Dollhouse Episode 6 - Things Get Good

I am only doing this because I wrote about Dollhouse earlier.

This episode has several good things going for it. Here are a few.

1) Patton Oswalt. He really took it up a notch in terms of acting. He brought his A game and it shows.

2) The twists. I counted three great twists in the storyline. Two of them I saw coming, but they still took me by surprise when they happened.

3) The dialogue. Really seemed better here than previous episodes. "Good hand." "No, it was a bad hand well played."

4) The structure. Mixing in the newscaster story with the man on the street interviews was a great way to present the story and concept. Because I can easily imagine a lot of people ignoring the first five episodes and just starting with this one. This structure provides a nice introduction to the series and the series concept.

5) The debate. This is what really sold the show for me. It wasn't the action or the set pieces or the twists or what have you; it was the conversation between Patton Oswalt and Tahmoh Penikett about the nature of the Dollhouse. Oswalt made a convincing argument, clouding the whole "the Dollhouse is nothing but evil" morality of the first five episodes. This made the series seem a little bit more intelligent.

6) The mythology. I will say one of the things I did not like about the first five episodes is that the concept of the show seems limited. This episode hints at a bigger mythology behind the show.