Hey uberwench,

I'm a Buffy fan. Really. I own the DVD's and everything. I even write
fanfic, that's how into these characters I am. I think Buffy was a
brilliant, groundbreaking show (which unfortunately went off the rails
the last two seasons, but still.) But I'm not part of the cult of
personality surrounding Mr. Whedon and when I see the hardcore Whedon
fans laying on the fawning superlatives like a trowel whenever they
describe one of his projects I always find myself thinking, why can't
these people look at this stuff a little more objectively? Don't they
understand people would take their opinions so much more seriously if
they would simply be objective? "Dollhouse has become one of the most
subtle and masterful explorations of character and humanity that has
ever aired on American television" is way, way over the top; in fact
it's risible. You can't just say it's great, you can't just say you
really love it, you have to call it one of the best things in the
history of everything and I'm afraid I'm forced to wonder whether or not
you've actually seen any other American television. If Dollhouse is "one
of the most subtle and masterful explorations of character and humanity
that has ever aired" then what is The Sopranos? Or Deadwood? Or The
Shield? Or The West Wing or even Veronica Mars? (Or Buffy for that
matter?) Because they're better than Dollhouse by miles and miles and
miles so we need even better superlatives. Are they TV dramas forged out
of solid gold and then sprinkled with diamond dust?

I agreed with you for awhile. Echo's character arc in the beginning was
nowhere near enough to hold viewer interest? Check. Eliza Dushku was
occasionally overwhelmed by the material? Check. Lachman and Gjokaj are
more versatile and therefore their characters, even as erased drones,
were still more interesting than Echo? Check. All we're left with to
root for are the Dollhouse employees and they're basically a bunch of
human traffickers? Check. But then the review unfortunately heads off
into Joss is God land and I had to leave the train. Let me offer a few
rebuttals if I may. In my opinion Dollhouse is a show with a flawed
premise and structure. A character drama without a character, centered
around an organization that enslaves people and sends them out as
brainwashed prostitutes or, depending on how you look at it, to be
raped. Right there, you've lost lots and lots of viewers. Agent
Ballard's quest to find the Dollhouse was painfully plodding and it was
integrated into the main story of the show so haphazardly in the
beginning that whenever a Ballard scene came up it felt like I had
changed channels. The fact that Tahmoh Penikett brought not an iota of
charm or charisma to the part meant that there was literally no one to
watch: our choices were brainwashed drones, sleazy human traffickers,
Boyd Langton or this boring FBI guy. And Boyd Langton did seem concerned
for Echo's well-being but at the same time he was in charge of
delivering her to the clients who were raping her/hunting her/putting
her life in danger with alarming regularity, so he wasn't exactly the
hero of the story. So we had a premise that guarantees an early lack of
character development for the lead, a backdrop that many people
considered sleazy and offensive, and a cast that kept all its best
actors (Williams, Gjokaj, Lachman, Acker) out catching fly balls in left
field while the major screen time went to the actors that simply weren't
as interesting (Penikett, outright miscast; Dushku, not always up to the
challenge and constrained from being able to show off any of the charm
she exhibited in previous roles by the fact that Echo isn't really a
person yet; Kranz, hitting the same notes repeatedly as Topher "look how
clever I am!" Brink.) Epitaph One worked so well in part because the
main cast were tiresome. In Epitaph they were all allowed to essentially
play new characters, Dushku's screen time was limited, and the new
characters introduced--Felicia Day and her friends--were actually a lot
more engaging than most of the regular cast ever had been. That's not a
good thing. That's a problem.

Adding to the problems was the fact that the show was often executed
badly. Tired engagement of the week stories tried people's patience well
into the second season while plot holes abounded: the ultra-secret
Dollhouse somehow rents out slaves to rich people all around the world
but no one has ever found out about it? Its security is so porous that a
guy can simply walk in and take his serial killer nephew out without
security even noticing? Its technology is so flawed that Echo glitches
every single week but we're supposed to believe that they've somehow
fashioned a successful business from it? And how exactly did Echo escape
from the police at the end of Gray Hour? ("There was a bunch of smoke
and she just sort of ran into it and magically none of the cops noticed
while she was carrying a guy" doesn't quite cut it but that was the kind
of plotting this show gave us.) Joss Whedon has said in interviews that
without the glitching and the security breaches and the various other
constant, constant screw-ups that there couldn't be a show and I agree,
but that doesn't mean it isn't all a contrivance on a grand scale. It's
not the same as the Hellmouth on Buffy: "there's a Hellmouth and it's
magic and it makes freaky things happen" is something one can accept in
order to watch Buffy, but "there's a super-secret illegal
slave-trafficking organization that is so inept it regularly aims a gun
at its own foot and pulls the trigger but no one ever catches them"
isn't. None of this sounds historically masterful to me; it just sounds
like a misfire that needed some heavy revision and recasting and
retooling before the pilot was ever shot. (And as for the "Fox made them
do it" argument to justify the early episodes: Fox didn't write the
scripts. Fox said, "Give us some procedurals to introduce the premise
and the cast." And Whedon and his writers gave Fox some procedurals and
they were lousy procedurals.)

Yes, the show is plumbing the depths of its own mythology to explore
identity issues now, but the problem with this about-face is the fact
that it's too little, too late. A bland group of characters people lost
interest in are now telling different kinds of stories but the problem
is the characters and the premise: they never clicked, never worked,
never became people an audience would want to spend time watching every
week. Because at the end of the day that's what it's all about: you can
talk about the human condition all you want but if the characters
showing us that condition don't hold our interest whether because of
premise (writing) or execution (acting) then that's the ballgame. Yes,
DeWitt and Brink have each had a crisis of conscience; I simply don't
care. And as for last week's Boyd Langton reveal (which I won't spoil):
it positively reeks of "let's make it up as we go along" plot twist.
Langton's behavior in all those private moments when no one could have
possibly been watching doesn't add up to the person who has just been
revealed to us. Sure, he was a tough guy, a hard guy. Maybe ex-military,
knew how to fight, did what had to be done. But this? It's fun but it
doesn't work. It really does seem to me, and I'm going to need a lot of
convincing to ever believe otherwise, that Langton's story was something
Whedon meant to get to eventually and never had time and then when the
show was cancelled he thought, well here's this character who is
essentially a cipher. So how about we do this giant plot-twist with him
just to go out with a bang? Basically, last weeks reveal was the
mythology equivalent of Echo escaping from the police through the smoke:
it happened and the writers really don't want us thinking too hard about
how it doesn't actually work. But that was always the problem with
Dollhouse. It was thrown together and sloppy and ultimately, it didn't
really work. I will grant that Dollhouse really tried to do something
different. But it failed to execute it: from premise to story structure
to plotting to casting, it has been deeply flawed and throwing such
heavy praise at it is unfairly dismissive of the television shows that
truly were great but did not have a fanbase ready to crown their
producers with laurel leaves.

--Mark

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