My thoughts on Dollhouse, let me show you them
I was home sick yesterday, so I caught up on Dollhouse out of boredom and throughadoor's insistence that if I pretend it's a shitty 2 AM show on the VS. network, I'll like it more. That didn't work though, and let me tell you why by talking about my deep, nerdy passion for alt-rock
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But for someone to consider himself a feminist and advertise himself as a feminist who is interested in making feminist programming -- uh, yeah, I'm turning on that TV show expecting to see some awesome, intelligent depictions of women. Granted, Joss is doing a bang-up job of lowering my Bar of Expectations, and I'm starting to think that while to a lot of people, Buffy was the *beginning* of opening a dialogue about things like the financial appeal and successful marketing of women and women-driven shows, and got a lot of networks to re-think how they approached adolescent and young women as a potential market, for Joss that's just the one trick he knows. So in some respects, I think it's less matter of Dollhouse not being as good as his previous work, so much as it's just Joss's work/message/etc isn't quite as relevant, important, or interesting as it was 12 years ago. We believe you about tiny ladies being able to fight! WE BELIEVE YOU, YOU CAN MOVE ON NOW.
You're right, I forgot about LFN, which essentially every show featuring a woman holding a gun has been ripping off since it was created (starting with the original French film). I draw it more closely to Alias because I have such a hard time not calling Echo's handler "Dixon" in my head, especially in the episode where he was shot. I was like, "And then Sydney calls in the CIA and uses her other alias and Dixon hears it and...wait." Some of that is racial/age casting, and some of that is because I've seen 3 episodes total of LFN and it was a loooong time ago.
Episode 3 was definitely more enjoyable, partly because of the Britney/Rhianna knock-off character (Joss Whedon: writing roles that could be played by Britney Spears since 2002), and partly (mostly) because the closer the "imprint" of the episode is to Faith, the more credible I find Eliza. But also considering that most of the dialogue with the singer consisted of the (apparently on-going) clumsily obvious discussions that Actually Applies To Echo Herself Zomg Meaningful!! ("I'm nobody! You don't know what it's like to be grown in a lab! I want to be freeeee!"), it was kind of hard to see past that (and given that she was usually talking about her manager, her stalker, or her mass of fans, I'm still not really feeling like it was a meaningful conversation that wasn't still All About Boys).
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OMG fucking for real. I've only watched one episode of Dollhouse so I don't have a really fleshed out opinion but I've been doubting the Whedon-as-Progressive-Feminist thing since the last two seasons of fucking Angel when all of the female characters were murdered or turned into fucking demons. Especially the send-off to Fred, which he wrote, which turned a rather interesting, intelligent, and sexy female character into a damsel in distress while allegedly and completely unsuccessfully trying to subvert that whole thing. Still pisses me off.
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Dude, for real. Part of me feels like Joss stumbled across the massive, massive trove of Wesley/Angel slashfic on the internet and was like, "NO HE IS STRAIGHT OH-KAY" and made Wesley "fall in love" with Fred.
I realize I have no foundation for this, but then again, he stretched out the "Willow goes evil" plot across season 5 AND 6 because people on the internet loooooved Willow/Tara so much, and he didn't want to take that away. This makes me hate season 5 even more than I already do, FYI, since the whole point was apparently supposed to be that Glory was the fake-out, and the back half of season 5 would be dedicated to Willow becoming eviler and eviler. Which would have been amaaaaazing.
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