Season 1 Spoilers follow. OBVIOUSLY.
Against all odds, evens, and lucky thirteens, the execubots at Fox Corp. have pulled the proverbial bunny from the TiVo hat and deemed Dollhouse worthy of anti-cancellation - more colloquially known as renewal.
That’s right, Joss fans, Dollhouse is comin’ back - like Buffy “Chosen One” Summers!
Like the first time Buffy came back. After she died. At the end of the first season? Well, except Dollhouse never really died. It was close, though. Maybe. I mean, the ratings sucked.
The point is, it’s time to pop the corks off the champ-pagg-unn. We’re all in for a new season.
And in the time-honored tradition of the internet, we’re going to start begging the Whedons to give us some love… writing love, that is.
What the fuck. Who wrote that? Moving on.
8. What is the Rossum corporation?
Maybe not for the second season, but more for future seasons: What do they do, and how are they connected with the Dollhouses? Let’s explore that, but not in the way of Fringe’s Massive Dynamic.
7. Miracle Laurie.
I know she was released from the Dollhouse, but I would like to see what her life would be like in the real world after having been gone for so many years. What does the release of the doll mean for him/her and the people they encountered as actives? And maybe November (aka Madeline Costley) could save Paul Ballard from the Dollhouse’s grasp, or work with him to take the Dollhouse down?
6. Felicia Day and Summer Glau.
Listen, universe, you can’t just tell us that Felicia Day (versicle and hymnody!) is going to be on Dollhouse and then take her away from us at the last second.
She has over 850,000 Twitter followers. That’s 150,000 nerds living in their mama’s cupboard and seven hundred THOUSAND marketing killer twitterbots. (Killertwitters? Kilters?) Christian Bale warned us about the coming robot apocalypse. You don’t want to get on their list.
Speaking of which:
Summer Glau. Yeah.
5. Ballard fighting from the belly of the beast.
One of our least favorite things about the season one finale was how Paul Ballard switched sides so easily.
For twelve straight episodes, he is Boyd Langdon’s foil. They represent men of character and conviction at drastically opposite ends of the ethical spectrum. At the center of each is loyalty and integrity.
But Langdon is a man who has discarded the grand concept of morality. He may believe in it, in the same way men believe in and remember things they’ve lost. Instead, Langdon’s sense of right and wrong has narrowed. He’s pragmatic. He accepts the way the world is, even if he doesn’t like it.
But heroes don’t do that. Whedon heroes don’t do that. “They live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be.”
I don’t believe for a second that Ballard sacrificed all that, even to save one person. I don’t believe that, in the span of forty minutes, his worldview transmuted into its polar opposite. I don’t believe he gave up and fell in line beside Langdon.
Could the writers convince me? Perhaps. But I think it would be a disservice to the character.
4. Boyd Langdon needs more meat like a 4x4 from In-N-Out.
The most engaging aspect of the show early in the first season was his internal battle with moral ambiguity as he got emotionally closer to Echo and questioned a lot of what the Dollhouse’s mission is. The later half of the season was absent of that and Langdon became a Dollhouse tool. Can he and Ballard work something out against the Dollhouse? Or has he been absorbed completely into his new position as head of security?
3. Exploring the ethics of “creating human personalities and then wiping them out.”
A lot of time is spent on the show focusing on the sin committed upon the dolls themselves - that is, their original personalities.
No effort has been expended on the rights of the new personalities.
Every imprint comes with at least one failsafe to prevent him or her from running off (“treatment”). This might prevent an imprint attempting to run away. But while such necessary plot points keep them chained to the Dollhouse, it does nothing to address the moral implications of constructing whole people and deleting them at a whim.
Everyone talks about the other moral issues associated with the Dollhouse, the questions of what it means to be human, but so far there is the unaddressed elephant in the room of sixth day morals. I don’t mean the ethics of releasing crappy scifi action flicks featuring California’s thirty-eighth governor. I mean crafting Eve from some unlucky host’s digital rib, then smiting her once the John is satisfied.
2. Episode structures and stories that are less procedural and more serialized.
What didn’t work for me was the formulaic style that took over the early season. Episodes like “The Target” and “Stage Fright” seemed like they were just episode fillers without getting to the real juicy mythology of the show. If the whole season consisted of episodes that were only about the actives’ engagements, the viewer drop off would have been much steeper. I lose interest when the heart of an episode is the consumerist narcissism of a Dollhouse client.
What worked for me were the episodes the focused most on the lives of the characters most closely associated with the Dollhouse. I care more when actives’ engagements reveal emotional and moral aspects about the Dollhouse employees and the dolls themselves.
I understand that the Dollhouse writing team is still trying to find their footing. I hope that in the upcoming season and (hopefully) in seasons to come, we see more episodes like “Needs,” “Briar Rose,” and “Man on the Street.”
1. More Enver, Dichen, and Amy.
We cannot give enough accolades to Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj, and Amy Acker. For one, we’re an internet blog run by a gaggle of dirt-poor LA yups and consistently find ourselves short on rent, much less accolades. For twos, they made the show.
Tons of credit to Eliza Dushku for headlining and charging Dollhouse with star power. But the breakout performances were from the ensemble cast. When the show stepped up halfway through the season, it was because Whedon brought together some freakishly talented people.
Lachman is graceful perfection, chilled professionalism, nerdy geekdom. She flips from Boba Fett to Felicia Day in six flat seconds on the chair.
Gjokaj is consistently heartbreaking and visceral. We still get chills in the penultimate episode, when he revives as Dominic. The phrase pitch-perfect is bare and insufficient praise for his portrayal.
Plot-wise, it may now be difficult to utilize Gjokaj’s acting range as it was used in season one - but whatever happens, bring him back. He’s too goddamn talented to collect dust in the attic.
And as for Amy Acker… well, you all know what we think about Ms. Acker. Simply marvelous.
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