The Box Co.

‘Dollhouse’ was busted – want a refund

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse is finally over.

The first season was a little rocky. It picked up around the 6th episode ("Man on the Street"), and really intrigued me during the super-secret season finale, "Epitaph One". With high hopes for the second season, I tuned in again to see what would happen. And the show continued in its downward spiral. It seemed impossible that the show could take all of that forward momentum that built up to Epitaph One and throw themselves out the window, but they pulled it off.

Season Two started off on the wrong foot by reverting back to the status of Season One. Boyd took the role of Mr. Dominic. Ballard took the role of Boyd. And the newly introduced Senator Perrin took the role of Ballard. Nothing terribly inventive. It was a mere shuffling of roles and nothing new was injected into the series until the big reveal that Perrin was a Doll.

But then everything started to get bad again. Quickening of the pacing of the story, huge inconsistencies in character behaviour and motivations, and - on occasion - complete disregard or disrespect of series canon.

Adelle's character fluctuated wildly, and - in my mind - she should have been the one to sacrifice her life in the end to restore the world, after giving away the remote wipe tech to Rossum. Honestly, what was she thinking?

The character of Echo became increasingly annoying. Her ridiculous pompous attitude and the absurd mess of her messianic spinal fluid was ridiculous. Madness. Even the fact that Caroline's original memory was important seemed ridiculous. First, how did no one know who the CEO of Rossum was? A huge pharmaceutical company with multi-national interests has a CEO that no one knows about? How is that even possible? Second, Caroline is the only one to know who the CEO is? That seems awfully coincidental. And why didn't she recognize Boyd during the events of "Need"?

The whole series stumbled like a legless Felicia Day towards its disappointing conclusion, and was - ultimately - a huge disappointment following Joss Whedon's show Firefly and the tremendous success of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

But is the problem Joss Whedon? I cannot help but think that the creative potential exists within him to make something good again, but since Dr. Horrible, there have been two names plastered across all of "Joss Whedon's" creations: Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. Mr. and Mrs. Whedon, if you will (because I believe they are married or engaged or something).

But I have to say, I think Maurissa Tancharoen is something like the Yoko Ono of the Whedon family. Zack seems talented. Joss is clearly talented. Jed might even have potential. But every single thing that I have seen Maurissa do has been pitiful. Her part in Dr. Horrible could have been filled by a stump, her Dollhouse acting has been pitiful (Kilo was a ridiculous character, especially in the finale), and every episode that she and Jed wrote together was disappointing. "Stage Fright" and "Haunted" were among the worst episodes of Season One and "The Attic" and many of their Season Two episodes were equally disappointing (and nonsensical).

The only episode that they have a writing credit on that wasn't garbage was Epitaph One, which has Joss Whedon on a Story credit, meaning that he was - for better or worse - running that episode.

In my opinion, Jed and Maurissa are a terrible pair of writers, and I feel like Joss could have done so much more with the show if he had stuck to his guns and worked with Tim Minear and Jane Espenson on most of the episodes. Look at the episodes of Firefly. A lot of the episodes were written or directed by those three. Look at Dollhouse. Joss Whedon wrote three episodes throughout the whole series! So incredibly disappointing.

In short, I blame the failure of the show on several factors.
1. Eliza Dushku's terrible acting. Also, for the record, I feel that having her as a producer of the show from the outset had the entire thing geared to be very self-serving. Miracle Laurie wasn't that great either.
2. The poor writing. Whether Jed and Maurissa were the weak links is still beyond me, but I hope that Joss' next project does not include them on the creative team.
3. Poor character development. (Half the main cast were non-entities for most of the series).
4. Misused premise. Seriously? Echo has a cure in her spinal fluid that makes people immune to imprinting. But Boyd wants technology that can imprint everyone. So, he doesn't want to imprint himself, but why imprint everyone else. His motives made no sense. I cannot even fathom what his endgame was.

The show did have a few good things going for it:

1. Boyd was a really good character (until the end) and Harry Lennix is a great actor. And - despite being blank slates - Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman were phenomenal. No matter what "imprint" that they were required to play, they performed flawlessly. It was incredible. If only Dichen Lachman had been the main focus, the show would have easily been hundreds of times better. Reed Diamond was also pretty good.

2. Very interesting premise. Until they started dabbling in some ridiculous spinal fluid cures and magical memories retaining themselves post imprinting. Still, the idea of the Dollhouse, its purpose, the technology, etc was incredibly interesting.

The one problem with this is that they never expanded on the premise. When Mr. Ambrose transplanted his consciousness into Victor talking about anatomical upgrades, I was truly taken back. Of course! It made perfect sense. You've got a bunch of old decaying wealthy men running a company that has the technology to imprint minds into other bodies. They've found the "Fountain of Youth". Better than that. They've found a way to get live forever AND be better than you've ever been. I wouldn't want to live forever in my body. But if you give me the offer to take over Enver Gjokaj and live looking like that for a few decades, I'd say "Sign me up!"

After that, you can explore all the immorality of human trafficking and the complexities of the technology. It could have been tremendously interesting. The exploration of the premise that they followed was truly disappointing.

3. Fantastic set design. (That's all I can say.)

Anyway, I'm sure that Brendon will come back and say that he found it fantastic and compelling. But no. This entire series was terrible. An incredible disappointment. Completely shakes my faith in Whedon, but I hope that his next project redeems him. The favour that he created with Firefly has been depleted.