Episode 7 - Echoes
28 September 2009
Synopsis: We flashback to see idealist Caroline and her boyfriend Leo breaking into the Rossum Corporation’s research facility on Fremont College Campus. They discover experiments being done on foetuses as well as animals. Security kills Leo and Caroline is captured and is offered a deal by Adelle. In the present a student dies in the Rossum lab from being exposed to a new memory drug. A team of actives led by Victor arrive to sedate the infected students. But the infection spreads by touch and soon Laurence and Boyd are affected too. Eventually the dolls start glitching and remembering traumatic events. Back at the Dollhouse Topher injects November (Mellie) who then passes it to him and Adelle. Echo is on another engagement but when she sees Rossum on the news she rushes over there and helps Sam break into the lab. Once there Sam tries to steal the drug to sell it but is caught by Boyd and offered a deal by Adelle.
The Good: This is a very densely packed episode. There are three main stories all raging at once and from those there are some good things to take away.
If all is as it seems here, then we learn a lot about the Dollhouse and how Caroline came to be a part of it. She found out too much about what Rossum were up to. They wouldn’t let her leave because they couldn’t have the press or police investigating their activities. So in comes the Dollhouse and offers a deal. Caroline can live her life again but she must first spend five years as an active in the Dollhouse. The Dollhouse seems intimately linked to Rossum. Clearly a company experimenting with a memory drug have good reason to be connected to a company who wipe people’s minds.
But the connections seem to go much deeper than that. Adelle implies that Rossum provided the science behind the Dollhouse (She says Rossum “is why we exist”) while the Dollhouse earns money for Rossum to experiment (“I believe in the work we are funding.”). Could this controversial research be one of things which the Dollhouses around the world exist to pay for (see The Unknown)? Either way it is good to start to get a better picture of what the Dollhouse’s functions are.
The drug getting loose does create a very engaging story. As each new person becomes infected it becomes increasingly interesting as to what they will do next. We learn that Laurence feels guilt for trying to kill Echo (105) and that Boyd plays the piano. We learn that Adelle could have got Ambrose’s job and is bitter about not getting it. We also get to understand Laurence’s disdain for the actives a bit better. He complains aloud that suddenly he has to take orders from Victor, who is now an expert NSA officer. From Laurence’s perspective this is annoying because he is the one with the training and expertise and only minutes ago Victor was a child. It was a nice touch to humanise him a little further. It’s a nice role for Victor too as he gets to play a smooth, seen-it-all agent. Quite a different role from the Russian gangster we saw him as earlier in the season. It was nice logic for him to insist his agents hand in their guns once he realised any of them could become infected.
And then there was a little taste of classic Whedon comedy as Topher and Adelle succumb to the drug together in his office. Some of the humour misfires (see The Bad) but one scene works perfectly. Adelle is bouncing up and down on his trampoline as Topher calls Victor. He is freaked out and warning Victor that the drug is passing between people by touch. He accidentally refers to Victor as a doll and clumsily back-pedals from that statement quickly. Victor asks if he is sure and the camera pans back to reveal Topher has taken his pants off and is standing in his boxers. “I am fairly sure” he says.
We see Ballard is going to keep up his investigation despite his suspension. Which only makes sense after the message he received in the previous episode.
The Bad: There is too much going on here for it all to sink in. You have flashbacks to Caroline’s original break in and her current break in with Sam. But then you’ve got Laurence, Boyd, Victor and Sierra all breaking down on campus. And Topher, Adelle and November (Mellie) breaking down at the Dollhouse. All three stories are quite significant and could have used their own episode. That way the symmetry of what Sam and Caroline went through could have been drawn out better. And the characters getting high and going crazy could have been much better developed.
The Caroline flashbacks are not very good. There is something very generic about them. We don’t get any real sense of who Caroline is. She talks about her passionate dislike for Rossum’s experiments but I don’t buy into it. Similarly her relationship with Leo just doesn’t come across as very real. It’s hard to blame the actors when they have such short scenes to work with. But I don’t feel there was any chemistry between them and Eliza Dushku doesn’t give Caroline a strong sense of differentiation from most of the roles she plays as Echo.
In the present Sam and “Alice’s” story similarly lacks much character development. Again perhaps the result of cramming in too much to the rest of the story. He doesn’t show characteristics one way or another which would make us like, loath or find him interesting. He does however find time to needlessly change his shirt for no good reason. Between that and the strange fetishy outfit which Echo is wearing you get the impression someone has their eye on keeping the show’s sex appeal in the front of our minds.
The way the story comes across just doesn’t have the serious or dramatic tone which I think it ought to. The Rossum building security actually shoot and kill Leo. Rossum is on a college campus it’s not a private company with barbed wire around its facilities. So that is actually a very serious and unexpected moment for Caroline. She is then (presumably) imprisoned by them and coerced into becoming an active. Again that should be a major reveal and dark moment for the show. But it just isn’t presented in those dramatic tones. There’s also a bizarre moment when Sam comes across what look like foetuses in jars. I’m pretty sure if you came across human babies in jars you would react a lot more surprised and outraged than he does.
Meanwhile seeing the staff of the Dollhouse “get high” just doesn’t work nearly as well as it should because we don’t know these characters or their motivations well. This mind altering plot has been used to good effect before by Joss Whedon (“Band Candy” and “Tabula Rasa” on Buffy and “Spin the Bottle” on Angel). But the key of course is that the well established motives and behaviour of characters is suddenly turned on its head for dramatic and comedic effect. Here we don’t know what Adelle or Laurence or Boyd are like when they aren’t looking serious at work. We don’t know what they think of one another and so there are precious few moments which grab you as a viewer. We are also exposed to some of that groan inducing “high” acting as Laurence whines that his gun is “so heavy” and Adelle complains (seconds after being infected) that “lentils are completely incomprehensible.” And in whatever state he is in Topher is perhaps too idiosyncratic throughout, as if every line he says must be hilarious.
Boyd knocks out Sam but then walks off with Echo leaving him lying on the ground. Even if Boyd didn’t know what Sam had in his bag, it still looked foolish to just leave him unattended while the rest of the staff were still bugging out. Also you can see other people walking about in the Dollhouse who can see into Topher’s office. Apparently none of them thought Adelle jumping on a trampoline or Topher being pantsless was worthy of investigation.
Echo once more glitches on an engagement and actually leaves a paying customer tied up. Surely that would make it impossible to trust her out on a mission ever again. The Dollhouse can’t afford unhappy clients who might spread the word can they? She even refuses a treatment which must be a dangerous sign.
The Unknown: Adelle claims that she has been trying to convince Caroline to join the Dollhouse for two years. We see Caroline escape from a “hospital” bed, so can we assume that Rossum spent two years keeping her in captivity trying not to kill her but refusing to allow her to expose their operations? I suppose Leo must be a candidate to be Alpha. His bullet wound might not have been fatal and he would have perfect motivation to not kill Echo and want her to escape the Dollhouse. Is Adelle putting something in that tea to help aid people’s coercion? Does the world think Caroline is dead? That’s what they are telling the world happened to Sam. Adelle claims Caroline is punishing her. What does she mean? Also what does she mean when she says after five years Sam will have the skills to provide for his mother? It raises the intriguing question of who you are once you leave the Dollhouse.
Could the Rossum Corporation be doing good work? They say they are experimenting with a memory drug. Perhaps they are going to cure diseases and end suffering with their research, it’s just the methods they use which people find repugnant. It would certainly make it easier to understand why the employees of the Dollhouse are happy to work at such a seemingly immoral place. It’s interesting that Ambrose comes to Topher to find a cure. Surely the scientists who developed the memory drug would have been useful in that situation? It calls into question who Topher is and how he was recruited. Perhaps he is an active who has had many a genius mind blended into his own?
We learn that Victor was once a soldier involved in a traumatic explosion. Was that his real life or an engagement?
Best Moment: The opening scene presented one of the creepier visuals I have ever seen. Poor Owen who was exposed to a lethal dose of the memory drug runs into the glass window. He then begins using his head as a battering ram repeatedly smashing it against the window as the glass breaks and his head becomes a bloody mess.
There’s something about that that works on two levels. The human skull is tough and there’s something unnerving about seeing someone using it to smash glass the way an animal might bash its head against a cage door. It’s disturbing because the brain which the skull is intended to protect is being relentlessly smashed in two.
You can perceive this scene in many ways but the analogy for me was drawn with the actives in the Dollhouse. Owen is mimicking an insect trying to escape a jar, rather like the actives are prisoners of the Dollhouse. We later learn that Caroline spent two years avoiding becoming an active, perhaps she finally grew tired of beating her head against the glass?
Epilogue: This is not a great episode of television. But the details within it do increase the intrigue of the show. There is still a huge amount to work with here, but so far Whedon has made poor choices for how to showcase it.
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