Great Minds Think Different

I just got around to watching the unaired thirteenth episode of Dollhouse, made famous by Felicia Day on Twitter amid some contract-related angst and FOX asshattery.

I’ve always been strongly drawn to post-apocalyptic stories (with the notable exception of zombie-apocalypse stories). It’s why I like Stephen King’s The Stand, and the Half-Life series, so much. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I’m helplessly fascinated by pondering the circumstances and events in which civilization as we know it can collapse — and what happens to ordinary people as the world falls to pieces around them.

Best of all is when, in a series of fictional works, someone stumbles across a ruined relic from the far-distant past — a relic that was covered in the present time of a previous work in the series. The first time I can remember this happening is in the Redwall series: in “The Long Patrol”, the characters stumble across the buried ruin of the castle from “Mossflower”, which appears to have been set hundreds of years before in Redwall-time. Many years after I read the Redwall books, that is the only one that truly stands out in my mind, exactly because of this post-apocalypse fixation I have.

Epitaph One does exactly this. OK, the time difference is only 10 years, but it was apparently a very eventful 10 years. From what I can gather, the Dollhouse’s technology got into the wrong hands and turned wireless, so the concept of identity was largely meaningless, and then civilization busted apart. In parallel with this, somehow Echo, Ballard, Boyd and possibly the other main-character Dolls were working on subverting the Dollhouse. I don’t quite understand what they were doing as the world was ending, but eventually they led a bunch of people out into the world, from being holed up in the Dollhouse, and we don’t know what became of them.

Quite apart from the end-of-the-world grittiness, we learn several very interesting facts about “present-day” Dollhouse-world:

• DeWitt has a conscience, and there is an ethical line she does not want to cross.
• The larger Dollhouse organization was the shady puppet-master ultimately behind the world’s destruction, and apparently the tipping point was when they started selling Dolls’ bodies for people to live in. It’s unclear (and a very interesting question) whether or not they were fully aware of the consequences of this.
• Topher was not the original architect of the Dollhouse’s technology. He made it much better, but it still means that there is or was someone else in the world who created it.
• Ballard and Boyd were apparently both double agents. Is Topher the only major male non-Doll on the show who isn’t?
• Whiskey/Dr. Saunders did a variety of things that I still can’t get my head around. She developed a way to resist the imprinting process (while imprinted as Dr. Saunders?), then remained in the Dollhouse for 10 years in her blank state? Does this mean Dr. Saunders (the original, briefly seen at the end of the season in flashback) was a double agent, and that got preserved in the imprint? Or did Whiskey somehow develop this urge while imprinted? Or something else? Who knows?
• Echo continued in her composite-of-imprints state for some time, apparently, after the end of the previous episode.

Now that we know all these facts, the futures of the main characters, and the future of the world in ten years, what is going to become of Dollhouse the show? In particular, is this foreknowledge of the future going to dampen the intrigue of the present-day Dollhouse story?

I really don’t think so. As I noted above, stories are entertaining when set both during and after apocalyptic events. I’m still interested to see what Echo and company are doing to subvert the Dollhouse, how that goes for them, and especially to see the world begin to crumble (and to see Echo and company deal with it) as the technology leaks out and starts to be used for more and more reckless purposes.

Just because the world in ten years is a total wreck doesn’t mean there isn’t still hope. This episode leaves the ultimate fates of Echo and company unknown; perhaps they’re still alive. Perhaps the world isn’t irrevocably broken. Perhaps there will be heroism in the downfall.

In fact, this glimpse of the future, of the ultimate consequences of the Dollhouse technology, serves to darken the backdrop of the present-day show. The mystery of “what trouble could this technology cause?” is gone, but the answer is rather horrifying, which puts Echo and company’s present-day struggles into perspective. We already know that if their aim is to prevent the technology from harming too many more people, they’re fighting a losing battle, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested to see how the battle plays out. It’s like watching Star Wars Episode III. You know what’s going to happen in the end, but watching it can still be entertaining.

To sum up: Epitaph One answers a lot of questions, but raises quite a few as well. This is what’s known in the trade as a game-changer: the loose ends have not been tied up, but merely rearranged.

I have a few other random notes. Eliza Dushku still can’t act, though fortunately this episode let her play to her (few) strengths. She also probably didn’t speak Russian very well. I don’t know Russian, but I know that she sounded like a person making sounds she doesn’t perceive as words. And I’m still scarred from the French incident, so I assume any foreign language spoken on Dollhouse is done badly until proven otherwise.

Speaking of which, the dialogue writing is still bad. A lot of the worst writing was during the future scenes, when during an otherwise intense moment, some guy in the group would spew out a line that sounded like something written by a first-year poetry major. When I heard someone say, “Nice little display case for our potential corpses,” I had to pause it and yell out “WHAT”. Then I replayed it to make sure that was what he actually said. I swear, Dollhouse in its 13 episodes has racked up more People Don’t Talk Like That violations than basically all the episodes of every TV show I’ve seen.

Near the beginning, when Felicia Day’s ragtag group of “actuals” is approaching the Dollhouse, they come across an old radio blaring something meaningless. I can’t help but be reminded of Portal. I know the chances are slim, but I’m choosing to believe that was a deliberate homage to Portal (a post-apocalyptic story of its own, in a way) because that makes me happy.

This surprised me: even though I’ve only ever seen Felicia Day in “Dr. Horrible”, I could take her totally seriously in this episode. This is in contrast to Neil Patrick Harris, although to be fair I’ve only ever seen him in things where he’s in a role that makes it impossible to take him seriously anyway (like the Harold and Kumar movies).

Dollhouse sure does have a deep and enduring love of shower scenes, doesn’t it? Especially shower scenes where someone bites the dust. (Speaking of which: how did a person in a child’s body manage to reach high enough to conk that girl on the head? And how did she do it with enough force to knock her down?)

I sure feel sorry for anyone who actually wants to follow the plot and starts watching season 2 without watching this episode.

I will certainly be watching season 2. If only this show can be like “Chuck” — stumbling at the beginning, picking up towards the end of the first season, and knocking it out of the park in the second season. I’d be pleased.

You have to be cynical about the chances of a show like this, so I imagine that this was the last episode of “Dollhouse” that will ever air on TV. You have to keep this context in mind when considering the implications of the finale, and the creators’ intentions for this episode.

My lasting impression was simply that they tried to do too much in too short a time. And you can understand why. They wanted to bring the story to the kind of point you’d like to leave it at for the end of a season. The story needed two episodes to cover that distance; FOX wanted one.

It does seem unfair. While it lasted, “Dollhouse” developed enough of a world, raised enough questions and provoked enough thought that it deserved a proper ending, even after such a short run. I don’t mind the fact that the story was left completely open — they had to allow for the possibility of more “Dollhouse”, however remote it is — but I do mind the fact that whatever led up to this point in the plot was not adequately explained.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Ballard tends to serve as the audience’s representative because he seems to be the only good guy. And at the end of this episode, now he’s working for the Dollhouse? I feel like something must have happened between him catching the hard drive with Caroline’s brain on it and him agreeing to work for the Dollhouse and all of a sudden wanting to free November instead of Echo. (This is one of the more obvious casualties of the time constraints: Sierra and November get imprinted, and then what? Sierra is never seen again and November is suddenly being freed. Buh?) And what about Echo? What made her decide to just remain a Doll? I’m sure with her multiple-personality badass powers she could have escaped.

On the plus side, if the show does return, this gives us the dynamic duo of Boyd and Ballard, who for some reason I really enjoy seeing working together. I get the feeling that neither really understands the other, but they have a quiet confidence in each other nonetheless. And now they’re both centers of considerable moral ambiguity, which is always interesting. Boyd’s motivations have never been explained (and he dodges Ballard’s question on the subject). Ballard’s moral compass has obviously shifted somewhat; my best guess is that he’s working for the Dollhouse so he can have a role in protecting the Dolls from Alpha, figuring that if he can’t bring down the Dollhouse he might as well protect its victims as best he can. But it’s far from certain that that’s what he’s really up to. Hell, as far as we know that’s what Boyd is up to as well.

Alpha is this episode’s strong point. The actor, Alan Tudyk, was brilliant, the only downside to his performance being the way it exposed Eliza Dushku’s performance as mediocre (par for the course there). He made Alpha a genuinely frightening villain. He stole the most graphically disturbing scene I’ve ever seen on a TV channel that isn’t HBO: him slashing Whiskey and then gouging out his handler’s eyes. He convincingly conveyed a person with tons of personalities struggling for control and ending up a wildly, dangerously unstable psycho. I haven’t seen an insane villain played so well since “The Dark Knight”.

Obviously, there’s an awful lot more of this story to be told. Unfortunately, it looks doubtful that any of it ever will be. So in the end, am I satisfied with what’s been told so far?

My relationship with “Dollhouse” has been strange. There were only a few episodes that actually held my attention closely. Yet I kept watching because despite everything I was curious to see what was going to happen next. Watching “Dollhouse” didn’t give me as much pure enjoyment as, say, “Chuck”, but I did want to find out more about its world every week. So in that sense, yes, it was a good show. At least it didn’t completely lose my interest like, for example, “Lie to Me”, which I stopped watching after the second episode.

“Dollhouse” was built upon a very deep premise and had the potential to be a show truly out of the ordinary. It was out of the ordinary, to be sure, but it did not astound. It really did come quite close at times to being excellent, particularly during those moments when my head hurt trying to think through the tangle of deception that the audience was allowed glimpses of, and those moments where they took the lid off the more disturbing parts of the world. The show’s premise is inherently disturbing, and to the show’s credit it never held that back. Much like the beach landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan”, that’s the only way it could have been done right.

So what killed “Dollhouse”? I can identify several reasons. Let’s look back at my midseason review and look at the four points at the top. In my mind, the first three of them have either cleared up or the show works in spite of them (with the possible exception of the sympathetic-character one; I’ll get to that later). The fourth is still a problem, and it’s gotten to be a bigger problem as the show goes on. Eliza Dushku just does not have the kind of versatility and talent the role requires. Though most of the other Doll actors are relative unknowns, they all manage the shifting-persona thing better than Dushku does. The non-Doll actors do fairly well for the most part. Tahmoh Penikett as Ballard occasionally starts acting a little too much like Keanu Reeves at critical moments. It conflicts with the establishment of the character’s obsession with bringing down the Dollhouse, to the detriment of his own life. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz are probably the show’s acting-quality strong points. It may be because they play largely one-dimensional characters (evil and obnoxious, respectively) but they each do so quite well.

The reason I brought up the sympathetic-character beef again was that in the later part of the season, we mostly lost him. Around mid-season, I latched onto Ballard as a guy you could root for and sympathize with, because he showed up a lot and did good things. Then he mostly disappeared from the show, appearing in occasional scenes to stick out his manly jaw as he angsted about how his girlfriend’s a Doll. Then he went into the Dollhouse, and without too much fuss started helping them eliminate their biggest threat. Well, so much for the good-guy thing, then.

I can’t say I’m heartbroken that “Dollhouse” is probably toast, but I do have to admit I watched it with some interest and would almost certainly watch it again if the planets aligned and it were renewed. But I’m not holding my breath.

Good stuff, guys. Honestly this time. Apart from the massively gratuitous scene with Eliza in bondage gear near the beginning, this was overall a highly fascinating and well-executed episode of “Dollhouse”.

Again, let’s start with the bad. The DeWitt/Victor subplot was obviously for DeWitt’s character development, but it still felt a little tacked-on, both to fill some time and to provide an excuse for DeWitt to be away from the Dollhouse. (Again, how extremely convenient.)

The Ballard subplot suffered from the same problem. We saw him once, then never again. Granted, there’s not much that could have happened in that subplot, but maybe at least have Ballard reeling from the weighty implications of all this? Also, I like the angle they’re starting to take on Ballard. He’s obsessed, and it’s ruining his life. He’s better as a tragic-hero character than as your garden-variety FBI agent.

So Sierra was extracted successfully. Could they not be bothered to film that? Seems like it would have been an exciting action scene.

So I understand imprinting Dolls with stuff that helps the Dollhouse, but then how is it OK to talk about the fact that they’re imprints right in front of them? Echo is imprinted with awareness of the Dollhouse, and then Topher and Dominic go ahead and talk about what she’s imprinted with while she’s standing there. Shouldn’t she flip a shit about that? Or is it part of the imprint that Dolls become conveniently deaf whenever anyone mentions that they’re Dolls?

Also, how did Dominic know enough to modify Topher’s imprints? Is he just that badass? To me this is a major point of implausibility. But the fact that he was the mole (or rather, a mole; we don’t know there isn’t another one) underscores a nugget of wisdom from Bruce Schneier: trusted insiders are dangerous. And insiders don’t get much more trusted than the chief of security. Related: the fact that DeWitt promoted Boyd to chief of security must mean that she trusts in his loyalty to the Dollhouse. What that says about him, I’m not quite sure yet. Speaking of which: where the hell is Boyd? Ever since episode 6 when the show started having real plots, he’s been pretty much benched.

Also, why is nobody more concerned about the fact that Echo, in her “blank” state, seems to be aware of the technology’s capability? And actually wants to be imprinted? And holy crap, why are blank Dolls freely allowed into places where they can see the imprinting procedure take place? This seems like the kind of thing that should happen behind closed, opaque doors.

Also, I know it’s a TV show and you should be able to see actors’ faces but wow, guys, put some fencing masks on.

Ah, one more bit of bad: all Asian people look the same, so it’s perfectly OK to have a Tibetan/Australian halfie pose as a Japanese woman. Nobody would notice. Man, that one made me wave my arms around silently mouthing profanity. Also, they screwed up the Japanese woman’s name: her ID card said “Saito”, but a security dude called Sierra-as-Saito “Sato” later on. They’re both real Japanese names, but not the same.

Now the good news. If previous episodes reminded me of “Memento”, then this one reminded me of two other movies: “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Vantage Point”. The use of Dolls to aid the Dollhouse in its investigation and DeWitt’s use of a Doll as a companion was the “Eternal Sunshine” part, like when Elijah Wood uses Kate Winslet’s erased memories to seduce her, and when Kirsten Dunst had her memory of her affair with Tom Wilkinson erased. This kind of thing blurs the line between Doll-world and Dollhouse-world, which I see as an excellent catalyst for plot complications. The retelling of the story from different perspectives was the “Vantage Point” part. I enjoyed both movies, so this is all good.

I mentioned that the DeWitt/Victor subplot felt pretty arbitrary, but it served a good purpose: establishing that DeWitt is a troubled person. It is relieving to have the occasional glimpse of a character for real, when so much of this show is based on people deceiving each other. Once again, adding moral complexity makes the whole story more engaging. A possibly-unintended side effect of this is that “Dollhouse” is turning out to be more about morality than the nature of identity, which is what I thought it was supposed to be from the beginning.

Topher was quite a bit less grating in this episode, partially because he’s starting to lose control, which wipes out a lot of his smugness. It still bothers me that a programmer has to be such a negative stereotype, but I suppose there’s not much that can be done in Topher’s case because what he does for the Dollhouse makes him inherently villainous.

Who the hell is this “Travis” guy, Mr. Sketchy Japanese Mustache Man? Methinks he may be a bit of a deus ex machina who will cause all sorts of interesting plot developments. Maybe he’s another mole. Maybe Ballard knows him. Anything could happen.

Finally, I have to admit: the plot was clever, if propped up by a series of plausibility stretches as mentioned earlier, and I didn’t see it coming that Dominic was the mole.

To conclude, let’s talk a bit about the future of the show, since it has a big impact on where the plot can go. FOX ordered 13 episodes (half a real season), but the first one was an unaired pilot, so there are only 12 episodes in the current season for all intents and purposes. There was a bit of a kerfuffle on the Internet when Felicia Day of Dr. Horrible fame tweeted that the episode she’d guest-starred in was not going to air. And this throws into sharp relief the possibility that FOX isn’t even going to pick up the “back nine”, let alone continue “Dollhouse” beyond that. I mean, come on. It debuted (a) on FOX, (b) in the Friday night shithole, (c) with horrible ratings. That’s three strikes already.

So where can the plot go with potentially as few as 3 episodes left? It’s likely that since they’ve already shot an episode 13 that apparently isn’t going to air, this season is going to end without a real resolution. And what a shame that would be if the show isn’t renewed.

Finally: nobody tried to speak French in this episode, heureusement.

I just noticed that the following is a search term through which someone found this blog recently:

what does tango say in french dollhouse

GLAD TO BE OF SERVICE, INTERNET

So far I’m not regretting my decision to give “Dollhouse” a second chance. But, as I pretty much always do with TV shows, I have both good and bad stuff to say.

Let’s start with the bad. It bothers me that the show takes such incredible liberties with its own premise. What exactly happened to our four intrepid Dolls this week? Some needs from their past arose within their wiped brains and started causing them to have glitches? The essential problem is that the Dolls have widely varying levels of how much of their past selves remain from week to week, depending on what the plot calls for.

In fact, “Dollhouse” is one of the most egregious offenders among TV shows in the crime of giving itself plot-convenient dii ex machina. What an extremely handy time it was to have random power outages just as they were letting Dolls become aware of themselves as an experiment. How extremely inconvenient it was that these Dolls could not have these “latent needs” erased but fortunately they could have things in their brains that detected when these needs had been fulfilled and released sedatives.

Ballard made some appearances, but we have no idea what relevance the stuff he was doing had, so his scenes just seemed like random interludes to provide breaks from the main action. I have no doubt that whatever he was up to will be explained in the future, but I’m not sure they had to set it up now in the midst of something apparently unrelated.

Last bad thing. Naturally, I have to whine about the French that Tango was speaking. It was indeed French, but with awful pronunciation, bad grammar and bad usage. First of all, this seems implausible within the world of the show because the Dollhouse should theoretically able to imprint Dolls with a different native language (unless some strange client wants a hooker to non-natively speak French to him). Second, I can understand the bad pronunciation as a byproduct of a non-native French speaking actress, but why not consult a native French speaker for the writing? (Native speakers wouldn’t talk like that. Then again, I suppose the native English speaking characters on the show don’t talk like real people either despite being written by native English speakers.)

OK, I can’t resist. Here’s what she said:

• Chaque mot que vous dit* c’est comme un porc** grognant*** en mes oreilles “Every word you say to me is like a pig grunting in my ears”
  • * this is incorrectly conjugated; it should be “dites” with the “t” pronounced. You’d pronounce the “t” even in fast casual speech.
  • ** I might have said “cochon” (this is a very minor complaint); it’s got more of the double meaning of a literal pig and an unsavory person.
  • *** kinda formal for this context.
• Les véhicules sont si* dégoûtants**! “The vehicles are so disgusting!”
  • * she pronounced this like the word “ces” or “ses”, which are “these” or “his/hers” respectively, which make no sense
  • ** too formal; it should be “dégueulasse”
• Je ne* sais pas pourquoi je continue à employer** ce service de voitures en Los Angeles*** “I don’t know why I continue to use this car service in Los Angeles”
  • * most real people omit this in casual speech if “pas” is also there
  • ** “j’emploie toujours” is more idiomatic but you can’t get it from literal translation (it means “I use always”)
  • *** should be “à Los Angeles”. And why mention “in Los Angeles” anyway?

Really last thing: if the power went out and the Dollhouse is underground, where was all that light coming from during Topher and Echo’s confrontation?

On to the good. There were more glimmers of humor. “He’s very tired.” “Maybe these are clothes from our former life. *leopard-print thong* Never mind!” And of course: shower scene ha ha ha. Ha.

This episode, much like episode 6, when Ballard came into his own, was refreshing in its development of sympathetic characters that you could care about as they did things and things happened to them. Once again it was partially destroyed by Eliza Dushku’s sadly obvious lack of acting chops. I get the feeling that she’s capable of playing exactly one personality, and “Caroline” isn’t it. Part of it might be the rather unusual demands of this week. What is a person who has a personality and motivations but little to no memory of who they are? How would they act? It’s an impossible question to answer, and I suppose the four intrepid Doll actors were giving it their best shot.

The main thing I liked about this episode was that it threw more complexity into the morals. DeWitt’s justification of the Dollhouse as having altruistic goals was an interesting twist. Of course it’s complete crap in some cases, like Echo’s. What we know so far indicates that she got into trouble with the Dollhouse’s parent company and was promised that it would all go away if she joined up, so it was essentially blackmail. November’s case is far more interesting, and there, the altruism argument actually makes some sense. November’s service in the Dollhouse is a temporary escape from a tragic life. It also seems like she gets special treatment; after all, until two weeks ago she was living pretty much as a normal person. But then there’s also Sierra’s situation, which has got to be the most sordid of the four. Her service in the Dollhouse is utterly reprehensible. But the existence of a semi-legitimate reason for a person to become a Doll, in November’s case, is enough to make the Dollhouse not completely morally one-sided, which makes it more interesting than a pure villain. Of course it’s still a shady, evil organization, but it makes a lot of difference to be able to see it as fallen from grace (which makes it tragic), or rejecting a chance to do good (which makes it even more evil).

This episode also shed some light on Dr. Scarface’s morals (I can’t remember her name). She suggested letting the problematic Dolls rediscover their former selves, but why? Out of concern for their well-being? Hoping that they would actually escape and everything would be ruined? Maybe DeWitt only went along with the idea as a test of Dr. Scarface’s morals (seeing if she would help Echo and the others escape, for example)?

“Dollhouse” successfully held my interest for another week. Will it keep up the good work? Tune in next week to find out.

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.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that it has to be a bad sign when interviews with a show’s creator are required reading if you’re trying to understand what said show is getting at.

So according to interviews with Joss Whedon, “Dollhouse” is meant to be a thought-provoking drama about the nature of identity. You’re supposed to end up pondering what makes a person a person. Here we have a main character whose personality has been erased and who can have other personalities applied with the show’s one get-out-of-implausibility-jail-free magic computer machine. So who is this person? She exists as a bland, neutral, naïve sort of person in between missions. Is that the real her? Is this what all people are inside? This is the sort of question you only end up asking after reading interviews with Joss Whedon.

You might be driven to ask these questions for yourself if the show did even a passable job of evoking sympathy. I’ve really got no idea who I’m supposed to care about and why. Presumably you’re supposed to care about Eliza Dushku and her plight at the hands of this shady corporation running what seems like a grossly unethical operation, but how are you supposed to do that when in the very first bloody scene of the first bloody episode you establish that she got herself into this situation voluntarily?

I suppose I should stop being offended when new TV shows come out and continue to reuse tired negative stereotypes of computer programmers, but the rodentlike sweater vest-wearing compyooter wiz who operates the Magical Memory Machine is the most unlikeable character on the show. I feel like I should quit whining about this because the US will elect a gay black Muslim president before the mainstream media stops smugly making fun of computery people. (Actually, the current president has two out of three if you believe the conspiracy theorists.) “Chuck” is pretty much the only show I’ve seen whose portrayal of geeks is well-intentioned.

It doesn’t help that pretty much all the other characters are so bloody unlikeable that watching the show basically consists of watching unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other. And when you can’t sympathize with anybody, it becomes next to impossible to ignore the fact that this is a TV show, and hard to take seriously in any case.

Dollhouse clearly wants to be taken seriously, with its blend of action, pseudo-criminal thriller, and weighty philosophical ruminations. I’d say “philosophical drama” if not for the headache-inducing oxymoronicity of that phrase. The trouble is that Dollhouse does very little to earn being taken seriously. Most egregiously, it takes every possible opportunity and more to bust out implied Eliza Dushku nudity. She’s the producer of the show, for God’s sake, and presumably has at least some sort of input into the creative direction, so one wonders how it can possibly be that these totally opposite goals can coexist in her head. They’re trying to convey the fact that the Magical Memory Machine has maybe not done its job so great with an inconvenient flashback, trying to bring a new wrinkle into the problem of exactly what identity this Eliza Dushku person has. And this flashback is…Eliza Dushku, in a shower, nekkid. Good job, guys — hint: don’t be surprised when the weighty philosophical drama doesn’t work because you smother the key moments with implied boobs. For the target demographic of this show, profound insights on the human condition are never going to be more interesting than boobs. It’s like they’re making a mockery of their own concept.

The sad thing is that despite my cynicism about the average TV watcher’s intellectual depth and attention span, I still think that a show questioning the nature of identity could be interesting and have insightful things to say. It’s possible that Dollhouse will deliver, in time. But right now it’s so off the mark, and apparently content to be there, that I don’t think it will. The problem is that pondering these issues in the form of a TV show is a monumentally difficult thing to do, and I don’t think even Joss Whedon has the deftness to do it. I once took a semester-long class on this exact subject. Before, I had been the type of person always content to have a good philosophical discussion. After, I had the answer to every philosophical discussion. The answer is “we don’t know”. There are all sorts of interesting hypothetical situations you could consider in the matter of identity, but in a TV show it would be next to impossible to keep it up for long before the ultimate answer, “we don’t know”, started showing through and from then on it would all seem pointless.

The other complication with a TV show that considered various hypothetical identity conundrums is that it would necessarily involve a lot of discontinuous jumping-around of plot. Dollhouse is, in fact, perfectly set up to do this. Echo, an “empty vessel” character, is a pretty good blank slate on which to consider these issues. Unfortunately, I don’t think Eliza Dushku has the acting wherewithal to do the thing properly. All the acting I’ve seen her do on this show is in one of two main modes: “Keanu Reeves Mode” or “Tough Resilient Rah-Rah Woman Mode”. The latter has a few minor variations, but it’s not enough. Without a wide variety of vastly different personalities, there’s a very low limit on the insight you’re going to get out of this premise.

The premise of the show shackles it a little in this regard. Presumably the services of the Dollhouse cost serious money, so the people the customers get out of this deal should be expected to be high-quality people. Plus the show needs ratings, which necessitates all the 18-49 ratings trappings like explosions and high-pressure situations, which requires the people hired from Dollhouse to be badasses. So the show’s background goes a long way towards being a good vehicle for philosophical inquiry, but doesn’t quite get there, because it’s all about the money. Between network executives clamoring for money on one side and the 18-49 demographic clamoring for guns and tits on the other, the navel-gazing gets lost in the uproar.

If a show were to successfully ponder the philosophy of identity, I think by its very nature it couldn’t appear on a major national network in prime time. It’d be the kind of thing where all the Whedonites breathlessly proclaim its magnificence on Internet forums, and the other 99.9% of TV watchers are never even aware of its existence.

That said, I wish Dollhouse would drop its pretense of seriousness. “Chuck” is a show that deals with rather heavy subject matter, if you step back and realize what’s actually going on, but it does it in such a lighthearted and fun way that you can’t help but like it for the writers’ willingness to laugh at themselves. The writers of Dollhouse crank out ridiculous drivel wrapped in ominous music while Joss Whedon talks to reporters about how deep his show is and Eliza Dushku gets her boobs out. If Dollhouse could just develop a bit of a sense of humor, that would go a long way towards making it less painful to watch.