Whedonesque line of the night: "Illusions aren't worthless. They are at the heart of most relationships." (I always wonder if the writers who write things like this have wives or husbands and if their significant others are watching when they say such dispirited anti-love statements?)
I really HATED the A plot-line of this episode, it hearkens back to the initial Bionic Woman-y feel of the show. And the acting. Oh the acting. The actors struggling with the characters within this funeral-dysfunctional-family-reunion cliche of a story arc were so unsatisfactorily melodramatic it made me feel rather yurksome. (And I called the killer, immediately, did you?)
However, the B line was AWESOME. Penikett/Ballard who I found wooden last week was BRILLIANT this week in the yummily complex Melly-Ballard pairing. I don't think I've ever quite seen a romantic pairing like this before. It has astonishing dramatic potential and Penikett (unlike last week) did not disappoint. Sometimes Penikett does steely stoic resolve with just the right amount of volcanic eruption potential surface deep. And sometimes he's just doing a bad Clint Eastwood interpretation. He seems to lack a sense of humor--unlike Nathan Fillion, who. Well. Swoon. (I'm watching Castle right now, which is a lame Pride and Prejudice meets Moonlighting sort of deal, but it has Fillion so yeah, I'm there, even if I'm on the laptop the whole time its on because it bores me too much).
Topher's storyline was rather touching this week--and real. Ah, Nerds and those who love Nerds--how real was that? I mean seriously. Almost too real for comfort. The motif of loneliness in this show continues to be just achingly poetic.
I don't really see an escape from the Bionic Woman-y of it all, so I try to just roll with it--but again, you are asked to attach to characters who only exist for one episode, and actors are asked to play them with very little time for development. Firefly escaped this modality--by which I mean switching back and forth from the B line of character arc and the A line plot of the episode--simply because I think the situation was just more interesting, intergalactic space outlaws in a Gilligan's Island floating tank in space, provide much meatier stories to explore than the possible stories to explore in Dollhouse.
Buffy did not escape this same plodding/plotting trap as Dollhouse--nor did Angel. I often found myself really, really BORED with the main stories of the episodes, simply because I wanted to see advancement in the character arcs and larger B line stories. The episodes that came to some sort of dramatic apex (like episode 6 of Dollhouse) when B line BECOMES A line are what I lived for. (I'm thinking in particular of "Becoming" in Buffy Season 2). If Joss plans a limited run (I heard him and Dushku cite a developed five season story arc) I'm sort of wondering why he couldn't just push all of the assignments to the B line and let the overall story of the Dollhouse and its central players play out on the A line. Then again, I think Joss knows better than anyone that the perception of quality is increased by your desire for it. So he's a naughty, naughty withholder. (Note to self: Joss as Catholic school girl? Discuss.)
Stay tuned for tomorrow's discussion of the model of consciousness advanced in Dollhouse. I had to cut it out of this post because it was becoming the Post that Ate My Blog. I need more time to pare down that discussion.
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