My latest on Tor.com:
Dollhouse ends as it lived its two-year life: Uneven. The first half of ‟Epitaph Two,″ the series finale, which aired Friday, was broken, but then the show pulled itself together for a moving ending.
The episode opened confusingly with what appeared to be a ‟previously on″ sequence that set the stage: We′re now 10 years in the future, the world has gone all Night o the Living Dead, and Felicia Day, the waifish actress who stars in, co-produces, and writes the Web sitcom The Guild is butch. It′s all a sequence of quick-cut scenes, looking like they were taken from some previous episode that I′d never seen, which had me scratching my head. I checked IMDB to see if we missed an episode of the second season. No, we did not. That confusing montage is how the series finale starts.
A little Googling solves the mystery: ‟Epitaph Two,″ the series finale, is a follow-up to ‟Epitaph One,″ the first season finale, which never aired. It was only available on DVD. So the people like me, who only watched the series on the network and never saw ‟Epitaph One,″ are left struggling to catch up with ‟Epitaph Two.″ You stay classy Fox, way to show how much you care about your viewers.
The first half-hour of ‟Epitaph Two″ was disorganized and disjointed. I suspect it would have been more enjoyable if I′d seen ‟Epitaph One.″ ‟Epitaph Two″ featured at least two major new characters, played by Day and Zack Ward. I presume they were introduced in ‟Epitaph One.″ But because I hadn′t seen E1 (I′m getting tired of typing out the full names), I couldn′t care about the two new characters, especially since Ward′s character always seemed to be complaining and insulting people. Maybe he showed redeeming characteristics in E1, but Fox viewers didn′t get to see that. He was annoying. I wanted to hit him over the head with a shovel.
Day was great. I′m used to seeing her in The Guild, where she plays a delicate neurotic, like Woody Allen if he were a pretty Irish-American woman, about fifty years younger, and lived in L.A. Well, actually, Felicia Day′s character on The Guild is nothing like Woody Allen, except for being smart, fast-talking, and neurotic. And the other characters I′ve seen her play on TV -- including a patient on House, and a gloomy Potential Slayer on Buffy -- have always been delicate. But in Dollhouse she was very different, she was tough and practical. Felicia Day has acting range.
We learn that the brainwipe technology that allowed the Dollhouse to exist has been unleashed on the world and it has run wild and out of control, much like Twitter, and most of the people of the world are now mindless zombies, some of whom are predators and others prey. They watch a lot of reality television, eat bad food and lead largely sedentary lives-- oh, wait, no, that′s the real world today. The brainwiped people of the future just wander around randomly, not saying, ‟Braaaaaaaains!!‟
Not everyone is brainwiped. We never do find out why some are brainwiped and some are not. Some of the un-brainwiped people get rich trading in brainwiped bodies. They are not nice people.
Read the rest: ‟Did I fall asleep?″ The end of Dollhouse
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