Broken Dolls: Thoughts on the Season Finale of FOX's "Dollhouse"

In a position that is bound to make me unpopular with the legions of Dollhouse fans, I have to say that I found Friday evening's season finale of Dollhouse ("Omega"), written and directed by Tim Minear, an illogical and messy affair.

Following a first season that was fraught with behind-the-scenes complications and showcased an often disjointed approach to serialized storytelling, the finale failed to pay off some of the more intriguing story threads that had been slowly weaving together throughout the eleven or so preceding episodes and offered an Alpha (Alan Tudyk) that seemed bizarrely at odds with how he had been previously presented within the series.

"Omega" also suffered from an odd emphasis on telling rather than showing some important beats (meet Adelle: exposition dump) and potentially wrapped the series with a nonsensical ending that didn't in any way feel earned. (Not helping matters: the last scene was in fact culled from the final scene of Joss Whedon's original Dollhouse pilot.)

Confession: I've known about the Claire/Whiskey twist since last May and had been eagerly awaiting this reveal, though after several Joss Whedon interviews indicated that the series likely wouldn't be dealing with the possibility of any of the Dollhouse staff being dolls themselves until the second season, I gave up all hope of seeing this storyline play out. Still, I thought that if they were going to go down this road with Claire/Whiskey, it could have been handled a hell of a lot better. I thought that the reveal that it was Whiskey and not Echo dancing in the distance was fantastic and spoke to the beautiful visuals that Minear constructed throughout the direction of this episode.

But Alpha and Whiskey's Mickey-and-Mallory rip-off engagement was just odd to me. Why would a client book an engagement with a psycho couple? I could see Lars perhaps hiring Whiskey to be his Mallory on a crime spree but what was Lars' role meant to be here? Third wheel? It seemed more a means to an end for Minear to create a stunning visual of Whiskey and Alpha going at it while they torture this poor guy in a deserted club while the handlers try and track down their errant dolls.

Sadly, I thought that the handling of Whiskey's backstory was clunky and made little sense, given her scars and her apparent agoraphobia, neither of which was dealt with satisfactorily. It was interesting to learn that there was a previous Dr. Saunders and that Whiskey was given his personality as an imprint, leading to some continuity for the Actives as they continue to be treated on-site by a Dr. Saunders. (I did love that Whiskey accepted who she was at the end and picked up the jar of lollipops and that her hatred towards Topher was unrelated to her programming.)

But the reveal didn't quite ring true when you consider Whiskey's scars. Hell, I'd have much rather learned that the scars were repaired and Whiskey kept recutting her own face, making it impossible for the Dollhouse to fix their most valued Active and that it was self-inflicted, indicating that some things can't be erased no matter how many times you imprint. As it is, it doesn't really make much sense why Whiskey still has the scars that Alpha inflicted on her. Why would the Dollhouse let their best Active remained scarred and locked up? Surely they would have forced her to have them fixed, given she was under contract. And why was she an agoraphobic in this imprint? It made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

Additionally, Alpha's characterization here was diametrically opposed to the week before, where he was presented as a genius whereas here he was a garden-variety psycho with a fixation on Echo. Not that we know why he was quite so fixated on her or what his master plan actually was... which seemed to have nothing to do with taking down the Dollhouse at all and more to do with giving himself a multiple-personality psycho bride and killing Caroline's personality and making Echo watch. What happened to the Olympian-sized intellect? The genius skills? The feeling that Alpha was a larger-than-life ghoul instead of an average psychopath?

Was his endgame really so small? To allow Echo to "ascend" the same way he did via his accidental compositing and achieve something that wasn't quite self-awareness but an ability to embody a host of imprints at once? To infect someone else with the same madness he suffered from? If so, why did he give Echo an imprint of a Southern floozy rather than, say, Whiskey's Mallory imprint? Just why did he fixate so much on Echo in the first place? You've got me. And then without any real answers, Alpha climbs up the stairs of the power plant never to be seen again. Just how did he escape? No idea.

Even more frustrating to me was that several storylines--especially Paul Ballard's--went nowhere. I've never been a fan of Ballard as a character. Throughout the season, he's been portrayed as icy and unsympathetic and this week's episode made him seem weak-willed and vapid as well. After doggedly pursuing the Dollhouse (resulting in the end of his career) and proclaiming the wrongness of what they're doing, he just sits back and takes a job for the very organization he was looking to take down? Why? To be closer to Caroline? To free November/Mellie, whom I never bought his feelings for in the first place, from her contract rather than, say, Caroline? To take it down from the inside? (A rather far leap of logic, given that this is not indicated anywhere on screen.)

Meanwhile, November and Sierra vanished after being imprinted with the personalities of two bounty hunters and tasked with tracking down Alpha. I understand that a scene with the two of them at the power plant was cut from the finished episode but the result made them look like the two worst bounty hunters in the entire world, who apparently failed to find their quarry at all. Why bother showing the scene of them being imprinted as bounty hunters if it wasn't followed up on at all? (If anything comes from Dollhouse, it's that I hope that the superb Dichen Lachman gets a lot of work as a result. She's proven herself versatile, talented, and memorable even when stuck with a largely thankless role, as has the supremely talented Enver Gjokaj.)

We're told repeatedly that the Dollhouse is impenetrable and infallible yet it was anything but and the last two episodes proved this once again. Apparently, to get in, you need only break through two flimsy grates. And to get out, Alpha just took the elevator. Additionally, the fact that no one--not Topher, not Adelle--thought it was prudent to look at Alpha's file and investigate (A) who he was before he came to the Dollhouse or (B) what crimes he had committed after slicing up members of their staff, tormenting them, and breaking in was absolutely ludicrous. Surely, they'd want to to know everything about their target, even if it meant delving into his past before his initial imprinting. And, given that Alpha smashed his wedge on his way out the first time, shouldn't Topher have taken a look at the primary and backup wedges first thing after Alpha's latest attack? Sloppy.

As for Echo herself, I don't really think that after her experiences with Alpha, she would just gladly go back to the Dollhouse and have her mind erased. Yet we weren't given any inkling into what this Super-Echo believed or thought about her situation. I never for a moment thought there was any danger for Echo from Alpha at the end and he literally runs up the stairs into the ether while Echo climbs out onto a catwalk to retrieve the wedge with her original Caroline personality on it. Was Alpha really going to kill her? Hell no. And even when he has multiple opportunities to do so, even when Echo is distracted from chasing him by the precipitous position of said wedge, he doesn't even bother to fire at her. I thought the ending--with Echo whispering the name Caroline as the pod closes on her--was completely unearned and at odds with the Super-Echo we just saw in the previous scene, given how the season as a whole seemed to point the way towards Echo's growing self-awareness. After finally achieving self-awareness, would she really throw it away to be put back into a box?

Dollhouse dealt with some intriguing concepts of identity, individuality, memory, and free will but the execution of the individual episodes often paled in comparison with the ideas that they sought to explore. I'm all for the discussion of these fascinating moral and metaphysical questions--such as whether it's right to experiment on prisoners, whether our identities are more than just electrical responses--but I couldn't shake the feeling that the questions themselves were more interesting than the answers that the series was offering and that the series itself had the haphazard feeling of a rudderless boat.

All in all, I have to say that I'm disappointed. For a series so rife with potential, it failed to achieve it on a regular basis and remained, in the end, a frustrating exercise in the push and pull of concept and execution. Whether FOX will renew Dollhouse in spite of its shortcomings (and its dwindling ratings) remains to be seen. But I'm definitely ready for the cast and crew to move on to other, hopefully less creatively uneven, endeavors.

What did you think of Dollhouse's finale and, should Friday's episode be the series' finale, of Dollhouse as a whole? Were you disappointed by the final product or did you revel in the concepts of identity, memory, and individuality that the series brought up? Discuss.