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Dollhouse Tonight
The buzz is quite good. I'm looking forward to it. But over the summer, my reservations about the show increased rather than decreased. Thoughts on Epitaph One below the cut.
Everybody loved this episode. So I've watched it three times to try to see if I could get over my problems with it -- but no luck. As a story it's very entertaining and well-done -- not at all boring even watching it three times in a row. But it has really lowered my hopes for the series as a whole. Three things worry me:
1. Echoes (episode #7) was a disappointment because Caroline's backstory turns out to be a totally dull and grating cliche. I've got no affection for the character and pretty much want her to get squashed like a bug. I'd been hoping there were more layers there or that Echo, at least, would be something other than Dudleyette-do-right. Well, in Omega, it turns out that Echo just wants to do good. The only layered thing we know about Caroline is that she agreed to be wiped in the first place (that's not a small thing). But even that layer seems to be gone in Echo who reacts 180-degrees differently to her situation than did Alpha. I don't watch the Jossverse to root for pure heroes saving the day. But as of Omega it seemed more likely that this was the case. And Epitaph One just seems to say that's really how the whole show will run out. Echo will save them all, or at least be their best hope for salvation. Gag.
2. The folks who run dollhouse all have plenty of potential to be more than corporate tools. Epitaph One tells us that they will all learn their lesson. Just exactly the one we thought they needed to learn from the beginning. They were children playing with matches and they burned the house down. (Yes, that's a line -- in fact that's probably THE epitaph). I don't watch the Jossverse for stories to unfold in an utterly predictable way. But here it is. Again with the cliche.
3. At the end of Man on the Street there's an interview with a professor who says that this technology spells the end of the human race. Now that was something I could get behind. We're steadily increasing how much of human nature we can control. There's going to be an inescapable push to engineer our future generations to be smarter, better, more. We'll design better and better environments to get the otucomes we want. That's all in the mix here. Not to mention the way this technology serves as a metaphor for the way advertising and popular culture end up forming us into the people that the advertisers want us to be. So I was very enthusiastic about all the subversive ways this show could point out the subversive ways we are destroying human freedom or human nature without noticing that's what we're doing. There were a lot of ways to go. Fast forward to Epitaph One, though, and it turns out that the danger of this technology is much less insidious than that. On the contrary, it's just going to let bad people create armies so they can blow up the world. Woo hoo. Yes that's an apocalypse. And yes, this technology could go that way. But the dystopia that we could have been shown would be one where evil people had imprinted our presidents, entertainment folks and so on so that they could totally control the world and all the people in it without one of us noticing that the apocalypse had happened. My evil people are just smarter than Dollhouse's evil people -- cause really, what good is it to have a world blowed up when instead you could have billions of unwitting slaves working for you and leaving you in total power?
Whatever. The good news is that I'm sure everything in Epitaph One can be written around if Joss, et. al. decide to. All the reports on the new season are good. But Epitaph One read to me a bit like Lynch's treatment of the Shanshu prophecy... and I'm consistent enough to say I don't like that kind of flattening of meaning even if it comes from Joss himself. So, me, less optimistic.
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I mostly found myself watching it and thinking, "Um, what happened to the metaphor?" Maybe someone else can explain the connection, but how does this dystopian future relate to the whole idea that the Dollhouse is a metaphor for the TV industry and popular culture? That was the thing I found most interesting about the show (since the premise as non-metaphorical scenario makes little sense to me), and I can't seem to make this piece fit the puzzle. Except possibly to say that TV will destroy the world, which... whatever.
Also, wholly agreed on the blahness of Echo/Caroline. That, coupled with Eliza's less than stellar acting, and I find myself way more interested in the minor characters. Can someone please offer Amy Acker more money and lure her away from her new show? I think she'd make an excellent centerpiece for Dollhouse.
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Exactly! When I got all quivvery about DH it was because of that metaphor and the way it folds back onto the show itself. Epitaph just reads like a straight-up tale of technology gone mad. Throw in a huge number of interviews with Joss saying that they've been groping around to figure out what the show was, and I begin to think that the cool metaphor was only accidentally there. I miss naively trusting Joss in all things. :(
Is there anybody who doesn't think AA rocks in this show? No accident that she got featured heavily in the clips they released.
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Wordy McWord. Of course, I also no longer trust anything Joss says in interviews, so maybe they DID intend the metaphor, and the "groping around" thing is just a cover for the fact that it looks like they have no idea what they're doing, when really they're just executing it badly?
...I'm not sure that makes it better.