Tag Archives: Dollhouse

Dollhouse.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
I just got to the last episode of Dollhouse, and far from my “OK, not great ” impression when the show started: Oh Fuck Yes!

The plot got complicated in wonderful ways, the characters became interesting and compelling, and (in retrospect, probably most importantly) the acting stepped up; Eliza Dushku (Echo) and Fran Kranz (Topher) get their “crazy” roles down perfectly by the end; Echo really does seem to shift between personalities visible from the earlier episodes, and composite states thereof (the best are the composite/Caroline transitions), and Topher really does come off as a shattered genius. Even the actors I strongly associate with previous roles mostly rolled over; Eliza Dushku as Echo instead of Faye and Tahmoh Penikett as Paul Ballard instead of Karl “Helo” Agathon stopped having that weird “third character” effect for me only a few episodes into the series, and Summer Glau as Bennett Halverson instead of River Tam, and Alan Tudyk as Alpha instead of Wash were mostly de-aliased, but only mostly; partly as a function of screen time and partly as a function of the relative similarity of the characters. It’s worth noting that three of the four character aliases are from other Whedon series.

The end of the plot arc is a solid ending to almost all the threads, and it completes the way I would have liked in almost every way: Most importantly, it works out such that the solution to a technological problem is understanding and improving technology (not necessarily the same technology; in this case it was). I pretty strongly feel that way about all sorts of tech, and in particular like that it stresses that the worst thing to do is to try to hoard or hide a technology, as that is how it comes to be abused. I was also very pleased with some of the character choices; the sympathetic interpretation of Adelle is mostly affirmed (and the odd, vaguely oedipal relationship between Adelle and Topher is just neat characterization.)
I think the only big issues is that I would have liked an extra season in the middle to develop things at a more stable pace, particularly the Boyd/Rossum plot, and the redemption of Alpha, which just kind of appear in the second-to-last and last episodes respectively.

As for the closing episode itself, the aesthetic for Epitaph Two is spectacular; it cues from Fallout and Mad Max (I believe it actually made a couple of in-joke references to each), and has the same Whedon last desperate battle feel from Serenity (which, frankly, is a good look.)

A couple of my favorite quotes from the closing episode:
Topher to Adelle: “I’ll fix what we did to their heads, You’ll fix what we did to the rest of the world — Your job is wayyy harder”
Echo: “It’s just the next thing.” (on spending years underground in order for actives to retain their memories when the world is reset… and the reset itself.)

For someone watching from the start (and everyone with even the slightest inclination toward scifi really should), do watch in broadcast order. Having Epitaph One in the middle really does enrich the mystery of the second season.

Now the last (non-terrible) Sci-Fi standing (at least until Warehouse 13 and Stargate Universe come back on) is Caprica, which has just started actually running. Hopefully it lives up to its pilot, it was promising in many of the same ways Dollhouse proved to be interesting.

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Dollhouse Renewed

Holy crap, FOX renewed Dollhouse for a second season. The best part is it looks like the renewal is based on “ancillary factors” (DVD sales, Streaming, DVR), which implies at least one major media company may be coming to understand that the video entertainment market is shifting away from broadcast TV and feature films. In related news, Sony’s CEO demonstrated a surprising grasp of new-media realties. These two little newslets are definitely the exception of late; after the disingenuous comments from Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton that were doing the rounds on the interwebs earlier this week, and all the gloomy news about print media, I was feeling like all the old media dinosaurs (the established forces in the major content industries disrupted by the advent of the Internet; print media, music, and video) were actively working to commit suicide instead of trying to adapt. At least there are a few little signs that powerful people in the media industry are looking to find a way forward that doesn’t involve sticking their heads in the sand and trying to litigate the Internet cat back into its bag.

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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.

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