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| Joss directing Eliza |
What's wrong with Dollhouse
I've watched three episodes of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, and each is marginally better than the one before. At the end of the last one, it suddenly dawned on me what was wrong.
We started with the Season 2 stories.
Think about it. Apart from an afterthought of a scene establishing a pre-Dollhouse Eliza/Echo, there was no origin story. Buffy had that great entrance into the library, that first meeting with Giles, the slow birth of the Scoobies. Angel, when he spun off, didn't start at the detective agency - he fell into it. Even with Firefly, despite Fox's meddling, we ultimately got to see Mal's epic defeat in Serenity Valley and transition to his new life as a "mean ol' man" and find out how Book, Simon and River came to join the extended family/crew. And even with Fox's, uh, creative restructuring we still arrived quite early, just as the newcomers were struggling to fit in. And, more importantly, there was a fair amount of continuity between episodes.
With Dollhouse, there's none of that. There's in medias res and then there's ridiculous. Just maybe, after Dollhouse is inevitably canceled and Joss gets to release the box set that re-assembles the series as he'd envisioned it, we'll see its brilliance. Perhaps the fabled sixth episode where Dollhouse reputedly "gets good" is the one Joss always intended to begin with - a true pilot where we discover the origins of pivotal characters.
Even if that happens, I still feel like we started too late - and that we've already run to our season filler storylines where pop stars need to be saved from themselves and hunters become the hunted. If these had been aired after a riveting season that pulled us in and kept us watching, I'm sure we'd forgive and forget. But launching the series with them will probably doom it to failure.
You could argue that the past doesn't matter in Dollhouse, since the point of the show is how memory is transitory and interchangeable, but I don't buy that - it leaves us without any real connection to the characters. More likely, the creators plan to peel away layers of Echo's lost history and the founding of the agency, but what good will that do if there's no one left watching?
Then again, I'm still watching. Show us something good, Joss. Before we all go back to our box sets with Eliza rapping "five by five" and razzing Angel about his predilection for Barry Manilow.
Or maybe even Tru Calling. I can just hear Joss' Rent-influenced musical response to that: "Anything but that."
Yes, I am a Joss Whedon fan. But I have not seen Dollhouse. I know that Joss had to take work to make money. But after the ridiculous handling of Firefly, personally I would think twice before taking money from Fox. I will let the show die and then Netflix the series. But after this post by the penny-arcade guys, I may not even do that.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/2/27/
Actually, in true Fox form, the first episode they aired was (gasp) episode 2. Oh, and the episode aired after that was actually episode 4. You'd think Joss would've learned not to deal with Fox after the abuse Firefly got. I'm betting we never would've gotten 7 awesome years of Buffy had it debuted on Fox.
Actually, the problem I'm really having with Dollhouse is the lack of Joss humor.
> Actually, the problem I'm really having with Dollhouse is the lack of Joss humor.
Yeah, the lack of snappy, memorable dialogue is a problem. I've actually resorted to reading the Twilight books, which have wonderful verbal jousting and mostly unpredictable plot twists - at least for me, and I'm usually pretty good at predicting where a story will go. It's certainly been simple with Dollhouse so far.