Fox's serial sci-fi drama, The Dollhouse, has, as it's resumed in the second season, a nice turn. It would seem with the shuffling of alliances for key characters, addition of first season finale back-stories for "weak" characters, and the removal of uncharismatic characters, the producers have managed to give the show a nice kick of with a little attitude adjustment and a modest face-lift.For those who haven't followed the show or been put off by its galm-bam image in the first season, The Dollhouse is an eponymous "secret" lair who recruit delinquent young men and women who, to avoid prison or court mandates, elect to spend their sentances by freely giving up their memories and personalities for a contractual period of time. Their bodies are then given engineered personalites and memories whose purpose is to fulfill the fantasies of The Dollhouse's "clients." In short, they re-pay their debt to society by becoming glorified rubber girls (or guys ... but more on that a bit later).When the show is good, it picks up threads of previous episodes, slowly uncovering further "secrets" of this clearing house of flesh and its role in high society, business and government. As such, it, like many other shows that have been released as of late like Fringe and FlashForward, satisfied the greedy appetite that a modern viewer has for watching programs that base their drawma on a plublic unaware of the puppet strings that bind it.
The Dollhouse's only opposition up until the second season was that of a maverick, lone-wolf FBI agen, Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett). Driven by an almost psychotic compulsion (sometimes alluded to as love for the central doll, Echo (Eliza Dushku), he alienates his peers and potential love interests in search of this fabled institution. While a seemingly shrewd investigator, he seems more of fumbling crusader for no reason and no real threat to this megalithic conspiracy he tries to uncover. Meanwhile The Dollhouse, headed by shrewed and calculating woman, Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Wiliams) has problems of its own. It has, by allowing a doll-gone-rougue escape, jeapordized its standing amidsts other flesh clearing houses in its network.
Standing in relief is the no-nonsense employee Echo's bodyguard, Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix), who seems to ally himself with what's right, and the Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), the boy genius in charge of the machinery that swaps personalities into the dolls. On the sidelines are a smattering of other mainstay dolls (all named after Greek letters which should have significance as the series continues with plot twists or the writers get stumpped) and a meek doctor with scars on her face, Claire Saunders (Amy Acker) who, finally, deligtfully starts taking center stage as season two opens.
"Vows," the season opener, solidifies the role Paul Ballard as part of the "conspiracy." While he has, as the episode opens, been now "using" the dolls, and particularly Echo as a tool in his vigilante crime fighting bindge, he finally gives in to his "staunch" principles and becomes part of the organization. Frankly this was a good move on the writers' part since his character was too proud to be a mosquito pecking at the The Dollhouse, and too Bourne Supremicy in skill and combat to be this weakling agent in the FBI world. Now he is well placed as a character with all the conscience and bodyguard accumen that all the backing of his new employer's special interests lend to the potency of his characters. Not to mention, his background could provide for the writers the thread that finally begins to unravel the knot of having a diabolical organization be made our drama's hero.
Also, the doctor, Saunders, discovers in the cliff hanger that she is nothing more than a doll, and to that end, her sidelined figure in the teleplay has now seemed to share center-stage if not trump Echo. This is cause for a good "Bravo" to the writers because, in so far as the dolls had represented prostitution for both the male and female ones, depictions of "missions" was generally reserved only for the female bunch per common sterotype. As such, Saunders character who had been originally presented to the audience as a mutilated professional, has a score to settle; and, she will, presumably, do this without the sense, at least in the audience's mind, that she had been once an object of ... well, just another typical female object.
As the season goes into swing with such promise as, on the one hand, buttressing some of the show's original shortcomings, and, on the other hand, giving more "feminist" power to its meekest female role, there's promise that the close of season two might have us clamoring for more.
