Dollhouse: Season 1, Episode 10: "Haunted"

Dollhouse:
Season 1, Episode 10: "Haunted"
Grade: 8.0

While “Haunted” in many ways gets back to a lot of the one shot episodes that were at the beginning of the show, it is a very intriguing episode. For the first time on the show I really cared about the engagement. I have been interested in other engagements on the show involving Echo but I really found myself totally intrigued by Echo’s or rather Margaret’s interactions with her relatives. It was pretty obvious it was the son early on but whatever, I still found myself captivated by the story and actually somewhat impressed with Eliza’s acting (even though Dichan is such a better actress its ridiculous). I also liked how the main plot of the episode suggested the possible eternity of life that the Dollhouse can offer. I am sure that they are setting that up for something that will eventually come up even though it won’t get to come up because it will probably be cancelled.

I really liked seeing Topher interact with someone that he connects with. We essentially got to see what Topher’s perfect day would be like. I wonder if that day ends with him having sex with the active or if he even uses a girl every time. Topher however will always to me remain creepy and difficult to sympathize with.

On the Ballard/Mellie front we have some intense stuff going on. Ballard has to deal with knowing that Mellie is a Doll as she asks questions about the Dollhouse. He does not know how to deal with this predicament so he basically deals with it by having angry rough and hatred filled sex with Mellie. He finds out that November’s real name is Polly but she has a bunch of different names and mug shots it looked like.

Overall this was a solid episode that for me showed that they could go back to the old format of the show and have a compelling episode unlike the earlier shaky episodes.