For God’s sake don’t make me watch any more.
We’re doing a Joss Whedon roundtable hopefully week after next. In preparation, I thought I would watch Dollhouse…but it’s so crappy I don’t think I’ll actually make it all the way through. I like Eliza Dushku; she’s charming, if not exactly talented. But charm can only take you so far.
Anyway, what’s interesting to me in the first few episodes is how they work as self-parody of television writ large. Echo (that’s Dushku) is a mind-wiped young woman who gets some new personality transferred into her in each episode, at the behest of some paying client who wants a customized toy human to play with. Each of the scenarios is basically a clichéd and indifferently realized genre exercise: Echo becomes a profiler and deals with kidnappers; echo goes into the woods with an outdoorsman and then it turns out he’s a psychopath and she’s in a slasher movie; Echo is programmed as a swaggering art thief in a caper gone wrong. The blips in echo’s program function as a kind of wink at televisions myriad plot-holes. In one episode Echo is programmed to protect a pop singer, and keeps protecting her because the programming/plot demands that she should, even when, as far as character consistency goes, it makes no sense. In that art thief ep, Echo is mind-wiped half way through, becoming completely useless—echoing, again, the erratic competence of tv characters, who are as hapless or as effective as the plot requires. The fact that Dollhouse is itself wretched television only makes its meta-commentary on the wretchedness of television more perfect. It is itself the slipshod awfulness it mimics; Whedon is a fool performing a perfectly brainless imitation of a fool.
Dollhouse isn’t just a parody of television, though; it’s a parody of Whedon himself—and particularly of his feminism. Each of the personalities injected into Echo is resourceful, intelligent, determined. They’re strong female characters all. But they’re strong female characters that are made up, and visibly hollow. More, they’re strong female characters who just about all seem designed to be raped. Echo is often programmed to have romantic and sexual encounters—and such encounters are of course not consented to by Echo’s original personality, wherever that may be. For that matter, the insertion of the personalities into a unwitting body is itself a kind of assault. The creation of strong female characters is conflated with skeevy, snickering, and generally horrible abuse. This juxtaposition fits rather too neatly onto, for example, Buffy, where the strong female lead is frequently punished and shamed for her strength, almost as if the whole point of creating strong women is to run them through a sadomasochistic fever dream.
I only made it through episode 5, and in theory 6 is where things start to somewhat improve. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there…but I guess I do grudgingly admire the start of the series for its unremittingly self-accusatory awfulness. It’s hard to think of another series that so self-consciously uses its own crappiness to indict its medium and its creator.
Episode five? You made it two or three farther along than I did.
ep3, the pop star one, is I think one of the worst episodes of television I have ever seen.
Jesus, that is one fucked-up premise. Plus it comes off as a ripoff of Quantum Leap.
Hah; hadn’t thought of Quantum Leap in a while.
I’m a Whedon fan but those first several episodes are bad, maybe even the whole first season. Even when it gets better it’s completely forgettable.
There are a couple interesting ideas buried in the show, but the first six or so episodes are almost unwatchable. It also falls apart at the end. Still, to judge the whole show on those early episodes is unfair. Prime wallow does not occur until the last couple episodes of season 1. The show is severely flawed, but I admire it’s eventual ambition.
Season one does indeed suck. But if you can find a bootleg copy of the original unaired pilot, you’ll see Whedon at one of his better moments. Unfortunately, Fox said no to the pilot, and then he had to chop it up and rewrite not just the first episodes but the organizing principle of the series (it wasn’t going to be action-heroine-of-the-week). Unlike with Firefly, the first season never recovered from the false start. And season two is bizarre because it was essentially pre-cancelled.
Eugh… Dollhouse… I watched 4 episodes and couldn’t handle it. My wife, however pushed along and found that the finale of season 1 was surprisingly interesting. The final episode of the first season (Epitaph One) is basically where they wanted to take the show but never did or never could. It involves a kind of post apocalypse caused by the Dollhouse technology. It’s not a bad premise, but like you mention, it’s such an awful mess that by the time you get there, you can’t believe they didn’t lead with that to get you hooked. Worse yet, the second season never follow up on that premise. Instead it’s sluggishly moving along with it’s “genre-of-the-week” format and it’s misguided execution.
It surprisingly manages to be both awful and ambitious at the same time.
It’s no masterpiece, but it gets significantly better.
I actually only started watching episode 6, so I have no idea how awful the first five were (though I’ve heard).
Hope you muster the strength to watch a few more episodes.
Oh, Dollhouse…
It’s so inconsistent, and Eliza Dushku’s range is a seriously limiting factor (and don’t even get me started on Helo from BSG, who is legitimately TERRIBLE), but I’m fascinated by its ambition. It might be the best single argument against the auteur theory of TV, since it seems like every single world-building instinct is hamstrung by the circumstances of production (bad acting, pushback from the network, the limits of network vs. cable shows, etc etc)
I’ve watched the entire first season, because I wanted to see how the ideas would evolve and I the PKD-ish conceits were close to my heart, plus I had hopes it would develop into something more colorful.
Alas, it only gets more contrived and “clever” and I ended up just skimming the second season. Certainly, the two part prologue episode is interesting stuff but it doesn’t make up at all for the painful slog of the early first season. And depending on your penchant for “world-building” and twisty plots, the second season might actually be your cup of tea but it just didn’t have anything interesting to say, it just kept revealing more stuff.