(Note: This post is a little late, since I’m mired in the grips of #DeathKold09. Any incoherence is strictly the provenance of the virus taking residence in my sinuses. Sincerely, the Mgmt.)
OK, a little backstory here. I was ignorant of the Whedon-verse before Bronwen introduced me to it. One of my labours when I went a-courting was to watch all seven seasons of Buffy, plus season five of Angel. And I enjoyed a lot of it. (Especially “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”.)
Then we moved on to Firefly. *sigh* I miss Firefly. I’m still pissed that we never learned about Shepherd Book’s backstory.
So, yeah, I wouldn’t describe myself as a rabid Whedonist, but I’ve seen Serenity more than once in the theater. I’ve been to a “Once More With Feeling” sing-a-long. I was looking forward to Dollhouse. Now that it’s cancelled, I’ll watch the rest of the episodes, but I won’t miss it when it’s gone.
The show never quite worked for me. From the start, I felt like the dolls should not have been the protagonists. Their changeability and their blankness rendered most of the engagement-of-the-week plots meaningless for me. Their small changes, flashes of awareness and slow development would have worked much better if they were relieved of the focus. I’d have been much more interested in having the handlers and employees as the protagonists, with the dolls always tantalizingly out of reach. Is Echo more aware or isn’t she? What’s really going on in her head? The dolls are objectified; they should have been the story objects, not subjects. For example, see the work of Summer Glau on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Now, you could say that one of the points of Dollhouse was to deal with that inversion. And I’ll grant that it’s an interesting premise. But premise is nothing without execution. I’m never comfortable saying that a performer or artist is incapable of doing something; doesn’t possess the talent or ability. I’m not interested in discussing whether or not someone has the ability to do something, only what they did and how they did it. But it’s fairly clear that Eliza Dushku did not pull it off. If Amy Acker had been in the lead role, who knows if it would have worked any better? It still wouldn’t have changed some things.
I’m one of the few people who thought Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a really good show, and would have happily watched it for many seasons. But in the face of its persistent difficulties, I accepted that the thing to do was just wrap it up and let all the talented people move on to their next thing. And so in the end, that’s my epitaph (har-har) for Dollhouse. Let’s just let it go, and allow all of the talented artists move on to the next project. Which will hopefully be free of all the angst and controversy.
