Dollhouse

Introducing Both the Beginning and the End…

…of Dollhouse.

Dear Moth Chase readers,

Let us introduce our friends, Martin and Travis, who will be blogging with us for the next few weeks on the final episodes of a show they both requested we cover, Dollhouse. Martin and Travis are both fellow grad students at different programs and great guys, and we’re excited to welcome them to themothchase’s ongoing procrastanalysis!

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

ox, Kathryn and Natalie

Sup’ Travis,

I’m sure you have heard: Dollhouse has been cancelled. Why should anyone be blogging about the show, then? That is the question I hope to address in this post. Now, since neither one of us are Whedonites (we just discovered Buffy, after discovering Firefly), the obvious point is that we can’t claim it’s simply because we’re Joss Whedon fans (although, now, we obviously are).

The way I would go about it would be precisely to start with the end.

Not just the end of the show or the end of last season, but, in fact, the end of our world.

That’s exactly what Epitaph One, the thirteenth unaired episode of the first season of Dollhouse is about. Frantically yet methodically we are introduced to a whole new cast of characters trying to survive in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world. In the year 2019, people can be imprinted remotely, by wave, and we find our characters trying to get underground in order to avoid being either imprinted or killed by those imprinted above ground. The world is in the midst of a global war launched by telephone call: those who answered were instantly imprinted to destroy those who weren’t. As the episode unfolds we see the role of the Rossum Corporation in the various events leading up to the end.

Aside from the brilliant indictment of corporatism, what Epitaph One does so remarkably well is to attack the very medium to which it is wedded. This is both its amazing vision and its ultimate downfall. Taken as a modern reflection on the conditions of its own possibility, Epitaph One and Dollhouse more broadly finds itself in the strange predicament of attacking corporatism while relying on Fox for its existence, on questioning technology while depending on the same for its actuality, on decrying the objectification of women while lavishly promoting itself by means of Eliza Dushku’s scantily clad body, on championing freedom while revealing the fundamental impossibility of its reality.

All of these elements come to a head in Epitaph One, but most prominently surrounding the creation of the episode itself. Made in six days, with a new cast, and on the whims of a studio request for a 13th episode for the foreign market, Epitaph One sees Joss Whedon caving to corporate interests while at the same time working to undermine them. This irreconcilable procedure, as I mentioned above, is precisely its downfall. Whedon wanted a show with an insatiable creative drive that extended beyond limits of genre, style, and medium, but was wedded to corporate interests that demanded boundaries, limits, and ratings. In yearning to do the impossible, the show trudged on in its aporetic glory, but from the very first episode we knew it wouldn’t last and Epitaph One simply confirmed it (although actual news of its cancellation would come only later).

In framing the show in this way, I hope you and our readers will notice an element of frustration, fairly or unfairly, with Whedon himself. This summer, Whedon produced an internet-only quasi-musical with Neil Patrick Harris called “Dr. Horrible.” A stunning production that showed the possibility of bypassing corporate involvement, one surely wishes, in the case of Dollhouse, that Whedon would have used the experience to become self-aware of his aspirations for overstepping various boundaries and pursued his agenda in a way in which the disappointment of cancellation would be a non-issue. This stunning mixture of triumph and defeat is precisely why the show deserves to be discussed.

Holla,

Martin

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http://themothchase.wordpress.com/dollhouse/