P. D. Griffith's P.O.V.

Ep. “Grey Hour”

There is an aspect about this show that I really find fascinating. Basically, just like real life experiments, the Dollhouse organization truly doesn’t know the long term effects of their process on their “actives” and that they are learning about their patterns and behaviors while we, the audience, are.

This episode was a pretty good one. In it Echo is turned into a master burglar in charge of an antiquities heist. The part that made the episode interesting, however, was when Echo is remotely wiped and enters her “tabula raza” state while locked inside the vault. I have to give Eliza Dusku props because she did a great job at shifting acting personas so easily. In the end, she obviously gets out of the vault (thanks to a smoke bomb) and returned to the Dollhouse wiped clean of her robbery exploits.

It turns out that Echo’s wipe is traced back to the rogue “active,” Alpha. The upper management of the Dollhouse told the other workers that Alpha was taken care of after he massacred a number of people and then broke out of the complex, but as an audience, we have know that it was a lie for a while. Topher realizes Alpha’s involvement in the incident and, as such, receives a higher security clearance. Only time will tell if we get to learn more.

I think as the show progresses, there is going to be one big problem. As of now, the only characters the audience care about are Echo and her handler, Boyd. Characters like Topher, Victor, Peter and Sierra are not seen enough to really make anyone care if something happened to them. Although after this week, I think they may start working on this.

Great episode. Great show. Great end to the long week.

So Friday is kind of my break from TV. If you have been following me through the week, you would understand it’s a break that’s truly warranted. But even with it being my break night, I still have to watch something…

Ep. “Stage Fright”

So I like this show. I don’t love it, but I like it. I think the concept is pretty intriguing and I have historically been a Whedon fan. Buffy. Firefly. Stardust. He just seems to have a knack to write the fantastical story with a strange twist on normalcy. Dollhouse is no exception: a mysterious private company who’s contracted to provide a person to meet the clients every need; the imprinting of memories into “actives” to create the perfect product; a police investigator, Ballard, attempting to uncover the ethically-questionable organization; and an active, Echo, who might be malfunctioning slightly (which Dollhouse doesn’t like to see). It’s just strange enough.

This week, within the music industry introspective we witnessed, we were made aware that Lubov (Ballard’s informant) is actually an “active” being used by the company to throw his investigation off track. Apart from that insane plot twist, not much else happened. The “mission” of the episode, where Echo worked as a back-up singer with a bodyguard twist, was all a bit contrived and emotionally lackluster. The overarching story got a bit more complex (which I like), but apart from that, episode 3 was not the best.

The other thing I like about this show is that it is the second experimental subject of FOX’s revolutionary, “Remote-Free TV.” Its a commercial media strategy where FOX can charge companies premium prices for commercials during their more popular programming. FOX can do this because have reduced the number of spaces significantly (which also give us about 6 extra minutes of our show), but it’s just supply-and-demand bitches. Now the break is short enough that it isn’t worth the effort to reach for the remote and fast-forward through to the commercials. Genious.