Episode 10 - Haunted
28 March 2012
Synopsis: Wealthy horse lover Margaret Bashford wakes up in Echo’s body and Adelle has to tell her that she died. She had suspected she might be murdered and had “backed up” her own personality in case. She heads to her own funeral and begins to see how her family really felt about her. It turns out her son Nicolas killed her to pay off his gambling debts. She is able to rewrite her will and tell her family how she really feels about them. Meanwhile for Topher’s birthday he is allowed to programme Sierra to be his gaming buddy for the day. Paul Ballard runs Mellie’s prints through the FBI databases and sees the records get deleted. His own dark feelings about her and who she is begin to come out.
The Good: The Topher and Ballard stories are very strong.
Topher shows off some much needed morality while playing with Sierra. He refuses to play with any other actives and there seems to be no sexual component to his relationship with her. It would be nice to assume that’s because he knows where to draw the line. In the meantime he gets to indulge in some fun geeky behaviour which sheds more light on who he is. I suppose we could have imagined that he enjoyed science fiction and computer games but seeing that brought to life makes him seem more real and like real people we all know. The revelation that it is his birthday was well presented. The viewer is thus given a reason to sympathise with him and imagine how lonely it must be working in the Dollhouse and having so little time to have a social life.
Ballard’s reaction to knowing who Mellie really is was also played out well. He seems deeply uncomfortable and miserable around her which seems only natural after such a crushing discovery. He intelligently decides to run her prints through the database and the result manages to convince his friend Loomis that the Dollhouse is real (see The Unknown). Mellie, sensing Paul’s withdrawal offers to be with him whether he really cares about her or not. So he has rough angry sex with her. It’s a very dark scene and is left to the viewer to imagine what is going through his mind. The fact that he takes out his bitter frustration on her in this manner says something a bit unpleasant about who he is and what he is going through.
Then we have the Echo\Margaret story. I appreciated the attempt to do a standalone story. Too many shows get wrapped up in the 24 style hooking of viewers into watching every episode for the next piece of the puzzle. Sometimes it is nice to watch a self contained story play out. The concept of using the actives to live after your own body has died is an important idea to explore. It gives a hint of all the nefarious uses to which this technology could be put to if it fell into the wrong hands. Assuming that is that the Dollhouse are the right hands. At least on this occasion we see the pleasant side of life after death as Margaret gets to have some closure on her life and it is left to Boyd to question the morality of it all.
The story itself has its good moments with Echo playing the stiff upper lip and strong posture adequately. The Back to the Future moment when Margaret’s son Nicolas tries to kiss Echo was a plausible and amusing idea. Seeing the emotional disconnect of Margaret from her daughter and reconnection with her brother were pleasant scenes. And the storytelling covered the obvious plot hole by having Nicolas be a Dollhouse client, making it plausible he might have been able to recognise his own mother in a different body.
The Bad: There is something old fashioned about the Echo plot. It feels like an episode of Murder She Wrote or Agatha Christie’s Dollhouse. A more modern analogy might be Stat Trek: The Next Generation where a bunch of aliens might come in and have their disputes aired and we as viewers are expected to care about characters who are in essence pretty generic caricatures.
Sadly this story can’t escape that feeling as the generic wealthy family with emotional problems is too familiar a tale. That generic feeling isn’t helped by those convenient scenes where Echo finds the grieving family members sitting alone crying, all too happy to share their inner most feelings with this oddly curious stranger. Just like a lot of murder mystery shows, the killer (Nicolas) reveals himself and has his final showdown in a way which feels so unlike real life. Would a son really banter with his mother in that “I’m about to kill you” way we have all seen a hundred times? Or would killing your own mother actually be a lot more emotional and traumatic than that? The scene isn’t helped by Jack smashing the door down with a shovel. He seemed to jump to the conclusion that Nicolas had killed his mother from drugging a horse way too quickly.
It’s difficult not to feel like “life after death” deserved a grander story than this one. Again imagine if you got to live for another week after dying. The possibilities are mind boggling for all the things you would want to do or the feelings that might overwhelm you. This story just doesn’t cover as much ground as such a huge concept offers.
The Ballard angry sex scene didn’t have all the impact it perhaps could have. That’s because we don’t know Ballard very well at all. We still have no idea what his priorities in life are. We don’t know why he joined the FBI. We don’t know if he has any friends. We don’t know who his last girlfriend was or why they broke up. So his possibly disturbing behaviour might actually be something not entirely out of character for him. How would we know?
The Unknown: When Mellie’s prints go through the computer, a large number of different identities flash up on the screen before they are deleted. Did Mellie have a number of aliases before becoming an active? Or had her various personalities since become an active somehow end up on an FBI database? Why exactly did the records get deleted at that moment?
Was Sierra’s personality made up by Topher or actually parts of him or some friend he used to have?
Best Moment: The shot of Topher getting his birthday cake. It’s the first time in the whole show I have felt a reason to sympathise with him and see his loneliness.
Epilogue: A nice idea for an episode but once more it falters under the sheer weight of possibilities which Dollhouse’s technology can allow.
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