Joss Whedon's Dollhouse barely managed to earn a second season on the Fox network, as it seemed no one was watching. But luckily, some of its limited audience were Fox executives who liked the show and could ultimately decide its fate. In a strange feat of contractual gymnastics, Fox demanded a cheap thirteenth episode be shot that would only air in foreign markets. Whedon agreed, and created the enigmatic Epitaph One.
The episode features a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles in 2019, where personality-imprinting technology has run wild. A group of "Actuals", or non-imprinted people, infiltrate the abandoned Dollhouse facility and discover the still-functioning imprint chair. They use it on one of their own to extract individual memories from the system for any helpful information. These memories reveal more than an entire season of Lost.
The first part of this article and summary can be found here.
Another reminder that there are full spoilers ahead for Dollhouse- Epitaph One:
Continued Revelations
A Victor (Enver Gjokaj) memory shows he has been imprinted with a Mr. Ambrose from the Rossum Corporation - the company responsible for funding and supplying the equipment to all the Dollhouses. Ambrose, in Victor, informs Adelle (Olivia Williams) and Topher (Fran Kranz) that Rossum has taken it upon itself to offer an even more expensive and sinister service to their clients - permanent transfer of personalities to younger Dolls in order to achieve a kind of immortality (the fallacy of this logic has been explored by this author in an earlier Dollhouse review here). This would mean the complete surrender of the Dolls' bodies forever, presumably against their will. Since the money from Rossum seems to flow in all the right directions, the legality of such a service continues to not be an issue.
A memory from Laurence Dominic (Reed Diamond) shows an angry confrontation with Adelle, holding her at gunpoint. This indicates he has somehow escaped his earlier mind-wipe and internment in the Attic, though he refers to something having been done to his body, so maybe the image of him in this scene is tempered by his own memory? It's also revealed here that a means exists to block any attempt at personality imprinting, and that Caroline is the only one who knows about it.
Sierra (Dichen Lachman) is next, in a scene with her and Victor (seemingly free of Mr. Ambrose), where she also admits to headaches for some reason, and she shows Victor her "birthmark"- a tattoo on the back with one's real name, used to confirm identity in the wake of the war against the imprinted. They make references to some kind of new religion that has developed in the secluded Dollhouse in reaction to the war. Also, Victor reveals the presence of a cache of back-up hard copies of all the Dolls' original personalities in a hidden panel in one of the rooms.
Back to Adelle again, as she witnesses a number of people in robes with candles praying in the Dollhouse complex. She then goes to visit poor Topher, who has apparently gone mad. Sitting in a hole in the floor, barricaded by a pile of all his possessions, he sits scratching out figures and talking to himself. Adelle comforts him as and listens intently to his ramblings, which imply pretty directly that he is responsible for discovering the technology that caused the worldwide apocalypse.
Finally, another memory of Echo/Caroline's (Eliza Dushku) shows that she and Ballard (Tamoh Penikett) successfully escaped, but then came back to the Dollhouse during the war, to lead everyone left inside to the compound that would later be known as Safe Haven.
Epitaph One ends with Caroline, imprinted from one of the hidden back-up hard copies, leading the remaining few Actuals out an office window and up to the roof of the decimated building atop the Dollhouse, to begin the very long journey towards Safe Haven.
Final Thoughts
This is how Joss Whedon and Company chose to (sort of) end their first season. It's possibly the best episode of the series, but it's still a strange choice, considering the whopping amount of information about the future it holds, and that it won't even make it to the general TV-watching populace. But perhaps that's what makes it such a savvy move.
Clearly, it would have been foolish to put so many plot points into this episode that weren't going to be part of the overall arc of the show. But why spoil so much so soon? Why paint the creators into such a corner? First of all, these events are ten years in the future, so there is plenty of time to catch up to them. Second, according to Whedon, these snippets are only part of the larger picture. The recorded memories of the characters might also be skewed, and open to interpretation.
But let's say Whedon decides to go directly against something established in Epitaph One in a later installment. He now has an easy out. Since the episode never aired, he could say that technically, not everything in it is canon. It can just be rendered a glorified DVD extra.
Regardless of what happens from here, the episode certainly succeeds in finally showing what Whedon had in mind all along. Mercifully, Dollhouse is much more than just an acting exercise for Eliza Dushku as Echo's persona-of-the-week.
So how will season two reflect the events of Epitaph One, if at all? Thankfully, the wait to find out won't be long, since Dollhouse re-opens for business September 25th.
Dan Kaufman - Dan is an actor/writer/teacher with a passion for all kinds of geek interests. He has been cultivating this passion for over 30 years, to ...
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