Dollhouse--Even Joss Whedon Isn't Perfect

I have a confession to make: I am a huge Joss Whedon fan, yet I abandoned two of his TV creations.  Not Buffy, the Vampire Slayer or Angel; I stuck with those series until the very end (although the abysmal quality of Buffy’s last two seasons made it a challenge).  No, I gave up on his two non-Buffy TV shows, Firefly and Dollhouse.

Given the subsequent critical adoration of Firefly, my throwing in the towel after three episodes seems inexplicable.  But, as the defendant said in court, I plead guilty . . . but with an explanation.  I will lay the bulk of blame at the feet of the FOX network, which reportedly insisted that the show NOT begin with the pilot episode but instead insisted that Whedon rush a new episode into production for the premiere.  The result, an episode called The Train Job, proved to be arguably the worst episode of the series (IMDB has it ranked as the third worst).  I have since purchased the show on DVD and watched the episodes in their correct order, and the results are MUCH better.

Secondly, I still believe that the show pushed the “space as the old West” metaphor WAY too hard.  Okay, settlers on new planets in the future may have a culture similar to that of the old West, but it wouldn’t necessarily look like the American west circa 1870.  I find the stronger episodes of Firefly (and the exceptional follow-up movie Serenity) are the ones that minimize the Western paraphernalia and instead deal with space ships (Out of Gas), Government control (Ariel), and behavior modification (the movie Serenity).

I gave up on Firefly after three episodes, but I stuck through Dollhouse until the end of season one.  Once again, network interference played a part in my initial disappointment.  The first few episodes of the series, in which humans called “actives” could be programmed with different personalities, mostly featured stand-alone episodes in the vein of “Who will Elisha Dushku be this week?”  I have read that this was on the insistence of the FOX network, and that Whedon had wanted to start the series in the direction of the shadowy conspiracy of the Rossum Corporation that eventually emerged in season two.  Despite a weak beginning (one of the minor knocks on Buffy is that the seasons were slow to get going), I stayed with Dollhouse.

A bigger problem with Dollhouse was that it was created by Joss Whedon as a vanity project for star Elisha Dushku.  Frankly, she couldn’t pull it off.  Dushku is a very god actress, and showed some talent for playing multiple personalities in the Buffy body-swap episodes This Year’s Girl and Who Are You?  But she’s no Sarah Michelle Geller; heck, she’s not even as good as Charisma Carpenter.  Building a show around an actress that will showcase her skill at playing disparate characters is a non-starter unless the actress is supremely talented, and Dushku wasn’t quite there.

It didn’t help that Dushku was surrounded by an exceptional supporting cast, notably Tahmoh Penikett, Enver Gjokaj, Dichen Lachman, Franz Kranz, and Amy Acker.  Many weeks I wished the show was following the exploits of Sierra (Lachman) and Victor (Gjokaj) instead of Echo.  By the way, Dollhouse must hold the record for the most cast members with really strange first names; I know actors want distinctive monikers, but Tahmoh, Enver and Dichen?

I think another problem with the concept of Dollhouse was the potential (and reality) of unreliable narration.  Sometimes an unreliable narrator can be a blessing (for example, Mr. Robot).  But with Dollhouse there were several plot twists where the revelation was that a character that we thought was good turned out to be an “active” who’d been programmed. After a few such shocking twists, it becomes difficult to invest in any character, lest we find out later it was all a ruse. Such shocking reveals are great in a Hitchcock film, but in a weekly TV series it makes it hard to keep watching.

The best episode of Dollhouse I’ve seen is the un-aired “season finale” for season one that was scrapped when the show was renewed.  The episode, called Epitaph 1, was never aired in North America but is available on DVD (and on streaming, although it is leaving Netflix on April 1, 2017).  It was a brilliant demonstration of the potential devastation that could be wrought by the Dollhouse technology, potentially destroying humanity by obliterating the concept of “self.”  My understanding is that this thread was developed in season two, and the series finale Epitaph 2 wrapped things up.  Season two is the vision that was sidetracked in season one.

I could go back and catch up with season two of Dollhouse on DVD.  However, to appreciate season two, I would by necessity have to go back and re-watch season one, and that is too much of an ask.  I don’t remember much of season one except that I kept expecting it to get better and, with the exception of the episode Spy in the House of Love, it never did.

Life is short, and there is too much good TV on to find out if a sci-fi show I passed on in 2009 was as good as people say.  I gave it a fair shot.  It’s just that it has been a long time since Joss Whedon produced a new TV series, and season two of Dollhouse is the only Joss Whedon produced TV that I haven’t seen.  I guess I can hold out until he decides to produce some more.