Dollhouse: Haunted

This week, on Dollhouse …

RECAP DETAILS AHEAD (don’t read if you haven’t watched it yet) …

This week’s episode featured three different kinds of “ghosts”.  The main story involves a rich dead woman who, thanks to the Dollhouse technology, is able to live again and hunt down her own murderer.  Topher, sad little overly-focused geek boy that he is, creates an imaginary geek friend and programs it into an Active (Sierra) to play with — something DeWitt lets him get away with once a year.  And Ex-Agent Ballard, still reeling over the news that his girlfriend Mellie is an Active, attempts to hunt down who she really is (or was) and the attempt to do so results in her being purged from the FBI database — effectively, she no longer exists.

I thought this episode was well crafted, and a logical extension of the story in the first episode of the dead kidnapped woman who basically ended up finding her own kidnapper.  It also really spelled out for us the ethical implications of this technology — as Boyd puts it (paraphrasing), “So we’re offering life after death now?”  Especially when the dead woman’s son describes a scenario in which somebody with enough money could essentially live forever by having themselves transferred from one Active to the next.  In fact, I have to imagine now that Whedon already has a nefarious Big Bad character like that planned for a future plot arc.  If so, bring it on!