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quinaraOoh!!
Wow, that was such a mindfuck! I loved it; Dollhouse is back on form!
What I loved was the constant intercutting of Terry's situation and the professor/Kiki situation and Echo and Victor and Ballard taking Echo/Kiki shopping. It encapsulated the whole spectrum, I felt, of misogyny, from the whacked-out serial killer end to the fallacy of the love-subject being in their object's power. (I can't comment on the Wife of Bath, but hopefully someone who's read her tale can fill me in. Maybe she's the exception, but at the same time she is written, just like Echo.) Because we always want to other the OTT stuff and abstract it from the 'casual' stuff that spans from people saying they wouldn't even sit with a book for an hour while their wife shops to people who are happy to stare at the fun-loving/effeminate/apparently-gay man only to punch him when he gets too close. (Yep, misogyny feeds into a lot of violence against men too.)
The character stuff for DeWitt was fascinating. When she was talking to Saul Tigh it seemed clear to me she was sympathising with the survivors (to what extent I'm not sure we'll find out), yet when Ballard was talking to Terry the situation he described was not unlike DeWitt's (go away from the world and surround yourself with fakes?). It added a nice bit of complication. I do like when the themes aren't presented with crystal-clear 'answers' (retreating from the world <=> hating women), but instead jump and fractal all over the place.
Oh, and of course, standard interrogation techniques are to wrong-foot the guy straight off by calling him a girl... Ballard is still sinking like a stone, fantasising about Kiki!Echo and ashamed of it. He's ensnared in teh patriarchy as much as he's ensnared in the Dollhouse.
I read something by someone a few weeks ago where they said that they really didn't like Boyd, because he's as much Save-A-Ho as Ballard is. I can't work out whether I'd go that far, but I think there's something going on there. "I'll take her" gets it's double entendre from us residing in Ballard's perspective at that moment, but I can't help but think it pings back on Boyd as well and reveals a colour to his thoughts not wholly unlike Ballard's. It can't be a coincidence later, either, that Boyd sits outside Echo's engagement with a book just like the handlers in the clothing area.
Can I just say how much I love that they set up the clothing warehouse like a shop? And I love the man who runs it - I want more of him. He's on the list behind Ivy and Sierra/Priya (though I know she's got an episode coming up). Though that want is qualified by wanting an episode with non-caricatured gay people in it - I don't think the shop man was a negative portrayal particularly, but in a vacuum on the show things could easily get unbalanced. If he's even gay at all, since all we know about him is that he's slightly camp.
Which brings me back to Victor, because I want to say again how much I loved that scene with Kiki!Victor. Enver Gjokaj (and have I been calling him Djokaj? Bollocks, I apologise) was amazing and hilarious and acting utterly like it seemed Kiki would - which I think made the rather spectacular point that as a woman what he was doing would have been 'fine': welcomed and allowed by the club and the guys in their polo shirts. But for a man it's not allowed: it's a spectacle, of course, but apparently something quite dangerous to do because people will beat you up. The moment when Kiki says that she saw the guy watching her so she assumed he was interested was contrasted with the reality that the guy was watching her because he felt he had a right to and was apparently waiting for his moment to strike... I think that was serious stuff.
(And thank you Dollhouse, for letting Victor lay the smack down on that guy. It's stuff like that that makes me think the show knows what it's doing.)
Topher messing around with remote wipes obviously has implications for Epitaph One, even if he didn't get it right at this point. I love how it informs the mother/son dynamic that DeWitt and Topher get, because so much of what he does is in response to her commands/requests. She feels responsible because she is a little bit. Not that Topher is absolved since after this episode he will no doubt spend night after night working out where he went wrong and how to perfect it (and then want to test it again). I wonder, if we're getting flashforwards later, whether DeWitt's haircut won't become a handy indicator for the year we're in, because it'll take a while for it to all grow back, presumably, and it's definitely long in the future. It does make her look softer long, so (if it does indeed grow the way it should), it'll become an interesting symbol of her fall into being Topher's mother.
Oh, agh, I hope the ratings were good. This series is going so well. :(
ETA: Just watched the trailer for Sierra/Priya's episode. It looks bloody amazing!!
ETA2: I forgot to talk about Echo's bizarre death-wish moment with the kidnapped women. Possibly because I'm in the conundrum of wanting to say something but not knowing what to say. The phrasing seemed very similar to a lot of S7 Spike's "you've got to kill me before I get out", but so much of that was influenced by his post-soul depression, as Buffy saw. It felt a bit like the lines between Echo and the personalities inside her were breaking down: she knew enough that she didn't want Terry to kill the women, but that was being filtered through a very unhealthy brain chemistry presumably created by Topher. We saw last week that chemical/biological effects (supposedly) influence the actives more that we might think, and continue into the wiped state. That moment at the end seemed a lot like the old bits at the beginning of S1, but I think it was necessarily informed by what was going on in that scene just previously. It isn't just memories, I don't think, not anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if she starts actually changing in her core personality. Maybe I'm inferring too much from what I've read Joss saying, but I have a feeling that when Caroline comes back, she won't mesh as perfectly with her body/'soul' as she did before. (Oh, blimey, am I starting to get actually interested in Echo? Rather than just finding my dislike of her interesting?)
ETA3: It's unlikely anyone will catch this (ETA4: by which I mean people will probably have already read this entry and not come back, rather than the idea that my analytical skills pwn everybody else's, because that's not true), but I wanted to write it down because I was thinking about it. Well, actually I was thinking about how the OTT 'we're not his toys!' cry from the women didn't actually strike me as an OTT parallel. I can be obtuse like that anyway, but I think also it's something to do with the way I don't see a lot of the 'parallels' in Dollhouse as parallels - there's always another variable making things interesting. (The show seems to care more about working out differences than similarities.) But then thinking about that parallel is interesting, because it means that Echo is essentially facing off with a whole group of Echoes and encouraging them to kill her. In that scene is she seeing herself as the Dollhouse? She wants the Echoes to destroy her, plain and simply, but isn't overly surprised that they don't want to. It makes me think about Echo and the gun in Epitaph One and what I thought was the implication that she killed DeWitt and Topher etc. I think she thinks she has to utterly kill the Dollhouse to be free of it, and I think this scene opens that up to question, because there are always other factors involved (though I'd rather that wasn't followed by a bunch of men running in to save the day). Interesting!
Wow, that was such a mindfuck! I loved it; Dollhouse is back on form!
What I loved was the constant intercutting of Terry's situation and the professor/Kiki situation and Echo and Victor and Ballard taking Echo/Kiki shopping. It encapsulated the whole spectrum, I felt, of misogyny, from the whacked-out serial killer end to the fallacy of the love-subject being in their object's power. (I can't comment on the Wife of Bath, but hopefully someone who's read her tale can fill me in. Maybe she's the exception, but at the same time she is written, just like Echo.) Because we always want to other the OTT stuff and abstract it from the 'casual' stuff that spans from people saying they wouldn't even sit with a book for an hour while their wife shops to people who are happy to stare at the fun-loving/effeminate/apparently-gay man only to punch him when he gets too close. (Yep, misogyny feeds into a lot of violence against men too.)
The character stuff for DeWitt was fascinating. When she was talking to Saul Tigh it seemed clear to me she was sympathising with the survivors (to what extent I'm not sure we'll find out), yet when Ballard was talking to Terry the situation he described was not unlike DeWitt's (go away from the world and surround yourself with fakes?). It added a nice bit of complication. I do like when the themes aren't presented with crystal-clear 'answers' (retreating from the world <=> hating women), but instead jump and fractal all over the place.
Oh, and of course, standard interrogation techniques are to wrong-foot the guy straight off by calling him a girl... Ballard is still sinking like a stone, fantasising about Kiki!Echo and ashamed of it. He's ensnared in teh patriarchy as much as he's ensnared in the Dollhouse.
I read something by someone a few weeks ago where they said that they really didn't like Boyd, because he's as much Save-A-Ho as Ballard is. I can't work out whether I'd go that far, but I think there's something going on there. "I'll take her" gets it's double entendre from us residing in Ballard's perspective at that moment, but I can't help but think it pings back on Boyd as well and reveals a colour to his thoughts not wholly unlike Ballard's. It can't be a coincidence later, either, that Boyd sits outside Echo's engagement with a book just like the handlers in the clothing area.
Can I just say how much I love that they set up the clothing warehouse like a shop? And I love the man who runs it - I want more of him. He's on the list behind Ivy and Sierra/Priya (though I know she's got an episode coming up). Though that want is qualified by wanting an episode with non-caricatured gay people in it - I don't think the shop man was a negative portrayal particularly, but in a vacuum on the show things could easily get unbalanced. If he's even gay at all, since all we know about him is that he's slightly camp.
Which brings me back to Victor, because I want to say again how much I loved that scene with Kiki!Victor. Enver Gjokaj (and have I been calling him Djokaj? Bollocks, I apologise) was amazing and hilarious and acting utterly like it seemed Kiki would - which I think made the rather spectacular point that as a woman what he was doing would have been 'fine': welcomed and allowed by the club and the guys in their polo shirts. But for a man it's not allowed: it's a spectacle, of course, but apparently something quite dangerous to do because people will beat you up. The moment when Kiki says that she saw the guy watching her so she assumed he was interested was contrasted with the reality that the guy was watching her because he felt he had a right to and was apparently waiting for his moment to strike... I think that was serious stuff.
(And thank you Dollhouse, for letting Victor lay the smack down on that guy. It's stuff like that that makes me think the show knows what it's doing.)
Topher messing around with remote wipes obviously has implications for Epitaph One, even if he didn't get it right at this point. I love how it informs the mother/son dynamic that DeWitt and Topher get, because so much of what he does is in response to her commands/requests. She feels responsible because she is a little bit. Not that Topher is absolved since after this episode he will no doubt spend night after night working out where he went wrong and how to perfect it (and then want to test it again). I wonder, if we're getting flashforwards later, whether DeWitt's haircut won't become a handy indicator for the year we're in, because it'll take a while for it to all grow back, presumably, and it's definitely long in the future. It does make her look softer long, so (if it does indeed grow the way it should), it'll become an interesting symbol of her fall into being Topher's mother.
Oh, agh, I hope the ratings were good. This series is going so well. :(
ETA: Just watched the trailer for Sierra/Priya's episode. It looks bloody amazing!!
ETA2: I forgot to talk about Echo's bizarre death-wish moment with the kidnapped women. Possibly because I'm in the conundrum of wanting to say something but not knowing what to say. The phrasing seemed very similar to a lot of S7 Spike's "you've got to kill me before I get out", but so much of that was influenced by his post-soul depression, as Buffy saw. It felt a bit like the lines between Echo and the personalities inside her were breaking down: she knew enough that she didn't want Terry to kill the women, but that was being filtered through a very unhealthy brain chemistry presumably created by Topher. We saw last week that chemical/biological effects (supposedly) influence the actives more that we might think, and continue into the wiped state. That moment at the end seemed a lot like the old bits at the beginning of S1, but I think it was necessarily informed by what was going on in that scene just previously. It isn't just memories, I don't think, not anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if she starts actually changing in her core personality. Maybe I'm inferring too much from what I've read Joss saying, but I have a feeling that when Caroline comes back, she won't mesh as perfectly with her body/'soul' as she did before. (Oh, blimey, am I starting to get actually interested in Echo? Rather than just finding my dislike of her interesting?)
ETA3: It's unlikely anyone will catch this (ETA4: by which I mean people will probably have already read this entry and not come back, rather than the idea that my analytical skills pwn everybody else's, because that's not true), but I wanted to write it down because I was thinking about it. Well, actually I was thinking about how the OTT 'we're not his toys!' cry from the women didn't actually strike me as an OTT parallel. I can be obtuse like that anyway, but I think also it's something to do with the way I don't see a lot of the 'parallels' in Dollhouse as parallels - there's always another variable making things interesting. (The show seems to care more about working out differences than similarities.) But then thinking about that parallel is interesting, because it means that Echo is essentially facing off with a whole group of Echoes and encouraging them to kill her. In that scene is she seeing herself as the Dollhouse? She wants the Echoes to destroy her, plain and simply, but isn't overly surprised that they don't want to. It makes me think about Echo and the gun in Epitaph One and what I thought was the implication that she killed DeWitt and Topher etc. I think she thinks she has to utterly kill the Dollhouse to be free of it, and I think this scene opens that up to question, because there are always other factors involved (though I'd rather that wasn't followed by a bunch of men running in to save the day). Interesting!
(no subject)
Date: 10/10/2009 20:38 (UTC)I think *Caroline* is unlikeable (although I did feel for Omega's Caroline-in-Wendy) but I've always rooted for Echo. I like the idea of her slowly creating herself from her nothingness.In many ways it's a more radical story than Claire's, it's easy to come up with mythological equivalents for Claire's relationship to her creator but I don't think there are so many stories which focus on the process of self-creation from nothing. I also think that Echo has for whatever reason an unusually pronounced need for a sense of central coherence, a soul if you like, and the quest for Caroline is about that need not its satisfaction. As she evolves I think you're right and 'Caroline' will turn out to feel like just another imprint if she ever finds her.
(no subject)
Date: 10/10/2009 21:20 (UTC)I think that means it's good. (And I know exactly what you mean! I wanted to rewatch earlier today, but didn't have enough time so was going to skip through my favourite bits - but then I found I couldn't watch Victor's dancing in isolation because it felt too exploitative to be doing so.)
And I agree with you about Echo vs. Caroline (I'm a bit miffed that the actress who played Wendy can't come back). I'm coming round to finding her story of self-creation interesting - though I do think we need more of it. We're getting glimpses, but they're so vague it's hard to see what's progression and what's further revelation of the status quo. It would be nice for her to have some antagonism to Caroline, if only to debunk the possibility of an implication that we're supposed to see both of them as paragons of good.
Claire's still my favourite though. She puts rats in cupboards!