Monsters of Television

“With your life.”

One can’t help but think think that this week’s episode title is a little meta.  Echo and her gang (Oh, how I wish the show would be around long enough for us to give them a group name!) think they’re getting closer to bringing down Rossum, while we all know that they’re just getting closer to the future seen in last season’s “Epitaph One” and that the show is getting closer to finishing its run (just as it was getting its legs…again).

I was none too keen at the end of “The Attic” when Echo announces she wants to meet Caroline. Having met Caroline in “Echoes” last season, and seeing the, as Adelle noted in this week’s episode, seemingly pampered and innocent girl, who is actually an idealist (and as Caroline self-identifies at the start of the episode, also a terrorist), I was actually fairly relieved that we never revisited Caroline. The episode only reinforced that relief, but in all good ways.

Caroline is a driven person, much like how Echo has become in the later portions of this season (you know, after painful/pointless reintroduction episodes), but Caroline’s personality and motivation were always just a bit off, but I suppose they’re supposed to be. Caroline’s that protest happy college student whose reasons are, probably, that she’s in college. With “Getting Closer”, that personality develops a bit more, as does pretty much everything else. As a result, there’ll be spoilers below the jump. I’d advise not reading on if you haven’t seen the episode.

Through flashbacks, we learn how Caroline and Bennett met. Turns out that Caroline broke into the LA Dollhouse, stole files, found out Bennett working at Tucson Tech and decided to become buddy-buddy with an up and comer at Rossum. Unsurprisingly, we find Bennett to be a socially awkward mess at Tucson and Caroline, the girl who is full of verve, makes Bennett feel special as someone is finally “taking an interest” in her, becoming friends, giving her tips on how to dress and prep for interviews.

The sequence of events doesn’t do much to help me like Caroline. She uses an insecure young woman to get into Rossum to blow it up. On top of that, we know that from “The Public Eye”/”The Left Hand” set of episodes, that Caroline’s responsible for Bennett’s dead arm, so Caroline’s way in the hole as a likable character. The fact that she agrees to allow Bennett help her blow up the Rossum HQ only makes matters worse. For me, the supposedly redeemable act of putting the ID tag on Bennett after she’s been caught under the debris so she won’t get arrested with Caroline, doesn’t really make Caroline any better. She’s abandoning a woman who has come to idolize her.

Now while the flashbacks do help contextualize Bennett’s loathing of Caroline, they essentially serve the larger purpose of revealing who Clyde’s partner in creating Rossum is, and that’s ultimately what this episode is about.  The present day story centers around trying to restore Caroline into Echo since Caroline has seen the man behind the curtain. The vault copy of the personality is missing and all Echo and the crew have is the wedge that Alpha used. They kidnap (way too easily; did Ray Wise not think to up security…?) Bennett from D.C., and she and Topher attempt to repair the wedge while Boyd and Adelle make final preparations to close down the house and take down Rossum.

Now, I’m going to say it again: If you haven’t watched this episode yet, you really need to stop reading. Seriously. This post will still be here. It can wait for you.

One of the things I initially did not like about Dollhouse, and that many people early on identified as well, was that potentially anyone could be a doll, active, sleeper, and the nature of the show made it very easy to have reveals like that occur. (It’s a similar problem, among many others, that I have with V and the idea that there have been Visitor cells on the planet for a long while.) It allows for, essentially, easy narrative outs. The idea, of course, is not to overuse that ploy, and, indeed, use it effectively when it is. “Getting Closer”, I feel, does just that with the reveal of Boyd Langton as the (body of the) other founder of Rossum.

Yeah, I know. My head asploded, too.

Leading up to the reveal, I was attempting to guess who it might be. I was trying to think of a Whedon actor who hadn’t been used recently (I won’t lie: I was hoping it was going to be Anthony Stewart Head…maybe it still will be!). So fixated on that idea that the notion it might’ve been someone we knew all along didn’t occur to me until after Dr. Saunders (yay for the return Amy Acker!) shoots Bennett in the head (sad for the death of Summer Glau!). Boyd, however, never occurred to me since they were about to put the character on the bus after getting shot. Needless to say, I was thrilled when he broke a Rossum mercenary’s neck to save Echo and then shocked at the reveal.

But that it was Boyd speaks to a larger problem I’ve had with the season overall, and that has been the lack of Boyd. I never felt that the show had earned the Ballard/Echo relationship (especially the implied sex in “Meet Jane Doe”) in any real way (Why, exactly, was Ballard so hard up to find Caroline? I can’t remember). However, the Boyd/Echo relationship clicked from the first episode. It was clear that Boyd probably cared about Echo more than he should, but not in an inappropriate way, more like a fatherly way, which the episode drives home with a nice moment between the two of them. So to have Boyd be the Big Bad (I’m assuming he’s the one who took the Caroline imprint, alerted Rossum earlier than planned, and possibly had Saunders shoot Bennett) feels like a bit of a narrative “Who haven’t we seen a lot of this season? Must be that guy.” move.

I’ll be curious to see how this reveal plays out, mainly why Boyd’s (or whatever the guy’s real name is) allowing them to do all of this, and to what purpose. The move that it was Boyd doesn’t feel totally pulled out of their creative asses, but it does feel like a reveal that they couldn’t have had held onto past this season (provided they would’ve had another season). It’s the endgame. Next week is the last episode before “Epitaph Two.” I’m eager for a finale.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Clearly Topher’s breakdown seen in “Epitaph One” wasn’t just the fact that he created the technology that destroyed the world, but that he still hadn’t recovered from the death of Bennett, the only person who ever made him think about someone other than himself (thankfully, it allows him to save Ivy).
• As much as I love it, even I’m a bit over fetishizing Summer Glau. She’s been barefoot, badass, disabled, and wearing glasses (Really BIG glasses in her flashbacks with Caroline). Can I see Glau play someone normal and ordinary?
• Atticized Dominic was creepy. Who was that  interpretive dance zombie with the weird collar? (Or, as Topher noted, a Tron extra.)
• Line of the episode goes to, unsurprisingly, Adelle: “You’ve forced me to come to Arizona. I loathe Arizona.”