Simply - it just wasn’t very good.
I love Joss Whedon’s work. I own complete series of Buffy, Angel and (the all too short) Firefly and I’ve watched them all many times.
But Dollhouse just seems so… pointless. It’s a bit like the second season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles – it doesn’t know where it wants to go, or what it’s trying to say. Being a Whedon fan, I wonder sometimes if he’s taken a back seat on this one as it lacks almost all of his trademarks – clever dialogue, playing with genre, pop culture and self-reference. It feels at times like someone else’s attempt at a Joss Whedon show.
His previous shows have all taken a simple premise and pushed it to its extremes with great results.
- Buffy – a beautiful example of using a fantastic setting to tell stories about the difficulties of growing up.
- Angel – the obvious sequal to Buffy dealing with redemption and the grey line between good and evil.
- Firefly - more redemption and the importance of family and holding on to your convictions and independence whatever the cost.
Dollhouse though – just what the hell is it supposed to be about? Prostitution? Identity? To be honest, the overriding theme seems to be ‘let’s get Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman into skimpy outfits’.
I like ambiguity as much as the next man, but how are we supposed to feel about the characters of Dollhouse, with its catologue of sociopaths, broken people, murderers and willing sex-slaves. Worse still, as it busily spins its wheels with yet another ‘imprint of the week’ episode with a tacked on ‘twist’ ending to show that there really is an arc (really! honestly!!), we all saw the apocalyptic future in the final episode of the previous season. And it looked awesome. So why do I now have to sit through a bunch of doll in peril episodes while they drip feed us plot developments that have already been revealed?
And on top of all that, we are constantly expected to overlook the fact that it’s fundamentally a show about sex-slaves and their pimps. Even if we can overlook the ethical issues (and that’s difficult when the Agent Ballard character (now a ‘reluctant’ pimp) brings it up every week), the premise just doesn’t make sense – if you had the technology to wipe people’s minds and implant new personas, why would you dick around with a worldwide network of brothels? If it’s about co-opting the rich and powerful – as has been hinted – there must be easier ways.
Anyway, I hope they can do something interesting in the final nine episodes to restore some of Whedon’s reputation. He’s promised a proper climax and they have a couple of epsiodes left to film, so we’ll see what happens (and if S2E4 was anything to go by, things are going to get a lot darker). And I’ll watch it because:
- I still have some faith in Whedon’s ability to pull something out of the bag and
- I quite like watching Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman in skimpy outfits.
