Save Dollhouse? Only if you promise to make it better!

Last night, someone mistakenly thought that Eliza Dushku would look convincing as a dominatrix.  She didn’t.  She looked like that mousy girl who shows up at parties and tries to get attention even though she’s actually not that smart.  So she tries dressing in ways completely out of character and is just more awkard.

But she did the right thing for most of the show, stood around a waved.  Dollhouse is going off the rails, after a very brief period of actually being good.  It’s a shame because there were actually a couple good scenes in the episode:

• Helo finding out that his lasagna-bearing neighborly girl-friend is actually a sleeped doll.  That scene was very compelling, even sad.  His character is great, because he sort of has that “beautiful mind” level of obsession, but when he turns around it turns out that even the person he trusts is part of “them.”
• Echo doing the interrogation of the staff.  Usually Eliza Dushku (spelling may vary) seems out of her depth, but she seemed to carry this segment off pretty well.  But, as some sort of compensatory effect, Sierra crossed over from cool to ludicrous.  Only Victor was still engaging.

But there were so many bad parts:

• Dominic was not that convincing as head of security, he was even less convincing as an NSA plant.  It’s not the actor’s fault, the scripts gave him wildly inconsistent motives from show to show, and the explanation for being an agent was too thin for even this kind of show.
• Echo was once again, at the end of the show, lauded as being ’special’.  Why?  Because she gave Tofu an idea?  She is seriously becoming the stupid one that everybody likes so they act like anything she does is just brilliant.  Even though everyone knows better.
• That chip.  In this universe, apparently, anybody who is technically smart can identify a piece of average-looking electronics as “super-secret NSA” stuff.  Not only that, but why do these fall off of agents and get found?  Do they flake off the skin?
• The gun shot.  Really?  He shot her, blood splatter across the window, and it turned out to be a small puncture wound?