Dollhouse: The End

Thursday, February 4th, 2010, 10:00 pm

Having finally gotten up the nerve to watch Epitaph Two last night, I've finished all the Dollhouse there'll ever be. (Well, except that I never saw Epitaph One. I own the DVDs, but I lent them to Austen, and she hasn't watched them or given them back, so I just had to bypass that one.) Endings have a way of getting to me in any case, and Joss Whedon's finales don't shy away from darkness and pain, so you'll forgive me if I'm still feeling a little emotional about the whole thing. (A quick note: I will speak freely here, without regard to plot points or anything else. Don't read further if, somehow, you're even further behind on watching the last episodes than I was.)

In the end, Dollhouse was a failed show, much as it pains me to write that. The first five episodes were really not good. The standalone stories were so standalone as to have no resonance, and the main critique that cropped up before the show even aired (as unfair as that kind of "analysis" is) came true: why would we care about Echo if she's almost never Echo? Further, the criticism that Eliza Dushku has no range as an actor turned out to be, sadly, spot on. She has a comfort zone, and she's very watchable in that zone: as Faith in Buffy is, of course, still what she's most known for, and late in the Dollhouse's run, when she becomes Echo with all her various abilities and the angst that comes with it (I've seen this before ...), she tapped into some of that Faith mojo. It just took a long time to get there.

Fox seems to have exacerbated the difficulty by ordering Joss Whedon to kick the show off with that bunch of standalone episodes, only lightly seeded with a larger overall story. In a thirteen-episode season, shouldn't we know before the end of the fourth episode who the Big Bad is? Shouldn't we have some more information about him earlier so that he/we can get a full arc? Information about Alpha was leaked out in dribs and drabs, and it felt clunky and added on to the standalone stories early in the show's run (which it likely was).

Think also about how Fox marketed these episodes: "Echo is blind!"; "Echo loses her mind during a big art heist!"; "Echo is hunted!" The universe of Whedonite loyalists plus people who might watch a Whedon show because their friends all told them the excellence of Firefly is not huge, contrary to Whedonite assertions that "everyone loves Joss Whedon". Dollhouse's pilot garnered 4.715 million viewers. That's respectable if that's your consistent audience on Friday night, but you can't afford to lose much off of that and still have a viable program. Thus, you needed to start the show off with a bang, not a whimper, because the group of truly hardcore Whedonites, who were going to watch regardless of how bad the show was in the early going (ahem), is really not very big. Fox apparently had the idea that they were going to leach off the millions watching Supernanny and Flashpoint (ABC and CBS's entries for the Dollhouse timeslot at the time of the premiere). In hindight, it's blindingly obviously how dumb this was. But even at the time, Fox was criticized, because the show very obviously wasn't working, and the audience was not responding. If you let Joss be Joss right from the start, and, say, start with "Man on the Street", then maybe I'm not writing this post today. (Maybe I still am writing it because maybe the number of people who kept watching Dollhouse even after those first five episodes is the same as the number of people who'd have watched if the show had started a different way. Or maybe I'd have written this post six months ago after the show was canceled after just six episodes. It's hard to say.)

Back in reality, the show was basically in a full death spiral by the time "Man on the Street" aired -- some people had abandoned the show because they didn't like the first few episodes, some stuck around but still didn't love the show when it picked up in the second half of the first season, and some left because they didn't want to get invested in a show that was surely headed for cancellation anyway. Rumors of cancellation were swirling in all the usual places. All of this left Season 2 (frankly, it's a miracle Season 2 exists, given the above litany of difficulties) with generally low-two-million-viewer numbers, though those stats became meaningless once the show was cancelled. Fox decided to air the rest of the episodes (bless them for that, at least, especially since it's not clear that reruns of The Family Guy or something wouldn't have done better), but crammed six of them into three nights in December to make sure the whole run was burned off before we hit the midseason premiere point.

All of that is business, not writers-room stuff, though business of course affects creativity: the first five episodes of the first season, for instance, are different from what we'd have seen otherwise; or the fact that the writers couldn't assume that the audience had seen "Epitaph One", since Fox chose not to air it; or the completely rushed pace the show took on over its last six or eight episodes, pushing revelation after revelation out the door, killing characters like there was no tomorrow, and so forth. Also, I noticed a lot of complaint about Boyd as the founder of Rossum, and I firmly believe that if that had been a Season 3 (or even later?) revelation, it could have been built to. Or maybe the audience could have gotten the reveal before the characters. Remember, now-famous Dollhouse lore is that Joss Whedon had a five-year plan right from the start -- it doesn't seem to me that Boyd-as-Rossum-head was just pulled out of the writers' asses sometime in October, 2009.

So far, I've put all my blame for the show's demise on Fox for dicking around, but the writers share plenty of blame as well. After all, just because Fox tells you to write five episodes that you didn't really anticipate having to write doesn't mean you should make bad TV. You still have to put high-quality product on the air, and "The Target", "Stage Fright", "Gray Hour", and "True Believer" were not high-quality television. When the network gives you the lemon of saying "we need these episodes to be standalone adventure stories to give the audience, which is mostly dumb sheep with no capacity for intellectual reasoning, time to adjust", you have to make lemonade by (a) (and this really is (a), as in it is the most important factor there is) making good adventure stories; (b) getting us to care about the characters who don't have that inherent disability of constant change. As to (b), Ballard was the only strong character in the first half of the first season. Boyd was sort of a generically troubled (or should I say "troubled"?) new handler, Topher cracked wise a lot, DeWitt kept a firm hand, and Dominic was a hardass. Over the course of five episodes, since we're not going to get to care about Echo, you have to make us care about some of those other characters. And we didn't. (I did eventually end up caring about all of them, but it took the massive leap forward to Season 2 to get there. Topher got scruples, Adelle got severely tested by her overlords, Boyd took over security, Ballard joined the team, and Dominic got to be the hero of The Attic.)

Even on this front, though, I'm not sure I can blame the writers for the whole business. After all, imagine being in the room, plotting your season, planning arcs, etc., when suddenly the network passes on just a wee note: "We hate everything you're doing, change it all." You've got less time to pull together those first episodes than you did before, because you're kind of back to square one when it comes to figuring out how your seasonal arcs are going to run, what your tone is going to be, and so forth. And don't forget that those orders from the network are on top of having had to shoot two pilots because the network rejected the first one after audience testing. Of course, maybe the original pilot would have been terrible and gotten the show off to an even worse start, but that's not really the point -- the point is about time, energy, direction, and so forth.

I called Dollhouse a "failed show", but I don't want to denigrate what Joss Whedon et al. did accomplish, which was a hell of a lot. The show raised all sorts of moral quandaries about science and technology, issues of the philosophy of self, questions about sex and violence and their role in our culture, ideas about the nature of entertainment and the boundaries between real and fantasy. All of this in 28 episodes, only 26 of which actually aired.

Further, as I said above, by the end of the show, there were a number of characters I genuinely cared about, Topher most notably. (Fran Kranz's excellent work in the role really ought to be recognized.) Also, it's really interesting how much the show became his -- think about how at the end of the series, in order to restore humanity, it is Topher, not Echo, who makes the Christ-like ultimate sacrifice to rescue all of us. (If you don't like the Christ analogy, how about him being the deus in the deus ex machina that his little pulse bomb represented?) Hell, at the end of "Epitaph Two", Adelle seemingly has more to do than Echo, as she has to get out into the world and help people recover. Echo just gets to sit in the Dollhouse and dream with her memories of Paul. (I realize that's oversimplifying, but remember Adelle's line to Echo: "It's not your fight.")

So Joss, I say once and for all: get thee to cable! Put a show like Dollhouse on Syfy and it's considered a huge hit, even though you don't get all that money to build that gorgeous Dollhouse set. You also don't get Eliza Dushku, for whatever that's worth. (I don't want to be mean to her, since I follow her on Twitter, but she really was part of the problem in the early going of the series, and while things got better later on, I'm not sure she was ever actively part of the solution so much as she was just not that bad.) But what you do get is one to two million people watching every week, plus more on DVR, plus more on Hulu, and Syfy is completely overjoyed with you because, come on, what else does it have? Warehouse 13? Sanctuary? I've seen those shows, and I'll tell you: they're no Dollhouse. (Ok, Battlestar Galactica was still on, but it was in its final run, set to end three months after Dollhouse premiered.)

One last shot across the bow, this one a little more meta: I saw far too many reviewers, bloggers, etc., talking about how icky the sex-slave aspect of the show was. That was the point! If you believe that Joss Whedon, writer of Alien: Resurrection, creator of Buffy, brainchild behind one of the more interesting prostitute characters on TV (Inara on Firefly), isn't addressing these issues head-on, completely intentionally, I think you're missing something. Yes, the show engaged in a certain amount of fanservice (Eliza Dushku was in various states of undress a lot), but I would even give Joss credit for doing that intentionally. Remember, the Dollhouse is about satisfying desires and creating entertainment through semi-scripted fantasy. It's not crazy to think that Joss was turning the lens on us as well, is it? That we're meant not only to say "wow, Eliza really does have a fantastic rack", but to also be creeped out by ourselves, our sexism, our objectification? In short, aren't we supposed to reflect on our own attitudes toward sex, violence, fantasy, and gratification by being forced into the same pleasure-oriented position as the (sleazy, creepy, even dangerous) clients of the Dollhouse? Maybe that's a gross over-reading. But I think the larger point stands: very little in the show was unthinking or gratuitous or legitimately objectionable.

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