoh Penikett.

There are no details on what Bamber’s role will consist of, but it appears that he will be a part of an engagement Echo is sent on.

Seriously, guys … wasn’t it bad enough that you commissioned one of the best sci-fi shows in history, Firefly, only to pull the plug on it before the season had even ended?  Why did you then feel the need to, years later, when faced with another series that showed signs it could be as good or better (a series created by the main creative force behind the new Battlestar Galactica, a serious contender for the title of Best Sci-Fi Show Ever), cut it off at the knees by failing to even make a series at all?

I’ll give you guys a few points for sticking by Dollhouse, which, after all, is a Joss Whedon show; I know you figure the Whedonites will worship you for that.  Well, as much as I like that show, it looks to me like you guys bet on the wrong horse.  Again.

As you can probably tell, I kinda loved the pilot for Virtuality.  In fact, I kinda flipped out for it a little bit.  All that said, with due respect to Fox, I can understand why they might have taken a look at this and said, “Huh … well, now, there’s a Nielsen disaster waiting to happen.”  This is dense stuff, with a cast free of star power, an emphasis on talk in favor of action, and a concept that is not easily summarized so that it can be pitched at Bubba … or at the people who want to advertise to Bubba.

Thing is, anybody with sense knows that any quality sci-fi show is going to attract a devoted audience, even if it’s a small one, and that that audience tends to get awfully generous with their pocketbooks and wallets.  In short, you’d have to be  a dullard to not figure out how to makeat least a little money off of a quality sci-fi show.  Sure, it might not be as much money as you’d like to make; then again, look at all the bucks Fox made on that itty-bitty amount of Firefly they made.

It’s obvious to me that Virtuality was going to be something special, and the fact that Fox failed to see the potential in that specialness is galling.  I’m no genius, so I don’t know exactly how I would have gone about turning this show into a moneymaker; but by gum, I’d have figured out something.

But enough anti-Fox sentiment for now.  Let’s talk about the pilot itself.

Here’s the story: Several decades in the future, the Phaeton (a long-range space exploration vessel commissioned by a private consortium) is six months out from Earth, heading toward Neptune.  Once there, the ship’s commander has to make a decision: does he use Neptune’s gravity to slingshot the ship back toward Earth, or to send it even further into space on a ten-year mission to explore the Epsilon Eridani system.  The stakes are high; since the Phaeton launched, they have received word that scientists have announced the Earth will be uninhabitable within a century, now making the mission one less of exploration than of salvation.  Two things spice up the mission a bit: it is all being filmed and broadcast back to Earth as a reality show (produced by the ship’s psych officer!); and to keep the crew amused, a set of virtual-reality modules has been installed, allowing the crew to have holodeck-esque experiences that will presumably allow them to escape the feelings of cabin-fever-like confinement they will begin to experience during their journey.  However, the virt-modules have begun to malfunction, as members of the crew are being visited in the virtual world by a mysterious man who apparently means them harm.

If you’re saying to yourself, “Self, that sounds like about four shows in one!”, well, you’re not wrong.  (If I might digress, doesn’t that mean that Fox had about four different ways they could market this as a series?  Make ads playing up the reality-show angle and pitch it at reality fans; make ads playing up the virtual environments and pitch it at the appropriate people; make ads playing up the ecological-emergency element and etc. etc., so forth and so on.  Hell, if all else fails, lie to audiences.  Jesus Christ, Fox, you do it all the time; why be shy about it now?)  There is a lot going on just in that concept, and the actual events of the show add several more layers.  I’ll get into that further on into the article.

This is the point at which I’m going to start getting into spoilery territory, so if you don’t want to know, now might be a good time to stop reading.

First of all, let’s talk about the cast of characters/actors.  Producers Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor and producer/director Peter Berg found a great cast and wrote a bunch of very interesting characters for this show, and I’d like to look at them individually.

First up is Commander Frank Pike, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (whose previous Fox series, New Amsterdam, at least got one season).  If  there is one role I would have recast, I think this is the one.  Now, don’t get me wrong; Coster-Waldau is perfectly good, but if the role had had a star, then I think the series might have stood a better chance at getting picked up.

Pike himself is an intriguing enough fellow, but it’s clear that his role on this show was not going to be a traditional Captain’s role on a sci-fi show.  I mean, he dies toward the end, only to persist in some sort of virtual existence.  That’s a twist Hitchcock would have been proud of; who kills off the show’s main character in its first episode?  That’s definitely not the traditional Kirk/Picard/Mal/Adama-type leadership role.

It’s right there in his name, too: Frank (the name of one of the astronauts HAL murders in 2001) Pike (the name of a former captain in the original Star Trek who goes to live in a make-believe world with a race of highly-advanced aliens).  Eeeeenteresting…

Pike’s virt-module time is taken up by a Civil War scenario, in which he plays a troop commander in charge of leading an assault on an enemy camp.

Pike has been having a virtual affair (or, as I like to call it, a v-romance) with Rika Goddard, who is played by the stunning Sienna Guillory.  I admired Guillory in the woeful Eragon, and I admired her here, too.  Rika is the ship’s botanist, and was obviously going to carry a decent amount of the show after this episode, as she is, at the end of the pilot, the only crew member who knows Frank is “alive” inside the virtual world.

Rika is married to Roger Fallon (James D’Arcy), the Phaeton‘s psychiatric officer who is also the producer of Edge of Forever: Life on the Phaeton, the Fox reality show being beamed back from the ship.  Roger is a bit of a cold fish, which is presumably why Rika has been virtually stepping out on him with the manlier Pike.

Roger is obviously being set up as one of the main suspects in terms of who it is we think is causing the “malfunctions” with the virt-modules and the ship at large.  D’Arcy (he was in Master & Commander, you might recall) is quite good in the role, although in some ways, it is a thankless one; you’re not supposed to like Roger very much, but he’s not villainous in any obvious way, and therefore has no scenes that would really attract audiences one way or another.  Instead, he’s called upon mainly to quietly seethe, and to project quiet disdain and distress; he does those things well.

Pike’s second-in-command is Jimmy Johnson.  No, not the football coach; the nuclear physicist, the closest thing the Phaeton has to a Scotty.  This Scotty, played by Ritchie Coster, is a wheelchair-bound, antisocial dude who obviously aches to be taken seriously and stresses over his status as the guy who will be left holding the bag should anything hap’n to the cap’n … which, of course, it does.  In further episodes, presumably, Johnson would have had to actually assume command, and given how contentious his relationships with various other crew members is in the pilot, there would have been some good drama develop from that situation.

In the virtual world, Jimmy seems to spend his time climbing mountains … with the full use of both of his legs.

One of the crew Jimmy doesn’t get along with too well is Sue Parsons, the Phaeton‘s pilot.  She’s played by the lovely Clea DuVall, who previously worked with Ron Moore on Carnivale.  (DuVall ain’t every dude’s cup of tea, and I get that, but can I take a moment to complain about Fox again?  Take a look at the above publicity photo of DuVall; it’s been airbrushed to remove all of DuVall’s freckles, which is an odd choice on somebody’s part.  Did somebody out there think there were people who, when confronted with the prospect of a freckled person on television, would say, “oh, fuck naw, I ain’t watchin’ that garbage!  Send me a freckle-free show or nothin’!”)

Sue is a bit of a grump, and is definitely antisocial, which is why she and Jimmy don’t get along; they each want to be the ship’s outcast, I guess, and resent the competition.  Sue strikes me as being something like this show’s version of Starbuck; she’s a former Marine who, apparently, got raped by a couple of her rackmates, but figured out a way to keep on living.  You get the sense that she was willing to go on a ten-year mission to another star system as a means of getting away from people, and that if she could just get away from these last few, she’d be just fine.

Sue’s virtual time is spent in a variety of physical exercises, including surfing and biking.

Speaking of rape, there’s Billie Kashmiri (played by Kerry Bishé), the computer specialist who has recently been pressed by Roger into service as the host of Edge of Never.  Bishé is cute as a button, and has a nice, natural on-screen presence.  Billie’s virtual fantasy involves her playing guitar and singing in a rock band (Nikki and The Hellraisers seems to be their name, and they play Tokyo a couple of times, performing the Munsters theme song in Japanese!).  Nikki also appears to be some sort of international crimefighter or spy, and there is an amusing scene in which Sue/Nikki has to cut a gig short in order to chase down a villain by the name of Lazarus; he’s fond of plastic surgery and comes after her backstage wearing his new face and guns-a-blazin’ (“You shot Rico!” she shouts, hilariously).

This scene is pretty great.  It plays like a parody of bad television (think of how the Nikki-and-Paolo episode of Lost began), and seems to offer an idea of what the virt-module concept could lead to week after week.  But just as soon as that idea takes root, it is shattered by this man:

Referred to as either the Green-Eyed Man or the Virtual Man, depending on where you look, this fellow seems to exist only in the virtual world, and he is perpetrating various acts of violence against crewmembers.  In the beginning of the episode, he shoots Frank in the stomach during his Civil War scene; later, he tosses the doctor off of a virtual mountain, shoots Frank and Rika while they’re in virtual bed, and (off-screen) causes Sue to have a virtual surfing accident.  He saves the worst for poor Billie, however, beating her up and then trussing her and v-raping her.  By the episode’s end, Billie has bonded with Sue, and has taken Jimmy’s advice and headed back into the virtual world, where she and Sue plan to hunt down her assailant and punish him, whatever he is.

Clearly, the Virtual Man is one of the show’s most intriguing characters.  He’s played (quite well) by Jimmi Simpson, whom I mainly remember from Rose Red; he’s been popping up in things like House and My Name Is Earl and 24, and seems to have graduated from the Callum Keith Rennie school of being an on-screen creep.

Played by Joy Bryant and Nelson Lee, Alice and Kenji are another couple.  Their main traits seem to be indiscriminate randiness and, on Alice’s part, both moodiness and an intense mother-instinct.  Seemingly cut off from the prospect of having a child anytime soon — possibly ever (it’s a ten-year mission to Epsilon Eridani, and another ten back to Earth, so Alice might be past her child-birthing years once the Phaeton has returned home) — Alice is indulging herself in a virtual pregnancy.  This is an odd fantasy, and it’s even odder when you find out that her doctor is the Green-Eyed Man (!), and that she seems to have some sort of knowledge of who and what he is (“We need to talk,” she tells him, meaningfully, toward the end after Frank’s death).

The ship’s other couple is Manny and Val, the astrophysicist and geologist who also serve as ship’s cooks.  Manny (Jose Pablo Cantillo) is upset with Roger for the way in which he is portraying them on Edge of Never as queens who fight all the time; Val is a bit more laid-back.  I like Val (Gene Farber), who puts Jimmy in his place and has an obvious soft spot for Sue.  We don’t get much of a look at the interior lives of either character, and it’s possible to see them as merely being The Gay Characters (or as the Homonauts), but I suspect Moore and Taylor would have developed them if the series went on, and if Fox allowed it.

Erik Jensen plays Jules Braun, the navigator who also designed the Phaeton.  Jules is grieving over the (unexplained) death of his son, who he visits inside his virt-module.  If this reminds you a bit of the relationship between Daniel and Zoe Greystone in Ron Moore’s Caprica, well, it reminded me of it, too.

More interestingly, Jules is a former Mission Control man who thinks it’s possible — and this is a theory we first hear from Frank — that the ecological crisis on Earth is a sham perpetrated on the crew by the company in charge of the mission’s pursestrings; he thinks, in other words, that they’ve created the illusion of a crisis to motivate the crew to continue their mission.  This is an intriguing idea; I’d love to know how it would have played out in the series.

Dr. Adin Meyer is played by Omar Metwally, whom I remember from an excellent small role in Munich.  Early in the pilot, Meyer finds out, and informs Pike, that he has developed Parkinson’s, and his disease and the future complications from it pose a substantial reason to consider going back to Earth instead of to Epsilon Eridani.  Meyer is a sympathetic fellow, and his virtual fantasy involves painting landscapes of a mountain range.  The Green-Eyed Man pushes him off a mountain ledge, and Meyer later reports that the experience made him feel alive; he, in fact, is the only other character who truly seems to share Frank’s weird enthusiasm for this new development in the virt-modules.

The final crew member is Jean, the computer; Jean is voiced by Kari Wahlgren, a seemingly-in-high-demand voiceover actress who does solid work here.  Jean is portrayed as a sort of eye, and obviously is reminiscent of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  To make that connection even more concrete, toward the end of the pilot, there is an accident in which an airlock is opened, killing Pike by exposure to space.  Did Jean cause this?  Did another crewmember?  Did the Virtual Man?  Was it something else entirely?  We’ll never know, I guess.

There’s a lot to talk about with this pilot, not the least of which is to speculate upon where the show might have ended up going.  I’m not going to do that, because it’s just too annoying, but I suspect there will be many such a conversation had at sci-fi conventions.

Other points of interest:

*  The virt-modules are obviously reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s holodeck.  Moore worked with that conceit for years on both that show and Deep Space Nine, and I’d love to see what he made out of it on this show, cut free of Trek’s traditions.  Not to be, it seems.  (Although Moore’s v-club over on Caprica is a very similar idea, so maybe that show will fare better.)  One thing I particularly like is how the look of the virtual worlds is conveyed.  During the scenes involving complex virtual-scape creations, such as an ocean or a battlefield, there is a copious amount of CGI, and it gives those worlds a sort of unreal sheen; it makes the virtual environment feel blatantly unreal, but somehow very appropriate.

*  Roger claims to Billie at one point that the most recent episode of Edge of Never got the best ratings it’s had in quite a while: 5 billion viewers.  Now, that’s a big Nielsen number.  I enjoyed the conceit of the reality show more than I expected.  The candid-interview segments, in fact, are full of promise as a means of delivering both exposition and character development within a fictional format.

*  I got a kick out of the microwave meal Jimmy makes himself: a Tweety Burger, which, thanks to the magic of DVR pause, I now know is a “MEAL READY-TO-EAT INDIVIDUAL” consisting of a “BEEF HAMBURGER WITH FRENCH FRIED POTATOES.”  I’m a sucker for fake brand-name products like that.  Put it on a t-shirt, and gimme one, size 3XL, plz.  And make it snappy; I still haven’t received my Breaking Bad Schraederbrau shirt yet.

*  This pilot was exceptionally well-edited.  There is a decent amount of footage representing security-cam and hull-cam feeds, which is all good, but the show in general is just very nicely cut together.  It’s also beautifully lit by Stephen McNutt, the cinematographer who shot most of Battlestar Galactica.

*  The production design is also quite nice.  The Phaeton, inside and out, doesn’t quite look like any other ship from a sci-fi show, which is always an achievement.

*  Frank’s “death” at the beginning of the show foreshadows his actual death toward the end, but I suspect there is much more going on here than meets the eye.  At one point, Frank has Jean replay the experience for him, and this time we see what he saw: first, he is underwater, then flying through a beautiful sky; we also see the corridors of the ship, and an airlock, and then we exit into space.  Frank “wakes up,” and says something about “it” being true.  After this, he is a different person, energized, convinced that everything the crew knows is about to change.  I wonder if it’s possible that Frank knows he’s going to die from this point forward, and simply isn’t sweating it.  I also wonder if it’s possible that he isn’t actually dead; inside the Civil War scenario, he tells Rika: “It’s okay, Rika; none of it’s real.”  What does “Frank” mean by this?  Clearly, something hinky is going on, and with a show like this one, there’s just no telling what it could be … because it could be anything.  Grrr!

*  I don’t how if the science is at all realistic (it very well might be), but I love the way the Phaeton is put into near-lightspeed travel by the exploding of hundreds of nuclear bombs.  The effects-work in these scenes is great, although I could have used a bit more footage of the actual slingshotting off of Neptune.

*  I was highly intrigued by this dialogue between Frank and Roger, after Billie’s rape.

Frank:  "What do you think?  Was it real?"
Roger:  "What are you asking me, Frank?"
Frank:  "I'm asking you if you know fantasy from reality, Roger."
Roger:  "I think I do.  Do you know what's real, Frank?"
Frank:  "I'll tell you what I think.  I think this mission has changed.
"I think our eyes are about to be opened, and that we are on the verge
of a profound awakening that you and I cannot even imagine.  And I think
the virt-modules are crucial to that awakening.  I won't shut them down."

That’s a good scene.  The tension between Frank and Roger plays out as the tension between two men who are in a relationship with the same woman, but there’s no particular evidence — other than Roger’s attitude — to suggest that Roger knows about Frank’s v-romance with Rika at that point; it may simply be that Roger the psych officer is a little freaked out over how weird his captain has gotten.  I mentioned 2001 a couple of times, but Frank’s belief in something extraordinary being soon to occur also puts me in mind of 2010 … as do a few other things in this pilot, such as the slingshot maneuver.  Nice to see that movie get some referrences (assuming they’re intentional); I always kinda liked it.

*  The scene in which Sue comforts Billie after Jimmy’s blatant disrespect for the trauma of the v-rape (“I don’t see what the big deal is,” he says) is a highlight.  Sue says, “They don’t get that even when something like this happens in the real world, your mind is where it happens.”  This is a blatant case being made for the relative reality of virtual experiences; to some degree, I’d imagine that the entire show would be about this concept, one way or another.

It’s a great pilot, one of the better I’ve seen in recent memory, and it’s a shame that Fox killed the series before making it.  It might have gone differently.  If Fox had created buzz for the show by screening the pilot at sci-fi conventions, instead of burying it on a Friday night in June (against the first Friday of Transformers 2, which was Fox’s fault, and also against coverage of the previous day’s death of Michael Jackson, which was not), then I can see Virtuality having become the next big cult-fave sci-fi show.

Instead, now they’ve got a mere curiosity on their hands.

Ah, well, better luck next time.

On the second season of Dollhouse (which is currently two weeks into the planning phase in the writers’ room): “We don’t have the onus of trying to be a big hit sitting on our shoulders.  We can just be ourselves.  And so the stories we’re breaking are pure, and exciting, and everybody’s on-board in the room, and it’s never flowed better.”

On the in-development feature film reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “I think that’s something better left untouched by me.”

Airing Fringe against those other heavyweights is likely a tremendous sign of faith in the J.J. Abrams-produced series.

In other Fox news, James Hibberd spoke with Joss Whedon about the renewal of Dollhouse.

Hibberd cites the strong DVR and online streaming numbers, as well as Fox executives’ actual appreciation of the series (!), as the deciding factors in the decision.

Also expected to be announced on Monday: NBC’s decision on the future of Chuck.

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.

Trust me, you don’t want to read this if you haven’t seen the episode yet.

Written by the illustrious Jane Espenson, tonight’s episode of Dollhouse – possibly one of the final three we’ll ever see — is one that I want to call vintage Joss Whedon.  I really, really want to.

I can’t, though.  It might be vintage Joss Whedon, but I’ve got a couple of questions about certain key plot developments that I’m going to need answered before I can start slobbing on this episode’s knob too much.

But, as I said, I really, really want to, so for a while I’ll do just that.  Conveniently, this also gives any of you who haven’t seen the episode time to dip on outta here before the spoilers start flying.

The episode starts with a (presumably) homeless man finding what appears to be a dead body in a dumpster.  When the seemingly-lifeless arm shoots out at him and grabs him, he knows better.

Cut to Echo, who is at an orphange or a foster care center or something, reading fairy tales to children.  Specifically, she’s reading the story of Briar Rose, the sleeping beauty of the Brothers Grimm.  Echo’s mission is only dealt with for part of the episode, but it’s apparently charity work being conducted from an idea originated by Topher.  Pro bono Dollhouse work?  Well, that’s a new wrinkle.

Anyways, it’s a cool idea: Topher has taken the mental patterns of a disturbed little girl (no word on how he got them), advanced and modified and manipulated them into a state of ideal maturity and development, and placed that idealized mental pattern into Echo.  In other words, Echo is the little girl, or at least a potential version of her.  Echo has been sent to help the girl avoid a long, slow descent into what promises to be a very painful life.

During this scene, we see Echo’s storybook, with an illustration of the Prince who comes to rescue Briar Rose, and we cut from that illustration to Paul, who is in his apartment packing up, refusing to explain to a tearful Mellie why he’s leaving.  He’s being quite a bastard, in fact, and the result is that Mellie starts walking the streets, and finds the nearest bridge.  She seems to be strongly considering turning herself into a freeway pancake when her handler shows up, places a hand on her shoulder, and leads her to the black van.

Paul has been following her, and he tails the van to the Dollhouse!  I wasn’t surprised!  I saw the promo for this episode!  I try not to watch those things, but soe weeks, I just can’t help it.

Later, Ballard tells Loomis at the FBI that he went into the building, and took a good look around, but couldn’t find anything.  Obviously, this must mean there’s a building underneath the building; Caroline did say she was underground, after all.  Ballard follows this lead to an ecological consultant, Steven Kepler, who (he assumes) must have built the Dollhouse.  He tracks Kepler down, and lo and behold if Kepler isn’t played by Whedonverse Hall-of-Famer Alan Tudyk.

Here’s where things start gettin’ damn spoilery; I’m done recapping, I’m going to just start diving into the rest of the episode in whole, because this is the point at which I start having a few problems.  Depending on how things go in the next episode, they might not even turn out to be problems.  This, of course, is one of the pitfalls of reviewing a series like Dollhouse one episode at a time.  (Except on the level of saying whether or not I was entertained; in this case, I certainly was.)

Kepler isn’t actually Kepler; Kepler was dead in a dumpster in Tucson, presumably with a whole lot of Alan Tudyk on top of him when we began this episode.  Tudyk, of course, is actually Alpha.  This whopper of a spoiler has been floating around the internet for weeks now, and I (unfortunately) had seen it, so it came as no surprise for me.  But for the majority of this episode, I was wondering if that hadn’t all been an elaborate deception, and that Ballard was going to end up being Alpha.  That didn’t seem logical in some ways, but given Ballard’s single-mindedness about finding the Dollhouse and his recent turn toward hate-sex, I was definitely wondering.

That was over as soon as Topher saw him standing in the hallway and said something along the lines of “What are you doing over there, person I’ve never seen before?”, all while Tudyk’s back was turned.

Why, exactly, did Alpha need Ballard’s help to get back into the Dollhouse?  Did he need it, or even arrange to get it?  Did he kill Kepler to get the info on how to get into the Dollhouse, and then get surprised by Ballard before leaving Kepler’s apartment?  If so, he’d probably have just killed Ballard, so I’m inclined to think that Alpha needed Ballard for some reason.

Based on how the episode ended, it seems as if Alpha infiltrated the Dollhouse with the intent to retrieve somebody’s personality, imprint them onto one of the Dolls, and get the heck out of there.  I don’t think we’re meant to think he was there specifically for Echo; presumably, any (female) body would do.  Thing is, would he really have needed Ballard to get all of this accomplished?  Would he have needed anyone?  And why, if he was acting all twitchy and manic only for Ballard’s benefit, was he still playing that part during some of the scenes in which Ballard was in a different room?

Next week’s episode might well put all of those questions to rest for me, and if it does, then I’ll have no hesitation in saying “Briar Rose” is a great episode.  If, on the other hand, I don’t get some satisfactory answers, then I’m going to feel this episode was a bit of a disappointment.

Only a bit, though.  Even if some of the story points aren’t quite gelling for me this week, there’s still a lot here to love.  The use of the Briar Rose story works well, and can be seen in several different ways.  For one, there’s the obvious casting of Ballard in the role of the Prince.  However, Alpha would see himself also fulfilling that role, since he seems to be there to save somebody.  You can also put Langton in the role of savior prince, along with Mellie’s unnamed handler; both of these fellows are princes of an entirely different variety, but they are both serving the role of protector.  Heck, even Topher — who is using Echo to try and save Susan, the abused orphan girl — is a sort of a white knight in this episode.

Those are all pretty obvious.  Maybe a bit less obvious is how the various women of this episode fulfill the Briar Rose role.  First of all, there’s Susan, who gets upset by the story because of Briar Rose’s inability to rescue herself.  Susan was abused by her stepfather, and had multiple opportunities to escape but didn’t take them.  She’s mad at herself in a typical Whedony-feminist way: she doesn’t want to have been rescued, she wants to have rescued herself.  Echo tells her that it’s okay that she didn’t save herself, and that if she can’t get around that, then she should just look at the story in a different way: see herself as the Prince.

This applies to Saunders, a character we’ve seen frequently looking scared and somewhat defeated throughout the season.  She gets revisited by Alpha toward the end of this episode, and it’s not clear when the episode ends whether or not she’s still alive.  I assume she is; I wouldn’t put it past Joss Whedon to kill off Amy Acker again, but I don’t think he’d do so off-screen.  Either way, Saunders is a former victim of physical abuse who has presumably had multiple opportunities to get herself clear of danger by finding a less risky line of work.  She has taken none of those opportunities.  But I think Saunders is there for some specific reason.  Did anyone else think that when Dominic/Victor said “whiskey” to her, he wasn’t asking for a drink?  Could it be that Saunders is a second NSA agent, or some other type of infiltrator?  If so, then perhaps she has recast herself into the role of a prince.

More concretely, the Briar Rose story applies to both Caroline/Echo and to Mellie/November, both of whom — in their natural guises — are definitely asleep.  In their unnatural guises, they are in need of imminent rescue:  Mellie has to be saved by her handler, and she has, in a sense, been cursed by an evil witch in the name of Paul Ballard.  Or is Adelle DeWitt that witch’s name?  It’s a matter of interpretation, I suppose.

As for Echo, Ballard is obviously trying to rescue her.  So, in his own way, is Langton, who feels — probably with good reason — that if Paul were to succeed in getting her out of the Dollhouse, she would soon thereafter be tracked down and killed.  Ultimately, though, it’s Alpha who “rescues” her: by putting another person’s personality into her body.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that both Echo and November are the shells of people who have (as far as we know) contracted with the Dollhouse to be employed there.  At that stage of things, at least, they were proactive, and perhaps they felt they were rescuing themselves.

Where is DeWitt in this equation?  Well, she might be the witch who casts the spell, but she might also be what Susan wishes she had been: she might the person who found a way to escape the danger she was in.  I have no doubt that there is more to DeWitt than meets the eye.  Could it be that by serving the Dollhouse in such a major role, she too is being proactive in some sense, and saving herself in some way we’re not currently aware of?  Does a rhetorical sentence end in a question mark?

The “Briar Rose” element of the episode is rich stuff, and you can look at it from any number of angles.  I can imagine someone complaining that it’s not concrete enough a metaphor, and I’d have a certain amount of sympathy for that opinion, but I wouldn’t agree with it.  No, instead of concreteness, what we have in this episode is a metaphor that practically demands the viewer to put their mind to work.  Espenson has written something here that has to be engaged with, and I don’t think solving the puzzle is what it’s all about.  It’s about making it clear that Dollhouse is a sort of a fairy tale, and that’s something I’d not considered before.

There is probably a lot more to hash out here, but I don’t feel up to it based on this episode alone (not on a single viewing, at least).  I’ll probably return to “Briar Rose” a bit in the review of next week’s season finale.

Before I go, though, a few brief notes:

Topher uses the word “frakked.”  Heh.  I wish he had said it to Ballard, though.

Enver Gjokaj … seriously, how good is that guy?  In this episode, he does what might well be the world’s first Reed Diamond impersonation, playing Victor as Dominic, and he knocks it out of the park.  This is Emmy-nomination-worthy material, as far as I’m concerned.

I was very surprised to see Victor get his face all sliced up by Alpha; that was an effective moment.  Hopefully, Victor hasn’t been killed.

Alan Tudyk struck me as far too manic in some of his scenes as “Kepler,” but he was, of course, actually Alpha playing a role, so in retrospect, I’m impressed.  And once he actually became Alpha in the presence of Saunders, Tudyk was quite scary.  I’ve never seen Tudyk do that, but he did it well.

When “Kepler” unlocked his door, he turned something like five or six locks … yet when Ballard is on the other side of the door, you can clearly see that there are no extra locks.  I tend to not notice continuity errors; that was a big one.  Or maybe Alpha had Michael Winslow hiding somewhere in his apartment.