The folks behind this have bigger stones than I. I can’t think of any role less likely to resonate with a replacement actor than Patrick McGoohan’s John Drake…oops, No. 6.
At their site AMC is showing all the original episodes from the late sixties. I still remember my friend John making fun of my rapt attention whenever he’d drop by while I was watching the show. I didn’t care. There was no recording, DVD, or online streaming back then. When it was on I watched. Rapt up in every detail and nuance.
I hope this is good. AMC’s track record is great, and they’ve chosen an impressive cast for this this remake.
All the other numbers are variables.
But I can’t see No. 6 as anything but the most fixed of constants. Patrick McGoohan is the man.
♥ Shoulder-Length Hair + Bangs = A Prince Valiant Haircut. “The prince was a boy,” young Susan says during her close up — a framing that leaves out every aspect of her appearance that does not rhyme visually with Prince Valiant’s.
The neverending Arthurian comic gets a shout-out from Loomis a couple of scenes before this one. Prince Valiant is, to put it one way, androgynous. To put it another way: an old-school prince who looks like a modern princess.
Susan the Older, Susan the Wiser, Susan the (theoretically) Healed and (hopefully) Healing, tells her young self to read Sleeping Beauty old-school Bruno Bettelheim-style (well, not in so many words, but Bettelheim said children do relate to every character, gender be damned) (again, not in so many words).
“Read it again, OK? But this time think of yourself as the prince.”
This isn’t just the point of the entire episode. Or of the finale. Or of the entire series. It’s the point of the entire career of Joss Whedon.
To conceive her as hero.
Ω Aristotelian Unity. The finale, particularly the scenes between Young Susan and Echo/Susan, is tying tie together motifs that have spanned the entire season (like a good finale should). Motifs like:
♥The Grown Up Abused Child Rescuing Her Younger Self. Episode One, “Ghost,” gave us one beautiful vision of this. In that episode, Echo was imprinted with the personality and skills of a woman who had been abused by one of the kidnappers when she was a child. Although the woman committed suicide, in a sci fi version of resurrection she was able, when imprinted in Echo, to overcome her childhood abuser and rescue another child from him. In this episode, Echo teaches another abused child to see herself as a rescuer. In both episodes, the victim is identified with the hero. The victim is the mother to the hero.
On the flip/dark side, Young Susan’s knives, like Alpha’s in this episode and “The Target,” evoke the chapters of Men, Women and Chainsaws on slasher movies and rape/revenge movies. Susan’s future could be a lot darker than the one Echo/Susan models. For much the same reason, Echo’s future has the potential to be as dark as Alpha’s, if she undergoes a composite event like his and suddenly knows and feels everything that has happened to her as a flesh-and-blood sex doll. We have seen, especially in ep. three, ”Stage Fright,” that Echo thinks that responding to pain by spreading it around is wrong. She is about to enter unknown realms of pain. As Echo/Susan says of Young Susan: “Just be ready. She’s close to moving forward, but it’s gonna hurt.”
◊ Fairy Tales. The fairy tale motif:
◊◊ First appeared in Act I of Episode One, when we saw a storybook in child Echo’s hands,
◊◊ Informed the series theme song (which Whedon conceived as a cross between Jonatha Brooke’s “Careful What You Wish For” and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Faeries”), and
◊◊ Popped up in the dialogue of episodes two and six.*
Whedonia being a character-driven realm, the biggest way that fairy tales figure in Dollhouse is in the exploration of the nature of the:
♥ Fairy Tale Prince, in both Handsome and Frog Form. (This builds on my takes on episode one,two, and six.) We’ve had lots of variations on (and interrogations of) the Prince/Rescuer, starting again in “Ghost” with the client Matt.
The theme was highly developed in “The Target,” both with the ostensible client, “Richard Connell,” and with the (likely actual) client, Alpha. I deleted a bunch of my speculations about Alpha’s motives, but now that we know that he has programmed Echo to be his lover, I’m going to at least type that he has been grooming her as his Bride of Frankenstein since early in the season. I have a fairly elaborate theory of how Alpha has done this that I’ll keep to myself on the off-chance I’ve struck true phlebotinem.
“Man on the Street” had a frog (Joel Mynor) and a handsome prince (Ballard) interrogating one another, and I think both scored.
Ballard, Boyd and Alpha all tell themselves they’re rescuing Echo from the Dollhouse. Boyd thinks he’s protecting Echo from clients, from Alpha, and from elements within the Dollhouse that would kill her (such as Dominic — who, sidebar, man-friend, is out of the way, so who is going to kill Caroline if she escapes, Mr. Head of Security?), but Boyd’s “protection” involves keeping Echo a doll — something he directly profits from. Ballard thinks he’s rescuing Caroline, but he can’t protect her from the legal consequences of whatever actions she took to bring the Dollhouse down before becoming an active. The incredibly talented and wonderful Jane Espenson crafted a great fight scene, a new twist on the “everybody’s right” scene that Drew Goddard described in the commentary to “Selfless” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This time, everybody’s wrong–including Echo, who remembers Ballard only as her attacker and Boyd only as her defender, missing a chance to get out of the Dollhouse — something we know Caroline longs to do. I loves this “everybody’s wrong” scene and hope it is answered in the second half of the finale with an equal and opposite “everybody sees how everybody was wrong” scene. (Or something better, probably.)
Another reviewer writes that Ballard should listen to Boyd. Boyd is better than some other employees of the Dollhouse, but better does not mean good or even right. Boyd would save Echo’s life, yes, but in a way that serves and preserves the organization that has destroyed her life. He’s heroic — he would risk his life for hers. But he is villainous as well — he keeps her in the organization that keeps her in peril. Everything he protects her from comes from her being a doll, and he uses force against Ballard to make sure she stays a doll. He’s not fighting the system from within, he’s protecting the system from within. Expressing contempt for it is a way to avoid feeling contempt for himself. An imprint of Caroline’s memories and an assortment of Active skills would enable Echo to avoid the Dollhouse’s reach on the outside as well as Alpha has managed to, so I’m not buying Boyd’s argument that Echo has to stay in the Dollhouse for her own good.
Unlike readers of this Bettelheim-bestrewn blog, a lot of reviewers have, IMHO, neglected the fairy tale motif. One wrote that the “theme tonight was fairy tales,” but IMHO it’s a theme of the entire series. “Anyway, the real reason for this encounter [between Young Susan and Echo/Susan] was to set up the fairy tale motif.” Structurally, the encounter, like the entire finale (so far) pays off the fairy tale motif that was set up in Act I of Episode One and developed throughout the season. (Another reviewer found the fairy tale allusion “heavy-handed,” but I think it’s clear that the show had to spell it out explicitly or it would go unnoticed.)
One reviewer wrote that the “big twist is that Ballard didn’t end up being the Prince. Alpha did.” Alpha does get her out of the Dollhouse, but in much the same way as any client does — by imprinting her with a personality that pleaseth him. He’s not her rescuer. Like Ballard and Boyd, he may tell himself (and her) that he is rescuing her, but, again like Ballard and Boyd, he’s using her. So:
♥ Who Will Rescue Her From Her Rescuers? This is a Joss Whedon show. Wondering who’s going to save Echo is like wondering who’s going to save Buffy. (Another reviewer wrote: “Hopefully [Boyd and Ballard] aren’t too sore from breaking the majority of the Dollhouse with their bodies to successfully save her.”) Echo is the hero. She has shown her capacity to rescue others before. If anyone rescues Echo, it’s going to be Echo. The interesting question is how.
Echo/Susan points at Young Susan and says, “Prince.” She might as well be talking to herself.
♥ OMG, Alan Tudyk! Alpha is my new favorite Whedonvillain! What an absolutely amazing performance at every level. When’s the last time you saw a performance that was funnier? When’s the last time you saw a performance that was scarier? So vulnerable, yet so dangerous! Playing the victimizer playing the victim! Puppet and puppeteer! So intellectually complex, yet emotionally immediate! Which reminds me:
♥ OMG, Jane Espenson! Bringing this villain to life took as much of her art as his! The script provides the levels of complexity the actor plays. And what levels, from the moment we first meet him, giving a stoned answer as Kepler and a mocking answer as Alpha to Ballard’s simple question, starting a bunch of things-that-mean-one-thing-at-first-but-some-other-things-later:
“Steven Kepler, is that you?”
“Well, there’s a lot of aspects to that question.”
“That makes you my new partner.”
“Then can I hold the gun?”
“We’ve got to get in there and save her.” (All in the we.)
Ω Other lines that bit me:
Alpha/Kepler calls the dolls “stone cold foxes.” The other character to call them stone foxes was Dom. Short for Domination.* Hearn. Not a Prince.
“Stay asleep. Stay asleep.” No, not a Prince. Not for Echo. She wants everyone to wake up.
ETA:
*Henry caught that slip. See below.
ETA:
If Ms. E. had a production company, it would be called “Sad Robot.”
ETA:
More Tudyk & Espenson love from Art at the Auction.
This looks awesome and will launch soon. Has boy genius Topher been moonlighting? Oh wait, Alpha is the real genius.The guy in the clip is obviously an Active.
Back in the day, oh, two or three years ago, I actually believed Joss Whedon’s Goners would be filmed. So I made the image below, which I recently found on a Photobucket account I’d forgotten I had. I may have posted this, or a version of it, at the old Goners site. Or I may not have on the basis of it not being good enough. My standards have lowered since then, apparently.
click image for larger
But according to this, Thursday’s first night of sweeps ratings left ELEVEN shows hitting season or series lows for new episodes. Network tv is going down even faster than I expected.
Please, DirecTv, pick up Dollhouse for your 101 channel!
Oh, and thanks for Friday Night Lights and Wonderland!
I don’t know how I missed this little gem of a short film from a couple of years ago. Especially since I love Emma Caulfield so much. She won two acting awards for her dramatic performance. Watch the film and why will be obvious. Be warned: this is not just creepy but deeply unsettling.
Here’s the film’s webpage with interesting info.
And here’s the film, posted to Youtube by the cinematographer:
ETA: Embedding was disabled at the poster’s request so you have to go to YouTube , I guess:
Here’s a link.
So it’s the middle of the night, I can’t sleep, the tv died, everything hurts too much to read. Wrapped all my pennnies. Unwrapped a leftover burrito supreme and ate it–cold. Which gave me a stomach ache. Definitely no sleep tonight after that.
What to do? I know. I’ll take one photo each of of Katherine Waterston, Taylor Swift and Eliza Dushku and make a stupid picture that signifies nothing. Here it is.
click for larger
Now what am I going to do? Ah, coffee.
***(spoilers for this ep and maybe some previous ones, depending on my mood)***
. . . or “The Palace of Puzzles.”
Q: Is that a reference to “The Puzzle Palace,” James Bamford’s classic book about the National Security Agency?
A: You’re so smart. You just gave me the chance to make the necessary distinction between the real NSA (which intercepts electronic communications) and TV NSA (which does all manner of bad). Every time I use the letters NSA in the rest of this post, it’s about TV NSA. Maybe I should just call it the un-NSA. The NonSA.
Q: You shouldn’t waste too much time deciding.
◊ Looks Like a Puzzle Movie, But Ain’t. Puzzle movies like Go! and Memento draw attention to their unusual story structure, showing you the same events more than once, each time with a twist in the meaning. Puzzle movies make audiences and filmmakers feel clever, even though every last puzzle movie pretty much solves itself. The best, like The Sixth Sense, tie the puzzle into character development and character revelation. ***(wee conceptual spoiler warning for a movie you’ve probably already seen)*** The reason the end of The Sixth Sense works so beautifully is not just a neat intellectual puzzle it presents and unravels in the climax, but the profound things we learn about the character of Bruce Willis’s character.
Q: The character of his character?
A: We learn what kind of person he is, how much and how little he is willing to face the truth about himself, what his real motivation is for helping the Haley Joel Osment character is — basically, to hide from himself.
Q: Plus, we learn what a compassionate and wise little kid HJO’s character is.
A: It’s been years since I’ve seen it but, yeah, I think that’s how it ends. Everyone was all up in the trickery of it, but the reason the movie worked is not that it was so clever, but that it revealed to us two extraordinary (for the movies) true characters in the end.
This ep is shaped more like Reservoir Dogs or (IIRC) Go!, where it’s divided into segments that each focus on a particular character. We get a mystery — What Went Wrong? Who Got Shot? — at the start and an answer at the end. But this being a Whedonworld, the puzzle is not what’s important. What we learn about the characters and ourselves is.
Q: You assumed that it was an Active being put down and you worried about which one it was and you kind of hoped it was you didn’t know and then you thought it would be kind of a cheat if it was someone you didn’t care about.
A: Yeah. Basically.
Q: And you totally didn’t see it coming! You did not see it was Dom.
A: Not at all. And that was brilliant, writer Andrew Chambliss. Not for the silly intellectual puzzle of it, but because it made me wonder in the end how I felt about him being Attic’d. Dollhouse interrogates the heart. It doesn’t just provide a pleasing little puzzle for the head, with nice closure at the end, like an episode of Alias.
◊ Sierra Stars in a Perfect Episode of Alias! Sierra faces a purely external challenge, requiring no character growth on her part at all. She tackles it first through clothes and makeup.
Q: She tackles it first through clothes and makeup?
A: Yes, this point bears repeating, in the context of Alias. If you hide behind clothes and make up and conceal who you really are, you save the world.
A nice note was the way that Sierra, who is European/Asian, simply has to don a black wig in order to become the perfect double for an Asian woman. Who really doesn’t look much like her at all. I like to think that was a Maurissa Tancharoen touch, an allusion to the All Asians Look Alike (to Non-Asians) trope. Even if one of them’s only half-Asian. And doesn’t actually look like the other.
Q: What was up with Sierra making sure that her target saw that she had completely stolen her identity before she knocked her out?
A: Good question.
Q: That means you don’t know the answer.
A: I think my favorite scene in Alias was when their little nuclear family of double or triple agents was machine gunning down, what was it, an entire village, while U2’s song about the non-violent leader of the democratic opposition to Burma’s military dictatorship played in the background. It was so perfectly appalling. Like listening to music’s spirit being violently violated while its screams are drowned in automatic weapon fire.
Q: Speaking of perfectly appalling. So we get a nice little techno-thriller. Mission accomplished via superior technology, deceit, hand-to-hand violence of the non-fatal kind, a chase scene in which a woman in the most impractical of high heels–
A: They had zippers on the back. That’s what kept them on.
Q: –outruns a bunch of government agents–
A: –and their bullets!
Q: Hey, they explained that! It was all just for show, to make the Dollhouse believe it had acquired inside info when it all it got was a cover story.
A: People will forgive a lot for wish fulfillment. The unrealistic parts become fun in wish fulfillment. Examine a fairy tale just a little, though, and everyone’s all, hey, why would people pay so much just to get the ultimate hostage negotiator to save their daughter’s life? Or the perfect midwife for the birth of their child? Hey, if this lack of realism continues, I think I’ll go watch shows where violence solves everything.
Q: That’s unfair. Violence doesn’t solve everything unless it is wielded with superior technology. So you didn’t like Sierra’s story?
A: I loved it. Canned, superficial, seemingly high-stakes, absolutely no-stakes game-playing that looked awesome but was just . . . why did she have to dress exactly like the woman she was impersonating that day? Did that woman phone ahead and email everyone she works with a picture of exactly what she was wearing that day, thus forcing Sierra to wear exactly the same thing? To fool the people who would not notice that she has a completely different face?
The only people fooled by the fraud were the people who thought they were perpetrating it on someone else.
Q: Is there some deep, profound lesson in there?
A: Probably. I’m wiped. But I should point out that since Dominic did arrange the entire caper to fool the Dollhouse, not the NonSA, this careful attention to detail and spectacle was well-motivated by a character’s needs. This show is not stupid.
◊ Dominic Is Not Just a Jerk. He’s still a jerk, but now he’s one with a defensible motivation. The NonSA has a point. Dollhouse technology cannot get into the wrong hands. Or other wrong hands. Wronger hands. We can’t have other countries/non-state actors programming super soldiers to use against us. (Leaving aside for another ep the whole question of why the NonSA doesn’t just shut down the Dollhouse or why it hinders the nonFBI’s investigation thereof, and the obvious answers about possible NonSA desire to have its own programmable super soldiers, super spies, & sundry super options.)
Everything Dominic did has to be reevaluated, because he wasn’t doing it just to keep a lucrative private sector job in the field of killing. He was defending a legitimate national security interest and American lives. If Echo becomes another Alpha, she will kill Americans, just as Alpha did.
I do admire this show for depriving me of both heroes and villains. Whether you’re a saint or a sinner, an innocent or a bad, always depends on what you do next. Your next decision in response to your next challenge.
That’s why it was perfect to make you think that an Active was being victimized in the opening scene. The lighting and the setting reminded you of the scene in the premiere when Echo met Sierra. Then you were clearly supposed to empathize with Sierra’s suffering, just as Echo did. But who do you identify with in the closing scene, when Dominic’s identity is wiped away like Sierra’s?
1. The one who risks his life and his sanity to keep the mind-wiping technology out of the hands of (other) people who will abuse it?
2. The one he tried to kill, who managed, somehow, through her own efforts or aided by that of an internal spy (with unfathomable motives) or of Alpha (likewise with unfathomable motives) to defeat him first.
3. The one who defines his mission as protecting #2, a definition that apparently justifies putting down a NonSA agent whose national security justification for his actions is pretty hard to miss.
4. Narcissus and Narcissa, both certain of their entitlement to play with the best toys.
5. DeWitt, who’s too interesting to summarize.
Dominic’s the least sympathetic character in the Dollhouse, but he’s also the one with most defensible moral justification for being in there. He’s a guy who clearly is drawn to killing, but he found a place in the government where his desire to kill could be put in the service of protecting his country from other killers. This is the episode in which he became interesting. The “complete, unabridged” him will need to come back to disturb us some more.
◊ Dominic Knows What Jack Bauer Denies. If you torture someone long enough, she’ll confess to being a spy, even if she isn’t.
◊ Eliza Dushku Is an Excellent Actor. Echo/Dominatrix was a completely new character, as was Echo/Counterspy. This must be said. I love her counterspy face. Highly intelligent. Counterspy is also a new kind of character for this show — an Active who knows she’s an Active and is willing to accept that, for now. We see her back as an Inactive at the end, and there’s no indication that she put up a struggle to avoid being wiped.
◊ Saunders Has Blue Hands. Like the men who come two by two from the Blue Sun Corp. into River Tam’s waking nightmare of Firefly/Serenity. This says little, evokes much.
◊ Mellie’s the Perfect Femme Fatale! She doesn’t know she’s a femme fatale. She’s programmed to seduce Ballard, but innocently. We know that November, when compromised by the Needs drug, experienced her jealousy of Caroline as a trauma and associated it with the trigger that turns her into a killer, but Mellie does not know that one of the reasons she is in Ballard’s life is so that DeWitt can have a killer close to the FBI agent investigating Dollhouse if she decides she needs one. (We never did learn why she was programmed to be both Ballard’s lover and a killer, did we? I think the latter option is Plan B.)
I love this show because of the subtext beneath the subtext. In the opening scene with Echo/Dominatrix, her talk of trust means one thing as the character she’s programmed to be, another as the Active who’s programmed to trust Boyd, and a third as the individual who thinks she can trust this particular individual because he has come through for her when his own life was on the line.
When Mellie says to Ballard, “I take it you haven’t gotten your badge back,” it works as gentle lover chiding, a little humor to help him put a little perspective on his work, get a little distance, and perhaps return to functioning. It is also a reminder from Mellie to him and to herself that he does kind of need a sane person in his life. It’s also a small reminder that she is just such a sane person. It’s a small expression of hostility at his obsession with his work, which overlaps with an obsession with Caroline, which hurts not only Mellie but November. And it’s the Dollhouse collecting necessary information regarding the status of the nonFBI’s investigation.
◊ Ballard’s the Most Interesting Character on the Show. He appears to have been simplified into Obsessive Conspiracy Theorist, but he’s now exploring a deeper mystery than the Dollhouse: his own motives. He says he sometimes doesn’t know why he’s investigating the Dollhouse, which means he’s investigating his own identity. The dream sequence that opened “Needs” disturbed the dreamer, likening his desire to rescue Caroline to necrophilia, and if all she is to him is a damsel in distress whose rescue turns him into a hero, then she is more or less dead to him, and he is using her for selfish reasons — to see himself as a selfless rescuer. If all he wanted to do was rescue her, he would have rescued her in Joel Mynor’s dream house, but he was incapacitated by his own self-deception.
Now, thanks to whoever is sending him secret Dollhouse messages, Ballard must use Mellie consciously (instead of unconsciously, like he did in “Man on the Street”). This makes him a little better and a little worse.
ETAs:
◊ “I’m Not Broken.” I’m thinking this is something Caroline said at a very important moment in her life.
◊ Echo’s New Handler’s Mustache. Grounds for termination. With extreme prejudice.
◊ Roger Is the Name of DeWitt’s Toy Boy? In British slang, doesn’t to “roger” someone mean to . . . ? Rather on-the-nose, Miss DeWitt.
Thanks to the wonderful korkster for pointing me to this. My heart skipped many beats. And will every one of the thousand times I watch. Today.
If you didn’t see last night’s season and probably series finale of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, check it out. Summer is awesome.
Does God have blue hands? Is she blue like that Watchmen guy?
Nifty new image from NASA seems to support River’s Firefly refrain “Two by two, hands of blue.”
The image in the linked article is rather small, so I blew it up some below. It reminds me of the final scene from Sidney Carroll’s equally nifty short story”None Before Me.”
