Spoilers for the series finale of Dollhouse after the jump:
Last spring I wrote a post suggesting that it would be best all around if Fox were to renew Dollhouse for one final season, so that it could resolve its story without the impediment of stretching it out with one-off episodes. It didn’t happen by design exactly, but the writing was on the wall for Dollhouse early enough that Joss Whedon was able to bring it to a fitting, if fittingly uneven, end.
If that sounds like a criticism, it deserves a qualifier: there have been very few network TV series whose inherent degree of difficulty was as great as Dollhouse’s. Forget about the difficult of mass-selling sci-fi, or the typical Whedonesque mixture of humor and ultradark themes. Dollhouse asked an audience to identify with central characters whose personalities changed from episode to episode.
Or that’s what it did at first. Then it got more challenging. As Dollhouse developed into a story about the Rossum Corporation, exploiting a technology that allowed it to use human memories and personalities like software, we had: characters like Caroline and Alpha, who intergrated dozens of personalities in one head; characters swapping, sharing, or borrowing bodies (leading to the brilliant scenes of Alexis Denisof Enver Gjokaj doing his Topher impression); characters being written to disk, erased or transferred; and, in the conclusion, “Epitaph Two: Return,” Caroline/Echo inhabiting two bodies at the same time. (Oh, and it did all this while telling a story that leaned heavily on a DVD-only season-one finale that never aired on broadcast TV.)
And it is to the tremendous credit of Dollhouse and Joss Whedon that it got me to care, greatly, about these challenging, and fascinatingly mutable, characters. Partly that owes to the show’s storytelling brio and writing. But also, Whedon’s is a very humanistic science fiction: the philosophy of the show, as the finale laid out, is that you can separate body and mind into hardware and software, but you can’t snuff out the person-ness of people.
“Epitaph Two” pulled that off with a finale that allowed closure for several characters, and showed us how far many of them—like the brilliant, uber-smug Topher—had come. Plot-wise, it was a little thin; having Topher suddenly become able to un-mind-wipe all of humanity was a little bit of a deus ex machina.
But there were enough touches of the Whedon magic that that didn’t much bother me. The outbreak of laughter after Paul’s “The world still needs heroes” line was brilliant, as was, for that matter, Paul’s abrupt, out of-nowhere death. (Why is Joss Whedon just about the only TV creator who offs his characters so abruptly and naturalistically? It’s always striking and effective.) And for all my complaints about Eliza Dushku in the lead role, the final scene of her downloading Paul into her consciousness was really moving.
It was fitting to see Dollhouse end on the same night that SyFy was airing a new episode of Caprica, which is picking up on the same themes of downloadable consciousness (albeit with a—so far—easier-to-follow structure, since it only deals with a handful of virtual characters). “Epitaph Two” set the bar high for any quasi-cyberpunk TV to follow, and it was a good ending for a show that set its own goals high, even if it didn’t always meet them.
