gonzai | Review: Dollhouse, 'Epitaph One'

It took me a while both to get my mitts on Dollhouse’s ‘missing’ episode, ‘Epitaph One’, and then to actually get around to watching it. Bad on me, on both counts. Epitaph is (mostly) what I wanted from Dollhouse in the first place. Dark, a compelling and cautionary storyline and a point to be made – like the libertarian ‘Serenity’, Epitaph is about what happens when people try to make other people ‘better’, or at least what a select few consider to be better. It’s never anything good. Epitaph would have fit in perfectly with the late, lamented Terminator series. The only thing missing from Epitaph (and the rest of Dollhouse, for that matter) is Whedonesque wit. There is no funny here. It probably would have ruined the mood, so I can understand its absence, but I still miss it.

At the same time, I can see why Fox wouldn’t air Epitaph. Besides the usual pissing contest between Fox & Joss Whedon, the storyline is too complicated and dependent on the viewer both having seen the earlier episodes and paying attention to this one. And Epitaph sums up, in a nutshell, the next ten years in this dystopic world; but if we’ve seen the nutshell, we don’t really need the whole story anymore, do we? We’ve seen the outline and we know how it ends, so why read the whole book? Most people won’t.

But good golly, this is what I wanted Dollhouse to be. I’d like some more, please.