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Saturday, September 12, 2009

A few thoughts on Dollhouse Season 1

9:22 PM / Television / 4 Comments

Dollhouse is the latest series from Joss Whedon, whose previous shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, all attained cult followings and are fondly remembered despite never having made it big with the masses. (In fact, Buffy and Angel continue to this day in the form of comic books written in conjunction with their creator.) Whedon has a reputation for taking superficially simple or even potentially silly concepts (a valley girl fighting vampires, a crew of space cowboys jetting around the galaxy) and use them to explore surprisingly complex themes, told with a sprinkling of sharp wit and zingy dialogue. I don't consider myself to be a fan of everything the man has put out by any means, but whenever I hear that something new is coming out with his name attached to it, I'm always curious, if not outright ecstatic.

Dollhouse is different from Whedon's previous work. While his earlier shows all took place in a world other than our own (Buffy and Angel in a universe inhabited by vampires, demons and girls with superpowers, Firefly five hundred years in the future), the central conceit of Dollhouse is that everything portrayed in it could potentially be happening right under our very noses, albeit assuming that technology was considerably more advanced than we currently believe it to be. The basic idea is that, somewhere in Los Angeles, there exists a secret organisation known as the Dollhouse, which controls a group of "Dolls" or "Actives" - people who, for whatever reason, have voluntarily (or involuntarily, as the case may in fact be) submitted to having their minds wiped for a period of five years. During that time, the Dollhouse can use the Actives' bodies as they see fit, imprinting them with new personalities and sending them on a variety of "engagements", which can range from hostage negotiation to the theft of priceless works of art to glorified prostitution. The Dollhouse's chiefs don't seem to have any moral conniptions about renting their Actives out to individuals whose motives may be less than scrupulous, or indeed the notion of turning a living human being into essentially a zombie - from their point of view, they are merely providing a service.

One of these Actives is Echo (Eliza Dushku), a young woman formerly known as Caroline who, for reasons that are initially unclear, felt she had no choice but to flee her old life and surrender herself to the Dollhouse. As the series opens, she is, unbeknownst to her handlers, beginning to develop a sense of self-awareness and remembering elements of personalities with which she has been implanted and, later on, her previous life as Caroline. Meanwhile, FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) is convinced that the Dollhouse exists and has spent most of his career following a series of false leads, to the extent that his marriage is collapsed and he is looked on with scorn by his disbelieving colleagues. His latest lead, however, may not be so bogus: someone has sent him video footage of Caroline, along with a cryptic note urging him to "keep looking".

On paper, it's such a great setup. It's only once you see it in motion that things begin to fall apart, and at times it's difficult to work out why. All the ingredients for a truly riveting programme are there: you've got the overarching conspiracy thriller element, the cavalcade of moral quandaries that a construct like the Dollhouse poses, and on a more immediate level there's the fact that Echo and her fellow Actives can become any number of different people, meaning that, theoretically, every week the show could reinvent itself in a completely different genre. What's therefore baffling is how mundane, plodding and repetitive it often feels. This is, admittedly, far more of a problem during the first batch of episodes, which were apparently engineered to function as stand-alones at the behest of the Fox network and as a result feel decidedly inconsequential: Echo goes on an engagement, things unexpectedly go wrong and she ended up in danger, but the crisis is averted and she is returned to the Dollhouse none the wiser. Rinse and repeat. All of this is supposed to be a showcase for Eliza Dushku's range as an actress, but all it really shows is that, regardless of whether she's playing an asthmatic hostage negotiator, a backup singer or a blind evangelical Christian (ah Joss, I see what you did there), the same basic persona of a sassy ass-kicker shines through. Her lack of range is underscored in the episode Gray Hour, in which both Echo and another Doll, Sierra (Dichen Lachman), are imprinted with the same personality: that of a brusque, self-aggrandising professional burglar. Whereas Dushku's version seems reminiscent of a young girl playing dress-up, Lachman takes the same catchphrases and intonations and actually makes you believe them. Lachman, incidentally, emerges as a very competent actor as the season progresses, and I was a little surprised to discover that her most significant work prior to this was a three-year stint on Neighbours. (Then again, Naomi Watts cut her teeth on Home and Away.)

That's not to say that Dushku is the weakest link in the regular cast. On the contrary, she at least has something a screen presence, however limited in range, whereas many of her counterparts, particularly the males, make little to no impression at all. Her handler, ex-cop Boyd Langton (Harry J. Lennix), plays the typical strong silent type struggling with the ethical ramifications of his job, while another Active, Victor (Enver Gjokaj), wears the same blank look regardless of whether he is inactive or imprinted with a personality. The biggest problem, however, is Paul Ballard. I get the impression that Whedon and co intended for him to be the main audience identification figure - the lonely outsider who just wants to do what's right, not a million miles away from Angel or Malcolm Reynolds (in Angel and Firefly respectively). The trouble is that this guy's life is supposed to be falling apart around him as his obsession consumes him, but we never buy it for the simple reason that actor Tahmoh Penikett's facial expression never changes. I can only assume that the guy must have undergone a serious amount of Botox injections - he's more doll-like than the dolls themselves in their inactive states, and he wanders through his scenes with the slightly dazed look of an actor who has somehow wandered on to the wrong set. It wouldn't be the first time Whedon has picked a bland leading man (David Boreanaz, anyone?), and it may be that Penikett ultimately settles into the role, but in all honesty I'm not convinced the show will be around long enough for that to happen.

As for the Dollhouse and the people behind it - well, it's the Initiative from Buffy's fourth season all over again. Even if you're able to suspend your disbelief enough to accept that a massive organisation with Actives and their handlers flowing in and out of it on a near-constant basis is able to exist completely undetected in central LA, the overpowering, stultifying effect of its emphasis on impersonal technology and corridor after underground corridor and swarm of bland, faceless employees remains a massive issue to overcome. (It doesn't help that composers Mychael Danna and Rob Simonsen's score during the scenes set inside the Dollhouse is sonic wallpaper in the truest sense of the phrase - a low, numbing, ever-present hum that really grates after a while.) The head of the regime, Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams), is your typical refined, upper-class British villainess, and the show doesn't delve into her morality anything like as much as it should. By contrast, Topher (Fran Kranz), the scientist who masterminded the personality imprinting system, is actually pretty amusing to watch. When he first popped up, I was immediately filled with horror and found myself flashing back to the character of Andrew in Buffy's sixth and seventh seasons. I'm happy to admit, however, that my initial impressions were wrong: Topher is infinitely less annoying than the aforementioned snivelling little wretch, and if any of the show's dialogue makes you laugh, it's almost guaranteed to come from him - ever since watching True Believer, I find myself incapable of referring to an erection as anything other than a "man-reaction". (He also gets one of the most unexpectedly tender moments in the series in the otherwise underwhelming Haunted, where he acquisitions Sierra and imprints her with the identity of a girl geek so they can spend the night having fun together. It's not what you think: he just wants someone who'll play Laser Quest and Xbox games with him. Confronted with the sight of someone who is so bereft of actual friendships that he has to fabricate one, it's hard not to feel for the guy.)

Ah, the dialogue: often considered to be one of Whedon's strongest assets but, Topher aside, in painfully short supply here. Dollhouse is a departure for its creator in many respects, but the near-complete lack of his trademark verbal wit is perhaps the more regretful. He has been accused in the past of giving all of his characters the same wry, peppy, self-aware type of speech, but here everyone basically talks in bland TV-speak. On the plus side, he seems to have reined in his tendency to unexpectedly-but-not-really-unexpectedly kill off his cast for cheap thrills. (In its place is a habit of unexpectedly-but-not-really-unexpectedly revealing characters previously introduced as fully functioning human beings to be Actives - this happens four times in the space of the twelve-episode season and will, I suspect, become very tedious indeed if it continues into the second season.)

At around the midway mark, with the episode Man on the Street, things finally begin to kick into gear with the serial narrative being brought more to the foreground and the writers actually beginning to directly acknowledge the fascinating ethical debates that surround the Dollhouse. This is encapsulated in a tightly scripted, act-long discussion between Ballard and one of the Dollhouse's clients (played by guest star Patton Oswalt), which clearly sets out the arguments on both sides of the fence: why on the one hand it's easy to see the whole concept of Actives as unspeakably wrong, but on the other understand what drives people to seek out that fantasy. It's probably the best scene in the entire season and the whole thing consists of two men sitting in a kitchen talking to one another. Having said that, changing gears mid-season really doesn't make as big a difference as you might think. Many have stated that the second half is significantly different from - and substantially better than - the first, but while it's certainly true that things begin to happen rather more quickly from this point on, the same feeling of malaise that permeated the first five episodes remains more or less throughout. "More or less" being the key phrase here, because the final broadcast episode, Omega, manages not only to be head and shoulders above the rest of the season in terms of overall quality but also to pack in far more plot development than the other episodes put together, suggesting not only that the previous eleven hours were actually building to something after all but also that there is scope for things to get vastly more interesting as we progress into the second season. On the other hand, the unaired "epilogue" episode, Epitaph One, while offering an inventive and frightening look at what the world might be like in ten years' time, is crippled by having been shot predominantly on low-grade high definition video, which I'm led to believe is how Season 2 will also look, due to budget cuts.

"Lots of promise and little pay-off" is an apt way of describing the first season of Dollhouse. What's frustrating with is that it shows so much potential. Good concept? Check. Juicy ethical quandaries? Check. Talented writer? Check. Charismatic leading lady? Check... more or less. The end result? Definitely less than the sum of its parts. We're presented with a whole bunch of half-formed ideas about personal responsibility, free will and creating one's own identity, but they never ring true because they're dealt with in such a haphazard and half-hearted way. We might infer many of the problems to stem from network interference: a lot has been made of their "vision for the show" clashing with Whedon's, resulting in him having to make significant concessions to them. Furthermore, the original opening episode was shelved completely, with elements of it being cannibalised for later episodes, and while Whedon was quick to claim that this was entirely his decision, it's hard not to be sceptical given how he has been treated by Fox in the past. (That said, the original pilot is really no better than the one that aired, and I would argue that in some ways it is in fact worse.) I can see what attracted him to this project, but it's clear that he and his writers spent a good portion of the season floundering as they tried to figure out how to make the premise work. The season finale and epilogue suggest that they may at last have got it together, but it's undoubtedly going to be an uphill battle all the way. In my opinion there is little likelihood that Dollhouse will make it beyond its second season... but then again, I was convinced it wouldn't get a second run in the first place, so who's to say? Come September 25, I'll be there, and I'll be as cautiously optimistic as my more pessimistic side allows me to be.

• 1.00: "Echo" by Joss Whedon - 5/10 (unaired)
• 1.01: "Ghost" by Joss Whedon - 5/10
• 1.02: "The Target" by Steven S. DeKnight - 6/10
• 1.03: "Stage Fright" by Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon - 4/10
• 1.04: "Gray Hour" by Sarah Fain & Elizabeth Craft - 5/10
• 1.05: "True Believer" by Tim Minear - 6/10
• 1.06: "Man on the Street" by Joss Whedon - 7/10
• 1.07: "Echoes" by Elizabeth Craft & Sarah Fain - 6/10
• 1.08: "Needs" by Tracy Bellomo - 7/10
• 1.09: "Spy in the House of Love" by Andrew Chambliss - 7/10
• 1.10: "Haunted" by Jane Espenson & Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon - 5/10
• 1.11: "Briar Rose" by Jane Espenson - 6/10
• 1.12: "Omega" by Tim Minear - 8/10
• 1.13: "Epitaph One" by Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon - 7/10 (unaired)

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