A futuristic laboratory has erased the identities of lost young people, and now imprints them with the temporary identities they need to fulfill assignments for clients.
There's something to be said for the heady rush of getting a lot of business done fast; in fact, the task of wrapping up the show in a season has given Dollhouse an urgency that it sorely needed from the beginning.
Dollhouse definitely feels stronger now than it did for much of Season One, with a more layered storyline... Dollhouse is still not 100 percent there yet, as far as truly being appointment TV, but the positives are beginning to take root.
The cast is very talented and Whedon is still one of the best TV creators of the last twenty years. But the show needs to settle on a tone. Stop trying to have it both ways.
It is to the tremendous credit of Dollhouse and Joss Whedon that it got me to care, greatly, about these challenging, and fascinatingly mutable, characters. Partly that owes to the show's storytelling brio and writing.
Gutted of its initial creative spark, Dollhouse slowly began to feel more and more derivative of Whedon's past works, a fact which exposed his strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller.
Well-acted, thought-provoking and frequently devastating in its twists and turns, Dollhouse is a peculiar oddity, an extremely brave piece of fiction that fearlessly tackles uncomfortable concepts and themes and asks challenging questions.
