Siri

Well. How about that ep. I guess i'd rather feel conflicted/meh about this ep and love the next, than the other way around. So yay!

I am not sure if the big twist of Boyd was worth losing him as a friend. I love a good twist, but it has to be earned, and only the last scene with him being dolled into a suicide mission made this twist worth it. That was awesome.

I don't believe for a second that Whiskey was imprinted with the so-called docile Clyde 2.0. We heard before that real-life imprinted Clyde 2.0 was a non-ambitious, easygoing smartpants, plus we saw him being that way in the flashback, when Caroline meets him and Boyd for the first time. I think this was a Boyd-imprint, he surely would not have confined himself to that one body. What convinces me is the way he puts Adelle's hair behind her ear, the way he did with Echo a few times. What makes me doubt is the way he seems somewhat vicious and not as loving toward his "family" the way BodyBoyd is. Hhmm, nice anagramical way to support the retcon, with Boyd being just a Body. It was all foretooooold...
He could easily be a copy of Boyd that doesn't have the Dollhouse LA memories/experience, so he wouldn't feel very connected to them.

Another thing that made me pout was the fact that we didn't get any consequences of the Echo-Caroline merge. After ages of worrying, we don't get any quality time with the new, fully integrated gal.

The Amy/Eliza fight was pretty meh. And that's a shame, cause there have been some epic fights in the Whedonverse, and this was just the right occasion for another one of those. Ditto for the Echo-Boyd fight.

There's a few (many?) plotholes too, but i don't feel like analyzing them. I don't want to talk myself further into the trenches going into the finale!

Only a few hours left till the very last Dollhouse.....

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Caleb

Well well well - so DH has finally finished - and with a bang or a whimper?

Firstly ep 12 was OK - It did seem a bit contrived - perhaps they got to the finale a bit quicker than intended. There was a lot that wasn't entirely clear. Why did Boyd want to get them all together? Why didn't they just create a Topher without ambition? Planq didn't quite get why they wanted Echos spinal fluid - there was some comment about a vaccine against imprinting - personally my view is that they wanted the power to have multiple personalities - but this was never explicitly stated. All in all a bit untidy in parts but did seem to complete a number of threads. However it was clear that the job wasn't done - the technology was still out there in numerous houses around the world - the experts were still out there etc etc etc. Not entirely sure why the mainframe was the weakness that attic Clyde seemed to think it was.

There were some good bits - Victor doing Topher again was particularly good - but not too much more.

Ep 13 - Good in a way - bit too easy in the end - not entirely sure why it needed manual starting. Nothing really too special though. The killing of Ballard was not too bad, although they could possibly have made slightly more confirmation of the death at the time as it seemed a little confused.
Not sure it was entirely explained who the zombie types were or how they got there.
Certainly echos of Serenity in there with the Reavers.

All in all OK - but not brilliant - perhaps with more time they would have made it better.


DH - the whole show
On the whole I think that the show had a very good idea at the heart of it - If I have a major criticism it is that it didn't really explore some of the key concepts enough - what is an individual person? Are we just our memories? What does it mean to love someone? What does it mean to buy or own someone?
Some of these issues were fairly well explored, but I think that they could have gone a lot further with the format that they had.
There were a lot of inconsistencies and things thrown in to justify various short or long term plot lines - sometimes Echo was used to do community service - sometimes she was purely sex - sometimes other things - sometimes it was expensive - sometimes it was not - all a little disconcerting.
I think that there could have been a lot more thinking through about how everything fitted together.

There also came a point when they started to care too much about the wider arc, and not enough about the smaller sub-stories, which could have been used to explore wider issues.

Probably there is an excuse to say that if they had been guaranteed more time then they could have developed all of these things better - possibly.

There is a wider point about the direction of TV in general. Almost all of the crap that we now get from the USA is copied crap - police shows, supernatural shows etc. Almost none of them is any good. There are some interesting developments - Bionic woman was interesting as well as the show where Christian Slater was 2 people - however these are not written half as well as they should be - and they all seem to get cancelled early anyway.
The one bright star around at the moment for me is Being Human, which turned distinctly nasty in the latest ep - although I worry about what will happen when it gets translated into USA world - hopefully it will do better than the office, which just seemed to turn into a dull sitcom.

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(Its amazing that a country which is so keen on the benefits of competition seems to want no competitors)

Siri

As i understand, the zombie types are the ones that picked up the phone and got imprinted with fightin' fever. Like the dumbshows, they are everywhere.

Dumbshows: people that got wiped without a replacement personality, like our simple dolls
Butchers: imprinted with bloodthirst by some powerhungry big bad
Actuals: people with their original personality in place

I totally agree with the good idea at the base of the show. And they definitely delivered some good and even great eps along the (uneven) way. But I feel very woulda coulda shoulda about the whole thing.

Also, if nothing else, this will be remembered as Enver Gjokaj's breakout performance.

I really like the way this io9.com blogger wrote up the end of Dollhouse. She managed to write a lovely piece without trying to make Dollhouse better than it was. I like to call it Epitaph 3.

http://io9.com/5460420/dollhouse-isnt-really-over

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