Dollhouse

In my usual “Grab it off the Internet the next day” manner (Its OK for ratings, our cruddy Insight-provided DVR at least pretends to watch everything I download…) I watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse. Whedon’s record makes me optimistic for the show: Buffy was, while certainly not “good”, entertaining, and Firefly was amazing, while it lasted. The first episode isn’t enough for me to try to make a call about Dollhouse; it didn’t turn me off to it, but it didn’t grab me too intensely either. The premise is that a (evil?) company has a group of people who have had their personalities removed from their bodies, and repeatedly imprints artificial personalities tailored for clients into the bodies. The long arch plots of the show appear to be the lead character, one of the people with a removed personality known as Echo, becoming aware of her situation as pieces of other lives begin to leak through, and an FBI agent attempting to investigate the company doing the imprinting.
One of my favorite things about Joss Whedon’s shows is always his ability to integrate Pop culture appropriately. He definitely still has his sense for it; there is lots of current pop music in the background of the first episode, from big names like Lady GaGa (eugh, come on people, there is much better synthpop around), to a variety of things that sounded familiar but I wasn’t able to put a name to. The scenery also all had great current pop-culture integration; the dock scene is set to suggest the similar scene one of the Daniel Crag Bond movies (Quantum of Solace?), the motorcycle chase emulates the one from Kill Bill. That said, it all reads (to me) as a reference or homage, not a ripoff.

A few other things I will note:

• * It is “Faster” than Firefly; the long-arch looking plots developed as much in this episode as we learned about River before Serenity came out in Firefly.
• * Tahmoh Penikett is another one of those character-ruined actors; in Dollhouse, he plays a FBI agent obsessed with finding out about the Dollhouse, but I still come up with his character from Battlestar Galactica Karl “Helo” Agathon every time he comes on screen. All the main cast of Firefly is inexorably entangled with their Firefly characters for me in the same way now, so obviously it works both ways.
• * Eliza Dushku, who plays the leading character Echo, is adorable.
• * Another character, Sierra, is played by Dichen Lachman, who adds to the list of Hapa-Haoli celebrities. I recently discovered that the prevalence of this isn’t just because we’re nifty people; there is evidence that both Asians and Europeans tend to find (computer-averaged) Hapa-Haolis (or “Eurasians” in the article) more attractive than (computer-averaged) people of either race. The link is a pop-psych press release, the actual article is “Kieran Lee, et al., Attractiveness of own-race, other-race, and mixed-race faces”, Perception, vol.34, no. 3, pp. 319-340, 2005.” (FlatPress’s Font tags seem to be broken :/) I’ve been working on a paper about Cognition in Mixed-Race individuals for my Cognitive Sciences class; its neat stuff, I intend to either post the paper or something based on it in the not-too-distant future.
• * Whedon has decided to work with Fox again. Fox has an amazing track record of killing off promising sci-fi series prematurely, so don’t let yourself get too attached.

The thing that strikes me most is that premise is HIGHLY reminiscent of the back-story for Molly from William Gibson’s earlier works. William Gibson is one of my favorite authors, and the record of attempting to translate his work directly to the screen has been pretty miserable, so the idea of someone with a proven track record for making a good TV handling it is both exciting and worrisome.