Saturday, March 7, 2009

Dollhouse Episode 4

Via sometime commenter Maureen, according to ask ausiello in this week's EW:

Question: Do you have any Dollhouse tidbits? --Jenni
Ausiello:
The show's mythology will really start to unfold on April 3 when, through a series of flashbacks, we learn who Echo was and the underlying "why" and "how" she ended up being lured into the Dollhouse.

I think they should have scheduled it sooner.  

And no, I have no idea who Ausiello is or why we should believe him.

There's more.

These are totally random thoughts.

It was a nice switch to have Echo start out as just a plain person acting like a midwife instead of some sex object.  But why on earth wouldn't that couple have just gotten a real midwife?  At first I wondered, "Why a midwife?  What makes Whedon choose certain roles."  But it soon became apparent that we are, like last week, supposed to juxtapose a client who says she wants to forget something (in this case the pain of childbirth) with the reality of forgetting.

Topher is really annoying.  I assume the writers created an assistant for him because they knew it would be completely unbelievable that he could have been that annoying in front of any of his other colleagues for so long.  His colleagues would have walked away from him  or told him to leave.  Hence the necessity for an assistant who is stuck with him. 

I detected more Whedonisms in this script than in the last three:  Echo/Taffy calling the art expert "old guy expert" and the exchange between Victor and Ballard about Georgia: 

Victor: Russia Georgia not sweet home Georgia.

Ballard: Alabama

I assume that we're going to now see Victor in other characters.  I also assume Victor is his "dollhouse" name too?  DeWitt referred to him as Victor.

The idea of Echo getting remotely wiped in the middle of a gig was a good idea. I think I might have liked the concept of this show the best of the four that I've seen.   The story arc is developing so slowly that I felt that this was a good step forward.  On the other hand I'm not sure that we learned much, except that the wiped Echo was still able to get the nicer of the two accomplices out with her at the end. 

On the other hand, I found it completely unrealistic that those two guys would be as patient with Echo as they were.  It seemed more likely that the one would have beaten her senseless or at least thrown her in a corner and told her to shut up.   And it made no sense that Sierra would give the wiped Echo instructions on how to break out and not insist that one of the professional burglars who owned the drill do the actual drilling.

Hopefully next week we'll get some of that information about Alpha from Dewitt that she was giving to Topher at the end.

Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

I never intended to read yet another epic poem immediately after finishing The Iliad .  But I subscribe to the Poetry Unbound podcast and in...