If this show is canceled, there is no justice on television (oh, wait…). Dollhouse is sci-fi done right, with action aplenty, eye candy all over the place, and yes, plot twist on top of plot twist.

But what makes Dollhouse really worth watching is that it asks tough questions and indicts the viewer–each time you like the way Echo or Sierra or November (or Victor) looks all dressed up, each time you think “wouldn’t that be nice,” you are just as bad as the customers of the Dollhouse. You cannot simply write off its characters as bad guys or good guys, because it constantly makes you decide with whom to identify, and then proving you wrong.

I’ve tried to keep this review relatively spoiler-free, at least for this episode, but it’s hard to write about this show without referencing some of the twists, so it’s below the jump, just in case.

As the season went on, we got to see roles flip over and over again. Adelle had a relationship with a male doll, Ballard got obsessive and was cruel to Mellie, even Topher got lonely and needed someone to spend time with him, someone who understood him. There are no bad guys among the main cast, though admittedly each week has its own villain to defeat. But the ensemble characters each have their flaws and problems and little complicities in what’s going on in the Dollhouse, even the best of them, and the worst of them still turn out more human than perhaps we’d like to admit. This is not a show about monsters, but a show about what it means to be human.

Toward the end, the pressure was ratcheted up even further, asking if the character imprinted into the dolls was actually a person, not just a set of reactions and memories implanted into a mind. Did Adelle’s friend actually reappear in Echo, or was it just an imitation to make Adelle feel better? Did Dominic actually inhabit Victor’s body, or were they just interrogating a character created with his memories?

The final episode held twists aplenty, including–of course–finding out one of the main characters was a doll. Where the rest of the season played like a drama, with ups and downs, this one was a slow-burning horror film, light on laughs and heavy on tension and fear. And in the biggest twist of all, mind and body come face to face. The question is, as it has been for the entire series, how much of a doll’s self is really gone?

Ballard is the one who finally voices the statement, the one that this show makes all of us, no matter how skeptical, hope. Is there a soul, something fundamentally us, other than just a body and some firing of neurons?  Is there really a split between mind and body, and if there is, is your mind something that can be copied into a computer program?

But as quickly as he voiced the sentiment, he backed away from it, claiming, “I’m just trying to save the girl.” “There’s always a girl,” Boyd remarks. Yet both Ballard and Boyd are trying to save the girl, but the show is ultimately still about Echo saving herself. She doesn’t need either of them to rescue her, and indeed it would be disappointing if they did. (Instead, November is freed in Ballard’s thin attempt to make up for the way he treated her.)

Alpha’s story is interesting because it’s both essentialist–he was a “bad person” deep down, so deep no erasing could change it–and also about free will, because the Dollhouse could no longer control him. It can no longer completely control Echo, either, but she is “special” deep down, and her “special” is good.

Finally, the twist in Ballard’s story–his choice–will have to be illuminated in a second season, if indeed there is one. But again, like Angel’s joining Wolfram & Hart on Angel, it also asks a question of the viewer. Do we sell out or buy in or maintain our identity against impossible odds on the outside? Is the decision always between the lesser of two evils?

I wonder if this narrative, showing back up, is a rather personal one for Whedon, in some way illustrating his fight with the networks for the soul of his shows. Is Ballard’s joining the Dollhouse Whedon’s signal to the networks that he’ll play by their rules? Or am I reading too much of the creator into the show?

This final episode could be a fairly satisfying series finale, though I’m hoping it isn’t. It doesn’t provide answers, but it would be condescending and facile if it did. There are no answers to the questions here, except perhaps the one that Echo gives, still without her own personality in her head.

“I have 38 brains and not one of them thinks you can sign a contract to be a slave. Especially now that we have a black president.”

(Yes, damnit, even Dollhouse has to have its Obama reference.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 1:33 pm and is filed under News & Views, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.