Okay, I immediately began concocting different perspectives on the plot wherein Boyd is still on the side of good and not in fact evil. Perspectives such as he actually lost control of Rossum long ago, after realizing what his previous actions were going to lead to and is now fighting to undo the harm he has done. Or something along those lines. I simply refuse to believe that he's actually the evil head of Rossom. Or rather that he is still the evil head of Rossom.
quote:Originally posted by Brinestone: Was "Clyde" Topher? He had a lot of the same mannerisms.
I'm actually wondering that. I'm wondering if Clyde == Topher == Bennet. If Topher and Bennet are just modified imprints of the original Clyde who've had their memories changed to make them think they are different people. That would explain their brilliance, compatibility, apparently similar personalities. And it might go some of the way toward explaining Boyd...
If he came to regret what he did to Clyde 1.0 - but had since lost control of the company - maybe he recreated new people using Clyde as a base. But modified them to make them more whole people, with the hope that he would have allies in defeating the people who'd taken control from him. Maybe so he could get the original Clyde back or something.
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posted
Topher and Bennett cannot be imprints because they were not affected by the remote wipe zapper.
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posted
I would just like to bask in the fact that I know (and have hugged) Harry Lennix. I don't know him well, but we have had a few conversations and he would recognize me by name with some context. My boss knows him really well. He is a very lovely man. We joked about how people were always mistaking him for Barack Obama. (This was before the election.)
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Edit to add: I googled the word "Rossum" as being part of a play as stated by Clyde 2.0 or 5.0 or whatever and came up with Rossum's Universal Robots. Eerie similarities to the whole story arc the show has taken.
As soon as Clyde said it was from a play, I did a facepalm for not thinking of RUR.
What Saunders did totally caught me off guard. But it was only a minute or two after that that I realized Clyde's partner had to have been Boyd.
When Caroline stepped off the elevator and I saw the nebbishy Clyde, I thought I was wrong. Until he said he was Clyde.
I can't believe there are only two eps left.
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posted
I knew Bennet was gonna get shot (well, I knew Saunders was acting creepy. I didn't expect her to go out quite like that but wasn't surprised when it happened. Just sad. Poor poor Cameron *cough* I mean Bennet).
I also figured out Clyde was Clyde within a few seconds.
I totally did not see the last 10 seconds coming.
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posted
It shows how sensitive to formula we are as a people - as soon as I saw Saunders walk up with her hands behind her back and acting seemingly innocuously, I knew Bennet wasn't long for this world. Poor girl.
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posted
I missed this on first watch through.... Caroline using River's line when raiding Adele's office. Now I wish Topher had said that Bennett had gone all Terminator on him rather than Cylon.
I knew Bennett was doomed as soon as I saw her and Topher's interactions over Caroline's original imprint. when Bennett snapped out of it enough to ask whose imprint they were trying to fix, that sealed her fate for sure.
posted
I don't think that sealed her fate in the slightest. (Well, maybe in a foreshadowing sense, but I don't even think that necessarily led to anything bad. I was actually really interested in seeing the interaction between Caroline and Bennett and thought that would have been a perfectly good direction to take the story....
except we know Topher has to go crazy and be all alone except for Dewitt (duwitt?). So Bennett had to die to satisfy Epitaph 1.
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The show is awesome, yet ending. We get Amy Acker back, but lose Summer Glau... damn you Joss! Why do I love your work so much?!
I'm liking the twist with Boyd, and am super-curious where it's going and what his true aim has been in all this. I like it because he has always had a little nagging "why are you here?" thing going for me. It hasn't been enough to bother me, just enough to make me think "there's more backstory here" a-la Shepherd Book... Why would a generally good former cop be working for the evil morally dark-grey corporation?
After watching this much of Boyd though, I would find it hard to believe that he's really evil (still?). I mean, it's certainly possible, but we've seen him take bullets for people before, and I find it hard to believe he'd do that just to flush the world down the toilet.
My initial bet is that one of the Clydes is actually the bad guy and Boyd has been working against him. So excited to see the rest...
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posted
Hmmm, answers some questions (spoilers following last episode obviously):
quote:The man who shot Mal Reynolds in the gut came back to kick us in the teeth, with Friday's episode of Dollhouse. Tim Minear's brilliant episode left us with tons of questions, and luckily he was willing to answer them.
How long ago did you guys decide that Boyd Langton was going to be the mastermind behind Rossum? Was this a recent decision, or something planned since the beginning?
It was decided upon early in the forming of the stories this season.
quote:The trickiest of the flash forwards was the Saunders/Boyd-on-the-run scene — because we weren't thinking "Boyd is going to be Rossum" at that point. Mostly, we were thinking "nothing matters — we're cancelled." Whoops. So simply putting that scene in and trying to craft scenes around it seemed the best way to tackle that element.
posted
I can't decide if Tim Minear is the Darth Vader to Joss Whedon's Anakin or the Darth Vader to Joss Whedon's Palpatine.
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posted
Thank you, Grimace! Someone linked to it on Whedonesque, and it has now become the article with the highest hit-count GeekaChicas has ever had, which really blows my mind.
I wish there was more Dollhouse to come. There's what, one more episode?
It has insured that I'll watch anything Whedon writes, though. They could televise his shopping list and I'll be there.
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posted
too true, too true... but to be fair, he'd have you guessing to the last second whether those cucumbers were the villains, or if it was really the captain crunch all along. And lord help you if you grow attached to the soup, because the second you do, it's going to get dropped and you'll only have its spilt remains left to cry over.
and now I think I've taken the "Joss writing his shopping list" analogy waaaaay too far.
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quote:Originally posted by TheGrimace: too true, too true... but to be fair, he'd have you guessing to the last second whether those cucumbers were the villains, or if it was really the captain crunch all along.
quote:It may have started shaky, but it has come around to the point that the next time Whedon has a new show - no matter how off-putting the premise - I'll be right there to lap it up. Again.
Good point. Damn you Whedon!
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posted
A question I had from last time was, "Did Caroline deliberately befriend Bennet BECAUSE she worked for Rossum, or did she find that out later?"
My question for tonight was "Did Boyd deliberately allow Echo to blow up a building so that he'd have something legitimate to threaten her with?" It was implied that he had this whole master plan, but it didn't seem all that well thought out.
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Ahhh, another great episode. I'm beginning to think that more tv should be structured like this one: instead of delivering a ten-volume book series that gets lost along the way (multi-year series), it should be more like a short story . . . a limited run (two years) with no wasted time on extraneous stuff. Just go for the gusto all the way, like Dollhouse has been doing for the past six or so episodes. Makes for great television.
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posted
I found myself not enjoying this episode as much, but I can't tell how much of that has to do with the episode and how much is that I watched it on real TV instead of on hulu. A few times in recent years I've ended up watching season finale's on real TV and somehow it always seems... worse. On top of the commercials yanking me away for 5 minutes at a time, camerawork and lighting seem worse and even the acting feels not as good.
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quote:Originally posted by Sala: Ahhh, another great episode. I'm beginning to think that more tv should be structured like this one: instead of delivering a ten-volume book series that gets lost along the way (multi-year series), it should be more like a short story . . . a limited run (two years) with no wasted time on extraneous stuff. Just go for the gusto all the way, like Dollhouse has been doing for the past six or so episodes. Makes for great television.
I think the best approach is something like Dexter, wherein each season is a largely self contained very long movie. Granted, this is my favorite approach for STORYTELLING, which isn't the same thing as being financially viable. (Dexter seems to be doing well for itself but I think that's a combination of factors beyond the story arc techniques.)
In Dollhouse's case, Whedon's mentioned that he didn't get to do as many "romance engagement" episodes as he would have liked, which would have been largely standalone and dealt specifically with the kinds of things people would want from the Dollhouse. The problem is those episodes would have been a hard sell. period unless the opening season had somehow had a more interesting main character for us to root for prior to Echo's full manifestation.
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I can excuse all the rushed details and low budget shortcuts, but the utter lack of any sort of Caroline/Echo resolution really bothered me. Echo (possibly) sacrificed herself to bring back Caroline. What happened? Who's in charge? Are they both in there now? What the hell?
Since Echo's sense of identity was the focal point of the whole freaking series, I kinda expected a little more, there.
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Good article, Chris. I felt disappointed, too, and I think you touched on all the reasons why. It's not that it was bad, but it certainly was a letdown from the expectations that had been built up.
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I don't buy it. I feel like they went for Boyd as the leader of Rossum because he was the last person we'd expect. Pure shock value. They didn't make it the least bit convincing though. Everything Boyd has been up until now does not even remotely match what he became this episode. It didn't fly. He was like a child in this episode. In every other he's been the most mature, intelligent, perceptive... it just didn't work.
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posted
It also seems like a pretty crappy plan considering the sheer resources he has at his disposal.
But I give it a pass since the whole season was really rushed, surpassing the plot-crunch at the end of both Babylon 5's fourth season and Jeremiah in terms of crunchiness.
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I call BS. If they weren't cancelled and trying end on something interesting, Boyd would never have been Mr. Rossum. There's no way that that's what they were aiming for from the beginning.
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I offer the new Joss Whedon version of the nuked fridge to jumped shark: The Rossum revealed Boyd.
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Can a show really jump the shark in its penultimate episode? How much of a shark could there be at that point?
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My feeling is that Boyd COULD have been a convincing head of Rossum if they had put more effort into it. I could have bought something like realizing how out of control it had gotten and genuinely trying to fix it, or having an even bigger, badder company out there they actually needed all this military-grade neurotech to fight against.
I actually spent all of Season 1 (and some of 2) wondering what secret backstory they could possibly have for Boyd that would live up to all the secrecy about his origin story. Everything I could think of wasn't extreme enough to justify hiding it so long. The interview made it clear that they didn't know who he was until the beginning of this season, which is somewhat disappointing, but it is pretty much the only resolution I can think of that lived up to the hype.
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Without knowing what the original plan was, I honestly think 3 would have been fine. (Maybe with full 20 episode seasons, giving us some time to see Echo go on normal engagements with full command of her abilities). Although if they were intending to introduce a rival to Rossum that started the Thought-pocalyptic war, another season to show that in all its detail could have been useful.
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There where shiny moments, but they shined through a layer of crap. Very disappointing.
There was so much more that should have been done with Whiskey, Boyd, Mellie, Adelle, Victor and Sierra, basically everyone. I'm sure Epitaph Two will be good, but I am not happy.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Okay anyone else here thought Boyds plan kinda made sense?
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quote:The interview made it clear that they didn't know who he was until the beginning of this season, which is somewhat disappointing, but it is pretty much the only resolution I can think of that lived up to the hype.
What interview is this?
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Well maybe not every detail but think about it, 1 person has a biology that could work towards a vaccine against imprinting, its in many ways no different from other plans where best & brightest + richest are saved from death in disaster movies.
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