Great Minds Think Different

I was rather harsh in my initial review of “Dollhouse”. My complaints were, roughly in order of importance:

1. The show fell far short of earning the seriousness it clearly wants to be regarded with. I concluded it either needed to lighten up or quit pandering.
2. The main character has, by design, no coherent identity you can start to sympathize with, and everyone else is an unlikeable tool.
3. The intended philosophical conundrum gets swamped and weighs the show down.
4. Eliza Dushku can’t act.

There seems to be a consensus on the Internet that the first five episodes were basically rehashes of each other, to allow people to start watching anywhere within that stretch and not be too disoriented. The sixth episode was meant to be, according to both Eliza Dushku and Joss Whedon, where the show got into its groove and started shining.

I’ve got to say, I might yet be convinced to like “Dollhouse”.

Of those four things I listed above, I can see most of them starting to clear up. #4, obviously, won’t change. Eliza Dushku is still as mediocre an actress as ever. It’s starting to get a little irritating when I’m starting to get good and absorbed in the show and Eliza shows up and delivers a line so clumsily that I suddenly feel like I’m watching the screen test of a first-year drama student.

#1 is clearing up in both directions. I can see hints of a sense of humor starting. Echo’s indignant “porn!” in episode 6 actually made me chuckle a little bit. And that was in the midst of a rather serious and plot-important moment. I was impressed. And of course there was the memory-drug plot, with Topher and DeWitt’s reactions to it. (That damaged DeWitt’s established character a little, but not too much.) On the other side, episode 6 went without any Eliza Dushku-nudity-centric pandering (although it did go with Miracle Laurie-nudity pandering and some Eliza Dushku-fighting pandering, which the story doesn’t adequately explain). Episode 7 didn’t do quite as well, but anything’s better than earlier episodes. Oh by the way, I can’t let this go without a little slapping: in episode 3, the dialogue explicitly calls attention to Eliza Dushku getting her boobs out. I can’t even tell if that was tongue-in-cheek or just resoundingly oblivious. It looked like they were trying to be serious, and I can’t get my head around that.

Anyway, #2 is partly cleared up in that we’re starting to see some sympathetic characters emerge. Episode 6 featured a greatly increased role for Agent Ballard, which is a huge relief because he looks like the only purely-good character in the entire ensemble. Having someone who you can root for and establish in your head as a real person makes it so much easier to care about the show. In episode 6, for the first time, watching didn’t feel like a chore. I actually wondered, and cared, what was going to happen, and it’s worrying me that the odds seem overwhelmingly stacked against him. Episode 7 introduced some much-needed backstory for Echo, shedding some light on who she was before she became a Doll and the circumstances surrounding her becoming a Doll. And I’m starting to sympathize with her, wonder of wonders. Finally, it’s almost like “Dollhouse” is a good show.

Of course the Echo issue will be slow to change, but there’s another candidate for a sympathetic character: Boyd. I find it a little hard to sympathize with him, though, because although he cares about Echo, which concern we’re obviously supposed to share, he’s working for the Dollhouse, which for me raises some questions about his morals and motivations. For now, Ballard’s morals seem beyond question, which makes him a welcome, comforting patch of solid ground in a world where the reality of everything has to be questioned at every turn (Mellie?).

As for #3, I can’t quite believe the neatness of this myself, but the development of truly sympathetic major characters automatically frames the philosophical drama in an interesting way. When Echo and Ballard were having their (poorly-acted) conversation after their fight, I was having flashbacks to “Memento” as I tried, on the fly, to sort out the layers of deception and where the words were coming from. I was fascinated, though my head hurt a little. It felt good to have this show actually make my head hurt with ruminations. As it happens, all the show had to do to get me to be interested in the philosophy was to make it have implications for characters I care about. (Let’s leave aside the fact that this has been a well-known guideline in TV for ages.)

A few last things. I think “Dollhouse” could do a lot worse than to become an episodic prime-time retreading of “Memento” (one of my favorite movies) but I do hope it retains some variety. After all, that’s the point of a TV show.

I have to call this out again: I hate Topher and whoever had the idea of him. Maybe it’s a sign of effective writing and acting that I hate him so much, but it’s to the degree where I get angry when he appears on screen. It’s disruptive. It might offend me more than most because he’s a programmer and his unpleasantness almost feels like a personal affront.

All in all, these most recent two episodes feel as if they’ve scratched the surface of a vast underlying plot buried under layers of deception, and I can’t help but feel intrigued (much as Eliza Dushku’s acting might try to beat that out of me). I might have judged “Dollhouse” harshly at the beginning, but it’s starting to shape up. I think five episodes is an unacceptably long ramping-up period, but if it keeps improving (and doesn’t have too many slips like episode 7), I’ll forgive that and stick with it.