Dollhouse

Cowboy Pete Plays With “Dollhouse”

The conventional wisdom is that one should give a Joss Whedon program much longer than you would give a show produced by just about anyone in the known universe because it takes you THATLONG to realize the full scope of what’s involved. This is a fairly recent worldview considering that viewers knew pretty much what “Buffy” was about from the pilot, and that includes the abortive pilot that never aired. Same with “Angel.” But because of his body of work, Whedon himself should have our trust. Not the program itself, but Joss.

So I’ve been fairly restrained, waiting to see the overall concepts, waiting to see where Joss and his merry band of pranksters was going with this. And I find that, at the end of the season, as engaging as the last aired episode was…

If I never see another episode…oh well. And that’s because the show never got past the major problems I had with it initially.

First of all, the show is an actor’s dream job. “I get to be somebody totally different every week!” The problem is that it’s difficult to become emotionally invested in your lead when your lead is, by requirement of the show, a cipher. Echo has no personality. Basically, Whedon is gambling that viewers will be interested not in Echo, but in Eliza Dushku. That we’ll care about her because we cared about her in two other series that were much better than this. But how are we supposed to care about a character about whose background we know nothing? Okay, yeah, it can be done. We knew nothing about “The Prisoner.” But that was the entire point of the series—he was a determined everyman fighting for his identity against a symbol of totalitarianism. Echo is simply a vehicle for Dushku to do something different every week and for her to be whoever the writers need her to be that week. She brings no baggage. Unfortunately she also brings no reason for the viewer to become emotionally involved. “Did I fall asleep?” she always asks. Yeah, well, there were several times where I was watching “Dollhouse” on DVR and I suddenly found myself asking the same question, and the answer was “yes.”

We also have a raft of supporting characters: a madame, an assortment of pimps (including a rapist pimp who is punished for it because…well, because you only get to rape them if you’re a client, basically) and the FBI agent who is determined to find her because the concept says he has to. The majority of the interesting developments in the series centered either on him or on the fractured villain Alpha, kept off screen until two weeks ago. But they’re not the lead character. Echo is. She’s the protagonist. And the protagonist should be the one whose goals and desires drive your story. That’s just Writing 101, and “Dollhouse” proves why that rule is a good one. Because if you ignore it, you wind up with a story that’s unfocused and ungrounded.

True, she’s something unique in primetime: A heroine who is a damsel in distress and doesn’t know it. And that’s fine if you’re doing a two-hour film. But if you’re going to sell that week in, week out, then you’ve got a problem. The penultimate episode underscored why the show bugs me: It draws direct parallels to “Sleeping Beauty.” Jane Espenson’s subversive script had a number of female characters, including Echo, bitching about how much they hate that fairy tale because the protagonist is not only a moron—she arguably got herself into this by being at the castle and poking spindles—but then she just lies around and waits to be rescued. And they’re right, which is why the most interesting (the only interesting one, really) character in the Disney version is Maleficent. Basically Espenson deconstructed the entire series and underscored its central flaw. Echo (or Caroline as she was previously known) willingly got herself into this fix and now is waiting for someone else to get her out of it. So, y’know, props to Joss Whedon for signing off on the script, but it just brought the show’s shortcomings into focus.

Second, the show has moral ambiguities up the whazoo that it simply doesn’t seem prepared to handle. It’s like the old bit about “Your mouth is writing checks that your body can’t cash.” We’re watching the adventures of people who willingly signed over their bodies to have done to them whatever the clients want. They’re prostitutes. Worse: Since they’re unaware of what they’re doing, they’re prostitutes without the courage of their convictions. THESE are who we’re supposed to care about? Putting a prostitute at the heart of a reworked fairy tale is a dicey proposition. Even “Pretty Woman” was accurately lanced by Ellen Gleghorne on SNL when her Queen Shaniqua provided a six word review during “Weekend Update”—“Cinderella story?! She was a whore!”

The series attempts to address those very issues, but even when it does, it’s not telling us anything we don’t know. It’s not as if we’re being presented with a situation that we initially find acceptable and then have characters present us with points of view we hadn’t considered. Any viewer with a working moral compass is going to get the whimwhams from the concept going in.

“Dollhouse” might work better if an entire futuristic society were created in which the Dollhouse is considered a normal functioning part, and you have one individual challenging the status quo. But even the show’s own concept has it as an outlaw notion, tacitly supported and protected by the rich and powerful. We’re watching a show about rich man’s toys from the point of view of toys that don’t have a point of view.

It’s easy to say that it’s misogynistic since you’ve basically got women being used as sacks of meat for male fantasies. On the other hand, you’ve got men in the same fix. So neither gender is being particularly well-served.

I’ll grant you, the final aired episode provided enough twists and turns to thoroughly engage me. But by the end, we’re damned near back to status quo, with the only slight wrinkle being that Echo seems to be having stirrings of her previous identity. An identity about which we know nothing and care less.

Will I be back next season, if there is one? Probably, because I like Dushku and I like Whedon, and even poorly executed Whedon is better than a lot of shows at their best. But I don’t have a ratings box on my TV, so whether I watch it or not doesn’t matter. But this series has fatal flaws from the get-go, and they’re all so thoroughly engrained into the concept that I honestly don’t know how they can be fixed.