Thursday 14 November 2013

Dollhouse: The Left Hand

"There is no Dollhouse."

Gosh. Where to begin?

 I suppose I'll start by praising Enver Gjokaj's extraordinary performance as Victor implanted with Topher's personality, but there's so much going on, things are going so fast, and there isn't a status quo any more. Rossum seems to be winning, resistance is futile, Madeleine is enslaved again by that nasty Washington D.C. Dollhouse, Perrin is probably going to end up as Rossum's pet president (yep, definite political allegory there, given the outrageous extent of corporate manipulation of American politics), and both Echo and Ballard have gone rogue. It's enough to make you dizzy.

But we begin with a little light torture as Bennett has fun with Echo, and our friends at the LA Dollhouse are experiencing a fair bit if red tape in getting her back, in spite of Topher and Bennett's mutual squeeing. We (and Echo, who is thus at one with the viewer here) are treated to a flashback as to how Echo dropped Bennett on it and did her arm in. Bennett is not the forgiving type.

We are learning more about Caroline's past, yet there is an ambivalence here: Echo is a person too, the sum of all her memories. As she puts it, "I'm  afraid of Caroline. If she comes back, where will I go?" This, in a nutshell, is the philosophical quandary that haunts the whole series.

Things are, at this point, great. I have no idea where this is going. But things are, perhaps, moving a little too fast, given that Fox are once again being absolute arises to Whedon and forcing him to tie up all the plot threads by the end if the season. Here's hoping he can do so while maintaining the exceptional quality of television seen here.

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