Here’s why it sucked:
Throughout the entire season Alpha is billed as their resident boogeyman – he’s brilliant, he’s deadly, and he’s out there somewhere plotting his revenge. And then he appears and in the climatic episode…does nothing. How is he a bad-ass? How is he a genius? How is he evil? His ultimate plan basically boils down to making Echo love him. He doesn’t try to destroy the Dollhouse, he doesn’t kill anyone (ok, he shoots a shackled waitress in the neck, but who hasn’t done that?), he doesn’t give any particularly inspiring evil speeches, and his fight with Echo is substantially shittier than her fight with Ballard a few episodes prior. He’s a lovestruck, neurotic pussy. Even his outro sucks: we don’t see how he gets away, and am I the only one tired of people running up fire-escape-style staircases while gunshots (that always miss) clang off the metal around them?
They make him into the passive villain, the one waiting in a lair for his plan to succeed – whether it be a mindwipe or a nuclear countdown – while our heroes race against the clock to stop him. He just rambles and messes with his homemade chair. Not to mention the fact that his big plan is somehow a colossal failure. Not only did giving Echo forty something personalities not make her the least bit crazy or scatter-brained (somehow she became more lucid), but it also made her immediately aware of how crazy Alpha was.
Also, as a side note, I hate when things go crazy for no reason and then people explain exactly why they went crazy. I like the unexplained. 2001 works when HAL becomes nuts for no reason at all, and then they fuck it up in 2010 by explaining how it was a programming error. The Force works in Star Wars when it’s this intangible energy of the universe, and then they fuck it up in The Phantom Menace by explaining how it’s controlled by these little Medichlorian creatures or whatever. Likewise, I prefer Alpha going nuts for no reason. But instead they show us in painstaking detail how the circuitry got messed up and the chair accidentally imprinted him with all those personalities at once. Why can’t things just go wrong? Am I incorrect in thinking that’s more scary?
There were other shitty things about the episode – the lackluster shock of Whiskey’s reveal, Agent Ballard’s ridiculous compromise, the abundance of hill-billy accents – but I think the total failure to give us the villain we wanted in Alpha is what really tanked the episode.
