I thought it interesting enough. The FBI guy has an annoying mouth; something is weird about it and it kept drawing my attention.
I’m really disappointed. I’m willing to watch two more episodes to see if it improves, but I’m not holding my breath.
So much was just garden-variety TV garbage. The premise is taken from a long line of client-of-the-week shows, from Charlie’s Angels to Burn Notice (which does it with the charm and wit you’d expect from JW, and which is so sorely missing). The fanservice, while well-executed, was exorbitant and distracting. The set up of the mysteries was transparent and not compelling. I know I’m supposed to be itching to find out the backstory of scarred doctor and her possible attraction with techboy, but I don’t actually care. Likewise with Echo’s past and why she signed on. And the bit at the end overshot “compelling mystery” and went straight to “boggling confusion.”
Also, I agree that Dushku can’t carry this. Never liked her much, and this story desperately needs a very talented, nuanced actor. The only person who really made me care was Echo’s handler - the character and the actor are both pretty good.
And while the names Alpha, Echo, and Sierra are somewhat poetic and cool, I had my suspension of disbelief completely collapse as I pictured the Evil CEO introducing a client to three impossibly attractive imprint-slaves and saying, “Here are your assigned Actives, Golf, Hotel, and Uniform.”
Of course. That’s basically the subtext for the whole premise. The opening scene was essentially a veiled conversation between a TV star and her network-executive puppeteer. (Check out the opening shot, which calls attention to the artificiality of TV with the videoscreen effect.) That, I believe, is the analogy that caught Whedon’s interest, and around which he will be building the show. He has a basic metaphorical premise underlying all of his series (high school is hell, the fringes of space as a literal frontier), and “creative executive and the character-puppets he controls” is this one.
I was really looking forward to this, because when I heard the premise, I thought it was a nearly perfect idea around which to build a TV show: it’s got the neat metaphorical hook (above), and at the same time, it’s gloriously, gloriously stupid. There’s no way the tech makes any sense; it’s obviously going to take place in a heightened fantasy world the mainstream audience will eat up. “This week, our heroes are rented by a supervillain and turned into ninjas to assault the island fortress of another supervillain!” Cue Eddie Izzard’s popcorn-eating gesture. It would be totally dumb, in a sneakily smart way. I know Joss loves the broody subtexts, but I figured that after Fox’s meddling, he would deliberately submerge the smarts and deliver a huge fistful of dumb-viewer fireworks, in order to establish the baseline for the metaphor, setting up the fantasy world with a big, goofy, and thoroughly ironic grin.
The actual show did not achieve this; it didn’t even attempt it. Joss went for the broody subtext right off the bat. In this, what struck me most about the pilot episode is just how completely out of touch with its fundamental dumbness it is.
I mean, come on: You’re a multimillionaire whose daughter is kidnapped. You have the resources to hire a shadowy organization to assist you. You have already dismissed the police as a resource. Why the blistered fuck would you hire a group to fashion you a simulated expert in hostage recovery, instead of hiring an actual expert? Does this even begin to make the remotest molecule of sense?
That’s what I mean about the fundamental dumbness of the premise. It can’t be taken seriously. The only way to make it work is to acknowledge the dumbness right up front, waving it off with a dismissive chuckle, and say, yeah, so what, look, ninjas! The last thing you want to do is to try to take it seriously, from a writing standpoint. The characters can take it seriously, but as a storyteller? That’s going to put a big knife right in the heart of audience involvement. We can forgive a lot of stupidity, as long as you don’t examine it directly. Tell us what the scenario is, gloss it over, and get on with the storytelling. The moment the millionaire father started grilling Echo on her background, the whole thing just fell apart, and it never came back.
I am now exceedingly curious to see Joss’s original pilot, to see how he dealt with this. I want to know if he went even more in that direction, missing the same point he missed here, or if he shows awareness of it, handling it in the abstract. That sort of cerebral approach is probably what spooked Fox, but I have to say, they may well have been correct. Unfortunately, being TV executives, they probably didn’t explain it very well; “more slambang!” is their default position, and is thus to be resisted, but in this case, there’s actually a good reason for it, connected at a fundamental level with the basis for the show.
I’ll give it six weeks, but I have serious doubts the show will last that long. And right now, I’m not certain that it’ll be wrong for the network to give up on it.
In tropes terms, Joss is great at ‘hanging lampshades’ on these things. 
I like to give Whedon a big benefit of the doubt, but this show was awful. The writing was amazingly bad - ‘clever’ dialog sounded forced, and they kept reverting to the old hackneyed writer’s trick of putting characters in situations where they had to explain what was going on to someone else so the audience would get it.
Plus, so much of it just didn’t ring true. Not the dollhouse aspect - you expect that to be ‘out there’. But for example, when echo took on the persona of the hostage negotiator, are we really to expect that she’s so good at it that she can predict exactly how many hours it will take before the bad guy kills the others? That she knows exactly what they are doing at every given instant. I couldn’t buy that at all.
Anyway, the first episode was a big disappointment for me. If it hadn’t been for Whedon’s reputation, we would have switched it off halfway through. In any event, I’ll stick with it for one or two more episodes, but it’s going to have to get much better than this.
Eliza Dushku’s not a very good actress, but DAMN she just keeps getting hotter. I’ll keep watching because of Whedon and her, and hopefully the show will improve.
Well, it’s not really important whether she was right about how many hours… what counted was that the other henchmen believed that their ass was grass unless they turned on Big Bad right then.
(And I think I used the term ‘lampshade hanging’ incorrectly in my earlier post. They subverted the ‘women in refrigerators’ trope, but didn’t lampshade it - they’d have to comment on the similarity to comic books for that.
Also, apparently, tv tropes got the ‘hanging a lampshade on it’ term from Joss’ writing crew in the first place!)
Last night, Terminator pulled a 1.3 rating, while Dollhouse actually improved on the lead-in by scoring a 2.0 rating.
Both, however, are low ratings and don’t bode too well.
I think idea was that she was able to predict so accurately because she’s been through it with this guy. She’s reliving more than predicting.
To put it in context, there is a subset of fandom that gets worked up over a number of things that don’t bother most readers. Women in Refrigerators is one such concern.
The old “Tell, rather than show” mistake.
Yeah… I went in with low expectations, so it was going to be hard to disappoint me, and it was disappointing. It’s junk and if Joss Whedon’s name wasn’t on it, nobody would care and it’d be dead and buried in three weeks. It’s telling that so many re3views, here and elsewhere, are along the lines of “Well, uh, it’s Joss Whedon, so I’ll give it a chance…”
While it was not well written - and to be honest showcased all Whedon’s weaknesses and few of his strengths - the real weakness, really, is Eliza Dushku. She’s a very attractive woman, and she’s a very bad actress by any measure. There may be a supporting role she can play adequately, but she just is not cut out to be a leading actress; she has neither the charisma nor the acting skills.
Dollhouse is basically just another twist on the same thing we’ve seen before shows like Le Femme Nikita and Alias.
“Am I late? Did I miss any exposition?”
That’s the level of writing and self-awareness we’ve come to expect from Whedon and crew. This wasn’t good enough. We also watch “Ghost Whisperer” on Fridays (what can I say - we’re tired and don’t feel like turning our brains on), and the writing in that show was better than in Joss’ show. Ouch.
Why do you think there’s a “target”? Can you produce a shred of evidence that Joss Whedon modeled Firefly after a Japanese cartoon? If not, maybe you should stop saying it.
I don’t get the hate for Eliza Dushku. She’s not Dame Helen Mirren, but she’s not a terrible actress. I thought she did fine.
The premise is pretty much idiotic and somewhat less believable than demonic possession. That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does mean they have to be really clever to make it work.
Nice to see Olivia Williams.
I’ve been thinking about it, and the really unrealistic thing about the premise is that the clients know the Actives have their memories implanted into them.
How would that conversation go?
Olivia Williams: “We charge $1 million dollars for our services, and for that you get to design whatever kind of person you want. Then, we will erase their memory and implant the new memories on them.”
Who would ever sign up for step 2 and actually get to the design phase? Not to mention, I bet a real hostage negotiator is easier to find, cheaper and much more reliable than “Elizabeth Penn.”
It’d be better if they pushed the Dollhouse as some kind of “expert factory” (and dropped the creepy rape angle altogether) by saying for the right price they could deliver an expert in any disclipline the client wants. This would keep law enforcement questions to a minimum and, if a deal goes bad, keep the clients from wanting some kind of revenge. Because you know the father is eventually going to hook up with the FBI guy and tell him a tale about the Dollhouse.
I’m gonna be a bit contrary and say that I thought it was quite good, if I imagine this wasn’t Wheadon on a big network. Had this been a new show on Scifi, replacing Sanctuary, and being exactly the same in all details except “Created, written and directed by JW”, I’d be saying that this is the best show to hit Scifi since BSG. Judged solely on its own merits it’s a dumb but enjoyable little show.
Oh, and I keep saying that comboys in space was invented by Heinlein in “The Tale of the adopted daughter.” I find it the most likely source for inspiring JW.
It is not well explained, but there is some logic to this. The imprinted personality is actually a composite of a number of hostage recovery experts, and could thus be expected to be able to draw upon several accumulated lifetimes worth of experience. This would, in fact, be better than hiring your standard expert by a large degree. The way its presented in the episode doesn’t really work, and if you blinked at the wrong moment, you’d miss the explaination.
Also, it seemed to me that they failed to make the correct argument about continuing with the rescue of the little girl. It should have been, “We were hired by the client to get his daughter back. The initial try of the operation failed, and if we want to secure his business in the future (assuming he lives) or eliminate the possibility of him going to the authorities about us, then we must make the attempt to get his daughter back.”
There is a much larger framework which the show could address, but is totally ignoring. It seems to me that the company could operate legitimately by offering people the ability to learn an advanced skillset in a few seconds. You want to be a doctor? Pay the company some money, have the knowledge of a top medical expert planted in your skull. You then set the stage for conflict between folks who’ve come by their knowledge the hard way, and folks who’ve had it implanted in them. You can also create moral dilemmas by having characters who’re opposed to the “instant” education methods, but stand to gain a great deal financially by allowing themselves to be scanned so that others can make use of their knowledge.
Dushku doesn’t really impress me as an actor or a beauty, and I don’t think that I’ll make much of an effort to catch the show.
And who was the guy in charge of the implantation process? I can’t seem to find him in the IMDB listing for the show, and he’s familiar to me.
And that (and several other points) is my basic complaint about the premise: there’s absolutely no reason for the convoluted shadowy organization set up except to establish the same shadowy organization storylines that have been beaten into the ground. The whole thing just makes more sense, both in terms of internal logic and narrative possibilities, if it was a public company with people under long term contract for potentially hazardous work.
I don’t understand this critique. The setup for the brain transfer thing is all or nothing. You can’t just transfer a skill set, you can only transfer a whole personality. And if they were legit, where would they get the people/bodies to use?
I normally don’t like Joss Whedon but Firefly won me over, I thoroughly enjoyed it, except for Glau/River who pretty much ruins every scene she’s in. I couldn’t stand the character nor the actress. Other than that it was an enjoyable series so I’ll give Dollhouse a chance.