Dollhouse

Dollhouse: Season 1 Review

Joss Whedon’s new series gets off to a difficult start.

US, May 20, 2009 - Dollhouse tells the story of a woman known as Echo (Eliza Dushku), one of many "Dolls" or "Actives" kept in a place called the… well, it’s in the title. A super secret place (albeit one that has many, many guests and staff), the Dollhouse takes people like Echo and mind-wipes them, turning their normal state of being into something akin to a child. Hired by the uber-rich for whatever it is they want, actives like Echo are than programmed with a completely different personality and set of skills for each particular "engagement", only to be wiped clean again afterwards. Want a skilled thief to steal something for you, or a hot girl who knows her way around a motorcycle to be your weekend girlfriend? Then come to the dollhouse.

So who is Echo really? How did she come to be in the dollhouse? Those are some of the questions raised from the start of the show, as we follow her week to week on various engagements. This makes for innate difficulties for the viewers from the start, because your main character is a blank slate, with no strong ongoing character traits or intricacies to tie you to her. And it didn’t help that the "simple" dollhouse persona Echo has between engagements was pretty repetitive and semi-annoying, quickly making lines like "Shall I go now?" groan-inducing.

A big unknown going into the show was if Eliza Dushku was up to the considerable acting challenge series creator Joss Whedon was giving her. Dollhouse called for her to literally play a different person each week, as this was not just supposed to be someone who was a good mimic, but a woman who has been completely re-programmed with a new personality. And unfortunately, Dushku was not up to this challenge. It’s not that she’s talentless – Obviously, she plays the bad girl well, but I don’t want to dismiss the fact that within that, she’s skillfully portrayed many layered emotions. Just watch her work as Faith on Buffy and Angel for proof, which called for her to play a lot of different aspects to the character, and which she did very well. Dollhouse however called for an actress of especially notable skills and extremely broad range, and Dushku is not that person (Over on United States of Tara, Toni Collette is that person).

Without Echo as the anchor she should be, that left the supporting characters as other potential entry points into this series – and it was here Whedon was surprisingly lacking. The man who gave us Cordelia Chase, Xander Harris, Willow Rosenberg, Wash, Lorne and many more wonderful and memorable characters seemed oddly uninspired with the Dollhouse crew. He’d created a tricky scenario from the get go, because everyone we met who actually worked for the Dollhouse — including Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams), Laurence Dominic (Reed Diamond) and Topher Brink (Fran Kranz) — were morally compromised people, participating in sending brainwashed people out as sex slaves essentially (not shockingly, many of the Dollhouse engagements involved sex). But it’s not as though we can’t be involved in and even enjoy "bad" characters, and again, Whedon’s own history reminds us of Spike (the early version that is), Mayor Wilkins, The Operative, Lindsey McDonald and many more wonderful, complicated and fascinating villains, who audiences enjoyed spending time with.

Something was just off with Dollhouse though. Characters like Adelle and Dominic were fairly one-note and generic, while Topher was especially aggravating, not helped by an overly mannered and smarmy performance by Kranz. There’s a fine line between creating a purposely unlikeable character and creating a character you simply don’t want to spend time watching, and Topher crossed this line.

Then there was Echo’s handler, Boyd Langdon (Harry Lennix), who was used as something of the conscience of the dollhouse, constantly showing regret and asking if perhaps they were going too far. Lennix is a very good actor who brought a lot of his natural warmth to the role, and yet at the end of the day, his character still chose to work for this horrible group. The decision to not tell us why this seemingly good guy would be working for such a bad place might have worked as an underlying mystery on another version of this series, but that was if we had anyone else to latch onto. Here, that wasn’t the case, making the never-explained mystery of Boyd acting good and noble while working as a pimp of sorts just another frustration.

Another difficult character was Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), the FBI agent obsessed with finding the dollhouse. With little explanation as to the origins of his obsession, He was portrayed as stubborn and pigheaded without much in the way of positive traits or at least any understanding into how his specific obsession began. Yes, having flawed characters is admirable, but Dollhouse kept failing to balance those flaws with much else.

The first five episodes of Dollhouse were fairly "Engagement of the week" oriented, focusing mostly on Echo in a different one-off persona. These episodes did the show no favor by being, for the most part, extremely bland, and failing to make for exciting procedural television. They also raised unanswered questions about why people, rich or not, would spend a fortune to turn an active into some of the examples we saw, such as a hostage negotiator or midwife, when very skilled people are available in such fields for far less money. "Stage Fright" — in which Echo is turned into a backup singer/secret bodyguard for a famous pop singer with a stalker — was particularly bad, delivering an extremely silly story filled with poor acting, plot holes and corny dialogue. It was known that the network pushed for more stand alone episodes up front, but certainly they didn’t say "And make them uninteresting, with bits of bad dialogue and unmemorable guest villains," so Whedon and his collaborators can’t be left off the hook.

It took several weeks, but thankfully, things began to pick up for Dollhouse six episodes in. "Man on the Street" began moving the ongoing plotlines forward in much bigger and more exciting and interesting ways, adding some needed layers to the storyline, as some notable developments occurred with Ballard’s investigation, that also involved his neighbor turned lover, Mellie (Miracle Laurie). The episode "Needs" was cool and exciting, showing what happened when a group of dolls, including Echo, Sierra (Dichen Lachman) and Victor (Enver Gjokaj), wake up in the Dollhouse with much of their original personalities restored; while "Spy in the House of Love" was easily one of the best episodes of the season, as the dollhouse staff hunted for a mole in their midst, and the talented Olivia Williams was finally given something different to play, as we discovered Adelle had her own little secret.

While these were considerable improvements, Dollhouse still remained inconsistent for the entire season. The very weak "Echoes" made the miscalculation of doing an everybody-acts-uncharacteristic-and-silly story far too early in the series for it to resonate, considering we were following a group of characters we barely knew yet. That episode also proved to be a bit of a "be careful what you wish for…" one, in terms of Echo, finally giving us some concrete answers on who she was before she came to the dollhouse – which turned out to be an unlikable, unthinking would-be crusader. Something that could have been interesting, had it been portrayed as purposeful, but here, it felt like we were meant to feel an investment in the character, even as the more we learned about her — "Needs" would also give us more information — the more annoying she became.

The Season 1 DVD will offer a much-discussed additional episode, "Epitaph One", filmed as a coda of sorts to what preceded it, but the actual two-parter that ended the season on FOX was an example of the highs and lows of the series. "Briar Rose" was great, delivering an exciting and shocking hour of TV, which elevated the story of the doll that went very bad, Alpha. That being the case, it’s a shame then that the actual finale, "Omega", couldn’t successfully follow through – despite strong work by guest actors Alan Tudyk and Amy Acker, the story felt very rushed and included a huge decision by Ballard in the final moments that was not given nearly enough on-screen justification (barring the fact that the character is a total idiot of course).

More frustratingly, twelve episodes in and these characters were still, by and large, a fairly bland, murky bunch, especially given Whedon’s track record. Sure, Buffy’s first season isn’t nearly as stellar as what would follow, but If Buffy, Xander, Willow or Giles had died 12 episodes in, I would have been horribly upset, because the core characters at least were so quickly and strongly defined and relatable. On the flipside, if Topher, DeWitt and Ballard had all died in a giant fireball of doom in the 12th episode of Dollhouse, I would have been surprised, but hardly emotionally affected – and the same goes for Echo herself.

Two bright spots were Lachman and Gjokaj, who both were a lot of fun and also managed to add moments of emotional weight throughout the season as the dolls Sierra and Victor. Both were very good at taking on the different personas the scripts called for, changing their performance and attitudes in subtle ways Dushku often did not. Gjokaj in particular deserves kudos for how he managed to take on one of the most difficult parts of the show, the portrayal of the child-like between-mission doll personality, and give it a surprising amount of sweetness and poignancy, helping make Victor the most relatable and lovable doll character.

In a rather stunning victory for Whedon and the series, Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season, despite incredibly low ratings. Generally speaking, as a huge fan of Whedon’s work, and TV series that aren’t your typical, cookie cutter procedurals, this is great news. Yet I find myself oddly ambivalent about Dollhouse’s renewal, simply because this show has not proven itself to be a particularly strong one, at least not with any sort of consistency yet, and it continues to have some rather key core issues. I know the show has its passionate defenders, many of whom would argue that because Dollhouse is a challenging show, it’s harder for it to gain viewers. That’s true, but on the flip side, to say something is challenging does not mean it’s also automatically good. Challenging in and of itself doesn’t pertain to quality, and yes, Dollhouse has a complex, "challenging" concept, but it also has been "challenged" by having delivered several weak episodes – many of which were at the start of the season, but certainly not all, all while never making a pivotal component, the depiction of the characters, as involving as it should and could be.

Season 2 comes on the heels of Whedon giving FOX his pitch for where the show could go storywise, while also agreeing to significant cost cutting measures – all of which likely mean some notable re-tooling is coming. Whedon’s earned the good will so many of us have for him, having made some of the best and most unique television of the past decade. If anyone can shake their own show up and fix it, it’s him – and as a longtime fan, I certainly am pulling for him to succeed. Hopefully Dollhouse’s second season is where the show will become the special and – forgive the term – engaging series we all want it to be.