A couple of notes before I begin: 1. Some of you on the boards were keen to note the incongruities I failed to point out in the end of the second episode last week. Basically, we were asked to make a leap between Senator Perrin being self-aware and him going back to doing exactly what Rossum wants him to do. Seems like a scene missing. Am I wrong here? 2. And speaking missing scenes, the Chicago HD broadcast of “Meet Jane Doe” was all mucked up for about 10 or 15 minutes in the middle of the episode. I was able to get the basic information about Echo and Ballard living together during Echo’s three-month hiatus from Dollhouse and we see their involvement in training and smooching and whatnot. Or at least that’s what I could glean from fast-forwarding through all the scratchy, glitchy crap. So I apologize in advance for my review of “Meet Jane Doe” being a bit incomplete.
Meet Jane Doe
Over at HitFix, my frequent A.V. Club cohort Todd VanDerWerff makes the intriguing suggestion that “Meet Jane Doe” would have been ideal pilot material. (He says it “re-imagines the show as the mid-90s NBC series The Pretender.) I think that’s a great observation, and one that’s telling of the hour’s merits: For one, we’re enjoying a much more confident show than the one that stumbled out of the gate in Season One, victimized in part by network impositions, but perhaps also by its own identity problems. For two, this is largely a standalone episode that, save for a few plot points that carry the larger story forward, could bring newcomers into the show. And three, as Todd notes, it would have been cool to start with Echo as a nurse trying to break a brutalized immigrant woman out of prison, then fill in the details of the Dollhouse later. As a pilot, the episode would have been an exciting jailbreak on its face, and then whoop, out goes the rug, Dollhouse-style. To paraphrase The Simpsons, Todd, your ideas intrigue me and I could like to subscribe to your newsletter.
That said, I know there’s some resistance in these parts—and yes, within me, too—to episodes that are heavily Echo-centric, but “Meet Jane Doe” was better plotted and more exciting than most and Eliza Dushku was well within her comfort zone. It begins with the wiped, “blank slate” Echo left to wander the streets, rummaging through dumpsters for food and so lacking in basic knowledge that she takes a store clerk’s sarcastic comment about money growing on trees seriously. There’s a part of me that would have liked to see more time devoted to Echo’s babe-in-the-woods situation; it’s interesting not just because she’s an adult discovering the world anew, but because Echo is haunted by all the fragmented personalities fluttering through her brain. To have her reduced to someone child-like and vulnerable—a true doll again, basically—seems like relief.
But then, after an incident where she shoplifts some food for an illegal immigrant, gets caught by the police, and conveniently rediscovers some of the ass-whomping identities that lurk within her, the show pulls one of its trademark mind-blowing twists by leaping three months ahead. That’s three months in which Adelle and her best men couldn’t track down their most special asset, and three months where she’s had the terrifying freedom to find her own way and set her own agenda. Turns out that Echo has kept her focus on the wrongly imprisoned woman, whom she’s been treating for injuries as a nurse. Her attempt to break the woman out of jail is proof that the show isn’t mere head-trip; it can also pull off a conventional suspense sequence with aplomb.
More interesting than Echo—and really, the show tends often to have elements more interesting than Echo—is the transformation of Adelle as she seeks to regain control over the L.A. Dollhouse. [And sorry for the big leap myself there: As I said earlier, the FOX HD broadcast here in Chicago wiped out much of the Echo-Ballard stuff for me.] Lately, as the show has expanded and we’ve seen the nefarious folks running the Dollhouse operation and its D.C. branch, our regular cast of characters has seemed a little soft in comparison. So bracing as it was to see Adelle display her own ruthlessness this episode, it was perhaps a necessary reminder that she’s at the top of the pecking order for a reason.
With Keith Carradine’s bigwig Harding unhappy with the way Adelle is managing things, he’s taking over her affairs for the time being and it’s immediately apparent that Harding will go further to accommodate his moneyed clients than Adelle ever would. Harding meets with a noxious rich dude who “wants to satisfy vagaries,” which in his case mean vagaries of a De Sade-like nature. Then later, there’s talk of cherry-picking the best dolls in the L.A. branch for a new operation in Dubai. Given the choice between acquiescing quietly to Harding’s demands and becoming, in Topher’s words, “the coldest bitch on the planet” to take her operation back, Adelle chooses the latter.
The genius of “Meet Jane Doe” is that Adelle’s short-term victory plants the seeds to what we know will be long-term apocalyptic catastrophe. By giving up Topher’s extraordinarily powerful remote wipe device to Rossum in exchange for control over her Dollhouse, she gets what she wants without fully grasping the potential consequences. (A panicked Topher, no innocent for fiddling with dangerous science himself, has a better idea about it.) Two of this episode’s writers, Maurissa Tanchareon and Jed Whedon, were also responsible for the great, unaired “Epitaph One” from Season One, so it’s fitting that they be the ones to give us this subtle hint into the future.
And Adelle’s directive to keep Echo unwiped for a while, despite Echo’s piercing headaches: Badass.