TV REVIEW: Dollhouse: "True Believer"

Now that's more like it!

"True Believer" is an engaging, tense and intriguing installment of Joss Whedon's young series Dollhouse. It's also a vast improvement over last week's tedious "Gray Hour."

In this episode, our Active protagonist, Echo (Dushku) infiltrates a creepy fundamentalist cult (The Children of the Temple...) in Pleasant, Arizona. The twist in the tale, as it were is that Echo doesn't realize she's an infiltrator. Instead, she is an authentic "true believer," a blind religious fundamentalist who believes that she has experienced a revelatory vision of cult leader Jonas Sparrow...when it's really just an imprint.

Echo (as Esther Carpenter) is unaware that her unseeing eyes are actually miniature cameras and that she is recording images (for ATF agents...) of everyone she encounters in the cult compound.

Even better, there's a twist mid-episode concerning Echo's sight, one she misperceives as a "real" miracle.

I don't want to spoil the many surprises, but like "Target," this episode of Dollhouse packs more twists and turns into an hour than might rightly be expected or hoped for. Your assumptions about characters and events keep changing and the result is a fun, roller-coaster of a show.

I also feel that this is the first episode in a while in which Joss Whedon has remembered that it isn't the plot that's important to viewers hoping to connect with the series, but the characters and their mysterious natures. Here, several characters back at the Dollhouse (in a B story...) reveal tantalizing new shades. Victor, for instance, experiences a so-called "man reaction" (read: erection) while in proximity to Sierra in the communal shower. This is troublesome because in the "Doll" state, Actives are supposed to be total innocents. Another troublesome fact is that someone inside The Dollhouse is deliberately (and violently...) working against Echo. And, the last shot of the episode tells us that Echo knows it. Or at least senses it...

I also enjoyed the intellectual subtext of "True Believer." Echo visits a compound of smiling, empty-headed cult members who lack "will." The members of the cult are Sparrow's puppets; his pawns.

And how, exactly, is that unlike the Dolls at the dollhouse? They too are beings without will, to be manipulated by others. In each place (the cult and the Dollhouse), the blank slate is cherished as a return to innocence, a "new beginning," a return to the "Garden," to put it in religious terms. But what we're really talking about here is layers of control.

Fascinating stuff, and a legitimate, interesting comparison (and critique).

Next week's Dollhouse is the segment that's supposed to blow the lid off the series' mytharc and really kick the show into high gear. I'm crossing my fingers that's the case.

Can't wait...