I’m here for your entertainment.
Dollhouse: watched most recent ep, and it was brilliant. Everything I've been wanting out of DH.
It was by no means perfect--wait, why'd Priya go back to the Dollhouse at the end? (I mean, I get their point that she can't deal with her reality, and also the awful irony in her returning to captivity, but wouldn't this have been a great opportunity to send Priya home, and make for a better cover story in any case? She did kill him in self-defense, after all.)--but damn: a story that finally deals with the implications of the DH (and not the crazy mindwipe future, but the moral compromises that everyone who works for the Dollhouse must make everyday--and the way the DH is especially adept at victimizing women because it exploits rape culture) and offers great character bits for Sierra, Topher, Adele, and Boyd?
Oh, the other problem: the insistence on Sierra and Victor's Great Imprint-Transcending Love. I think it was mostly well-handled in this episode, and I liked the image of Sierra and Victor in the Doll coffin at the end, but I'm worried about where it's going (answer, due to DH's recent cancellation, is of course: nowhere), i.e., what life-affirming lesson about True Love will we eventually be forced to learn (none)? But again: Sierra and Victor in the coffin just about broke my cold, dark heart.
Other striking moments: the horror of Topher, of course, hacking up the doctor in the tub, and Boyd's chilling efficiency, and Adele breaking when they brought up her dalliances with Victor, and Priya making Topher promise to erase the last year, or even just the last day, if he ever woke her up again.
Dollhouse is so incredibly cynical, especially when you realize that Joss is the same man who brought us Firefly, an ode to friendship and surrogate families if there ever was one. On Dollhouse, relationships are near-impossible. The only characters apparently capable or interested in friendship are the Actives, and they're as simple as children, or at least supposed to be. DH is of course all about a simulacra of a human relationship rather than a real one. It's also a disturbing metafictional exercise: obviously, of course, the (mostly terrible) standalone episodes attempt to engage different genres, and it's no accident that the show is set in LA when the Dollhouse is a hermetically sealed pleasure palace designed to cater to "our" desire for entertainment and stories and fantasy (the dolls are ideal actives, of course), or how damn hard DH employees and customers work to think about the DH isn't fundamentally exploitative. But the Xander-Wash-Topher evolution gets me the most. If that character type is an avatar for Joss, the picture is bleak: Xander loses an eye, though he does learn how to be heroic and ordinary, and Wash is beloved, but irrelevant, and of course sort of heartlessly and abruptly killed at the end of Serenity. And now there's Topher, who actually is the "creator" and the raw talent, but he's chosen for his amorality and because the corporation behind the DH can manipulate him. Wash had dinosaurs; Topher has dolls, and while Topher, as Adele tells him, takes good care of his toys, he also doesn't see the dolls as people, really. (Sierra is also the doll Topher chose for his companion on his birthday; he doesn't have any friends, so he makes a perfect one.) All of his attempts to do something ethically right backfire: he's left hacking up a body in a tub--or bringing about the end of the world. Is the object here the entertainment industry--an exploitative fleshtrade (Joss's--possible--metaphor, not mine) in which the show itself is hopelessly implicated (cf. the marketing for the show, which relentlessly uses Eliza Dushku's body to sell the product, when the show itself--sort of--critiques the idea that bodies are commodities, and yet also wants us to be attracted to Echo)--or fiction itself?
It was by no means perfect--wait, why'd Priya go back to the Dollhouse at the end? (I mean, I get their point that she can't deal with her reality, and also the awful irony in her returning to captivity, but wouldn't this have been a great opportunity to send Priya home, and make for a better cover story in any case? She did kill him in self-defense, after all.)--but damn: a story that finally deals with the implications of the DH (and not the crazy mindwipe future, but the moral compromises that everyone who works for the Dollhouse must make everyday--and the way the DH is especially adept at victimizing women because it exploits rape culture) and offers great character bits for Sierra, Topher, Adele, and Boyd?
Oh, the other problem: the insistence on Sierra and Victor's Great Imprint-Transcending Love. I think it was mostly well-handled in this episode, and I liked the image of Sierra and Victor in the Doll coffin at the end, but I'm worried about where it's going (answer, due to DH's recent cancellation, is of course: nowhere), i.e., what life-affirming lesson about True Love will we eventually be forced to learn (none)? But again: Sierra and Victor in the coffin just about broke my cold, dark heart.
Other striking moments: the horror of Topher, of course, hacking up the doctor in the tub, and Boyd's chilling efficiency, and Adele breaking when they brought up her dalliances with Victor, and Priya making Topher promise to erase the last year, or even just the last day, if he ever woke her up again.
Dollhouse is so incredibly cynical, especially when you realize that Joss is the same man who brought us Firefly, an ode to friendship and surrogate families if there ever was one. On Dollhouse, relationships are near-impossible. The only characters apparently capable or interested in friendship are the Actives, and they're as simple as children, or at least supposed to be. DH is of course all about a simulacra of a human relationship rather than a real one. It's also a disturbing metafictional exercise: obviously, of course, the (mostly terrible) standalone episodes attempt to engage different genres, and it's no accident that the show is set in LA when the Dollhouse is a hermetically sealed pleasure palace designed to cater to "our" desire for entertainment and stories and fantasy (the dolls are ideal actives, of course), or how damn hard DH employees and customers work to think about the DH isn't fundamentally exploitative. But the Xander-Wash-Topher evolution gets me the most. If that character type is an avatar for Joss, the picture is bleak: Xander loses an eye, though he does learn how to be heroic and ordinary, and Wash is beloved, but irrelevant, and of course sort of heartlessly and abruptly killed at the end of Serenity. And now there's Topher, who actually is the "creator" and the raw talent, but he's chosen for his amorality and because the corporation behind the DH can manipulate him. Wash had dinosaurs; Topher has dolls, and while Topher, as Adele tells him, takes good care of his toys, he also doesn't see the dolls as people, really. (Sierra is also the doll Topher chose for his companion on his birthday; he doesn't have any friends, so he makes a perfect one.) All of his attempts to do something ethically right backfire: he's left hacking up a body in a tub--or bringing about the end of the world. Is the object here the entertainment industry--an exploitative fleshtrade (Joss's--possible--metaphor, not mine) in which the show itself is hopelessly implicated (cf. the marketing for the show, which relentlessly uses Eliza Dushku's body to sell the product, when the show itself--sort of--critiques the idea that bodies are commodities, and yet also wants us to be attracted to Echo)--or fiction itself?