Dollhouse – The Hollow Men

Largely unoriginal thoughts on the penultimate episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.  Numbered, because that’s easier.  I promise a proper write up after Epitaph Two.  SPOILERS GALORE.

1. The character that is Topher is superb. I don’t car if he’s being played by Kranz or Gjokaj, (both actors are amazing, Gjokaj’s impression of Topher is phenomenal, and the cancellation of the series is a disaster solely in that we’ll never ever see it again). I could easily watch an hour of Topher. Topher the tin-man, Topher the mad scientist, naming the brainpocolypse and his trying to work out whether or not his ‘real’ body was dead. The better parts of this episode were all about his character. In fact, one of my very favourite moments (Victopher always wins) was his asking Victor whether or not he was still Topher, because he needed someone to share his guilt.

2. This episode has a whole lot of gaps. I don’t really understand what Boyd’s plan with Echo entailed. Why send her out to the LA Dollhouse to be shot at, bedded by every rich boy in the city and have her head kicked in, when surely you could just as easily lock her in a lab and build up the same immunity within her body? There was no real turning point for Boyd. He didn’t really have any backstory…all I can come up with is:

3. Boyd’s a freaking sociopath. Reading through this suggests that it’s a pretty accurate assessment. I can accept that this is the case, but without any real pre-determiners for this, it’s a bit of a difficult sell. If only he had lashed out visciously to one of Echo’s clients at some point in the past, or lost his cool even once. His helping Topher in ‘Belonging’ is really the only time we’ve seen him be less than pure, and his actions there were experienced, but not really ‘pure evil’. I needed something more.

4. The last five minutes were godawful. I think had the episode ended at Boyd being left alone with his C4, I would’ve found it to be much more poignant. Instead we have the obligatory run faster than the explosion and sappy ‘yes, we saved the world’. Even when we had the cheesy ending, and Paul (I think) asks Echo if the world has been saved, I expected something clever, like this:
“Did we save the world?”
“For a little while.”

But no.

5. Millie’s death. It was sad, and clearly Mutant Enemy had gotten a discount batch of blood splatter, but after discussion with some of the whedonesquers about the scene, we figured it could’ve been easily rectified with this:

Adelle’s voice comes over the speaker, Paul and Mellie both realise what is happening, and have a tortured exchange of looks, before the trigger is complete, Mellie raises the gun to her head and blows her brains out to protect him.

Much, much more poignant.

6. The spinal fluid gathering machine looked more like the Master’s blood machine from ‘The Harvest’. The taps didn’t even follow a straight line, and inserting something like that takes serious precision, it would’ve had to have been made specifically for Echo’s body…even then, odds are most of them would’ve just hit vertebrae instead of penetrating at the correct points. THEN Echo gets up and starts fighting people. She may have special brain powers, but she’s still freaking human! No! And why wasn’t she tranq-ed anyway? Surely it’s easier to suck out someone’s spinal fluid if they’re paralysed?

7. There was no real explanation for Bennet’s death. There’s also a serious disconnect between how many of the mannerisms of the wedge personality they take on. Victor and Sierra have both taken on accents at great frequency, and yet Whisky when filled with Clyde is still American and fairly feminine. Odd, no?

8. I did love the running theme of rejecting technology, and then turning right back to it when it seems to provide the answers…fairly representative of the story itself. Anthony and Priya swear to never use tech again, and then imprint Victor with Topher, and then with super fighter-guy upgrades when it’s to their advantage. Topher wants to destroy all of his tech, but is quicky convinced by Boyd to repair it to save themselves….something also seen when:

9. Boyd is wiped. Now he can be controlled, and they are in a position of power…but instead of doing anything about that, they kill what is now an innocent man. Surely there was another way to do this?

10. Lastly I’ll comment on Topher again, who may actually have stepped up to my favourite Whedon character ever (and that’s saying something). The character has been growing in leaps and bounds since ‘Belonging’, both emotionally and physically. I find it hard to imagine that the strength of the person we saw in ‘The Hollow Men’ will fall back into the person he was becoming, for example, after Bennet’s death. Perhaps he’s a ‘gotta do what you’ve gotta do’ kind of guy, or perhaps his insanity in Epitaph One is, as a friend suggested, he’s being drugged. Either could work, though I’d prefer it if it’s his emotions that have turned him crazy instead of a drug, as it does really do more for the character.

There’s one episode left, and it’s sort of disconnected from the rest. I doubt we’ll get any more information about Boyd, and I’d definitely like to see Dominic again. I look forward to some more crazy Topher, and far, far less Echoline.

That’s all I’ve got for now.