Checking in on the Dollhouse

Dollhouse has aired eight episodes, but I haven't mentioned the show here since the second one. And without Battlestar Galactica to talk about on a Friday night anymore, it seemed like an opportunity to talk about where my opinion of Joss Whedon's newest show stands now.

The show has seemed to get steadily better almost every week, though not by leaps and bounds. When Agent Ballard lost his job a few weeks back, at the same time a secretly-programmed Echo made contact with him for the first time, things definitely took a sharper upswing. Alright, they regressed a bit after that when Dollhouse did the obligatory sci-fi premise of having "all the characters lose their inhibitions and start behaving as though they were drunk/children/stupid." But tonight's installment, with the featured Dolls waking up with awareness of their situation, turned right back around on the road to improvement.

But I have to say, I think there's still quite of bit of mileage on that road to cover. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was honestly no better in its lackluster first season, but I nevertheless find myself hoping for more out of Dollhouse, since I'm not really expecting at this point to get any more episodes of it after this run of 13.

I think there are two core problems with the show that might be unsolvable. First, it lacks the space in which to effectively place the trademark Joss Whedon humor and pithy dialogue. Now, he has said in interviews that basically, "the Dollhouse isn't a funny place," that this is going to be a darker show on a week-to-week basis than what he has made before. And you know what? I think I could accept that.

The problem is, I don't think he has. Many of the episodes (more, recently) have had quite a few "jokes" in them. But they often feel wedged in, inappropriate for the surroundings. That's because the Dollhouse staff, from Echo's handler Boyd, to Ms. DeWitt, to secondary characters like Dr. Saunders and Dominic, are incredibly serious, almost humorless characters. And the Dolls themselves don't have humor in their natural states either.

That leaves Agent Ballard, who has a trace of humor in an uptight FBI sort of way, and Dollhouse tech guy Topher. Oh, Topher. As basically the only character on the show with a sense of humor, the writers are loading him down with all the jokes. All the wry quips, turns of phrase, and practical jokes that got spread out evenly on Firefly among Mal, Wash, Zoe, Jayne, Kaylee, Book, Inara, and yes, even Simon and River, is all being funneled into this one guy. It might be cool for a person to have, say, the strength of nine people, but the wit of nine people? He just comes off obnoxious, in my opinion.

Joss says he has a dark premise. I think he'd be better off embracing that more.

The second problem is the lack of another hallmark of Whedon's other series. Buffy, Angel, and Firefly were all, amid their fantastical trappings, relationship shows. They were all shows about friends so close that they became a true family despite a lack of blood relation. Not that they always got along; part of having a "family" that close is that the characters could go at each other in ways that only family would.

There's inherently no way for these kinds of relationships to develop in the Dollhouse premise. Oh sure, it's been a running theme in the episodes so far that the Dolls don't get memory wiped as completely clean as you might think. But that's a long way from them developing any real history with one another. The staff tries to keep them all at a dispassionate distance. The staff is nothing but cold and business-like with one another. (Again, except for that "wacky" Topher!) Relationships on this series seem to operate at a roughly CSI: Dollhouse kind of level, and that deprives us of Whedon's greatest strength as a writer.

Now, is it a terrible show? No, not at all. I am generally entertained when I watch it. And like I said, I think that on average, it gets a little better every week. But it still lives in a "better than a fair amount of television" area, when I want it to be really worthy of Joss Whedon. I'm not sure it can get that far in the handful of episodes left to be aired. I'm not even sure I want it to get there, just so that I could be disappointed in the likely event the show won't be renewed for another season.

So that's where I stand. I'm in it until the end, pleased to see it taking steps up in quality, disappointed they're only baby steps.