Dollhouse 1.01
When I first heard of it the premise of Dollhouse sounded like the twisted love child of The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Normal Again. This would have been a very good, very creepy thing. Up close it also sounded like Buffy as seen from the perspective of the Watcher’s Council. The Slayer was always a doll to them even if they made mission not money from her and never programmed her for sex. One difference is that in BtVS the Watcher’s Council didn’t appear until Season 3 and the full horror of the system wasn’t made explicit until Season 7. For a long time the viewer was sucked into rooting for the set up as if it were a standard hero’s journey and when the truth was finally exposed that audience complicity made it into a personal epiphany which many rejected along with the show.
Dollhouse tells us right from the beginning that it’s a bad wrong thing. Even without the overt references to human trafficking, the very first engagement Echo goes on she’s someone else’s perfect weekend, a blow-up birthday treat programmed to simulate not only sex but emotions. The brief glimpse of Sierra’s first time she’s wired up like a prime piece of laboratory specimen in a place where they do do awful things to rats. Despite all this the surface gloss of the series rather undermined its disapproving stance. Tonally the pilot had all the dissonance of a forced hybrid of Objects in Space with Charlie’s Angels. It was particularly jarring in the kidnapping story, which hit every emotional note on cue but never convinced physically. Even Eliza’s shoes were wrong. It played like a comic book version of the things even standard cop shows do more convincingly. Maybe because they are all cop shows now - mysterious private agencies, even morally ambiguous private agencies, belong in the sixties or certainly pre-recession. No-one believes in billionaires right now.
I’m being critical because the show did promise to be about power. What men want to do to women and what very rich people expect to do to the merely middle class but also about the temptations for those with relatively little power to give up what little they have. For someone to look after them. It can still do that but I think they need to avoid basing engagements on grittier genre fare, the discrepancies are too glaring.
For all the complaints that the dolls would be impossible to root for I already feel interested in Echo/Caroline, I think Dushku’s strong personality works well here given that she’s supposed not to be so easily erased. Lead (and executive producer) aside, the most promising parts of the show relate to the Dollhouse itself. Who runs them and what else might they want this technology for? Where do they get the downloaded personalities that Topher amalgates and does he see himself as an artist or a technician? In what capacity did Adele know Caroline before she became Echo? What convinced Boyd and Amy Acker’s characters to do the jobs they do? How blank are the blank slates and what capacity do they have to re-write themselves? Do they want to?