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- TV Series: Dollhouse
- Episode: Meet Jane Doe, Part I
- Starring: Eliza Dushku, Olivia Williams, Harry Lennix, Fran Kranz, Tahmoh Penikett, Enver Gjokaj
- Written By: Andrew Chambliss, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen
- Directed By: Dwight Little
- Network: Fox
- Series: Dollhouse
Dollhouse: Meet Jane Doe Part I
Echo and Ballard Train to Bring Down the Dollhouse By Kurt Anthony Krug
December 13, 2009
Dollhouse Review(2009).
© Fox/Bob Trate
At the end of the last episode, Echo (Eliza Dushku) is on the run, ending up going from Washington, D.C. to Medina, Texas.
Three months pass between the teaser and the opening credits. In that time, the Dollhouse still has not yet found her. However, the AWOL Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) has. Echo now possesses the ability to instantly recall any personality the Dollhouse has downloaded her with. The only downside is she gets these incapacitating headaches.
Back at the Dollhouse, Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) is no longer in command, whereas Harding (Keith Carradine) is. He has frozen out Adelle from everything. To rub it in, he makes her serve him tea like she’s his personal secretary.
The amoral scientist Topher (Fran Kranz) is now Harding’s golden boy and he wallows in the praise the man showers upon him, much to Adelle’s chagrin. Topher also can’t help ragging on Adelle, who tells Boyd (Harry Lennix) that Topher has shown his “true colors.”
Or has he? Turns out he came up with a remote device that can download a personality into anyone off the street; these people do not even have to have Active hardware implanted in their heads for this to happen. That would place too much power in the hands of the wrong people. Topher doesn’t want to turn it over to Harding, he confides in Adelle.
However, Adelle steals the plans to use as a bargaining chip to regain control of the Dollhouse. Thus, her true colors are revealed. Man, is she a cold-hearted bitch or what? Probably “or what” because there’s so many shades of gray to these characters, which makes you come back for more. And Adelle is no exception. She’s very intriguing, to say the least.
Topher and Adelle’s respective agendas, the sexual tension between Echo and Ballard, along with the performance of Glenn Morshower of 24 fame as a redneck sheriff who crosses swords with Echo, are the high points of this episode. Morshower, who plays patriotic and polite Secret Service Agent Aaron Pierce on 24, shows that he’s a good actor with this role as the sheriff in Medina, Texas, who’s not above abusing his authority and hurting inmates. It’s a far cry from Agent Pierce.
Now for the bad…
It was a waste of guest-star Philip Casnoff (Strong Medicine) who was one of the guests in Harding’s office where it was announced a 23rd Dollhouse would open up in Dubai. Casnoff only appeared for 20 seconds, if that. That’s a shame because Casnoff is a talented actor. He is best known as the villain Elkanah Bent from the three North and South mini-series in 1985, 1986, and 1994 (he played the enemy of Patrick Swayze’s character Orry Main).
Additionally, Casnoff played Ol’ Blue Eyes himself – Frank Sinatra – in 1992’s Sinatra mini-series, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. For two seasons, he played a Russian inmate named Nikolai Petrovich Stanislofsky on HBO’s Oz.And that’s not even getting into his Broadway roles.
Bottom line: The man can act. The man can sing. The man is good. So to use him for 20 seconds in this episode is a criminal waste of his talents. Director Dwight Little could’ve just grabbed one of the extras or a crew member to fill in for Casnoff’s character Albers or Alberts (I rewound and listened to his name being muttered and still can’t confirm the correct pronounciation). We can only assume that he’s some kind of top Dollhouse official and that he’ll be seen again.
Despite the three paragraphs used on Casnoff, that’s not the end of my rantings. What’s jarring is flashing forward three months. It would’ve been nice to see Adelle get dressed down by Harding. And considering that she and Topher went against the Rossum Corporation (Dollhouse’s parent company) in the last episode, it’s a wonder why they weren’t sent to the attic. It also would’ve been nice to see how Ballard made his way to Echo. Obviously, he contacted Boyd, but how did this work out?
That’s the problem when you jump ahead significantly in time and have all these big changes, there’s too many unanswered questions. It would be great – to say nothing of essential – to see what happened in that duration. Given that Dollhouse has been cancelled and that Adelle regained control by the end of the episode, odds are that won’t happen.
What did happen, however, was that viewers were rewarded with another Dollhouse episode that followed immediately after this one, softening the blow.
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its great to see a mania "reviewer" spend all his research time on finding out the bio for what he describes as a throw away character rather then find out if this episode was written before or after dollhouse was cancelled. if whedon knew the show was being cancelled, the three month skip ahead could have been intended to get the show to a point of closure hes going for. at this point, thats what we should be wondering. can whedon give us closure on this shows many plot threads? will he tie things into epitaph one? or is he disregarding that and looking to leave things on a massive cliffhanger to try and goad fans into pushing fox until he gets resurrected or another movie deal? how about you ask some of these questions rather then just post useless recaps? because what you write, mr krug, is sure as heck not a review (yeah, this also applies to the love supreme recap where you spend five sentences whining about some confusion you suffered through watching the show on hulu).