Dollhouse

There are two things to say up front. First, this post does not indicate another schizophrenic relaunch of PIE SPOILERS!!! Instead, I just needed a place to put my disjointed thoughts about “Ghost”, the first episode of Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku’s new series Dollhouse.

Second, in many ways these thoughts became as much a response to other people’s reviews of the Dollhouse pilot as a reaction to the pilot itself. In that regard, I’m kind of thankful that I saw it so much later than did so many other people.

While I understand, superficially, the concern some reviewers have expressed about how the audience is going to care about a character that in essence is a blank slate, I’m a little surprised no one else seems to have seen what Joss has done: Boyd Langton, Echo’s handler, is the doorway through which the audience will connect to Echo’s humanity while we (and she) are still learning about her past self.

Harry Lennix is near-perfect casting for what he has to do here. A single concerned look for what’s happening to her in one scene (even though what’s happening to her is just a conversation, and of course it’s her assumed personality talking) makes us concerned for her in turn. Boyd is the audience’s link to Echo regardless of how blank Echo might be.

It also seems pretty evident that the concern over the audience’s connection to Echo likely would have been more problematic in the original pilot, at least based upon its script. The new first episode establishes some hooks into Echo’s story that the original script did not. I confess that when I first heard of this particular adjustment, I was skeptical that it would sit well with me. But it’s done in a way that gives just enough, without giving up the game.

But even beyond that, the second time through I noticed another dynamic: The audience might very well find themselves identifying with the personalities of the people with whom Echo is imprinted (I do think you get to rooting for her persona in this pilot). While that’s not the same as identifying or connecting with Echo, it works almost as a kind of proxy, and also, frankly, plays into the open and fluid questions about what makes us human that the show is posing to begin with.

Identification is not going to be simple, straightforward, or necessarily even easily identifiable. But given the premise, and its philosophical questions, I’m not sure it should be. And while it might not be those things, I do think identification is recognizable within the ways the show presents it. Those ways are just a little askance from the norm. But they are there, and they are reachable by the audience.

I’m afraid that I found myself most perplexed with the humor complaints. A fair number of reviewers seem to have noted a lack of Joss’ “trademark” humor (whatever trademark that might be). And while it’s true that there’s no overt “oh look, Xander just made a funny” humor in the pilot, anyone arguing that there’s no humor at all must have watched a damaged version of the screener with missing dialogue or scenes.

But here’s what I think is actually happening: The humor in the pilot is more subtle, even, I’d argue, a bit subversive. Much of it comes from the Dollhouse’s personality programmer Topher (and a little from Russian mobster Lubov), but in addition to having an odd sense of humor that is not at all of the Xander sort, he’s an amoral punk that I think many reviewers felt uncomfortable identifying with even just a little. And humor is one of those ways in which people identify with each other.

It’s actually a juicy little trick Joss has pulled. He gives the best humor in the pilot to someone we might not actually like if we had to deal with them in real life. If people don’t see Topher’s humor as funny, I suspect it might be because they were too uncomfortable with the idea of identifying with him.

Personally, and I’ve expressed this elsewhere, I think Topher has a bit of the artist’s humor. The observant craftsman who has to be both engaged in understanding the world around him but detached from it at the same time in order to do what he does. I’ve said before that I suspect that what he does, the forming of personality and identity, isn’t merely technical, but artistic. I now think his particular kind of humor is an aspect of that.

Click on the link for more :

http://www.piespoilers.com/2009/01/29/just-start-here/