10 Things That Dollhouse’s Finale Taught Me

#10: No-one will visibly age in the next ten years, except for the possibility of some grey appearing in women’s hair. This is, obviously, good news amongst a sea of bad.

#9: Having characters tell other characters how cool your central character is, instead of actually showing said character actually doing anything cool, is not only not convincing, but kind of horrifically awkward and embarrassing. Especially when the character literally tells the audience “She’s so cool.”

(Note: Echo was not cool. Ever.)

#8: While I’m considering writing tips I learned from the episode: Logic is less important than fan service and shock value. But then, I should’ve expected that considering the Buffy comic “Twilight” reveal, as well as the Boyd thing earlier in Dollhouse. Still, “I’m a former psychopath” struck me as particularly convenient/lazy, especially considering Alpha served no purpose in the episode than another character couldn’t have.

#7: By 2019, Mad Max chic will have made a comeback, meaning that the only designers to have survived the brainpocalypse were Project Runway contestants.

#6: In 2019, all fights will apparently happen in a series of fast-cut, close-up scenes that nonetheless fail to disguise the fact that angry mobs apparently consist of maybe six people at most.

#5: Apparently it doesn’t hurt that much to be repeatedly shot in the legs. Equally apparently, shooting people in 2019 means that they don’t bleed.

#4: Using hair metal music for a fight scene in a television episode that is already piling on the 1980s cliches as if it has bought them wholesale may make viewers wonder whether they are, in fact, watching scenes from a never-before-screened pilot for a Glen A. Larson-produced Terminator television show.

#3: The future will be oversaturated and yellow until someone has invented – but not activated – a device that will save humanity, at which point it’ll be blue skies for everyone. Therefore, optimism affects the color of the sky.

#2: Future geniuses can invent devices that will somehow bounce signals off of clouds in the sky so that they can be transmit all around the world from an office building in the middle of LA, but cannot figure out how to add a remote control to said device, meaning that Grant Imahara from Mythbusters may be the pinnacle of human intelligence and ingenuity and it’s all downhill from here on.

#1: The moral of Dollhouse ends up “Technology is really bad in the wrong hands, but give us a decade and everything will be just fine.” Which may, in fact, be a step up from “Objectifying women is a bad thing, and to prove it, here is Eliza Dushku in skintight leather as a programmable sexbot.” So: Win?

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