SPOILERS BELOW FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAS AIRED (OR UNAIRED) TO DATE
“They were children playing with matches. And they burned the house down.”
The FOX Network aired twelve episodes of Dollhouse in its first season, but Joss Whedon and company actually produced fourteen. The original pilot was rejected by the network and so far hasn’t seen the light of day, which is just the kind of thing that happens. But “Epitaph One”, the fourteenth episode (which is included on the Season One DVD release and just yesterday became available for download on Amazon and iTunes) is kind of an oddball. It’s not a season finale. In fact, it doesn’t advance the season plot at all. It seems rather to have been intended as a series finale in the event the show had gotten the (generally expected) axe in the first year.
But that’s not what happened. The show was renewed, albeit without a great deal of network enthusiasm. FOX didn’t air “Epitaph One” because, by their explanation, they didn’t order it in the first place. Having seen it now, I think that was probably a good decision. While the episode is completely crackerjack as it introduces us to the nightmare world of 2019 Los Angeles, it takes a lot of mystery out of future seasons of the show. Unless –
Well, I’ll get to the “unless” in a moment. First, let’s get you up to date.
The show opens in a burned out warehouse or something, where a young woman named Mag (Whedon veteran Felicia Day) talks to fellow post-Apocalyptic rebels through a walkie talkie. After reporting her situation, the person on the other end of the conversation instructs her to get rid of “the tech”, which turns out to be the walkie. Soon her crew arrives: three young adults named Griff, Zone, and Lynn, a pre-teen girl named Iris (Adair Tishler of Heroes), and her father, Mr. Miller, who unlike the others, seems unusually dazed given all terrifying scene.
Why all the violence and burning buildings? The Dollhouse technology has apparently taken over the world in some way. Now people can be wiped and imprinted just be answering the phone or being in range of a radio signal. Mag learns that a friend of hers has recently been euthanized, essentially, after suffering an imprint. Only ten years in the future, but it’s a brave new world.
The ragtag bunch eventually stumbles upon the old Dollhouse headquarters, which they like because it’s fairly comfortable and too deep under ground for any dangerous signals to reach them. But of course they eventually find The Chair, which they hope will unlock the secret of how to cure people who have been wiped. They pluck Mr. Miller — himself a blank slate — into the chair and start loading memories into his brain, hoping to stumble upon the key to their salvation.
It’s right about this time that Lynn is murdered and Whiskey (aka Dr. Saunders) appears before them.
Through the memories they load into Miller they (and we) learn what has happened since the inception of the Dollhouse: that an active can be programmed to feel anything, that Topher sped up the process of imprinting significantly when he was hired, that Caroline’s personality began to return to her even while being imprinted as Echo, and that she and Paul had plans to take the survivors of all the madness somewhere safe — a mythical place these people have come to know as Safe Haven.
It’s never really clear whose memories we’re privy to at any given moment in these flashbacks, but it doesn’t matter. We learn that the brass at The Rossum Corporation have decided that actives would be better if you could buy rather than lease, and — in arguably the most haunting moment of the episode — we see a broken down Topher musing about how easy it would be to create an army to do your bidding simply by sending an imprint signal over the telephone. “It’s genius,” he says. “Why didn’t I think of it.” And then, “Did I think of it?” I, like most fans of the show, quickly wearied of Topher’s goofball antics. Seeing a mentally ill Topher relive his mad scientist role in starting a holocaust was refreshingly grave.
Ultimately it turns out that little Iris has been killing the young refugees, and is really someone else. Turns out she just wants to get back into an adult body. But she’s found out and instead imprinted with Caroline’s personality, who then leads the surviving members of the group out of the Dollhouse and presumably toward Safe Haven, wherever that is.
If this had been the final episode of the series, I’d say it was fantastic. I mean, the whole “mysterious signal turns everyone into zombies” thing is certainly reminiscent of Stephen King’s Cell, but a world where identity is basically meaningless (and thus the most important thing of all) is stunning and horrifying. It’s a fast forward version of all the themes I’ve hoped the show would explore.
But if you’ll pardon the major geekiness of this statement, I’m not sure what role “Epitaph One” plays in the canon of Dollhouse. Is this a “real” story, for lack of a better term, or is it merely speculative? If Season Two returns us to 2009, is the 2019 of “Epitaph One” the future that awaits our heroes? Or does the second season order (and fact that FOX never aired the episode) essentially render it void? I’m not sure how to handle it.
Certainly Lost has flashed forward successfully, giving an entirely new dimension to its stories and characters. Dollhouse doesn’t seem old enough to need that kind of shot in the arm. I suppose it’s also possible that Season Two will pick up right where this episode leaves off, though I think that would confuse pretty much everyone that hasn’t gone out of their way to watch it. So I can only assume that “Epitaph One” is a tease. And given that the show isn’t likely to run through 2019, we may never know if the future it portrays is the future intended for the series.
On its own terms, it is a disorienting, frightening, very entertaining entry in the series. It’s easily worth the two bucks.
Rating: 
For what it’s worth, I hope we return to this world periodically during Season 2. Even if only die hard fans bother to watch this episode, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
