Before Severance, Dollhouse Ended Its Mystery Box With A Bang
Welcome to the distant world of 2020.
Joss Whedon made a name for himself as the voice of a quipping generation as the showrunner behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Marvel mastermind behind The Avengers. But in between the two, he had an era of overlooked masterpieces, including the now-iconic space Western Firefly and strike-era passion project Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
But after those, Whedon created what may be his best — and least known — series, a sci-fi parable that foreshadowed the premise of Severance with a distinct network TV flair, all leading to a finale that was just crazy enough to work.
Dollhouse’s finale skipped to its imprinting technology sparking the end of the world.
Dollhouse had a very simple premise: Echo (Buffy alum Eliza Dushku) is an Active, someone who has taken a hefty sum to have their personality and memories completely removed to become a customizable, bespoke escort for “engagements” with the ultra-wealthy. It became the perfect engagement-of-the-week series: one week, Echo is implanted with the personality of a hostage negotiator to help rescue a kidnapped girl, and the next she’s hired by a billionaire to replace his late wife.
That pattern was completely upended in the Season 1 finale, “Epitaph One,” which abandoned the setting altogether to flash forward to 2019, a world where the imprinting technology has run rampant, completely destroying society as we know it. It’s got all the hallmarks of a good post-apocalypse story: some characters have joined communes, others have gone crazy, and there is, naturally, a subculture of biohackers who use slang like “log off” instead of “back off.”
The only problem? It never aired in the US. Due to weird contract language, Fox only aired Episodes 1-12 of Dollhouse, leaving “Epitaph One” as a DVD extra. At first, it looked like that would be all she wrote for the series, but a Season 2 renewal came as a shock for all involved. “Fox forgot to cancel my show… Very awkward,” he told SciFi Wire in 2009. “They looked and said, “Oh, this is our bad. We forgot to cancel your show. You’re going to have to make more.”
Dichen Lachman, Severance’s Gemma/Ms. Casey, played Sierra/Priya in Dollhouse.
So what do you do when you need to make another great finale, but you’ve already flashed forward into the future? Simple: you flash a bit further into the future. “Epitaph Two: Return” is set in 2020, as Echo and her fellow Actives (including Sierra, played by Severance’s Dichen Lachman) try to put the world back the way it was, free from all imprinting.
It’s not a perfect ending, that would require at least another season. But it managed to satisfy so many questions from the regular episodes without being related to them at all. Dollhouse could have done amazing things with a third season, but “Epitaph Two” was the best use of the time it had.
Nowadays, Season 2 renewals are even rarer than they were in 2010. But with Severance already planning its third season, questions of where the show could possibly end are starting to bubble up. Maybe the perfect way to say farewell is to skip all the devolution and go straight to the apocalypse, trusting the audience to keep up along the way.
