Dollhouse

What follows is a review of "Epitaph One," the unaired episode of Fox’s "Dollhouse." The episode was screened Friday at San Diego Comic-Con, it comes out on DVD Tuesday and it goes on sale on iTunes Aug. 11.

I will say this very loudly: Do not go further unless you’ve seen the episode.

For live coverage of the Friday afternoon "Dollhouse" panel, Joss Whedon panel, check out my Twitter feed.

I had one big question at the end of "Epitaph One": Did it give away too much?

The flashbacks to what transpired at the Dollhouse in the 10 years between 2009 and 2019 were quite interesting but one sequence in particular set off some alarm bells for me.

It’s the scene between Paul and Echo in which we see that he has become her handler, and that she can now block imprints (a fact that Paul and Echo are keeping a secret).

These two things seem like they would be logical next steps for the show’s second season. But now we already know about these things happen. What suspense will there be in learning more about these developments and how they come about?

Perhaps those developments were so obvious that Whedon & Co knew they wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time on them. And perhaps there are more interesting things to explore in Season 2. Echo knowing how to block imprints is a big deal; perhaps learning how that came about isn’t that big a deal.

Or maybe it is. Maybe knowing all that will deprive Season 2 of tension. We’ll just have to see.

Truth be told, by episodes 4 or 5, I wasn’t sure that that "Dollhouse" would become must-see viewing, but it did. Having faith in the show in Season 1 paid off, eventually. So for now, I’ll trust that the show will still be able to go to interesting places, despite having given away some key facts about the dolls’ futures.

UPDATE: The next two paragraphs were written after I saw Joss Whedon talk about "Epitaph One" at Comic-Con

Joss said some interesting things that made me see the episode in a somewhat new light: "We intend to honor what you’ve seen here today, but we will question the veracity of it. A lot of it was memories and whether all those memories are completely true" will be questioned. The future "will inform where we go" with the show.

He said that the three characters left at the end of "Epitaph One," who are played by Zack Ward, Adair Tishler and Felicia Day, will be seen again in Season 2 of the show. According to Jed Whedon, who co-wrote the episode, they will act as a bridge to the information we learned in "Epitaph One" (thanks to Alan Sepinwall for this info; Alan talked to Jed after the "Dollhouse" panel.). Joss also said that Alexis Denisof will appear in several episodes and Summer Glau may appear in Season 2 as well.

In other news, we also learned that:

* Topher went mad, and Adelle became his caretaker. Which turned out to be rather sweet and heartbreaking. * Boyd and Dr. Sauders/Whiskey either became very good friends or lovers. Which flummoxed me yet made total sense, somehow. In a way that I can’t articulately explain. * Dominick escaped from the Attic, and post-Attic Dominick is even more cranky than pre-Attic Dominick. * Sierra spent years purposely not washing her hair. And she and Enver Gjokaj’s character broke up. * As imprinting technology develops, it’s possible to download one person into many different bodies, we learn via the dirtbag who is in Victor. Side note: Enver Gjokaj is, as always, all kinds of great in that scene. Yet also doing fine work there is Fran Kranz as the frequently sugar-spazzed, usually arrogant Topher. In that scene, his quiet demeanor and his lack of overt Topher-ness drove home his horror at what he had done. Slowly but surely, the implications of what he’s created have started to sink in. * As chaos grips society after imprinting technology goes viral, the Dolls established their own little hippie commune, which involved a sharing circle and undoubtedly some vegan granola. * Future survivors are funny: As one of them noted, mankind was inadvertently destroyed so that a few people could "create better hookers"? Ha. * Finally, we learned that we should never, ever trust the Cylons.

Ha! I kid.

But the underlying theme of "Epitaph One" is that an over-reliance on technology can destroy the world. If we’re talking about genre-flavored truisms, that’s right up there with "Zombies eat brains." In other words, we knew that. But knowing that didn’t take anything away from what turned out to be a highly enjoyable, suspenseful and wonderfully twisty episode.

First of all, Felicia Day is one of those actresses that you just instantly root for. Of course we want Plucky Post-Apocalyptic Survivor Woman to make it through the insanity, and there was lots of insanity to be had. How about one of the lead Post-Apocalypty guys buying it mid-way through the episode? And being shot by a little girl, no less? I sure didn’t see that coming.

"Epitaph One" was a tightly structured, well-made thriller, in which bits and pieces of how the apocalypse began and what happened after were woven into a mystery about who was picking off members of the Post-Apocalyptic brigade. As the icing on top of the cake, we got some meta-references to the show and its set (the aforementioned "hooker" comment; "It looks like a spa"; and I loved the comment about Topher’s office "It must have been a daycare").

The fact that this episode worked so well could, in fact, open up the show quite a bit in Season 2. Why not spend an episode on Victor or Sierra or Whiskey, as we spent this episode following Felicia Day’s character? Certainly the Alpha arc was a high point of Season 1. Of course Echo will always be the pivot point of the show, but the cast is so able that deepening the world around Echo and giving the other characters more to do can only be a good thing.

When the "Epitaph One" DVD commentary was recorded, it was still not known whether "Dollhouse" would get a second season. As the writers note, it would have made a fitting "epitaph" to the series — you learn a lot about what happened to everyone. It was, as Whedon and Tancharoen say, a possible "last hurrah" for the show.

Jed Whedon said on the DVD commentary that the plot points we saw in the episode were intentionally structured so that the writers could get at them in the future "many different ways." "Some of it we definitely have figured out but a lot of it we didn’t," he said.

Well, we shall see where they go with all of this in Season 2. I personally can’t wait.