Dollhouse Tonight!

Last Friday I was in NY for a sales conference, staying in a shoebox-sized hotel room, and I met up with my friend Ian, whom I’d first met at Slayage. The original idea had been to meet up for dinner, but then he remembered that last Friday was the return of Dollhouse, in special back-to-back episodes. So he said we should grab dinner early and then get back to the hotel room to watch them, starting at 8. Brilliant, I thought, since my husband gave up on Dollhouse ages ago, and NO ONE I know seems to be up to date with it, so I can never talk about it with anyone.

And WHAT a return it was. The two-part arc featured Summer Glau as a one-handed, female, more sinister version of Topher with some major issues with Caroline in her past (interestingly, not Echo, but Caroline); Ray Wise as the Adelle of the other Dollhouse (his presence made me miss Reaper even more); a surprise discovery about Alexis Denisof’s senator and his wife; and a laugh-out-loud hilarious performance from Enver Gjokaj, who plays Victor. See, Topher never leaves the Dollhouse, so when he has to, the only person he trusts enough to hold down the fort is... himself. So he imprints Victor with his personality (and loud shirts) and puts him there, and then calls "himself" to check up on how things are going. Gjokaj must have studied hours of footage of Fran Kranz, who plays Topher, and he gets every jittery movement and weird saying down pat. Ian and I were in stitches every time he was on screen. Gjokaj moves seamlessly into any character he’s been asked to play, from Russians to Italians to New Jersey bad guys, and he always nails the accents and quirks without issue. Here, playing a character that is very familiar to all of us, he absolutely pulled it off. I think Gjokaj is underrated on this show because of how secondary his role typically is, but watching him pull off these scenes made me even sadder that these were two of the last episodes of Dollhouse... ever.

I won’t give away any spoilers in case you haven’t yet watched these episodes, but tonight there are two more (don’t forget – set those PVRs to start at 8, not 9!) and I cannot wait to watch them. Sadly, I can’t get Ian to travel to Toronto from NY, so it’ll be back to watching them alone, but I don’t mind. With entertainment like this, it’s fine to watch alone sometimes. While I've run out of time to write up last week's episode, I'm hoping I'll be able to write up something for tonight's. Enjoy!