Dollhouse: Gray Hour Rewatch

October 2, 2020 11:44 AM - Season 1, Episode 4

Echo's engagement to steal some art starts to go bad when she and others in her crew get locked in the vault. When Echo is wiped remotely, the Dollhouse must figure a way to get her out.

AV Club: B

Poster's notes:

I think this is the first time we see Victor in the dollhouse? Presumably that means they're regularly bringing him in and not just letting him live the life of a small-time thug out in the real world.

Yet more of the mysterious Alpha, now introducing remote wipe technology.

And finally an engagement that doesn't boil down to some sort of weird prostitution - sure, let's just make some sort of composite super-thief. And I think they sort of missed the point of imprinting Sierra with Taffy's skills, but maybe TV time was actually considering travel time for a change.

posted by Kyol (3 comments total)

I wonder if there is a requirement to occasionally spend time at the Dollhouse for maintenance/ etc.? We haven't seen Mellie/ November at the House yet.

The job was kind of clever, especially if the speculation that the (ultimate) client is Greece is correct. The Dollhouse taking jobs from sovereign states has interesting implications.

Curious that they didn't just program Sierra-Taffy to do the job, and made Adelle have to talk her into it. Maybe that was faster than it would take to alter the program? But cool performance by both Williams and Lachman.

But yeah, kudos for acknowledging that there's insufficient time to airdrop 2Taffy to the site.

Hyping up Alpha is dangerous, and the showrunners took a huge gamble that they could conjure up a character who lived up to all the buildup.

Ivy will have her day, one day.
posted by porpoise at 8:22 PM on October 2, 2020

This was the first of the aired episodes that I actually liked and wasn't just watching out of morbid curiosity.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:44 AM on October 3, 2020

Well, and my problem in the rewatch here is remembering which apocalyptic endgame goals were Alpha's and which were ultimately Rossum's. I mean, at a high level from what I remember, Alpha's goal was merely to break his number one girl out of the dollhouse and her tabula rasa state, maybe some light mayhem, but that's it. Rossum just sort of took some of the technology and tricks that Alpha developed to... Well... Make sort of an incomprehensible mess out of things in the epitaph. We'll get there.

And yeah, the first 3 episodes I legitimately only watched because of Fanfare having mentioned the Victor/Sierra story, and that the writers and producers shared a lot of overlap with AoS, so why not, let's give it a shot.
posted by Kyol at 8:18 AM on October 3, 2020