Dollhouse

’Dollhouse’ Season 2: Joss Whedon on what to expect next

The following feature on Season 2 of "Dollhouse" does not, to my mind, contain major spoilers, more general indications of where the show will go in its second year. The video in the middle of this piece is an interview with "Dollhouse" cast members Dichen Lachman (Sierra) and Enver Gjokaj (Victor).

"Welcome to the biggest surprise of my career — our Season 2."


With those words, Joss Whedon welcomed journalists from the Television Critics Association summer press tour to the set of "Dollhouse," a show that shocked everyone, including its creator, by getting a second chance at life.

The vibe on the set was markedly different than it had been a year before; last July, when Whedon welcomed journalists to the lavish, two-story Dollhouse, the show was in the midst of its very public growing pains (in the summer of 2008, a new pilot was shot and production was shut down briefly so that the writers could tweak the early scripts).

Whedon is always self-deprecating, funny and articulate, but in a one-on-one interview after the 2008 on-set press session, Whedon had the stressed look of someone who has been given a terrifying homework assignment. This year, during the press session, he wore the energized expression of a kid who’s been set in front of a lavishly stocked sandbox — he looked happy and eager to play with all the cool toys.

The early going of "Dollhouse" wasn’t an easy time, Whedon recalled on Friday. "The struggle we were going through was monumental," he noted.

This year, "we have more excitement and enthusiasm than we last year by a country mile," Whedon said. "Because we’re in it now. Before it was an idea, and it was an idea that we had a lot of trouble defining and America got to watch that."

In response to a question, he said he had no regrets about being so candid about the show’s problems during its difficult early days.

"If an episode was nothing more than diverting and we hadn’t quite gotten inside the experience as much as I wanted, I wanted people to know that I knew that," Whedon said. "I can’t put something out there that is less than what it could be without some kind of explanation." [Many thanks to Daniel Feinberg, who asked that question and who prompted Whedon to say he’d "clam up" in future. Well played, sir!]

Last year, when it was time for questions from the assembled journalists, Whedon and star Eliza Dushku were alone on the main Dollhouse set, but this year, after some initial remarks from Whedon, the show’s entire cast came out and sat on either side of Whedon and Dushku. And in my opinion, that’s where Season 2 will rise or fall. By the end of Season 1, the relationships and emotions between the characters had become suitably Whedonian — inside the Dollhouse there was a complex brew of betrayal, loyalty, craftiness, fear and love. It’s certainly a promising starting point for a second season.

"How far can we take this? How much can we twist the knife? Where can we find alliances that we did not have? Where can we pull people apart who seem to be together?" Whedon said of Season 2. "And most importantly, how can we build Echo up from nothing, which was basically where she started last year, and really give her a sense of momentum and purpose that will ground the show in a way that it couldn’t be last year?"

The relationships inside the Dollhouse are what Whedon and his writers will be taking advantage of in Season 2, he said. Though he didn’t rule out doing self-contained episodes, he show would move away from an "engagement of the week" for Echo and move more toward the conspiracy-flavored character drama we saw in the last few episodes of Season 1.

"Ultimately it was the ensemble, the characters, that we wanted to talk about," Whedon said. "As soon as we had license to do that, as soon as the inner workings of the Dollhouse became as important as the engagements, we felt the show started to work and the network felt the same way."

The way to make Echo more engaging has been to give her a "mission," Whedon said.

"This year we’re going to see the results of everything she went through last year — particularly the event [in the finale] with Alpha, where she was downloaded with all the personalities — we’re going to see the effect that’s had on her and we’re going to find her to be a great deal less passive and a great deal more directed in what she wants, and that of course is going to make her life a lot harder," Whedon noted.

"We’re going to see Echo as we knew her and then we’re going to see something very different, and that’s all I’m going to say," Whedon said later in the session.

The dolls themselves will start to be more "three-dimensional," Dushku said.

The events of "Epitaph One," the season-ending episode that is only available via DVD, will be referenced in the first episode of Season 2, and Felicia Day as well as other actors from that episode will appear in the Sept. 25 season premiere. And that won’t be the only time we’ll see the post-apocalyptic world glimpsed in "Epitaph One."

"We’re fascinated by that world and its connection to this world and all the things we saw there," Whedon said. "We will basically make [’Dollhouse’] for both audiences [those who have seen ’Epitaph One’ and those who have not]. … But if you haven’t seen that, it will explain itself."

Whedon says he "tends to think" that disastrous future can’t be avoided, though not all the events of "Epitaph One" may transpire on future seasons of "Dollhouse" exactly the way we saw them in that episode.

I asked about something Whedon said at Comic-Con — that some scenes we saw in "Epitaph One" may actually be faulty memories. I wondered whether that would allow the writers a bit of wiggle room when it came to how those future stories would unfold.

"I did say that for that exact reason — we may want to fudge that," Whedon said. "There is no way you can map out a television show exactly in the first year. Because in the fourth year, you find out, ’Oh, this other thing works out so much better,’ and to be wed to the other thing would be a disservice. …

"[Also] this whole show is about perceived reality. It’s about the difference in how I think of you and how you think of you," Whedon added. "We are moving towards those [events], but we are being very cagey about the context. The great thing about all those scenes is that they asked as many questions as they [answered], and some of the answers to those questions will not be what people expect."

As for "Vows," the first episode of the season, which he wrote and directed, expect a certain amount of exposition for new old viewers alike, to get them up to speed on where things stand with the characters.

As Whedon put it, "The fact of the matter is, the first episode of a season is going to contain a lot of, ’So this is Brooklyn. Six months have passed, my brother, and I have become king.’"

Some news bits from the panel and interviews afterward (spoilers/casting news ahoy):

* "The bulk of the show takes place three months after the events of ’Omega,’" Whedon said.

* Jamie Bamber guest starred in the first episode of the season, which wrapped Friday.

* Victor is not in the first episode much, but he’s featured heavily in the second episode, which was written by Tim Minear.

* Amy Acker, who has a role on another network show this fall, is not in Season 2 as much as Joss would like, but she will be in "a few episodes."

* Alan Tudyk will be back on the show at some point.

* When asked at the end of the video interview if dolls would ever have cross-gender engagements, let it be noted for the record that Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman did not say a word. But I would guess that there will be those kinds of assignments, based on their "Oh, how did you guess that?" facial expressions.

* According to Alan Sepinwall’s "Dollhouse" story, Whedon is glad that Fox is ending its "Remote-Free TV" experiment.

* Fun fact that has nothing to do with anything: Enver Gjokaj and Eliza Dushku are both half-Albanian.

* A note on the video interview: I was one of a few people asking Dichen and Enver questions, as you can probably hear from the audio on the recording. Also, sorry that I’m very bad at editing and shooting video. It is what it is.