In other words, the only way to make the premise work … is to abandon the premise.
This was better than last week, but it’s still no better than average TV. Really hoping the show’s got a big screaming ace hidden in its hand that’s gonna land on the table sooner rather than later.
I think this just confirms that I’m never really going to like Joss Whedon shows. Whatever it is he tries to make, it’s not my thing.
I like your WAG; I think what the hunter said about his father was really based on Caroline/Echo’s father. In the scene at the end of the pilot episode, where Alpha was watching the video of Caroline (back when she was a real person), he could have learned all sorts of things about her former life. (Were those her parents he’d just killed?)
That’s kind of weird… I mean, aren’t the dolls supposed to be insanely good-looking? I mean, he’s cute and and all for a certain type, but I’d expect the male dolls to look more like Mr. Crazy Bowhunter. Still, I’m eager to see what he does with the role…
He’s “Alpha.” Maybe they started with a soldier, instead of a supermodel, because they didn’t know exactly how he’d turn out. Sort of like how the first generation of astronauts was made up of test pilots instead of geologists and doctors.
This is fantastic. I harbour perverse sexual lust for this individual and would gladly facilitate the gestation of their offspring.
I can think of a few…
Relatively new technology, not all of the kinks have been worked out, and it seemed like there were minor things they were aware of even before the bloodbath with Alpha. I imagine things like the “whoops, she has memories of abuse” thing probably came up before (especially since not everyone puts their abuse on any sort of official record, so there’d be absolutely no way to know about it before an actual triggering event in the field). Or, as another example, suppose you made an imprint from someone who was brilliant, but had undiagnosed bipolar disorder? They need people who are fully capable of thinking for themselves, and thinking on their feet, just to keep the whole thing under control. That control being another reason. I can see not wanting to completely hand over the factory to the robots. Plus we’ve already seen that occasionally the imprint just falls down if confronted with an event/circumstance in the field that the programmers hadn’t anticipated. Real people are more “fleshed out” personality wise, and therefore more adaptable. A person with no fight training can typically adapt and defend themselves in some fashion, but we’ve already seen that a Doll without “fight skills” being specifically and intentionally included in their imprint can’t fight at all. They don’t know how and can’t even guess.
So they think, anyway. Echo’s already turning that on its head, but they’re not aware that she can do that.
Third reason – Alpha’s “composite event.” If having the whole thing run by Actives wasn’t a bad idea before, it sure as hell is now. Would you risk 50 employees all suddenly going postal at once? I imagine that now, if not before, they make sure that most of their employees are “real people.”
I like it, but how would Alpha have pulled it off? I mean, obviously he’s not above killing people to get his point across, but where does he find someone who’s psycho enough to agree to play the “game”? Perhaps Alpha downplayed the risk of the hunter ending up dead instead of Echo, but it’s not a zero risk and the guy was smart enough to realize that. He’d have to find someone who actually was a homicidal narcissist, who’d think the risk of having the tables turned was worth it.
I’m not sure I’d buy that the hunter was an Alpha-programmed Active, either. Even if he somehow managed to memorize or smuggle out the blueprints to the machine, and the software needed to run it, he’d have to build his own equipment. Where would he get the money for that?
Re: the spoiler: WOOHOO! I’m really excited to see what he does with a creepy psycho role. It’ll be a very interesting contrast to his previous roles.
I sorta got the impression that the kidnap-negotiator-imprint lasted longer than that, though. Maybe 3 or 4 days.
On this point, the thought I had (which I expressed at rather colorful length to my viewing companion) was a comparison to several seasons of Star Trek: Next Gen, where it seems like every other week the holodeck was going haywire and putting people in harm’s way. Here, we have had two episodes where the Dollhouse protocol has broken down in spectacular fashion. This does not indicate a stable, well-vetted technology. Obviously, “things going well, according to plan” doesn’t make for compelling drama, so monkey wrenches are going to be inevitable, but the evidence so far is that the Dollhouse is a highly polished death trap which nobody with any sense would get anywhere near. After a couple of holodeck malfunctions, Starfleet would have yanked the technology off their top-ranked vessels, rather than continue risking some superintelligent avatar commandeering the thing and piloting it into a black hole for kicks; and after a couple of incidents like we’ve seen, Dollhouse clients would stop returning the “you’ve missed your appointment” calls. Next week’s episode looks dire, but at the very least I’ll be hoping for a story in which the technology doesn’t fail again.
I figured hunter-guy as an active when the falsified records came to light, but I also thought the fake ranger was supposed to be Alpha, so I’m not the most observant of watchers.
ooo, baby! Did you see the ep of CSI where he played a creepy (but also sad) child molester?
On re-watching, it’s possible geeky guy (Topher Brink) un-imprinted and re-imprinted Echo in the time it took Boyd to get to the lab.
Ha! Want to know how I picked Alan Tudyk besides the Whedonverse connection? The shots of Alpha in the pilot showed he had blondish leg hair. So, it was either Alan Tudyk or the guy who played Andrew…
I watched the pilot after I heard the news, and I noticed the blond leg-hair and the Tudyk-shaped head. But I’m pretty sure I would not have noticed if I had not known, so there you go.
I don’t think so. Wouldn’t that restore her to the point prior to the kidnap, and she wouldn’t have known a thing of what had already taken place?
The Devil’s Grandmother re: spoiler… no, I haven’t. I get all my “TV” via Netflix or Hulu, so there’s quite a few series I just never get into because I’m not exposed to “new on ABC” TV commercials. Do you happen to know the title or season/episode number? I wouldn’t mind looking it up on Hulu.
Maybe, maybe not… in the pilot, Topher removes a very hot cartridge from the chair after wiping Echo, so presumably it’s some sort of data storage device. It seemed to me like it was a download of everything in her head into the cartridge, and then an upload/overwrite of Echo’s Tabula Rasa imprint from the machine to her head.
On the other hand, it’s pretty ambiguous as to what exactly happened there. It’s just as likely that DeWitt phoned Topher’s extension and told him to stop, which would obviously take less time than it took her handler to run from the big pretty office to the lab.
Kaio, it’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” Burn Out (1 episode, 2006).
JSexton, I think if geeky guy had downloaded the composite “Ms. Elinor Penn” from Echo’s brain, it would have contained all of Elinor Penn’s experiences to date-of-download. The up and downloads don’t seem to take much time for Echo.
For your benefit, the phonetic alphabet and what we know/don’t know about the names so far:
Alpha - AWOL and crazy
Echo - our heroine
Juliet - almost certainly being reserved…
Kilo through Quebec - unknown
Romeo - also being reserved…
Sierra - bleached-blonde Asian who led the hit squad
Tango through Zulu - probably do not yet exist, since Sierra is the newest, but maybe Tango and Foxtrot can go on a double-date with Romeo and Juliet?
So we have nineteen total Actives created, with an unknown number killed off during Alpha’s attack. We know that at least Echo, Alpha, and five others (2F, 3M) survived the attack, because we see five Actives being shepherded into their glass floor pods during Alpha’s rampage. We also know that Sierra hadn’t been created yet. We know that some number died during that attack, but I can’t find clips.
There are at least nine current Actives - ABCDE,S, and the lasagna girl… and don’t even tell me she’s not one. 
The current maximum number of Actives is sixteen - At least three Actives died in the shower, which means they were up to at least Hotel when Alpha snapped. It would be really easy to get rid of the worst names (Golf and Hotel for sure… maybe Bravo or Foxtrot?) this way.
Contrapuntal, zangoba, I came looking for this thread just to make sure I wasn’t hearing things wrong. How did the show-runners let that slip? It was awful, grating, horrific. It was serious amateur-hour stuff.
Uh, yeah, the Dollhouse folks are the evil. I mean, there’s the whole premise of blanking people’s personalities and then programming them for missions, a large portion of which are “romantic”, i.e. prostitution but with better press. Then there’s the fact that they manipulated Caroline in order to get her to be Echo, plus the whole “secret criminal enterprise” thingy. I mean, sure, they’ve got some positive cred on their side (negotiating the release of a child hostage and facilitating her return, acting as clandestine body guard to a pop star), but that’s way offset by the creepiness factor of their main role - hookerville.
So yes, Whedon is definitely making them out to be the baddies, which is why Boyd is so uncomfortable with his role. He’s a former cop, now working for a criminal enterprise. What’s that about?
Yes, what we’ve seen of Alpha so far is scary, and he could really go either way, but I think we’ll be shown there’s more to him than just a homicidal maniac. I suspect he has a plan to try to trigger something larger in Echo, maybe reproduce what happened to him but without the psycho, maybe as a step in bringing down the organization. Something.
But Yes, Whedon is definitely aware how creepy the proposition is and he’s creating that feel in the audience on purpose. This is part of his exploring the nature of humanity thing. The only problem is that if he’s successful, he turns off his audience who are unable to allow the creepy so he can get to the point.
I was also going to say this episode had one stand out point that broke the suspension of disbelief. The point where the FBI agent is walking to his hallway with the folder out and Caroline’s picture in the open for anyone to see. His neighbor happens to see it. Right. That’s confidential information in an active investigation and he does not know her role or connection to his case, he would NOT have her file out in the open for causal observance.
Another comment about this episode specifically - dialogue. We finally have some Whedonesque dialogue in this episode, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
It’s Whedon’s attempt to be homey, country. The Forest Ranger channels Mal when he is talking to Boyd and the driver about them being “out here off the beaten…” Path. The word you are looking for is “path”, as in, “off the beaten path”. It’s called a noun. You should try them sometimes.
That was one feature of the Firefly universe that bugged me. I chalked it up to Whedon trying to mix country talk with variation through time, so I let it slide, but to have it crop up here is too much. Does anyone actually talk that way?