Lattice crusts make everything better
Today: I don't like it. Lots of snow to clean up, long walk to work to postpone the cleaning of the snow, work should have been closed but of course it was not because we never close for snow and the universe likes to laugh at me, and so on. I know I'm supposed to be contemplating the sheer unlikelihood of being alive and how I'm like the turtle stuck at the bottom of the ocean who frees herself and puts her head through a gold ring as she comes to the surface, but, I don't even know, I'm cold and sad and short-tempered and it's only the beginning of what I already knew was going to be a trying week. I would prefer to be many things other than At Work, but most of all, I think I would prefer to be in my pajamas, eating the strawberry rhubarb pie I made yesterday, and watching the snow plows rumble down my street.
I've been TiVoing Stargate for something random to watch when I'm in and out of the living room, and it has been recording episodes from Season 9 (interestingly, the only season I own on DVD) and I forget how easily the show replaces its main male lead at the beginning of the season. Maybe the transition didn't read that way when the show was on the air, but story-wise, with some distance from real-time airing, the switch is smooth, engaging, and believable. Also, Ben Browder!
I paused again in the middle of this week's Dollhouse, and it's turning out to be one of the easiest-to-walk-away-from shows I've ever watched. Pause mid-action sequence? Sure! Still, I was settling into this episode, thinking maybe I just needed some time to get to know the characters, because I really liked Back-Up Dancer Echo, her Southie jokes and her self-assurance, but - it's not Echo. I'm falling for a character who is just a personality. Also, female operative gets kidnapped by crazy man! I think we just saw that last week!
Speaking of The Target, I have been meaning to talk about how it was a study in excellent structure, but the premise of the episode and the Alpha backstory were both so deeply disturbing to me that I find I can't really rehash it. Still, I was impressed with the shoulder-to-the-wheel gesture at the close of the episode, and feel like I ought to give points for mechanics even if the spirit was troubling.
All of this Dollhouse deep-thinking made me want to re-watch some Buffy, because I can't help comparing the shows and the styles. (I also can't help thinking of Margaret Atwood's 'Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them' sentiment.) After coasting through a few episodes of Season 2, which I adore but also find problematic in some gender-issue ways, I realized that it's not that I liked Buffy despite some issues - a behavior I am sometimes guilty of as a viewer/reader - if some other part of me is grabbed by the story, I will give more leniency to an issue that should otherwise make me reject a story outright - see Battlestar Galatica: Razor.) Buffy, though, manages to carry a story about a boyfriend turning evil after you sleep with him because 1.) the metaphor works, and 2.) Buffy has all the power.
Dollhouse is so unsettling because while it's about a female lead with power, she has no agency. Echo has no control over her power because her power is given to her and she doesn't recognize it, has no context for it because the power never actually belongs to her, it belongs to the personality of whoever she has been programmed with. And while we opened with Echo "choosing" to sign up for the tabula rasa, it's clear that she is only in the situation because she really had no other choice. And I cannot honestly believe that Echo - or whoever she was before she became Echo - would have chosen this reinvented life if she actually knew what might happen to her, or what it would be like for everything she experienced, good and bad, to be erased over and over.
Perhaps I'm comparing the wrong stories. River has memories in her head put there by bad men, and, like the story of the original slayer, that power was forced on her by men who thought they knew better. Both River and Buffy (and Faith and the slayerettes) eventually learn to claim the power for their own and do things with it that the bad men could never have envisioned because they weren't good women. So, maybe Echo just hasn't come to that point in her story. Still, she had better make some movement in that direction soon, or Dollhouse is going to become a show I watch only to see what it's doing wrong, and that's going to get old fast.
I've been TiVoing Stargate for something random to watch when I'm in and out of the living room, and it has been recording episodes from Season 9 (interestingly, the only season I own on DVD) and I forget how easily the show replaces its main male lead at the beginning of the season. Maybe the transition didn't read that way when the show was on the air, but story-wise, with some distance from real-time airing, the switch is smooth, engaging, and believable. Also, Ben Browder!
I paused again in the middle of this week's Dollhouse, and it's turning out to be one of the easiest-to-walk-away-from shows I've ever watched. Pause mid-action sequence? Sure! Still, I was settling into this episode, thinking maybe I just needed some time to get to know the characters, because I really liked Back-Up Dancer Echo, her Southie jokes and her self-assurance, but - it's not Echo. I'm falling for a character who is just a personality. Also, female operative gets kidnapped by crazy man! I think we just saw that last week!
Speaking of The Target, I have been meaning to talk about how it was a study in excellent structure, but the premise of the episode and the Alpha backstory were both so deeply disturbing to me that I find I can't really rehash it. Still, I was impressed with the shoulder-to-the-wheel gesture at the close of the episode, and feel like I ought to give points for mechanics even if the spirit was troubling.
All of this Dollhouse deep-thinking made me want to re-watch some Buffy, because I can't help comparing the shows and the styles. (I also can't help thinking of Margaret Atwood's 'Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them' sentiment.) After coasting through a few episodes of Season 2, which I adore but also find problematic in some gender-issue ways, I realized that it's not that I liked Buffy despite some issues - a behavior I am sometimes guilty of as a viewer/reader - if some other part of me is grabbed by the story, I will give more leniency to an issue that should otherwise make me reject a story outright - see Battlestar Galatica: Razor.) Buffy, though, manages to carry a story about a boyfriend turning evil after you sleep with him because 1.) the metaphor works, and 2.) Buffy has all the power.
Dollhouse is so unsettling because while it's about a female lead with power, she has no agency. Echo has no control over her power because her power is given to her and she doesn't recognize it, has no context for it because the power never actually belongs to her, it belongs to the personality of whoever she has been programmed with. And while we opened with Echo "choosing" to sign up for the tabula rasa, it's clear that she is only in the situation because she really had no other choice. And I cannot honestly believe that Echo - or whoever she was before she became Echo - would have chosen this reinvented life if she actually knew what might happen to her, or what it would be like for everything she experienced, good and bad, to be erased over and over.
Perhaps I'm comparing the wrong stories. River has memories in her head put there by bad men, and, like the story of the original slayer, that power was forced on her by men who thought they knew better. Both River and Buffy (and Faith and the slayerettes) eventually learn to claim the power for their own and do things with it that the bad men could never have envisioned because they weren't good women. So, maybe Echo just hasn't come to that point in her story. Still, she had better make some movement in that direction soon, or Dollhouse is going to become a show I watch only to see what it's doing wrong, and that's going to get old fast.