Air Date : Friday, September 25, 2009


Episode Title : (DOL-201) "Vows"


**SEASON PREMIERE**"DOLLHOUSE"(9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT)

ECHO WEDS A MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND ADELLE MAKES A DEAL WITH AGENT BALLARD ON THE SEASON PREMIERE OF "DOLLHOUSE" FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, ON FOX

Episode Written and Directed by Series Creator Joss Whedon

Jamie Bamber ("Battlestar Galactica") Guest-Stars

Picking up a few months after the first season finale, Echo, who now sporadically remembers past "imprints" due to Alpha’s machinations, weds a wealthy and charismatic British businessmen tied to one of Agent Ballard’s open FBI cases. Dr. Saunders struggles with being an Active and makes Topher the target of her aggression, and Boyd mixes business with pleasure in a risky venture. Meanwhile, Adelle makes Ballard an offer he can’t refuse in "Vows," the season premiere episode of DOLLHOUSE airing Friday, Sept. 25 on FOX.


Cast : Eliza Dushku as Echo ; Tahmoh Penikett as Paul Ballard ; Olivia Williams as Adelle DeWitt ; Harry Lennix as Boyd Langton ; Fran Kranz as Topher Brink ; Enver Gjokaj as Victor ; Dichen Lachman as Sierra

Guest Cast : Amy Acker as Dr. Claire Saunders/Whiskey ; Liza Lapira as Ivy ; Jamie Bamber as Martin Klar ; Alexis Denisof as Senator Daniel Perrin ; Zoran Radanovich as Hugo Taubman

"Dollhouse" Tv Series - 2x01 "Vows" - Pioneerlocal.com Review











This might not sound like good news, but it is — the first episode of the second season of "Dollhouse," is very relaxed. Not a whole lot happens, but this actually could be a good sign. The season premiere, "Vows," (it airs Sept. 25 9/8 C) feels like it was made to set up the entire season, and not just to grab attention. Joss Whedon isn’t really known for his bang-up pilots (he’s not J.J. Abrams in that regard), he’s more known for setting up a show’s characters, dynamics, humor and some philosophical fat to chew on.

Why relaxed is better is that instead of feeling like everything has to be very self-contained and bursting with craziness, Whedon and company seem to be taking the approach that they have time to tell their stories and to tell them right. Sure, there’s no guarantee of a third season for "Dollhouse" (and a cancellation after this season would be a lot more painful), but they’re acting like it is and that’s good. Season 1 was pretty good, and got progressively better, but I have a feeling Season 2 is going to be great now that the jitters are gone.

What was kind of missing last year, especially from the first half of Season 1, was an ensemble cast we could care about. One of Whedon’s biggest strengths — and something that’s happened in all his previous shows — is developing this entourage of well-drawn characters, who interact in interesting ways, and are outsiders because of what they’re dealing with. Buffy and company couldn’t reveal to most that they were quietly going about saving Sunnydale from eternal damnation ; the Firefly crew were scavengers with two fugitives on board and Angel and his compadres were working to bring down the evil Wolfram & Hart. "Dollhouse" lacked that cohesive group of people we really cared about, partly because the dolls don’t have personalities at all. But in the first episode, it looks like they’re fixing that absence of a Scooby gang contingent.

"Vows" is definitely an ensemble effort. Echo doesn’t account for most of the screen time, in fact it’s actually Topher and Dr. Claire Saunders (they have a strange new dynamic) who get the larger storylines. (Yes, Amy Acker is in the first episode.) I still don’t think "Dollhouse" will ever be Whedon’s greatest show, but there’s still plenty of time to make the characters much more gripping. "Angel" didn’t really feel right until they’d got a good group together with Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Fred, Lorne and Gunn.

The "mission" part of "Vows" pretty much plays second fiddle to everything else. Echo gets married to wealthy financier (Jamie Bamber), who is up to some shady stuff. The rest is about how everyone else is adapting after the havoc Alpha caused. Here’s a few of the details from the episode — mostly minor spoilers, but if you don’t want to know much about the episode, don’t read ahead.

— Since finding out that she’s not really Dr. Claire Saunders, and not really Whiskey either, Amy Acker’s character is going through an identity crisis. In the first episode of Season 2, she practically gets more screen time (and development) than she got all of last season. Acker will appear in several episodes in Season 2 even though she’s cast in ABC’s "Happy Town." Fox recently announced that Miracle Laurie also will return in several episodes as Mellie/Madeline/November along with several guest stars like Summer Glau.

— Alexis Denisof makes his first appearance as U.S. Senator Daniel Perrin — although only on TV at a televised press conference where he talks about the Rossum Corporation. (They’re calling him the new Ballard.) Since he’s playing a U.S. Senator, he’s obviously ditched the English accent and is going with his regular American one. Bamber, on the other hand, who is English, gets to play English. Whedon sure does love the English.

— Topher has a new admirer — sort of.

— We find out how long Echo has left on her Dollhouse contract.

— Someone leaves a Dear John letter with the message : "I am running out of excuses."

— Victor and Sierra only make brief appearances, although Victor’s is significant in answering the to-be-scarred or not-to-be-scarred question and Sierra’s is darn funny. She basically is racist — against herself.

— Echo is not all fixed after her run-in with Alpha. She’s personality-hopping, and remembering, and Ballard uses that to his advantage.

promo

Jamie Bamber, Joss and Eliza Talk abour "Vows" with Access Hollywood :thumbsup: watch the video

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Hitfix reviews Dollhouse Season 2 Premiere. "Certainly one of the show's better hours and representing a strong focused direction".

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Dollhouse S2 premiere ratings from TvByTheNumbers "Dollhouse averaged 2.57 million and a 1.0/4 adults 18-49 rating."


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:ermm:

I just can't understand why the ratings are so low the episode was superb this show gets better and better but unless Whedon fans get behind and stay on Friday nights it won't last much longer! :tear: :cry:

Is this the right thread to post our thought on vows?

Yes. :)

article (what were the predictions)

'Dollhouse' returns to lowest ever ratings
Saturday, September 26 2009, 17:10 BST


The second season of Dollhouse premiered to the show's lowest ever audience last night, according to early ratings data.

The opener, which guest-starred Jamie Bamber, pulled in just 2.57m for Fox in the 9pm hour. The ratings are the lowest ever for the Joss Whedon series but are roughly on par with the 2.75m audience for the first season finale in May.

The season premiere of Medium on CBS won the hour with 8.78m, while Dateline NBC managed 5.82m for the Peacock. Encores of new comedies Modern Family and Cougar Town put in respective audiences of 4.28m and 4.18m for ABC, and on The CW, a rerun of America's Next Top Model grabbed 1.17m.

The fifth season premiere of Ghost Whisperer won the 8pm hour for CBS with 8.58m, while the premiere of Law & Order delivered 6.29m for NBC. An encore of FlashForward took 4.55m for ABC, the series premiere of new Fox comedy Brothers had 2.82m, and the season premiere of Smallville appealed to just 2.5m on The CW.

At 10pm, the season premiere of Numb3rs logged an impressive 7.92m for CBS. ABC was second, with 7.11m for 20/20, while NBC's The Jay Leno Show averaged 5.68m.



Yup. If the Whedon fans don't extract the digit and start to watch this, we won't be seeing much more of it.

I wonder if there's a lot of PVR/Tivo recordings not taken into account?

I really think she's letting herself down with these photos.

I know ratings need a boost, but this is just icky.

http://perezhilton.com/2009-09-28-seksi-or-slutty#respond

:lol:

Agreed. She couldn't even be bothered to clean up the kitchen worktop before crawling all over it :rolleyes: :lol:

As someone in the comments says - it looks like they've got a cheap motel room, and a cheap, disposable camera!

:o indeed <_<

I don't think they are better or worse than any of the magazine cover she's done! I don't see what the fuss is that might be the typical male response though.

"Dollhouse" Tv Series - 2x01 "Vows" - Avclub.com Review


Entering this second, improbable season of Dollhouse, there were a couple of questions that I was looking for the first episode to answer : 1. How much of an effort would the show be making in order to bring in new viewers ? 2. How much would the mindblowing revelations of “Epitaph One,” the DVD-only 13th episode of Season One, reflect on how the new season plays out ? Short answer to both : Not much at all. Without so much as a “previously on” to get us up to speed on the final episodes of last season—not counting “Epitaph One,” of course—the show immediately dives into the muck of confused identities and bruised psyches, and expects us to get up to speed quickly. This is not a complaint ; quite the contrary, it’s a rare thing for TV creators to have that much respect for a viewer’s intelligence and it’s an excellent sign that Dollhouse intends to move full speed ahead, torpedoes be damned.

Of course, that doesn’t keep Eliza Dushku’s Echo from going on a twisty little mission, just as she did for the wash-rinse-repeat formula of first five episodes last season. The crucial difference this time is that you can’t press the reset button on her now like you could then : She’s permanently broken, a glitchy assemblage of personas that sometimes interfere with the one that she’s supposed to carry off. Though we’re led to believe that she’s been assigned to wed a British arms dealer played by Jamie Bamber—best known in nerdkind as Battlestar Galactica’s Apollo)—Echo in fact is serving as a partner to former Agent Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), whose obsession with her makes the obligatory wedding night rumpus acutely painful for him to snoop on.

Watching Echo get put through another skeevy fictional relationship—even one that morphs into a tense, 24-like spy job against a dirty bomb supplier—seemed for awhile like the show was going on auto-pilot ; my heart sank a little to see Barber get reduced to the sort of generic (albeit handsome and charismatic) baddie who does business in an airport hangar. Yet the moment things started going wrong for Echo, the entire subplot came to life, because they weren’t going wrong simply because her cover was blown. They were because she was breaking up like static, unable to get a firm grip on who she’s supposed to be at that moment. The scene in the office between Echo and Barber’s character, where he catches her snooping and starts smacking her around, feature some of Dushku’s best acting in the series—she uses her wits to turns the tables on him miraculously, only to lose herself again in a smaller, quieter moment. Ballard smartly exploits Echo’s cluttered imprints to his advantage when they wind up in a sticky situation (and Battlestar fans, how cool was it to see Apollo and Helo in a scrum again ?), but he’s a tough one to read. Having him in the proverbial “lion’s den” as Echo’s handler stands to get pretty sticky.

But the real highlight of “Vows” was the back-and-forth between Amy Acker’s Dr. Saunders (er, Whiskey) and Fran Kranz’s Topher, whom she’s come to know as her diabolical Geppetto. After discovering near the end of last season that she, too, is an Active, Saunders has fallen into a deep, deep funk that’s only occasionally relieved by the pranks and torments she can visit on Topher. Stuffing his office cupboards with rodents is mere prelude to the head games she plays with him later, when she sneaks into his bed as if to prove that she’s not the predictable being her creator has programmed her to be. (Incidentally, she gets line-of-the-night honors earlier, when she says of Topher : “My entire existence was constructed by a sociopath in a sweater vest.”)

Yet Saunders’ attempt to play mind games with Topher, and suddenly we’re thrust into an intense, exceptionally well-acted exchange that clarifies how she came into being and how his God-like role is more carefully considered than she (and, let’s face it, us) ever assumed. (And I’d like to take this moment to declare that my Topher-hating days definitively over. His role as the show’s resident quipster has exactly changed, but it has deepened now that we know he’s not just a reckless, ethics-deprived science whiz who’s in over his head. There are layers to him, too, and I credit Kranz for showing more range than I assumed he had, especially in this scene and in his big scene in “Epitaph One.”) In any case, their back-and-forth tonight is a stellar example of why I love Dollhouse despite its occasional lapses ; where else on network television are you going to get a conversation about the nature of free will ? Or exchanges like the following :

Saunders : “I’m not better than you. I’m just a series of excuses.”

Topher : “You’re human.”

Saunders : “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Welcome back, Dollhouse. I missed you.

Grade : A-

Stray observations :

• More great stuff from the Saunders-Topher smackdown. Topher, insulted by the sexual advances Saunders assumes are his “endgame” : “Hey, I could whip up a love slave any day I want.”

• And still more from Topher : “You don’t know me. That’s the contract. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. Not fully, not ever. I made you question. I made you fight for your beliefs. I didn’t make you hate me. You chose to.”

• A light yet disturbing moment with Sierra, who’s come back from a standard call-girl gig in a stuck-up, old-fashioned British socialite get-up : “If you were to tie me down and spank me, I couldn’t be expected to resist, could I ?”

• Interesting new tension between Boyd and Saunders now that revelations about her have come to pass. What to make of it ?

• Seriously creepy line when Echo’s handler takes her away from Ballard for a treatment : “We have to check the wiring… and the plumbing.”

• Hey look, it’s Wesley from Buffy and Angel ! Whedon is poaching cool actors from every dearly departed series he can raid.

• Some nice directorial touches from Whedon tonight, especially that lovely tracking shot that backs away from secret sweethearts Victor and Sierra, and settles on Echo and Ballard. All set to an Elliott Smith track, too.

• Next week’s episode is credited to the writing team of Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, the creators of Reaper.

My thoughts on Vows

Wow what a fantastic start to season this had everything action, drama, suspense and yet more questions I can’t wait to find out the answers to I love this show!

So Echo has a new handler well two actually but I’ll get to that later. The way she told handler No.1 she “trust him with her life” it was obvious she going through the motions. Paul is the client it seems part on deal with Dewitt mean s he can use the Dollhouse to settle old scores? Not that stopping an arms dealer is a bad thing I was just surprised that she would let Ballard use her top active for that for a high risk engagement although she tell Boyd she has plans Paul.

Without a doubt Amy Acker stole the as Claire struggling to deal with the knowledge she is a Doll and spends her time getting revenge on Topher and for a moment it looked as she might have Echo in her sites too. If Echo’s flashback it seems Echo and Whiskey have more between them other then rivalry over who is number one. Joss has already hinted the Eliza will have a lesbian storyline at some point but we all Joss likes to mess with us some times so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. My favourite part of the episode was when a guilt ridden Topher tells Claire he made her a whole so person and like she evolved so it was her choice to hate him a great scene very well acted.

I still can’t understand why Eliza gets so much criticism over acting ability? I thought it was gripping when she starts remembering so many of her past personas at once and Echo struggles to understand what’s happening to her. A great finale to the episode as Echo tells Paul that Topher’s wipe failed and now she want find her own identity and her fellow Dolls too. Paul is now her new handler it seems this team want bring down the house! I will miss Boyd/Echo relationship it I though it they would be key to the series. Loads of action drama, evolving actives not to mention Eliza and Amy in their underwear :naughty: yes this series just get better and better!

a good start for the new season (still have doubt about Dewitt new hair cut :lol: )

really like Claire still having trouble with finding out she is a Doll and going after Topher to get a bit of revenge but it's kinda clear Topher has himself issue about it (but there is not much info about Claire trying to find out who she was before ending up as Wiskey :unsure: ) these two had the best scenes . there also seemed to be a lot of history between Wiskey and Echo (not just Alpha), some bit more :naughty: than other :rolleyes: . good for Claire to find the strengh to finally leave the dollhouse (even if the writers had to find a way to explain the character going missing due to Acker appearing in an other TV show)

Echo is more and more aware of what's going on (but really wondering about what imprint the dollhouse gave her in front of the bad guy :rolleyes: ) and seemed to know that Paul is the one to trust to help her finding out about the people the imprint comes from (does that mean Boyd is a bad guy for her now? :ponder: ), bit surprise that Adelle accepted to let Paul use Echo for a risky job or he just wanted to understand the process and/or he knew he would care a lot more if it was Echo. Eliza is improving in her character

Guardian review of Dollhouse's 'Vows' and 'Instinct'. Anna Pickard looks at the first two episodes of Season 2.

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Liked it. :thumbsup:

They seemed to cram a lot into just the one ep. I thought Amy Acker was great in this, her pain really came across. :)

Oh dear, so now Ballard`s lieing to Echo. It didn`t take long for him to start using her for his FBI-type work. :(

Hee to Sierra`s imprint being totally oblivious of her own ethnic background. :lol:

Ok but nothing special.

The Dr Saunders / Whiskey stuff was probably the most interesting bits.

Like DeWitt's new hair. :)

Really nice to see Alexis Denisof :) glad he's managed to escape that black hole he seemed to have disappeared into the last few years.

Ditto. :)

Looking at IMDB, there seem to be plenty of why doesn`t he work more threads - one of them says that he had bell`s palsy. :unsure:

:ermm: yeah apart for his appearance in HIMYM, he didn't do much

Poor guy if thats true. :(

what Tom said :)