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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: January 29, 2010
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Dollhouse, “Epitaph Two: The Return” (Season 2, Episode 13) [Watch on Netflix].
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Because Joss Whedon went on almost immediately to have massive success within the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Avengers, people didn’t have time to linger on the disappointment of Dollhouse. When I say “disappointment,” I mean that it only lasted two seasons and was cut down when it still seemed to have a lot of creative gas in the tank. “Epitaph Two” wasn’t the series’ best episode; that would be the first-season finale “Epitaph One.” Which NEVER AIRED in the United States, to give you a sense of how snakebitten the series was.
The original concept of Dollhouse presented as a kind of procedural, with Eliza Dushku playing an imprintable “doll” who could be programmed to be any kind of person for any kind of service. The conceit was that she could be an FBI negotiator one week, a ninja the next, a punk rocker the week after that, giving the series endless permutations of Charlie’s Angels-style capers. Now, Joss Whedon and co-creator Tim Minear weren’t monsters. They knew the horrible implications of using women (and men; dolls came in both genders) for privately-contracted purposes. That sinister notion hung over the whole show, and it’s what provided for the series’ overarching mythology. The problem — or one of them, I think — was that Whedon and Minear underestimated how little fun the audience would be able to have with the show once they caught on to the fact that the dolls were were essentially slaves. And very often sex slaves! The tone became impossible to maintain on a procedural level.
The good news was that Dollhouse didn’t stay a procedural. Once the mega plot of the series kicked into action and the ambiguities and complications of the characters (particularly the ones played by Olivia Williams, Fran Kranz, and Amy Acker) came into play, the show was as compelling as anything on TV. The latter stretches of the show’s first and second seasons were some of the best episodes of Whedon’s vaunted career. The problem was that Dollhouse worked itself up to a killer season 1 conclusion, then realized they’d have to pace themselves in order to build up to the end of season 2, at which point they lost momentum, and it was all over.
Which is too bad — and stop reading here if you’ve never seen the series and want to; AND YOU SHOULD — because “Epitaph Two” offered the most emotional of conclusions for the character who inexplicably became my favorite. I had so loathed him for the bulk of season 1, but watching Fran Kranz nail his breakdown scene in “Epitaph One” …
… got me onboard for good. The cocky scientist paralyzed with regret for what’s been done with his creation was an angle I was not expecting, and that Topher had previously been used primarily for comedic effect for much of the show’s early run made his descent into pathos hit very hard. It was unrealistic to think Dollhouse could pull a rabbit out of its hat for a third time, so to end after two seasons felt like a gift when it had initially seemed unlikely to make it past one. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what might have been.
