Dollhouse's "A Love Supreme" (Season 2, Episode 8): some random thoughts

Spoilers.

I wont go crazy with Hulu clips, since it takes too much time and ends up also being kind of culturally chauvinistic, and basically people reading this post should probably have simply seen the episode anyway.

I had a few disconnected thoughts about this episode, which I saw moments ago, that I thought maybe worth a share. All on my old hobbyhorse: influence and allusion.

Since I seems to think in twitter posts:

1. The cold open reminds me of Kill Bill -- the music, the way Alpha's head is kept off screen, the focus on feet, the desert, the voiceover, blades, themes of love. It reminded me both of Bill approaching the bride in the beginning of the movie and of the Sheriff approaching the bride in the church.

2. Which doesn't mean anything except at the end when Alpha activates all the dolls in the dollhouse to go crazy and fight in order to screw with our girl hero, -- the setting and action is straight out of the House of the Blue Leaves, sans budget. This episode of the Dollhouse is bookended with the bookends of Kill Bill 1.

3. Alpha was very much Frank Miller's dandy Joker from Batman: Dark Knight Returns: the focus on the suit, the reference to Beau Brummel. But it was by way of Heath Ledger's Joker: the monologuing, the knives, the bombs.

4. Look also to Grant Morrison on Batman. When Echo finds Alpha's first victim notice the rose petals on the black and white checkered floor -- a staple of imagery of Morrison's ambitious failure in Batman: RIP, which also introduced his new Joker.

5. Notice also that Echo and Alpha are kind of set up as these post-human super-men because of their multiple personality thing -- which is how a psychiatrist describes the Joker in Morrison's Arkham Asylum.

6. Notice also that the unaired season finale of Season 1, Epitaph One, jumps into the future, then kind of jumps right back to the present for the start of season 2, which we now feel alluding to that future. Same thing in Morrison's Batman.