Word: echo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...perfect at the Dollhouse. Echo has begun to recover memories, and the actives show a tendency to occasionally go haywire. It turns out that human memory is like an analog cassette tape: overwrite it too many times, and you start to hear the ghosts of old voices. Actives are meant to be clean slates, with no messy human baggage. But as preamnesia Echo notes, "You ever try cleaning an actual slate? You can always see what was on it before...
...affectless tabulae rasae--like children or especially pretty, dumb actors.) Some of those people, like the voices on an old laugh track, are now dead. Which raises questions: What does it mean to be alive? What is the Dollhouse's obligation to the people whose memories it "resurrects"? Is Echo herself, Caroline or the sum of her borrowed parts...
...Echo has a different assignment each episode--the three sent for review are a hostage case, a wilderness adventure and a heist caper--which makes Dollhouse a kind of drama-school exercise for Whedon and Dushku. The genre-hopping Whedon is up to the task; his hostage-negotiation story would make a crisp pilot for a CBS procedural. And he unsettlingly conveys the actives' experience of living a constantly interrupted dream. ("Did I fall asleep?" they ask after each treatment.) But Dushku, memorable as the bad-girl Faith in Buffy, isn't much of a chameleon. She's passably callow...
...problem, because Whedon has set a challenging goal. Whereas his past series had ready-made good-vs.-evil setups, Dollhouse is morally nebulous. Sometimes we're rooting for Ballard to bust the Dollhouse, sometimes we're rooting for Echo's handlers and protectors in the organization that pimps her out. (Harry Lennix is sympathetic as her conflicted bodyguard, and Fran Kranz amusingly skeevy as the in-house tech geek.) Pulling this off means getting the audience to connect with a lead who is not, in the usual sense, a person, which may be more than Echo--or Dushku--can manage...
...fractured perfection like “Peacebone” and “Cuckoo Cuckoo.”This also may be why the album’s best songs are the ones that deviate from this pattern. “Bluish,” a wash of innocent echo-chamber balladry, would disappear into the labyrinth of its swirling accompaniment if not for the sheer fact that it’s the album’s most beautiful adornment. Similarly, the relatively spare “No More Runnin” is a drawn-out, dreamy moment of calm...