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I have finished watching season one of Dollhouse. Haven’t seen any of season two yet, so no spoilers for that.
As I see it, the show has a few major flaws, especially in the early episodes:
1 – Eliza Dushku. I love the girl, but she can only play one part. She plays it very, very well, but she’s not exactly versatile. Even Tru Calling was painful in parts when she had to stretch more dramatic muscles. And this show? It is about a person who has no identity, who is someone entirely different every week. You need an actress who disappears into the part. Eliza does not. I understand that she helped develop the show and is a producer; the show wouldn’t be without her. And I understand how the role speaks to her about her life as an actress, trying to find herself while being told by everyone who they want her to be. But if you were just coming up with this show and trying to cast it, Dushku’s about the last choice. Thank god for Sierra and Victor. Those guys are both entirely convincing in all their roles.
2 – Echo. I’m sorry, but I could give a flying fuck about the engagements Echo is sent on every week. I don’t care. This isn’t Pretender or Alias, where the main character plays someone else each week but is always themselves. On each engagement, Echo is a new character that I know will not exist by the time the credits roll. Therefore I have zero emotional investment in her or what she’s doing. Her life’s in danger (again)? Great. She’s functionally dead anyway, so, don’t really get a lot of dramatic mileage out of that… I know Echo’s not going to actually die, it’s her show, and since she’s not going to grow or be traumatized by the events of the episode, it doesn’t actually matter what happens to her, does it? She is a pawn. The ultimate pawn. She has zero agency. And therefore should not be the dramatic focus. I do like the fact that when Alpha grabs her to be his uberfrau, it’s clear that it’s because she looks like his victim type, not because she is the chosen one.
3 – Caroline. Caroline was an idiotic, naive girl who broke into a building because of animal rights violations (*gag*), and "voluntarily" chose to give up her willpower and let someone else control her body completely. Yes, she was coerced, but the correct answer to what could be worse than being a doll is nothing. I can’t really respect a character that allowed this to happen, I don’t care how tragic the backstory is. So I don’t have an investment in her getting herself back.
4 – Paul. I feel almost cruel for saying this, but the guy has no motivation. We are given no reason for why he’s on this quest other than he’s the sort of guy who goes on quests. It’s like Fox Mulder with no Samantha. Therefore my sympathy for his problems is limited by my lack of understanding of why he’s in this fight to begin with. Also, is it just me, or does Tahmoh hunch his shoulders weirdly? When I first noticed it, I thought he was just acting defensive, but then I realized that’s just how he stands. For a martial arts expert with a body that ripped, he sure has crap posture.
For all that, there are a lot of strong points. The idea itself is fascinating, and Joss is tackling it in a very nuanced way. He says in his commentaries that using people as dolls is unacceptable, but he allows people on the show to disagree with that, to make cases for it as altruism or as a beautiful thing. He seems to be saying that it is almost impossible not to use people, if the capability of doing so exists. Even Paul, our hero, uses a doll. Even Adele, the boss, who is the most pragmatic about what they’re doing, can’t help but fall in love with a doll. How can you not? If a person is made for you, how can you keep from using them?
Joss points out in one of his commentaries the seductive power of fantasy. That when we imagine the perfect person, the perfect interaction, it is so easy to ignore the parts of the other person that don’t fit, and that those parts are what makes them real. He goes to great lengths in the show to point out that people use other people even when there isn’t this imprinting technology involved.
It’s like he’s taking Warren from season six of Buffy, taking that startling, revolutionary, feminist moment where his ex-girlfriend, released from a love spell, calls him a rapist, and expanding that into a series. With the episode "Man on the Street," it reminded me of the statistic I was told in high school, that trinityvixen recently mentioned, that one third of guys said that if they could rape a woman without any consequences to themselves, they would. And that’s what the Dollhouse does—allows rape to happen without consequences, and you see through the interviews with people on the street that many people would love to take advantage of that, and don’t even see the problems with it.
I love that Joss is willing to put in an actual, clear-cut, no gray areas rape to show how what the Dollhouse does is both entirely different and exactly the same. I love that we get to see the man who made Sierra a doll, so that he could rape her, and that encounter is left, not with him being righteously killed, but with the knowledge that he will rape Sierra again. And she won’t remember, and he will enjoy it more. I mean, he’s taken these high voltage issues of sex and consent and control and is really digging into them. For a show that is about fantasy, it manages to avoid being a fantasy itself, and I really like that.
After so many years of genre shows with the love spell conceit, where some magic or some wish or some technology makes people (women, almost always) into sex slaves, and it is either treated as a non-issue (Supernatural) or as a big joke (Stargate Atlantis), it is so refreshing to have a show that treats it as the enormously wrong thing it is. I mean, this isn’t an issue that has a real world allegory—you can drug someone into being unresisting, but you can’t brainwash them into wanting it, not really—but it is still so nice to watch a show that has this and says hey look! It’s rape! It’s slavery! It’s murdering people and having their bodies still walk around! I’ll put up with all the show’s foibles for that.
There are other things I like too—Topher is great. He’s charming and likeable but still despicable. The show doesn’t try to hide the fact that he is an awful, selfish, immoral person, but still allows him to be disarming. To extend the metaphor of wiping as death, which the show uses multiple times, with both Paul and Adele saying it, Topher’s the executioner. He creates entire, complete people, sends them off to be used, then tricks them into sitting in his chair and puts a bullet in their brain. The fact that the creepiness of what he does is not hidden, but that the show allows him to see himself differently, is really refreshing.
And of course, you have him as stand-in for Joss, and for writers in general.
All in all, it’s nice to be watching a Joss show again, with all of it’s complicated layers and slowly revealed secrets and plot twists. I could write pages and pages more analyzing Dollhouse, and that’s a nice change from most shows. Now I just have to wait for season two to be released on DVD and then belatedly mourn its early cancelation.
As I see it, the show has a few major flaws, especially in the early episodes:
1 – Eliza Dushku. I love the girl, but she can only play one part. She plays it very, very well, but she’s not exactly versatile. Even Tru Calling was painful in parts when she had to stretch more dramatic muscles. And this show? It is about a person who has no identity, who is someone entirely different every week. You need an actress who disappears into the part. Eliza does not. I understand that she helped develop the show and is a producer; the show wouldn’t be without her. And I understand how the role speaks to her about her life as an actress, trying to find herself while being told by everyone who they want her to be. But if you were just coming up with this show and trying to cast it, Dushku’s about the last choice. Thank god for Sierra and Victor. Those guys are both entirely convincing in all their roles.
2 – Echo. I’m sorry, but I could give a flying fuck about the engagements Echo is sent on every week. I don’t care. This isn’t Pretender or Alias, where the main character plays someone else each week but is always themselves. On each engagement, Echo is a new character that I know will not exist by the time the credits roll. Therefore I have zero emotional investment in her or what she’s doing. Her life’s in danger (again)? Great. She’s functionally dead anyway, so, don’t really get a lot of dramatic mileage out of that… I know Echo’s not going to actually die, it’s her show, and since she’s not going to grow or be traumatized by the events of the episode, it doesn’t actually matter what happens to her, does it? She is a pawn. The ultimate pawn. She has zero agency. And therefore should not be the dramatic focus. I do like the fact that when Alpha grabs her to be his uberfrau, it’s clear that it’s because she looks like his victim type, not because she is the chosen one.
3 – Caroline. Caroline was an idiotic, naive girl who broke into a building because of animal rights violations (*gag*), and "voluntarily" chose to give up her willpower and let someone else control her body completely. Yes, she was coerced, but the correct answer to what could be worse than being a doll is nothing. I can’t really respect a character that allowed this to happen, I don’t care how tragic the backstory is. So I don’t have an investment in her getting herself back.
4 – Paul. I feel almost cruel for saying this, but the guy has no motivation. We are given no reason for why he’s on this quest other than he’s the sort of guy who goes on quests. It’s like Fox Mulder with no Samantha. Therefore my sympathy for his problems is limited by my lack of understanding of why he’s in this fight to begin with. Also, is it just me, or does Tahmoh hunch his shoulders weirdly? When I first noticed it, I thought he was just acting defensive, but then I realized that’s just how he stands. For a martial arts expert with a body that ripped, he sure has crap posture.
For all that, there are a lot of strong points. The idea itself is fascinating, and Joss is tackling it in a very nuanced way. He says in his commentaries that using people as dolls is unacceptable, but he allows people on the show to disagree with that, to make cases for it as altruism or as a beautiful thing. He seems to be saying that it is almost impossible not to use people, if the capability of doing so exists. Even Paul, our hero, uses a doll. Even Adele, the boss, who is the most pragmatic about what they’re doing, can’t help but fall in love with a doll. How can you not? If a person is made for you, how can you keep from using them?
Joss points out in one of his commentaries the seductive power of fantasy. That when we imagine the perfect person, the perfect interaction, it is so easy to ignore the parts of the other person that don’t fit, and that those parts are what makes them real. He goes to great lengths in the show to point out that people use other people even when there isn’t this imprinting technology involved.
It’s like he’s taking Warren from season six of Buffy, taking that startling, revolutionary, feminist moment where his ex-girlfriend, released from a love spell, calls him a rapist, and expanding that into a series. With the episode "Man on the Street," it reminded me of the statistic I was told in high school, that trinityvixen recently mentioned, that one third of guys said that if they could rape a woman without any consequences to themselves, they would. And that’s what the Dollhouse does—allows rape to happen without consequences, and you see through the interviews with people on the street that many people would love to take advantage of that, and don’t even see the problems with it.
I love that Joss is willing to put in an actual, clear-cut, no gray areas rape to show how what the Dollhouse does is both entirely different and exactly the same. I love that we get to see the man who made Sierra a doll, so that he could rape her, and that encounter is left, not with him being righteously killed, but with the knowledge that he will rape Sierra again. And she won’t remember, and he will enjoy it more. I mean, he’s taken these high voltage issues of sex and consent and control and is really digging into them. For a show that is about fantasy, it manages to avoid being a fantasy itself, and I really like that.
After so many years of genre shows with the love spell conceit, where some magic or some wish or some technology makes people (women, almost always) into sex slaves, and it is either treated as a non-issue (Supernatural) or as a big joke (Stargate Atlantis), it is so refreshing to have a show that treats it as the enormously wrong thing it is. I mean, this isn’t an issue that has a real world allegory—you can drug someone into being unresisting, but you can’t brainwash them into wanting it, not really—but it is still so nice to watch a show that has this and says hey look! It’s rape! It’s slavery! It’s murdering people and having their bodies still walk around! I’ll put up with all the show’s foibles for that.
There are other things I like too—Topher is great. He’s charming and likeable but still despicable. The show doesn’t try to hide the fact that he is an awful, selfish, immoral person, but still allows him to be disarming. To extend the metaphor of wiping as death, which the show uses multiple times, with both Paul and Adele saying it, Topher’s the executioner. He creates entire, complete people, sends them off to be used, then tricks them into sitting in his chair and puts a bullet in their brain. The fact that the creepiness of what he does is not hidden, but that the show allows him to see himself differently, is really refreshing.
And of course, you have him as stand-in for Joss, and for writers in general.
All in all, it’s nice to be watching a Joss show again, with all of it’s complicated layers and slowly revealed secrets and plot twists. I could write pages and pages more analyzing Dollhouse, and that’s a nice change from most shows. Now I just have to wait for season two to be released on DVD and then belatedly mourn its early cancelation.