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I'll let Couch Baron do the heavy lifting and rating of this episode, but to tide you over, here's the quick rundown of the happenings from the series finale. I didn't think a year ago that this show ending would make me sad, but it kind of does.
Anyway, the trio from Epitaph 1 (Mag, Zone and mini-Caroline) are running trying to find the elusive Safe Haven. Along the way they get captured and taken into Neuropolis -- the town formerly known as Tucson -- where Echo and Paul are hiding out as prisoners. They dynamic duo take down the latest (fat) Harding, pick up an exhausted and screwed up Topher and head off to some sort of Amish country, where Priya and Adele are growing strawberries and Priya's got the cutest little son. Topher's latest plan is to build Harding and company the technology that they want (that will wipe the remainder of the world) but to underhandedly plan to reverse it without their knowledge and have everyone return back to their right minds. Priya is not too pleased with going back to the time before being a doll, and neither is Caroline or her mini-me version. We see why when Tony finally shows up all guns a-blazing and speaking Russian and whatnot. Apparently he and Priya have had some sort of falling out since he's a totally tech head and she doesn't want her son around him, and she's mighty peeved that Echo called him for backup. Anyway, they all pile into a big tank and head back to the LA dollhouse to get Topher the tools he needs.
Priya and Tony bicker about his desire to protect her and their son by being a tech head while their son sleeps soundly, though why they brought him on the mission in the first place beats the hell out of me. In the back of the truck, Paul and Echo have a thinly veiled conversation about having sex and the team finally puts a plan together as they pull up to the Dollhouse. The techheads load their aggressive personalities via embedded walkie talkie looking devices, and there's a lot of slow-motion shooting and running. During which Mag gets shot in the kneecaps and Paul gets shot dead with a bullet to the head. Yeah, just like that. In the dollhouse, it is all mindless people… and Alpha. He's created a nice place for "dumbshows." Topher starts speaking in tongues and making about as much sense as he normally does, when the tech heads aim their guns at the geek because they don't want him to wipe everyone. Their thinking is that if they just steal more personalities, they can rule the world. Echo and Alpha swiftly take down the tech junkies with their lofty goals. Priya starts smashing all the little portable personality hard drives, then Echo wigs out and tells Priya she's lucky that Tony loves her and then she starts bawling about how she never told Paul she loved him.
Topher finishes his Mindunwiper 2020, with the help of an old video tape of Bennett and says the device has to go upstairs and it will cause a big explosion. Oh, and did he mention that he has to set it off manually? Adele catches his meaning and realizes it is a suicide mission. He's tired of hurting people and their brains, so he tells her that she's got the task of reshaping the world and helping the dolls adjust to real life. Alpha goes away into hiding so he doesn't become a psycho killer again, Tony and Priya roast marshmallows or something with their kid underground to avoid the mindunwiping happening in the rest of the world and Adele awkwardly hugs Echo and tells her to destroy the chair post brain unwipe. Topher sets off the bomb, everyone, including mini-Caroline's all back to normal, and Echo reaches the chair and sees an imprint with her name on it (left behind by Alpha). She uploads it and we see that Paul is now inside her head forever and ever. Then she wanders around with only Mag, Tony, Priya and Tony Jr. as company before she lays herself down in a little pod and we're done. -- Angel Cohn
Want more? The full recap starts right below!I never recap the previouslies, because they usually annoy me with how much they give away and I end up hyperlinking to the relevant stuff anyway, but since this one doesn't have any, I'll flip the script and do my own version. So: Some time ago, Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku sat down and came up with a concept for a new sci-fi-ish show. Said show would star an actress with fan appeal beyond reproach and acting talent that was somewhat less so. They got Fox to pick up the show, whereupon they ran into massive creative differences that led to several delays and a reduced episode order. When the show saw the light, the first half of the season was tepid at best, but was followed by a strong second half that made its inevitable cancellation look unjust. But amazingly, Fox decided to give it another chance, albeit in a dreaded Friday night timeslot. The show repaid this kindness with three below-par episodes (one of them absolutely dreadful) and was informed its services would no longer be required; however, it was given the chance to air its full order of thirteen episodes to wrap the show up in a satisfactory fashion. The show responded by ripping off a rather mind-blowingly good series of episodes, but then advanced a horrifically nonsensical penultimate offering that left what viewers remained thoroughly unsure of what to expect going into the finale. And if that sounds frustrating, you're not wrong, but if you've been following along with this paragraph you'll admit it's not exactly unexpected either. Regardless, Dollhouse has been fun to recap, on the whole, and I'm sorry my return to the Whedon game couldn't have lasted longer. One more thing: Thanks very much to Angel Cohn for covering the recaplet when Fox unexpectedly switched up the finale date. And now, let's get to wrapping it up:
We start as we left off, in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles in the year 2019. Oh, I see: These are the previouslies, or the "postviouslies" if you prefer, but whatever, it's a quick selection of scenes from Epitaph One, which I suppose I can't begrudge them doing for the people who never got hold of the DVD in order to watch it. Probably a little confusing for those who didn't, but then again, it's not like we're catering to a whole lot of casual viewers here. Also, nice to see Whiskey, given that she's not in the episode proper. The whatever-you-want-to-call-them leads to a mere title card instead of an opening-credits sequence, which signals that my fingers are in for it here, and then where we really start is with some Dumbshow shambling around "Somewhere near the California-Nevada border," as a chyron so helpfully informs us. What, there's no particular town that wanted to be mentioned in a dying show's last gasp? Maybe after Chino's depiction on The O.C., everyone's gun-shy. Probably more important than the "location" is the year, which is now 2020, and this Dumbshow quickly becomes well beside the point, as a horde of charging Butchers come out of nowhere and head toward my wonderfully sarcastic TV boyfriend Zone, who awakens from the nap he was enjoying in his Jeep to yell a warning to Mag and... well, young Caroline, formerly "Isis," who are nearby fetching some water, as the womenfolk apparently do even in post-apocalyptic times. Zone starts laying down some covering fire as Mag sprints behind the wheel and gets them out of there, not without an assist from young Caroline, who uses a lead pipe to brain a Butcher who managed to grab the back of the Jeep. Actually, the pipe may not have contained lead, but I played Clue enough times as a kid that it's hard to imagine any other possibility. Once they've safely escaped, Zone wonders how there could be Butchers all the way out where they are, as they're not even close to a city, and Mag speculates unimportantly before pointing out that they have better things to worry about, such as getting to Safe Haven before they run out of water and gas. Young Caroline whines that she's doing the best she can now that she's unable to see over the dash, which would have been funny if she'd had any sense of humor about it, but she's too worried about asking whom her current body used to house. Zone declines to mention more about Iris than that she was printed before they met her, and adds that they put Caroline into her body because of her knowledge of Safe Haven, like, okay, none of that really makes any sense, because "Caroline" and "Echo" ceased to be any different as of ten-plus years earlier, so there's no way YC would know where Safe Haven is and not Echo, but a billion things here make no sense and we won't get an answer to any of them, and if I don't have time to dwell on them now, I'm certainly not going to bother recapping all the garbage about their goal of making a "true world" where everyone is an Actual, because we know this already and, despite what I said before, it's a LITTLE LATE for re-explaining stuff here. Anyway, they continue down the desert road...
...and sometime later, they pull into some sort of storage facility... and are promptly captured by three goons who yank black hoods over their heads. Well, at least they don't have to worry about running out of gas anymore.
After an establishing shot of a desert city with a chyron identifying it as "Neuropolis," we cut to a holding area containing many presumed Actuals, and after Zone predictably mouths off to a guard and gets just as predictably punched in the gut as a result, some guy in a suit snarks that they shouldn't "bruise the merchandise," and given who he's talking about I'm going to have to agree. The guards then remove many of the other prisoners for some nefarious purpose, leaving young Caroline to tell the other two that they're in Neuropolis, "the City of Minds" (which is the former Tucson, as she goes on to say it's where Rossum used to be located), and I'm afraid even with the exigencies that exposition sometimes requires, I have no patience for Mag being all "Neuropolis exists?" because YOU LIVE IN A WORLD OF DUMBSHOWS AND BUTCHERS, but the aptly-named if twee "Neuropolis" strains your credibility? Not surprisingly, Zone makes more sense to me when he asks why YC didn't see fit to mention that Safe Haven happened to be "parked right door to the freakin' Death Star?" Caroline says it had to be, because it's where they got the vaccine, and they would raid it for tech whenever necessary. That still doesn't explain why YOU DIDN'T MENTION ANY OF THIS IN THE LAST YEAR, girlie. Seriously, wouldn't they have asked her to fill them in on, like, EVERYTHING she knows? I mean, I know that's a whole lot of listening to Caroline talk, but these two are supposed to be soldiers. They can take pain. Anyway, Mag divines that Caroline has been here before, and when she asks what will be done with them, I almost go deaf from the answering ominous horn blast on the soundtrack. Were they so worried the audience would think the result of their capture would be a spa treatment?
Anyway, we cut to a fat, cigar-smoking Harding (most certainly not played by Keith Carradine here), who's glad when a smarmy-but-thin associate enters and tells him he's got a selection for his choice of a new "suit." Seriously, I really thought Rossum's higher-ups' endgame would be something a bit less banal. They went to the trouble of making sure everyone on Earth could be imprinted so a few people could be lazy pigs and then jump bodies rather than get liposuction? I mean, I know they think they're after immortality, but if this is what they do with it... it's just so uninspired, and if they'd come to that realization it could have at least been half-interesting. However, I'll move on to note that among the naked men in chains in front of the new and unimproved Harding is Ballard. Harding is not so food-addled that he doesn't recognize him even after all these years, although from his reaction he may buy the part where he's a Dumbshow. But once he hears that Ballard was with a girl (and seriously, wouldn't these people have put Echo and her cronies on a global Ten Most Wanted List by now?), he runs out of the room. His smarmy cohort wonders what the big deal is about a couple of Dumbshows, at which point Ballard exchanges his blank stare for a wry grin and then head-butts the guy. No idea how he's going to get out of the cuffs, but as Douglas Adams would have said, that's an SEP.
Back in the holding area, some guards come in to retrieve some more prisoners, prompting Mag to bemoan their situation. YC says they'll be okay, to which Zone sardonically asks if she has a plan. Just then, a hooded figure leaps into action -- it's Echo, and she quickly dispenses with all their enemies. YC then smugly answers Zone, "I guess I do," and if you didn't know what I was talking about with the pain of Caroline talking, there's a prime example. Anyway, Harding catches up to Echo and asks her if she thinks the tech might never have gotten out of control if she hadn't taken Rossum down. Well, I tried to suggest that to Boyd last time, not that he listened, but thankfully, Echo does not indulge this for long before she puts a bullet in Harding's brain, and then Ballard turns up, and while I'd normally bemoan the fact that he's fully clothed again, the way YC horns up upon seeing him even here makes me think it's for the best. When Echo goes to give medical attention to one of the prisoners, YC chimes in with her own diagnosis of the situation, so it seems like they're just making her a copy of Echo rather than the original Caroline, which is the only way the story can work now but makes no sense given that they already had Caroline-in-Echo in "Epitaph One." Anyway, we then switch over to Ballard as he locates Topher, who apparently was captured in the raid on the Dollhouse at the end of "Epitaph One." He's just as crazy, although someone has seen fit to give him a shorter, spiky haircut that I kind of like. Ballard is able to discern from Topher's babbling that Rossum is forcing him to watch as they execute someone every day until he comes up with a way to erase everyone in the world all at once. Lucky thing he was already nuts before they started. Echo then appears and asks Ballard how he is, and Ballard responds, "He's pretty far gone!" in that half-surprised/half-deadpan way he has that I'll miss. Echo kneels and tells Topher they're going to take him out of there, but when Topher mentions that he's so close to solving "both problems," Echo's ears perk up, and he explains that the second, surreptitious thing he's working on is a way to restore everyone's original personality. And look, that's ridiculous, but given how poorly they explained the idea behind wiping everyone remotely in the first place, it doesn't even merit a detailed rant. So I'll settle for this: What a load of crap.
When we return, we see a beautiful house with a proverbial white picket fence, and also a real garden, in which Adelle and an adorable young boy are tilling the earth. Adelle gives the boy a ripe strawberry to go show his mother, and he obediently runs into the house and displays it to Priya. Later, some more randoms have joined those three people at the dinner table, and while I'm getting the "Haven" part I'm wondering, given its aforementioned proximity to Neuropolis and the fact that everyone's acting like they're in a slightly more ethnically diverse remake of Little House On The Prairie, how they're managing that "Safe" part. I mean, I'm sure they have weaponry, but especially since they mention there are a bunch more houses I still can't imagine how they've kept their location a secret. Anyway, Echo and Ballard enter with their three new friends in tow, and after Ballard announces that Topher collapsed half a mile back and sends two non-speaking extras to retrieve him, Adelle asks... ABOUT TOPHER, and Echo assures her they got him, like, even if the script supervisor also collapsed on this day I still think they might have noticed this redundancy. Thanks to the Haiti telethon, they even had an extra week to ADR it so it made sense! God!
When we return, Topher has dug up a video lecture featuring the dearly departed Bennett, and when she talks about something that seems like the key to what he's trying to do, he freezes the action, plants a kiss on her image's lips, and thanks her. Aw. Alpha, his assistant in this procedure, finishes up, and Topher confirms that they're done and says they need to set off the device as high as possible. Adelle asks if her old office is up enough, and he tells her it is indeed. When he mentions that an explosion will be a necessary precursor to the chain reaction they seek, however, Adelle recalls that he said the device could only be operated manually, and at his guilty silence, she chokes, "You're not coming back." He refuses to meet her gaze as he bravely says it's a small price to pay, but when she caresses his face, he whispers that he didn't want to cause any more pain. Once again: Topher Brink, bringing us to tears. The best-developed character and the most satisfying arc in one. Adelle emotionally holds him until Alpha pipes up, "Is now a bad time to ask for a favor?" Considering the other two are too choked up to voice a denial, it seems perfect!
Out in the atrium, Victor's sitting glumly in front of a little Bonfire of the Technologies when Priya comes out to join him -- with their son. She introduces the boy to his father, and Tony tries to hold it together as he shakes his hand and parrots his introduction to Priya as he says his name's Anthony, but he can call him Tony. The boy pipes up that that's his name too (he'd been referred to as "T" up until now) and asks if he can help Tony burn stuff. Priya smiles through her tears, and as overwritten as their last scene was, this one is nice and spare on the dialogue, which actually gives us time and space to feel what the characters are feeling. Did the same person write them both?
It's time for Topher to go, and Adelle basically offers to go with him, but Topher says it has to be him alone. "I'll fix what we did to their heads; you fix what we did to the rest of the world." He smiles and adds that her job is way harder, and she manages to give him an answering smile before he heads away. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz, I hope you get to work together again in the future, and that I get to see it.
Mag is sitting in a wheelchair watching over the Asian Techhead when Zone enters and is basically like "Bamp chicka wow wow!" Hee. Mag tells him to grow up, and he responds that he's taking YC back to the surface so she can become a ten-year-old again, after which he'll take care of her. Aw. They exchange some light sarcasm before Zone asks what Mag did, "before." She says she was in sociology at Berkeley, and he replies that he was a landscape architect. Even Mag has to laugh and say she wouldn't have guessed that, and he leaves with this: "People are such a mystery!" She smiles as she watches him go...
...and then Adelle is telling Echo that Alpha couldn't stay, as he was afraid he'd become what he was before. Now, if he's referring to his original personality, that makes no sense, as he could avoid that by staying put. However, if he's referring to the fact that Ballard, his anchor to all things good and pure, is gone from him, it adds up. To me VOMITING! Adelle then says she'll lead all the Dolls outside for the blast, as she's the only one who can, although Zone, another Actual, does join them, at least at first. Adelle smiles affectionately as she notes the irony of the situation: "Funny that the last fantasy the Dollhouse should fulfill would be yours." Echo bitterly says she doesn't have any fantasies, and if that's true she's got some really unimaginative personalities rattling around up top, but Adelle merely replies, "More's the pity," and pulls her into a loving embrace before heading off, and for all my problems with the finale, it's affecting at the end here. She turns back, though, and tells Echo Alpha said for her to dismantle all the tech in the building. "He said you should start with the chair." Echo looks after her...
...and oh, crap, it's going to be hard to watch Topher go through with this. He looks out at the world he unwittingly wrought...
...while Adelle gets everyone out, and YC and Echo look at each other before YC anvils to Zone about how she's the lucky one because she gets to start over, She frankly sounds kind of smug about it, and I love the actress but I still want to smack her. Also, I realize that the Actuals are getting the shit end of the stick here, given that they have to live with their horrible memories. No wonder Topher wanted out...
...and speaking of which, he gets the gizmo ready...
...as the Dolls head outside. Conveniently, there don't seem to be any Butchers about, but that doesn't matter anyway, as it's go time upstairs. As the device gathers power, Topher takes a last look around and sees the wall of photographs -- before the pulse wave explodes out of the machine. Sniff, but I counted a full twenty-five seconds between him activating the gizmo and it going off, so you'd think he could have run if he wanted to. Outside, everyone but Adelle and Zone have been knocked out, but the ex-Dolls start regaining consciousness one by one, and when YC or Iris or whoever she is now warily asks Zone what happened, he helps her to her feet and smiles that everything is going to be okay. He brings her over to meet Adelle...
...as Echo's heading up to the chair. Atop it, she finds an envelope with her name on it, and inside, she finds a cartridge. She doesn't hesitate in imprinting herself... and then we cut inside her mind, wherein Ballard has appeared to talk to her. He wryly starts to inquire about the surroundings, and she smilingly replies that he wanted her to let him in, which is one of the only cutesy lines in this episode that worked for me. They moon at each other...
...and then she comes out of the chair with a smile on her face. She then happily walks by Priya, the two Tonys, and Mag as the most ridiculously overwrought alterna-ovary song continues to wail away on the soundtrack, and then she settles into her pod to mentally say all the things to Ballard she never got to say. Also, the Mutant Enemy card editorializes by cutting off the alterna-ovary in mid-wail, showing that I'll always see eye-to-eye with them on some things.
Well, that's it. I think I adequately expressed my frustration with the zigzagging quality of the show, but as I said, it was enjoyable overall, and I'll miss it on the whole. Thanks for reading, and hope to see you again sometime.
John Ramos is a writer and film producer living in Los Angeles. You can reach him at couchbaron@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/couchbaron.