The conventional wisdom is that one should give a Joss Whedon program much longer than you would give a show produced by just about anyone in the known universe because it takes you THATLONG to realize the full scope of what’s involved. This is a fairly recent worldview considering that viewers knew pretty much what “Buffy” was about from the pilot, and that includes the abortive pilot that never aired. Same with “Angel.” But because of his body of work, Whedon himself should have our trust. Not the program itself, but Joss.
So I’ve been fairly restrained, waiting to see the overall concepts, waiting to see where Joss and his merry band of pranksters was going with this. And I find that, at the end of the season, as engaging as the last aired episode was…
If I never see another episode…oh well. And that’s because the show never got past the major problems I had with it initially.
First of all, the show is an actor’s dream job. “I get to be somebody totally different every week!” The problem is that it’s difficult to become emotionally invested in your lead when your lead is, by requirement of the show, a cipher. Echo has no personality. Basically, Whedon is gambling that viewers will be interested not in Echo, but in Eliza Dushku. That we’ll care about her because we cared about her in two other series that were much better than this. But how are we supposed to care about a character about whose background we know nothing? Okay, yeah, it can be done. We knew nothing about “The Prisoner.” But that was the entire point of the series—he was a determined everyman fighting for his identity against a symbol of totalitarianism. Echo is simply a vehicle for Dushku to do something different every week and for her to be whoever the writers need her to be that week. She brings no baggage. Unfortunately she also brings no reason for the viewer to become emotionally involved. “Did I fall asleep?” she always asks. Yeah, well, there were several times where I was watching “Dollhouse” on DVR and I suddenly found myself asking the same question, and the answer was “yes.”
We also have a raft of supporting characters: a madame, an assortment of pimps (including a rapist pimp who is punished for it because…well, because you only get to rape them if you’re a client, basically) and the FBI agent who is determined to find her because the concept says he has to. The majority of the interesting developments in the series centered either on him or on the fractured villain Alpha, kept off screen until two weeks ago. But they’re not the lead character. Echo is. She’s the protagonist. And the protagonist should be the one whose goals and desires drive your story. That’s just Writing 101, and “Dollhouse” proves why that rule is a good one. Because if you ignore it, you wind up with a story that’s unfocused and ungrounded.
True, she’s something unique in primetime: A heroine who is a damsel in distress and doesn’t know it. And that’s fine if you’re doing a two-hour film. But if you’re going to sell that week in, week out, then you’ve got a problem. The penultimate episode underscored why the show bugs me: It draws direct parallels to “Sleeping Beauty.” Jane Espenson’s subversive script had a number of female characters, including Echo, bìŧçhìņg about how much they hate that fairy tale because the protagonist is not only a moron—she arguably got herself into this by being at the castle and poking spindles—but then she just lies around and waits to be rescued. And they’re right, which is why the most interesting (the only interesting one, really) character in the Disney version is Maleficent. Basically Espenson deconstructed the entire series and underscored its central flaw. Echo (or Caroline as she was previously known) willingly got herself into this fix and now is waiting for someone else to get her out of it. So, y’know, props to Joss Whedon for signing off on the script, but it just brought the show’s shortcomings into focus.
Second, the show has moral ambiguities up the whazoo that it simply doesn’t seem prepared to handle. It’s like the old bit about “Your mouth is writing checks that your body can’t cash.” We’re watching the adventures of people who willingly signed over their bodies to have done to them whatever the clients want. They’re prostitutes. Worse: Since they’re unaware of what they’re doing, they’re prostitutes without the courage of their convictions. THESE are who we’re supposed to care about? Putting a prostitute at the heart of a reworked fairy tale is a dicey proposition. Even “Pretty Woman” was accurately lanced by Ellen Gleghorne on SNL when her Queen Shaniqua provided a six word review during “Weekend Update”—“Cinderella story?! She was a whørë!”
The series attempts to address those very issues, but even when it does, it’s not telling us anything we don’t know. It’s not as if we’re being presented with a situation that we initially find acceptable and then have characters present us with points of view we hadn’t considered. Any viewer with a working moral compass is going to get the whimwhams from the concept going in.
“Dollhouse” might work better if an entire futuristic society were created in which the Dollhouse is considered a normal functioning part, and you have one individual challenging the status quo. But even the show’s own concept has it as an outlaw notion, tacitly supported and protected by the rich and powerful. We’re watching a show about rich man’s toys from the point of view of toys that don’t have a point of view.
It’s easy to say that it’s misogynistic since you’ve basically got women being used as sacks of meat for male fantasies. On the other hand, you’ve got men in the same fix. So neither gender is being particularly well-served.
I’ll grant you, the final aired episode provided enough twists and turns to thoroughly engage me. But by the end, we’re dámņëd near back to status quo, with the only slight wrinkle being that Echo seems to be having stirrings of her previous identity. An identity about which we know nothing and care less.
Will I be back next season, if there is one? Probably, because I like Dushku and I like Whedon, and even poorly executed Whedon is better than a lot of shows at their best. But I don’t have a ratings box on my TV, so whether I watch it or not doesn’t matter. But this series has fatal flaws from the get-go, and they’re all so thoroughly engrained into the concept that I honestly don’t know how they can be fixed.
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I have to confess I record the first two episodes on my DVR and delete them without watching them. From the promos it looked like a “sexy” show so I never payed attention to it. I think the same thing happen to me with Firefly. The promos made the show unappealing to me. I was wrong with firefly. I should have known better with Dollhouse.
@Tony:
You might have been wrong about Firefly – but Dollhouse? I don’t know. The reason I watch it are exactly the same as pointed out in the text above:
Dushku is not only cute but also very talented and i am a big Whedon fan, so I haven’t lost my hope yet.
Still: It took me 2 episodes max to get absolutely attached to Firefly. This one here – not so much.
Although I thought it was interesting I never thought it through: The plot makes it nealry impossible to tell a real story. It seems like a 12-episode-audition tape for Eliza. That’s cool. But imho that’s not enough to get people to fall in love with the show…
Of course, most of the first half of the series wasn’t really what Whedon wanted to do originally – but he had to let the FOX execs pee in it so they’d like the taste better.
Must have worked – it lasted longer than Firefly and got run in order.
Of course there are tons of moral squickiness involved with the Dollhouse; that’s what we’re SUPPOSED to feel. It’s a squicky situation all around. But rather than detracting from the show, I feel that’s what gives it its legs. It’s unique. Caroline et. al. did, in fact, sell themselves into slavery, and it is morally reprehensible, but it’s engaging because you want to know WHY. And it challenges the viewer to ask themselves what they would do if they were offered this contract in the face of other options. At what point would you feel you have no other choice than to subjugate yourself to the Dollhouse? The motivations of the Dolls, pre-Doll state, is fascinating.
And then there is the question of the soul vs. the personality, and how much of one crosses over to the other. Ballard insists there is a residual, permanent, undeniable soul that resides within the Dolls, and there are examples proving him right. Caroline was a crusader; Echo has repeatedly been shown as a fighter, even in her Doll state. Alpha was a psychopath, and that leaked out during his attack on Whiskey. And although Dolls are supposedly neuter, Victor experienced attraction to Sierra.
I personally love morally gray stories. This is one of them, where you question everybody’s decisions and motivations and I find myself intrigued by how the characters rationalize what it is they do. I’m sure the challenge implicit in loving the show is part of what is hurting it, as more and more people watch TV for generic escapism and sensationalism, but for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing, Dollhouse is incredibly rich in moral ambiguity and I deeply hope it gets picked up for another season.
The problem isn’t moral ambiguity. I like shows with moral ambiguity. The problem is that you have protagonists who have willingly made themselves victims. We’re being asked to care why they would do this, which is asking a lot of the viewer, and at the end of the first season we’re really no closer to finding out why and further away from caring.
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Why would they do this in the face of other options? I can think of lots of reasons. There’s always reasons why people do things. What makes for good fiction is establishing a base level for a character’s personality and then exploring why, based upon what we know, he does what he does. Why would a young man who grew up in a loving family climb a tower and start shooting people down with a high powered rifle? Why would a promising medical student instead decide to become a stand up comedian?
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We have no base line for Caroline. We have no base for any of the prosti–sorry, Actives. We meet them as blank slates, and they have no personal goals and no ambition except what other people layer on them.
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Their motivations are fascinating? Fine. Let’s explore them. Oh, wait. We can’t. We can only do it in the abstract, from a distance.
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Is it possible to do an ongoing series with no character growth? Sure. “Mission: Impossible” comes to mind. But you weren’t tuning in to watch fascinating motivations or moral squickiness. You were tuning in to watch the good guys outthink the bad guys. You can’t have a series all about exploring morality and ambiguity when your protagonists are blank slates who cannot learn or grow or question.
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Well…you CAN. But your series is flawed.
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PAD
Echo being a cipher is what MAKES her engaging, because the viewer can – like any client of the Dollhouse – imprint whatever they want onto her. Rather than trying to find a character trait one can identify with, we’re left to put our own motivations onto Echo. She’s anyone and everyone. When you can make a character be anyone you want, everyone can find some of themselves in her.
I think it’s clearly been indicated that the Dolls CAN display personality traits that are, pardon me, echoes of the person they once were. We’ve seen Echo consistently showing traits of Caroline. No matter how much Topher tries to deny it, I think Joss is throwing a little “Jurassic Park” in there – nature will prevail no matter how much science will try to deny it.
The promise here is that the characters WILL grow, despite the Dollhouse’s attempts to prevent it. And that’s when all hëll is going to break loose.
I’m curious to hear how you would repair what you see as flaws in the series. What would make you care about Echo et. al.? What would you like to see?
And as for the viewers investing themselves in characters with no personalities, well, how many people watch “Rock Of Love” every week? XD /yeahiwentthere
True, the characters do show hints of their former selves.
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But that’s not very satisfying to me. In a typical episode, Echo spends about 30 seconds showing hints of a real personality, then the rest of the episode is a programmed personality. If you add up all the Echo personality that we saw through the entire season, it would be less than what you see from Adelle showed in one episode. It’s like going to a restaurant hungry and only being served the appetizer.
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Plus, I didn’t like Caroline. Actually, this episode’s guest actress for Caroline made her much more sympathetic than Eliza has. I like Eliza Dushku, but her performance of Caroline was not a character I cared about.
I don’t understand your first paragraph. It sounds like you’re saying that Joss Whedon’s shows require a longer commitment than most shows in order to realize the full scope, EXCEPT Buffy and Angel? But aside from Dollhouse, wasn’t Firefly his only other show? And wasn’t that just like eight episodes?
Nooo, I’m citing the philosophy that many hardcore supporters of Whedon’s work put forward: That his shows require an investment of many weeks to fully understand what he’s up to.
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PAD
I tried to watch, but even with Eliza Dushku, and Patton Oswalt (HILARIOUS COMIC), even with the Whedon’s name attached, I couldn’t get myself involved in the story. And I rode out 5 years watching B5 develop.
Oh, okay, I get it now. I don’t know how I missed that the first time I read it.
I don’t think the problem is really that it takes a while to understand the premise of the show, but that it takes a while for Whedon to really hit his stride with one. Both Buffy and Angel, while they had decent first seasons, really became something worth praising with their second seasons. So no, while the first season of Dollhouse may not have been anything memorable, I am cautiously optimistic about the next season.
My problem (and it’s a big one) with DOLLHOUSE is that it seems to be about rescuing Echo, or about Echo rescuing herself — only that isn’t what she wanted. In the pilot we learn, for the Big Mysterious Unrevealed Reason, that Caroline was in some sort of trouble and signed herself up for the Dollhouse Project (or whatever it’s called) for two years. (Incidentally, how do you make sure they’re honoring a contract if your memories are being wiped? Do they make an agreement with a third party to make sure that it’s being honored?)
So if Echo regains her memories, or someone rescues her, isn’t she back in the same situation that led her to join up in the first place? That, to me, is a BIG flaw in the goal of this character: We’re told she needs to be rescued from or escape from what she willingly joined.
I think the fact that they might not have known what they were signing themselves up for is part of the reason you have sympathy for them. Did they tell them they might actually be sex slaves some of the time?
We have no reason to assume they did not. We have no reason to assume anything. It’s just one of the many glaring omissions that make it impossible for the viewer, even after an entire season, to get a true grasp of what the stakes are. “Oh my God, they’re slaves!” Well, except they signed on voluntarily. “But perhaps they didn’t know!” But perhaps they did. “They’re innocent people!” Or maybe they’re willing prostitutes. “Echo needs to be rescued!” Or maybe after five years they’ll just say, “Your contract is finished, go in health.”
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There is a difference between gray areas and just being maddeningly vague. After a full season, we still don’t know what the stakes are or who the players are. Could I continue to watch “Dollhouse” on that basis. Well, to quote another Whedon character, Spike: “Yeah, I could do that, but I’m paralyzed with not caring very much.”
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PAD
But I think that’s what interests me, and what I think in some ways the series is about. Everyone’s assuming Echo needs to be rescued…but what if she doesn’t? It’s no coincidence that the two-parter that closes the broadcast season is about two characters teaming up to break her out of the Dollhouse…and one of them turns out to be the villain. Just because Ballard loves her doesn’t mean he’s not projecting his own needs onto her just as much as Alpha is.
Echo might just be where Caroline wants her to be. And finding that out interests me enough to keep watching, at least.
I actually found the season finale very unsatisfying.
The bit about Echo remembering a little of who she used to be? That’s *exactly* where we were beginning of the season. The first several episodes all ended with her giving some little hint of being more than a doll. Seeing that again felt like a step backward.
I also felt like they removed some of the threat of what Alpha represents. Characters kept talking like Echo could be the next Alpha, so I figured that meant she could burst out and remember all her past identities like Alpha did. They hinted at that strongly in episodes like ‘Target’ where she remember past versions of herself. But no, that’s something that can only happen when something weird happens in the chair. So now there’s no chance that Sierra can “composite” in the middle of a mission, track down the guy who put her in the dollhouse, and ninja his ášš. The “composite event” idea seems less threatening now.
Plus, the last five minutes were cliched. They chased the villain as he held a hostage at gunpoint and fired shots at them randomly, then he tossed the hostage aside and got away while the hostage dangled from a ledge. Okay, it’s kinda funny that the “hostage” was a cartridge, but that’s like a meta-joke in the middle of a serious scene.
There was one thing I thought was really strong. This episode really got across the idea that the Dollhouse is a place for people who hate themselves, and that’s not just the dolls. Alpha’s need to “kill” his original self, Paul calling himself “nobody,” Boyd’s observation that “there’s always a girl,” these things gave me a better sense of what type of person ends up in the Dollhouse than anything else in the series. That should have been a focus much sooner; I still have no idea why Ballard was so obsessed with the Dollhouse before he even knew about Caroline.
I’m in pretty much the same boat as you, PAD. It’s a show designed for actors and writers, not for viewers. I’ll be happy to watch it again if it comes back, but it has too many faults for me to say that FOX shouldn’t cancel it.
Dammit, a rant that long needs paragraphs and I forgot the superfluous periods. I really wish this site supported blank lines.
I never got past the second episode of Dollhouse, mainly because those first two episodes gave me no reason, none, to watch a third.
The pilot pretty much lost me when they tried to expand the premise beyond the whole “whørë of your dreams” notion. If my daughter was kidnapped, I’d want a real negotiator, not a blank slate who’d been imprinted with a computer geek’s notion of what a negotiator should be (and who, parenthetically, would get me shot in the course of not actually succeeding in getting my daughter back).
Also I’m unclear as to how they can stay so sooper seekrit that the FBI laughs at their very existence, yet their security so obviously leaks like a sieve. Plus in the second episode they’re flying a bunch of black unmarked helicopters around a public hiking area. But nobody knows who they are. Right.
Bravo to you for sticking with it, Peter, but your review just convinces me that I was right to stay away.
You bring up a good point, Keith. When ‘Studio 60’ was around, PAD made that point that the comedy skits that the characters wrote weren’t that funny, which undermined the idea that they were genius writers. That first episode of Dollhouse had the same problem, it failed to show that they could make a hostage negotiator who was better than a real hostage negotiator. That hurts the whole concept, right off the bat.
It’s a time issue. Sure, you want an expert negotiator…but you don’t have time to vet someone, check their background and credentials, maybe have to worry about the kidnappers thinking you’re communicating with the cops, maybe have the hostage negotiator communicate with the cops…
Why go to all that trouble when you can just make someone with all the necessary skills, right there? (And she wasn’t imprinted with “a computer geek’s notion of a negotiator”, she was imprinted with the memories and skills of an actual negotiator. The reason that the father got shot was because one of the guys was planning a double-cross all along, and her figuring that out was why she did succeed in getting the daughter back. Which she, um, did, you know. Did you and I watch the same episode? 🙂 )
We all watched the same episode, but we’re talking about different things right now.
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You’re talking about the motivation of someone hiring the Doll. Keith and I are talking about how well that worked out for him.
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First, let me address your point. While the businessman might not have time to vet a real negotiator, the same is true of the Dollhouse. This businessman had never ordered a negotiator from the Dollhouse before. Thus, he has no more reason to trust an unvetted Doll than to trust an unvetted negotiator. That episode even showed him expressing doubts about the doll’s abilities, thus harming the idea that he would automatically trust them to make something that works untested.
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Now for my point, that the results he got don’t do a good job proving the premise of the show. The show depends on us, the audience, believing in the dolls. For us to believe that a doll programmed to be a negotiator would be better than a real negotiator, we have to see the doll do a better job. We didn’t see that. We saw the doll do okay up to a point, then she had a breakdown when confronting the bad guys. Yes, she provided the info that finally stopped them, but that wasn’t because of the design of her program or anything else inherent about dolls. She knew who the bad guy was because of a long-shot coincidence. That’s not compelling.
Ok ,now I dont feel so bad that this show never grabbed me.I loved Quantum Leap where Sam was someone different every week but I had an emotional investment in Sam and Al.Moral ambiguity ..SOLD.The Wire,The Shield,Nip/Tuck and several shows like that are mandatory viewing for me.These shows all had at least one character I liked in some way .
I just never felt that involved in these characters.More to the point they never gave me enough to want to care about these people.Honestly ,I watched in the beginning to see Eliza Dushku then it was just not enough.
Eliza,Amy Acker and Tamoh Penniket can be very good but I just never was grabbed by any one’s performance.Admittedly I did not watch many episodes but a lot of that had to do with never being grabbed by the show.That and every week I kept hoping the guy programming them would get stabbed in the neck and die horribly.One of the most annoying characters on TV ever.
Peter, you’ve eloquently summed up the reasons why I couldn’t get very far in this show. I wondered if I simply wasn’t be fair to it. After all, I LOVE Firefly, but I watched a couple of episodes of it when it was first airing and thought “meh.” Even so, I just couldn’t bring myself to really dive into Dollhouse. When people ask me why, I’m just going to point them to this blog entry.
Peter David: Why would a promising medical student instead decide to become a stand up comedian?
Luigi Novi: Viewed from the outside, some may at least see stand-up comedians as people capable of becoming stars who make millions, if they’re that talented and lucky enough (even if most don’t). An example that I can think of that I think underlines the point even better—and is more relevant to this blog—would be:
Why would a promising medical student instead decide to draw comic books for a living?
Sure, we know that it worked out well for the founder of Wildstorm Comics, but most people outside the comics industry probably don’t realize that the chances of that are even less than those for a standup comedian.
Thanks again for touching the problems with Dollhouse, Peter. Everything you said is pretty much the reason why I stopped watching it at least a month ago.
Actually, Luigi, I was referencing the film “Punchline” starring Tom Hanks.
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PAD
And for a real life example there’s Graham Chapman
Ah. Thanks, Kathleen. I remember the commercials for that film, but never saw it, so I didn’t know his character was a med student.
Btw, how do you choose a photo icon for your posts?
I have no idea. I’ve uploaded this icon to several accounts, including a Livejornal account, but I can only guess that that’s what this site is accessing. I have to type in my name and e-mail every single time I post, even after all posting on this site for a few years now, so I find it bizarre that it doesn’t know my name by it knows my icon.
WordPress uses Gravatar for those little icons. You can sign up for free, and assign an icon to your e-mail address for when you post comments.
With the exception of the episode two weeks ago, I’ve watched every week of Dollhouse. There are things about it I like, but if it doesn’t come back next year, like PAD said, oh, well.
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As I stated on PAD’s first thread about this show, back in February, I have several questions about the Dollhouse and why it exists. Have, not had. None of my questions have been answered. To give a specific example, I said:
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If the “Dolls” were, say, androids who could handle situations ordinary humans couldn’t, it might make sense in certain situations to go to the Dollhouse for help. Though that would imply that the clients know the Dolls are androids. Otherwise why wouldn’t they go to “Negotiators R Us”?
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Maybe the Dollhouse is meant to handle those situations that can’t go through “ordinary channels” for whatever reason. But that doesn’t explain the need to program the “Actives” rather than just have people with various skills “on staff.”.
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We should have some idea why the Dollhouse exists. Morally gray stories are fine, but I think Dollhouse would work better in that regard if we’d seen some indication of a conflict between staff members regarding the morality of what they’re doing. Boyd Langton seems to genuinely care about Echo, as a person. I don’t get the sense that he regards her as either a pet or as a robot that can be interchanged with another, if necessary. I kind of hoped he’d turn out to be Ballard’s contact on the inside, the one that sent first Echo then November to him with messages confirming the Dollhouse’s existence. We still don’t know who that is. You’d think that by the season finale, we’d have gotten some hint.
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If not that, I’d have hoped we’d have gotten a sense that Langton was conflicted about what they were doing, whether he voiced his concerns or not.
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Initially, I wondered if Echo would become more and more self aware, and that she’d have to fake her way through being a “Doll”, but the show clearly didn’t go that way. In fact, if it had, it would’ve been a nice reveal if it turned out Echo was a plant, sort of an “I was a Dollhouse Active for the FBI”; and that Topher (her ally on the inside) faked the process of making her a “Doll.”
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That might have been cool, and might’ve given Eliza Dushku even more acting challenges: Caroline pretending to be Echo as well as Caroline pretending to be Echo, as imprinted with some other personality. But none of that happened. Instead, for all intents and purposes it became the Paul Ballard Show.. As the season went on, I tuned in mainly because I was interested in Ballard’s story arc. His search for the Dollhouse, and his obsession with finding Caroline– a woman he apparently doesn’t even know– kept me interested. Why was this task so important to him?
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I have to admit, I also liked the reveals regarding the identities of Victor, November and Whiskey. The first two were especially interesting, as it had the potential of creating an atmosphere of paranoia in Paul Ballard. He might begin to wonder who else might be a doll. Who could he really trust?
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If Dollhouse returns for a second season, I hope that all our questions and misgivings are addressed. I’d like to think that Joss Whedon had anticipated our questions and had answers prepared; but frankly he should gave already given us some of them.
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Another thought occurred to me. If the show were set in a future political environment akin to the Cold War, it might make sense to have the volunteers programmed with certain personalities apparently sympathetic to the enemy power. Rather than send someone in to play a part (with the risk that he or she would either get caught or would actually go over to the other side), the Dollhouse could program the “Dolls” and “plant” these actives somewhere on the other side. The “Dolls” would carry out their programming, unaware that they were double agents. They’d have no qualms about what they were doing, because they’d have no sense that they’d have done anything to feel qualms about. Raymond Shaw, but with better programming. The closest we came to that was the way the Dollhouse used Victor and November against Paul Ballard.
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Will I watch Dollhouse if it comes back next fall? I imagine so. At least the first few episodes. And assuming it’s not scheduled against something I’d rather watch.
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Rick
“kind of hoped he’d turn out to be Ballard’s contact on the inside, the one that sent first Echo then November to him with messages confirming the Dollhouse’s existence. We still don’t know who that is. You’d think that by the season finale, we’d have gotten some hint.”
So…you missed that episode? Or did you think it a coincidence that the same episode where their traitor is revealed, Ballard gets a message from the inside that they’ll no longer be able to tell him things via the dolls? Or the traitor hinting to Echo at the end of the episode that one last delayed “message” may’ve been implanted in her?
But I agree with you as far as wanting to know why Ballard became so obsessed with the Dollhouse in the first place.
Well… We really saw no indication it was Dominic sending Ballard the messages and that would run contrary to his stated purpose. I really think he and the NSA DID support what the Dollhouse was doing as long as it was contained and controlled… and it would hurt that mission for Ballard to become involved.
Instead, I really do think it may have been Boyd. Consider that he knew he’d be bumped up to the Head of Security. He could only “work his magic” sending out coded messages as a handler. He’d be under too much scrutiny as head of security.
What puzzles me is how they’ll choose to differentiate Ballard and Boyd in a hypothetical second season since Ballard is now essentially who Boyd was at the beginning and the implication is that Ballard’s story is essentially almost the same as Boyd’s, in terms of how they came to work there.
The big difference I see is that Boyd is a more paternal figure. I see his story as signing himself over to the Dollhouse in exchange for a daughter or maybe ex-wife’s freedom.
Ballard’s motivations are very clearly NOT altruistic. He wants to sleep with Caroline. I think that’s really it. Sexual obsession. He wants to get there “the right way” (a good deed instead of a million dollars) but his whole motivation isn’t really ABOUT morality. It’s that there’s a girl he wants to sleep with.
And I have a feeling he’ll wind up as her handler and awkwardness will ensue.
As for the show as a whole… I agree with a lot of what PAD said. I think it moved too slow and the entertaining action and dialogue only came about in the last few episodes. The series would be in better shape if the pilot had ended where the season ended.
I think it is a great show and that its flaws will (or would) eventually be worked around. But it’s taken too long to get us there and wasted time with standalone episodes built on an unworkable premise rather than rushing its way towards the eventual working premise of the show, which I think it’s only on the cusp of discovering twelve episodes in.
If Season Two starts out with Omega on the run, with her own personality or composite personality, and Ballard being forced to chase her ON BEHALF OF the Dollhouse, you could turn Season One inside out and have a working premise.
And to be fair, I don’t think Babylon 5 showed any great promise as a premise until the very end of Season 1.
Patrick, we don’t really know what brought Boyd to the Dollhouse. We’ve had the vaguest of hints, but not enough to say that his story is too similar to someone else’s.
Also, Ballard’s motivations are more than sexual. He was getting harassed by his superiors for obsessing over the Dollhouse in the first episode, even though he didn’t know anything about Caroline until the second episode. She’s definitely become the face of his obsession, but the obsession is more than just her.
PAD, will you be rounding-up SMALLVILLE with next week’s season finale? I’ve been utterly loving this season.
Hmm. Yes. I think you’re right, for the most part. But, there is something that I would like to know. Why exactly are we suppose to LIKE our main characters? Why are we suppose to feel compassion for them all the time? The movie ‘Payback’ works without this concept. The main character Porter is a bášŧárd. Plain and simple. He has good points but for the most part he’s a class-Ãhølë. He isn’t black or white, he’s grey. But we cheer for him to get what he wants because he’s going after guys that are, theoretically, worse then him.
That’s what everyone in Dollhouse is. They are grey. Neither black nor white. Do they all have to be that way? Probably not. But the characters we do see we can feel for because bits and pieces of their lives are eventually laid out. Even our madam is shown to be lonely and emotionally crippled on some level. Buring herself into her work is basically her way of ignoring her pain. Is her work for good? No. Definately not. But I can feel for her. I feel bad for every one of them from time to time. Well, not Alpha. I really don’t feel very bad for him at all except that he was accidentally given a miltiple personality disorder that probably made him even MORE unstable and bugfirk crazy than he had been in his real “other” life. Caused by the Dollhouse.
It is a great show? No. But it is good. There are great elements here, though, which will keep me watching if it comes back. I have questions I want answers too, and I have a feeling I’ll get them from Dollhouse faster than from, say, Lost. Which I gave up on half-way through the second season.
Writing with the caveat that I have yet to watch the series’ final two episodes, I find “Dollhouse” to have been far more engaging (through the entirety of EVERY episode) than “The Sarah Connor Chronicles”; I found myself so incredibly bored after watching the third episode (in the FIRST season) that I just quit watching. Compared to “Sarah”, a visit to the “Dollhouse” was very much welcomed. (Oddly enough, I’m actually looking forward to the new Terminator film.)
While I haven’t really decided at this point whether to stick with “Dollhouse” for a second season (should it be graced with such), the show has been a fun diversion. My only real gripe with the show is how the sex was decidedly one-sided–male client paying for the “girl of his fantasy” (at least until “A Spy in the House of Love” but Adele’s little excursion with Victor somehow felt even more disturbing–although seeing that much of Enver Gjokaj made up for it). If the show isn’t renewed, well, that’s par for the course for my TV viewing. I’ve gotten used to losing shows, to the point that I’m very reluctant to start watching any new show. I’ve figured that if I like a show, the odds will be against the show’s lasting even a full season (especially if the show airs on Fox).
Now, if we’re talking about a show that deserves a very swift death, I nominate the latest addition to Fox’s Sunday night “Animation Domination” line-up, “Sit Down, Shut Up”. Whatever executive greenlit that piece of @#$% needs to be waterboarded while staked out on a fire ant mound. I watched the first episode and I honestly couldn’t believe how UNfunny the show was (and I thought that “American Dad” was unfunny–compared to SDSU, “Dad” is a laugh riot). And considering some of the voice talents connected with the show (Kristin Chenoweth, Jason Bateman, Henry Winkler, Cheri Oteri), I certainly hope they were paid huge sums for their time because I think the show is a huge waste of their talents.
My only real gripe with the show is how the sex was decidedly one-sided–male client paying for the “girl of his fantasy” (at least until “A Spy in the House of Love” but Adele’s little excursion with Victor somehow felt even more disturbing–although seeing that much of Enver Gjokaj made up for it)
Well, at least they threw you a little bit of shirtless Tahmoh Penikett action, also.
You’re an idiot.
It generally helps on places like this to indicate who you’re talking about. Mr. David? Some other poster?
I love Dollhouse and pray they air the 13th episode. I wasn’t a fan of the first episode it was all over the place. After that I was hooked!! You deal with a lot of issues morality, mind altering (very creepy), and cell memory just to list a few. Also, where are they getting these imprints/memories from? Are these people in the attic that they are getting the imprints/memories from? I also want to know what each doll has done that has made them want to sign away 5 years of their lives to be in the Dollhouse. We are just beginning to find out bits and pieces about these characters and I want to find out more.Love the show and hope that Fox decides to renew it for another season.
I really enjoy Dollhouse, I was surprised by your posting on several fronts.
First, anyone who is married to a strong woman knows that the last thing she wants you to do is “rescue” her. Paul’s attempts to rescue Caroline are misguided. She is exactly where she wants to be. Thus, it has always been my impression that Dollhouse contained an obvious rebuttal to Sleeping Beauty.
Second, I felt the moral ambiguity was handled well. The characters (like Caroline/Echo & Mellie/November) had a loss that they wanted to forget. A child, true love, etc. So we know they were sensitive/fragile people who couldn’t cope for some reason and were very unhappy. Either as actives or dolls, they were generally happy. When Echo was “rented” to fulfill a fantasy, she believed the fantasy and WANTED to do everything she did. (Except maybe be hunted by that psycho in that one episode…)
It has been my belief that the show’s concept is more closely related to Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…
The point being that there is a difference between who you are and the part you are playing. As such, different “actives” imprinted with different personalities would have completely different results. Where I think the writers went off the rails that they did not make this clear – instead focusing on the “residual imprint” from an engagement. …That is until the season finale.
So I disagree about viewers not being able to empathize with the main character. It is not that Joss is banking on viewers liking Eliza Dushku, it is that Joss is banking on viewers being able to distinguish between the girl and the role she is playing.
Having said that, I think Eliza Dushku is talented, but wrong for Echo – which may be the show’s failing. In my view, a more fragile & accessible actor (like Enver Gjokaj) would have been the right choice. I have to believe Summer Glau or Julie Gonzalo or even Michelle Ryan (with English accent) would have been far more engaging and interesting to watch.
Having said that, if there is a Season 2, I will probably watch it.
Speaking to the idea the Caroline is exactly where she wants to be and doesn’t need to be rescued, I think it would be a pretty hilarious FU ending to have her wind down her contract, be amicably released, and have no ethical qualms about anything that had happened. Paul would be revealed, as you said, to be totally misguided, and Echo was mentally and emotionally fine along.
I will bet $10,000 to anyone that this is not what happens.
Okay, number one, I’m not sure what your deal is in terms of your hurt tone. I’m discussing the writing shortcomings of a TV and you act as if I’m kicking your puppy in the teeth.
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Second, I’m not averse to a series focusing on prostitutes. In the case of “Dollhouse,” I wouldn’t even mind if the focus of the series was on the type of people who would willingly contract themselves into this particular line of work that involves everything from endangering their lives to having sex with total strangers. But we don’t have that series because, thanks to the series, we know nothing about any of them. It’s like being in a classroom and you’re asking me to be intrigued, not by what’s on the chalkboard, but the chalkboard before it’s been written on and after it’s erased.
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Third, for what it’s worth, I’ve stated in the past that I stand with George Carlin when it comes to prostitution: Selling is legal. Sex is legal. How can selling sex be illegal? For that matter, if I’m going to hold to the belief that a woman has a right to choose what to do with her body when it comes to abortion, how can I contend that she forfeits that right when it comes to the act that can result in pregnancy?
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My problem with “Dollhouse” isn’t whether I approve of them or not. My problem is that I don’t know anything about them one way or the other to care about them. And since that’s a major underpinning of the series concept, that is–to me–a problem. I don’t see it as “Alias.” I see it as that Eliza Dushku was jazzed by the notion of being able to play a variety of characters a la “Alias,” and the rest of the concept is geared towards trying to make it different enough from “Alias” not to be seen as a rip-off. In that, they succeeded. But I cared about Sydney Bristow and I don’t care about Echo, and that’s because I learned more about Sydney in one episode than I’ve learned about Echo in one season. My comment about Dushku isn’t me speculating; it’s what she said in interviews. I think Joss Whedon’s intent wasn’t to create uncomfortable empathy; it was to work with Dushku again and develop a series that would interest her enough as an actress to come aboard. In that, he succeeded. Kudos. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s asking us to care about a bunch of ciphers every week. That is a fundamental flaw, and that’s not a “small writing formula.” If the audience doesn’t give a dámņ about what happens to your characters, then your story is flawed.
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If the series speaks to something within you, that’s fine. I don’t resent you for that. So it would be nice if you extended me that same courtesy and ditch the patronizing attitude.
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PAD
“We’re watching a show about rich man’s toys from the point of view of toys that don’t have a point of view.”
Yes. And those toys are actually us. At least, that’s one of the ways I view the show. It could represent how we as a culture are pulled into stories so easily, a new story every week, a new adventure. And at the end of the day, we put the story away and go back to our blank lives.
And you can kind of see that in the last scene. We see Topher, shaken by recent events, filled with doubt, fear, guilt. The memories of what he’s just experienced burned into his mind. And here’s Echo, clean, no baggage, sinless. And she feels sorry for him.
I know I’m in the very tiny minority of people who love this show. And I can’t even explain why except that it touches something primal inside me. It’s a show that explores a subject that’s been much on my mind lately: consciousness. What makes us who we are? Are we our memories? Our experiences? What’s left when you take that away?
I know I can’t convince someone else to like the show. I can only say that it blew me away. I’ll be quite happy to own the DVD set of the season.
“We knew nothing about “The Prisoner.” But that was the entire point of the series—he was a determined everyman fighting for his identity against a symbol of totalitarianism.”
So knowing nothing about The Prisoner is the whole point because it makes him an everyman that everyone can relate to, but knowing nothing about Echo to make her an everywoman is a significant problem? Or is the problem just that the fight for her identity is happening in her mind and only conveyed subtly, while The Prisoner’s involved lots of shouting things at No. 2?
In my opinion, the only thing that makes Echo difficult to get into is Elisa Dushku. She’s very good at doing a certain type of role, but when given an actor’s dream role that’s meant to show off someone’s range, all it really did was make it painfully obvious how limited Dushku’s range really is. It’s made even worse by seeing supporting cast members like Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman are regularly acting circles around her. If someone like Summer Glau had been cast as Echo, the reaction to the series may’ve been much different.
Also, I get the feeling that we’re not actually supposed to like Caroline all that much. Whenever we’ve seen her in action, she’s revealed herself to be overly naive, and has a tendency to rush into things way over her head. I know I’m not the only one who really liked seeing how awesome Echo became briefly at the end of the finale, and was disappointed it was all undone instead of her going and taking down the Dollhouse now that she had the skills and intellect to do so. It was frustrating to see her return to square one from that, and I think that was the whole point. Challenging us to think about how much better a character Super-Echo was, and yet…wouldn’t the ‘right thing’ be for this character we don’t particularly like to get her own body back?
[Full disclosure: I am a fairly die-hard Whedonite, and thus more forgiving than most, especially for a first season show.]
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If I understand you correctly, a lot of your dissatisfaction with Dollhouse stems from a lack of information – about the characters, their motivations, and the Dollhouse itself – but that’s exactly what makes it so interesting to me. The show refuses to hand us answers to complex mysteries and moral questions on a silver platter. It offers up hints, questions, sometimes even discussions and differing viewpoints, but ultimately we the audience must make up our own minds. This very quality has led to some really interesting discussions, both on the web and in real life.
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You gripe that you find the supporting cast more compelling than the lead, but that’s nothing new to me. I often find “the hero” less interesting than the people around them. This is even true for Buffy and Angel. Heroes have a very narrow scope in which they can operate and still be heroes. Echo, whether she knows it or not, is the hero of this story, which constrains the ways in which she can be written.
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As for:
“Basically Espenson deconstructed the entire series and underscored its central flaw.”
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I don’t see this parallel as a flaw. I see it as an opportunity to reexamine one of our culture’s most familiar stories. Was Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty a chump for acting as she did? Well, sure, taken from our modern viewpoint. Echo/Caroline may or may not be. We just can’t tell yet.
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A lot of the complaints I’ve been hearing about Dollhouse are eerily familiar to those I heard from theatergoers leaving after Fellowship of the Ring. It’s only the first chapter of a much bigger story. The best is yet to unfold if folks will just be patient. I mean, the first half-season of Buffy ain’t a whole lot to look at compared to later seasons either. The first season of The X-Files told us almost nothing.
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More and more I wonder whether audiences with shorter attention spans have created trigger happy network executives or if it’s the other way around. Perhaps there’s no way of knowing now that the cycle is in full swing. But for those of you who gave up on this show after a few episodes, you have no idea what you’ve been missing.
The difference between this and “Fellowship” is that “Fellowship” took three hours to tell the first chapter of a trilogy, the outcome of which was readily accessible to anyone with an interest and a library card. “Dollhouse” took twenty two hours to tell the first chapter of a story that may or may not continue beyond that first chapter and no one has any idea how much long it could go, what the outcome would be, or whether it’s going to have anything remotely satisfying as a conclusion, presuming it concludes at all. So in the former instance, the complaints have no foundation; in the latter, I think it’s understandable.
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Everyone views entertainment through the prism of their own experiences and interests. There have been plenty of TV shows, movies, etc., that have spoken to me deeply while others shrugged and said, “Eh.” In the case of “Dollhouse,” it doesn’t speak to me, and that’s because my prism includes demanding that we have some sort of minimal context for understanding why characters do what they do. That is, by design, absent in “Dollhouse.” And that is a problem for me. Not so much of a problem that I’ll stop watching the show; as I said, even middling Whedon is better than a lot of people when they’re at their best. But it remains, in its concepts, flawed on a writing level.
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To me, it would be interesting if they adopted a “Lost” model. If in flashbacks to the Actives’ lives before they signed on, we see various events that have a thematic parallel to events they’re experiencing as Actives. And we have an opportunity to see how they handled the experiences on their own and now as Actives. Thus would we be shown some of their reasons for signing on. To me, “Dollhouse” would be interesting if what they were doing was learning from their experiences so that they would be better equipped to handle life once they reentered it. Stories are all about the hero’s journey. If the hero doesn’t remember the journey, what was the point of the trip?
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PAD
I agree .. sort of. We’ve seen that some Actives retain some memory of their previous lives and imprints. So the person at the end of the contract, with subliminal hints of all those things they don’t consciously remember, will be different than they would have been without the time as Actives. My question, then, is – what happens to the people who’ve completed their terms?
Yeah Jerry, we get hints. I just hope that it grows beyond hints very soon. At the end of the second episode Echo mimicked something she saw during her adventure and I thought that was great. Not just because it was character development, but because he was a hint that something big was coming.
Well, we’ve seen the big thing now. We’ve seen what happens when Echo remembers every personality she’s ever had. She becomes… wait for it… pretty darn normal. Not psychotic, not super powered, not out on a quest for vengeance, just a fairly well adjusted person with some morals.
Then she went back to being the stoned five year old again. So hints of a personality aren’t good enough any more. It’s time for a real personality to build on.
To me the problem with Dollhouse is the same problem with Echo. She can play any role and be the best there is at it, but despite what the finale implies she has no core for the audience to latch onto. The show is the same thing. From spy thrillers to whodunits to action movies, the show plays with genres and it does it well, but it has no real “personality” of its own. An in-depth examination of the ideas underpinning premise might have helped it develop one, but Whedon only makes passing swipes at the moral and philosophical questions that the Dollhouse raises. (Man On The Street really didn’t accomplish much.) This isn’t surprising since his strong suit has always been dialogue and character rather than plot or theme, but it makes the show difficult to enjoy as anything other than a turn-off-your-brain guilty pleasure.
While Dollhouse does have some genuinely cool moments, it mostly leaves me wondering how the concept would have turned out in the hands of different writer.
Really good points, Peter.
I enjoy the show a lot, but since the beginning, I was always wondering who I was supposed to be rooting for. I wound up rooting for Paul, for most of it. But… now what are we supposed to think?
While I would definitely call the puppetmasters that run the dollhouse “pimps.” I am not sure I would go as far as to call the people that willingly signed up for the process “prostitutes.” As least not to the full extent of the word. I tend to view these people more like volunteers who sign up as a guinea pig for a drug trial, or a psych experiment. They agree to the process, they allow the experimentors to run their tests, and then they leave. There are a lot of unknows for a human lab rat, they might not know what the testers were testing, (but they accept the risk), they don’t know if they were in a control group, and they don’t know if there are any unforeseable side effects. The dolls are the same way — just to much more of an extreme. They still have choice in signing up, they go in knowing they’ll be kept ignorant of many things, and they know they’ll be able to leave at the conclusion — baring any unxpected side effects. And both the the human lab rat and the doll both go in knowing what kind of compensation they will be getting – which factors into their original decision.
This is rather long winded, but, again, given that the dolls (original core personality) is not doing the sex-for-money thing, I can’t really label them prostitutes.
I know that, as a guy who deleted the show from his DVR before he’d finished watching the pilot, I probably have no room to talk. However, I’ve read PAD’s comments about the show, and Whedon’s work get around, so I feel vindicated.
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The only way I see the show getting better is by becoming something completely different. At the start of Season 2, Echo wakes up and goes, “Holy crap, my name is Caroline. What am I doing here?” She then breaks out of the Dollhouse, and they send other agents after her, people who are strangely familiar. She only manages to elude capture because her imprinted personalities begin to phase in and out, allowing her to draw from a large pool of knowledge and skills (of course, this could very easily become deus ex machina). Perhaps she starts freeing other Actives, and two “warring factions” arise of former and current dolls.
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Other than that, everything PAD said is true. If Echo’s personality is just a bunch of data on file, why couldn’t Echo just die and have another Active become the main character. There’s no reason, which means the show does not have the grounding to be consistently compelling. Glad I tuned out. Wake me when Joss gets kicked out of Hollywood Elite status and really pours his heart into a series again.
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Oh, and since I love saying it with utmost conviction to those who hate hearing it, Firefly deserved to be canceled.
“Wake me when Joss gets kicked out of Hollywood Elite status and really pours his heart into a series again.”
Really? That’s the opposite to what I was thinking. My reaction to Dollhouse is that he wrote a show that was great for writers and actors (himself and his friends) but not so great for the audience. It needed to be *more* Hollywoodized, in that it needed a bit more focus on entertaining the crowds and not so single mindedly playing with his own questions about morality.
I feel the same way you do. What I meant by “Hollywood Elite” was more from a fan perspective: that is, he’s one of those writers who will draw big crowds to everything he creates. And he knows it. He doesn’t have to try that hard anymore to get a series on television. I actually saw a quote of his after Firefly was canceled that went something like: “To have that story in my heart and head and not be allowed to tell it anymore was a true tragedy.”
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My first response to that comment: screw you. Do you know how many people wish they could get one chance to make a television pilot, and you’re complaining because FOX canceled your third show for crappy ratings and audience numbers?
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I want people to see that Joss Whedon can flop, so that he has to convince us all over again that he is a great writer. He did it a couple of years ago with his X-Men comics because he was proving himself in a new medium, and I want him to do it again.
MrBlake
“Oh, and since I love saying it with utmost conviction to those who hate hearing it, Firefly deserved to be canceled.”
If the “Mr.” you put before your name is to indicate some sense of respect, good breeding or quirky butler charm, then please note that your personality eradicates all sense of any of those things.
People who visit this listing obviously have a care for Whedon or the show or the actors or some other aspect of Dollhouse. If you don’t like the show, try to follow the example of this site’s host and say so in a somewhat constructive and vitriol free manner. Or your opinion will likely just be dismissed as troll-ness.
I’ve loved a lot of his work in the past, but I just couldn’t make it past the half way mark with this one. And pretty much for the reasons you spelled out.
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From what I’ve heard from others I may look in at the start of the next season, but it’ll really have to start addressing those things from the get go.
Honestly, I don’t think this review fully articulates a decent counter to anything the show’s touted. Firstly, there’s very little to constitute the reasoning behind Echo being a damsel, to a point where her own body tells her conscious mind that she abandoned an essential part of herself. As a matter in fact, the melancholy nature of both the clients and the actives has been emphasized on countless times yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feel compassion for them. Do you honestly believe that prostitution is some flippant condition of a careless human being? Because a lot of people who resort to such measures to satiate some feeling of hopelessness usually don’t have such blunt reasons for doing so, we’ve been shown particularly in the episode “Needs” that the actives are all people who are ridiculously unhappy with their current condition. I guess this is somehow different than people watching the Sopranos or Nip/Tuck or Damages then? Should we not feel compassion for the actives because they’re supposedly prostitutes?
Also, in relation to the issue of rape, I find that implying what was done to Sierra compared to the active’s engagements isn’t at all fair. Dolls meander around their spa-like environment with virtually no personalities and minimal intelligence. Imprinted actives are different personalities altogether, this is a procedure that all of the actives have consented to thus making them more or less willing. In her default personality, Sierra can’t intellectualize feelings or desires and, for the most part, doesn’t have any complicated views on human relations. She was exploited in a time where she was mentally impaired whereas actives are imprinted with lush, full personalities that have perspectives and are consenting, just as consenting as their primary hosts.
I also didn’t find “Briar Rose” to underscore the show’s main arc at all, if you watch the episode “Needs” Echo/Caroline has a foggy idea of where she is and she’s appalled to a point where she holds Topher and Adelle Dewitt at gunpoint and makes an attempt to liberate all of the dolls. I would say that’s pretty proactive for an alleged damsel, no? Also there was something of a point made in Ballard’s infiltration ultimately serving no major service to Echo as she’s shown the capability to comprehend her surroundings to a certain extent, she even combats Ballard though she’s misguided. Not to mention there’s no real logic in this notion that Echo even wants to be saved in the first place, she doesn’t even know the origin of her primary personality yet enough to judge her decision to offer herself up to this underground organization.
I feel as though your issues with the show were precisely the issues Joss Whedon would want his viewers to raise and yet I believe it should be brought to the next level and not simply taken at face value. The Dollhouse has been challenged intellectually from the inside on numerous occasions from the pilot and forward, without that tension between both sides what would constitute the conflict any one hour drama needs? With regards to the status quo, Ballard liberated November and obviously is using his new position at the Dollhouse to get closer to Caroline/Echo not to mention the fact that he’s been a consistent character who’s actively opposed the Dollhouse. Would you prefer that it be played from a different angle? From Ballard’s perspective as the persistent FBI agent looking to shatter the ideologies of a corrupt organization to save his Mary Sue? Because I would find that to be terribly cliche.
I also am surprised that so many people jump to judge Echo/Caroline, someone who actually hasn’t been fully explained as of yet. Is November a “moron” for having fallen into misery after her daughter died? Is Sierra a moron for being a victim of what looks to be some kind of exploitation from a bitter lover? I think I’ve found myself feeling a tremendous amount of compassion for the actives in the Dollhouse because they’re predominantly victims of circumstance who’ve been brought to utter desperation in an attempt to escape their lives. Whedon’s relying on us to be open-minded enough to ask ourselves what it would take to bring a person to this point, what horrible catastrophe would cause someone to forfeit themselves and dissect their conscious mind from their bodies? I’m okay with not knowing about Caroline, I’m okay with Echo’s vacant personality because heavily investing on one character to be the axis of a television show isn’t practical. Joss Whedon writes for ensemble casts and I think the questions he raises with the actives are sufficient enough so that we, as viewers, are allowed to evolve with Echo in finding her own sense of self.
I’ve found that you speak of this show as though it doesn’t have enough introspection and I don’t believe that’s true at all. Dr. Saunders’ revelation about her own origins has quite a bit of darkness to it, Echo confronting Caroline about her abandonment of self plays highly into the shows message, “Needs” exposed a whole bevy of people who seem to have felt hope died within them, Ballard’s been shown to be actively opposing the Dollhouse while raising many of the points you do, Boyd’s been shown to have a different take on the Dollhouse altogether slightly off of Ballard’s, and we’ve already seen the consequences of an engagement gone wrong. Would you prefer the Dollhouse have it’s titular centerpiece tumble to the ground over a few episodes solely on the basis that it’s wrong?
Normally I’d restrain making accusations but seeing as how you’ve not cited episodes from the show too heavily or even characters, I feel like you haven’t seen the show in its entirety and I believe you should familiarize yourself with it a bit more if you intend to critique it.
Mr David,
I can almost understand where you and some of the other commentators here are coming from…EXCEPT for one crucial pertinant fact that you all seem to have overlooked in your critique. (Or at least certainly no-one’s mentioned it much here..)
You’re saying that essentially that viewer’s sympathy is difficult to engage because these characters chose their fate…Umm..Really?..
Because didn’t we find out in the episode ‘Needs’ that Sierra didn’t choose to be a Doll at all, but was instead made into one after turning down sexual advances from a well-connected man?
And if there’s one exception to that rule, if the Dollhouse(es) are doing that with her, who’s to say they haven’t been doing that with others too? For all we know Victor could have been forced into it too, Or Doctor Saunders?..I mean doesn’t that revlation change absolutely everything?…And who’s to say that we know the full circumstances of why Caroline ended up there? Not many shows with any real mystery to them reveal everything about their main character in the first season…There could have been a myriad of factors responsible for putting her in the situation, where she felt she had little choice but to go down this road, and who’s to say that the dollhouse or figures behind it, didn’t put people like her into these types of situations in the first place, and then dangled the convenient promise of a way out in front of them to get them into the Dollhouse in the first place? We simply don’t know yet. Becuase Dollhouse wasn’t planed as a one season mini series. There could be so much more there to be revealed.
(You wrote for Babylon 5. Would it have been fair to judge that series, and it’s charcters on the basis of what was revealed about them in the first 12 episodes of it’s first season?)
“even poorly executed Whedon is better than a lot of shows at their best.”
‘Nuff said, sadly.
~ Ben
If you thought you knew what Buffy the Vampire Slayer was after the first episode you obviously didn’t watch any episodes after the first season. It’s amazing you would say that you like Whedon and yet fail to see that this is probably the greatest work he has ever done. Possibly even better than Firefly.
The common thread to all of the criticisms I’ve read of Dollhouse seems to be the misconceptions that the critic brought to the party about what the show should have been, not what it is.
The only concept I brought to the party was that I wanted to become emotionally invested in the protagonist. The series concept is designed to make that difficult if not impossible. I totally get that others may feel differently. But it would be nice if there was some acknowledgment that my disagreeing with them might have some basis in shortcomings on the show’s part rather than mine.
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PAD
I feel that in general, people either want way too much from a show, or they want to be spoonfed. Everywhere I go, for EVERY show, people seem to never be satisfied by anything. This is the problem with writers like M. Night Shyamalan, Whedon, Abrams, and the like. We’ve come to so expect the twists and turns, depth, long story-arcs, etc. that we’re never truly satisfied. I grow very weary of people moaning and complaining all the time. I agree with some of the points on this thread, and I’m always up for a good discussion, but as usual, I get the sense that people are more critical that is necessary. Firefly is a great example. How many people were so turned off by the “language” that they never gave the show a chance? How many people thought the idea of a ‘western in space’ was just too strange of a storyline to even watch the first episode? Because of those people, we never truly get to see where Whedon was going with the show. I like a good healthy debate about the story, characters, strengths and weaknesses and the like, but I think overall, people need to relax and enjoy the ride.
Season two has been confirmed.
I’m sorry, I can’t read all 65 comments, but this commentary has lapses worse than those it accuses the show of. there is a lot of sex worker bashing, for a start. someone is a prostitute, so why should we care about them? huh? secondly, motivations for becoming dolls *have* been explored. sierra was enslaved against her will because a man who wanted to have sex with her was way too arrogant to take no for an answer. november was unable to cope with the aftermath of her child’s death. perhaps dollhood was an alternative to suicide. and caroline was busted breaking into the research lab of a powerful and connected organization. 5 years of unconscious slavery or who knows how many years in jail? I’m not saying I would have made the choices they made, but who is to say? the comment about, oh, it’s only ok to rape them if you’re a client – well, yes. the dolls require a serene and unconflicted environment. the house has to remain clean. not to mention the glaring fact that in the prostitution scenarios we have seen, the dolls were programmed to want to have sex with the people they were sleeping with – it was consensual for *those* personalities. this is exactly the sort of issue of possibility of consent whedon is engaging with. but certainly the traumatic rape of sierra is not the same as sierra engaging in sex she perceives as consensual while it is occurring. not to mention the issue of betrayal of trust by her handler.
and finally, yes, I went into the show asking, why should I care about these characters who are involved with an evil organization? but the fact is, we are all complicit in things we do not support, by the nature of our collective existence and the situation we have inherited. boyd cares about echo, though she is a doll or an implanted personality. and we are asked, further, to care about caroline, to care about the person who inhabited and evidently in some way continues to inhabit the body that is now echo.
I’ve become invested in this show, but I view it less as Echo’s show than an ensemble piece. It works better if you see how all these people and emotionless drones relate to each other. To be fair, the show is called Dollhouse, and not Echo. (But she is the star and the producer…well, nevermind). One of the most emotionally powerful arcs in Season 1 was Ballard and his Doll-Next-Door. That final scene they had together was fantastic and emotionally understated. “I’m nobody”. The actress was really cute too, I wish they had more in there.
Alan Tyduk needs absolutely more screentime. Unfortunately, he’s jumped over to the V remake. He was amazing in his limited two episodes (but he is in the unaired 13th episode to be on the DVD, “Epitath One”.)
I think there’s an interesting, subtle aspect to the show about just how mind-boggilingly insanely powerful this technology is. Live forever? to be a God? To wipe out human existence as we know it? Crazy stuff.
I share your views on this show, Peter. I sort of like it, but I don’t care about it at all.
The worst part for me was the episode (at the university) where they finally did show Echo’s real personality — and it turns out Caroline is a completely unlikeable @sshole.
Peter,
Have you seen “Epitaph One” yet by any chance? Without giving away any spoilers, it seems to address a number of your concerns head on. It’s great stuff.
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