Thoughts on Dollhouse after the first series

(spoilers below)

Joss Whedon definitely lived up to expectations! It was no Firefly and some of the plot lines were better than others but all in all I loved his development of an interesting premise. Plenty was left open for exploration in the second series and the epilogue was a wonderful bitter-sweet sending off .

My thoughts that De Witt might turn out to be a deep-cover active were quickly quashed in the hilarious 'Echoes', where her and Topher react in the same 'natural' intoxicated manner to chemical exposure. However, I was guessing along roughly the right lines as Doctor Saunders was revealed to be an active acting as unwitting staff in the Dollhouse. Her development over the last couple of episodes was fantastic and made good use of a previously under-utilised talent.

As the series went on I was also surprised by Whedon's tendency to reuse scenes and ideas from other series. The interview process in 'A Spy in the House of Love'  was especially glaring as he had famously already used the technique of mashing the interrogation of several characters together and cutting away at different points to create an intriguing meta-dialogue. The Butchers of the Epilogue and Alpha's taste for mutilation also closely mirrored Firefly's Reavers while the use of programmable people as weapons through neural manipulation brought to mind River Tam's conditioning in Firefly and Serenity. However, it was hard to begrudge these repetitions as they were solid ideas in the first place and were appropriate to the melodramatic atmosphere of the Dollhouse episodes.

The resolution of Alpha's plot was a bit of a mix bag. I didn't see the twist coming and loved his rapid transformation from comically neurotic environment designer to dangerously neurotic rogue active. The villain's subsequent encounter with Caroline's Omega was also breathtaking and cut to the heart of the identity issues on which the premise rests. However, after the reveal he could hardly hope to live up to the silent menace that he had represented in earlier episodes and I was not sad to see him largely absent from the epilogue (albeit with one enigmatic nod to his activities during the apocalypse).

I can't wait to see what Whedon comes up with for the second series. The existence of a network of different Dollhouses remains mostly unexplored and I suspect we will be returning to the dystopian future of the Epilogue before the programme is wrapped up!