Dollhouse: Faith No More

[naill_renfro]

I guess this is either the season of disappointment, or of me turning into a curmudgeon. First JK Rowling, now Joss Whedon...

So last Friday I watched the first Dollhouse episode, "Echo." Will I watch the next tomorrow?  Probably not.  As far as I can tell from the first, the basic premises of the series are:

(1) What if the Initiative from 4th-

Comments

[mollyringle]

Oh dear. I didn't actually watch it (yet; I figure I'll get the DVD's later), but it doesn't surprise me too much that it's off to a slow start. Neither Angel nor Buffy had their best episodes in the first part of their first seasons. (I seem to remember Firefly starting off more promisingly, but it's been a while now since I saw it.) Joss sometimes takes a few weeks to find his footing.

But the lack of funny? Oh, that's a problem. Joss definitely needs to begin with funny, or at least sprinkle it in regularly.

[naill_renfro]

Ep 1 of Angel was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen!

[mollyringle]

Huh, it's been too long for me to remember the details. But I do remember that Doyle really perked the show up in that first season, bless his Irish heart. (My softness on him has nothing to do with the cuteness and the lovely accent; no, nothing at all...)

[naill_renfro]

He has an accent?

[mollyringle]

As a linguist I'm obliged to point out we *all* do. :) But yes, his is lightly Irish for sure.

[naill_renfro]

:D

My part of *England*?

[naill_renfro]

What I meant to say: Another laughing-so-hard-I-had-to-hit-pause-until-I-could see again came when some demonic skip-tracer is looking for Doyle and Cordelia tells him, Doyle that is, "Your cousin called, with one of those names from your part of England."

Glenn Quinn perfectly captures the outrage of any Irishman thus accused.

Which in turn reminded me of Huc & Gabet, in Travels through Tartary, Thibet and China, frequently being mistaken for Russians, Mongols, or anything but French. Most of the time they're content to let this slide, but on the three or four occasions on which they're mistaken for Englishmen, Abbé Huc rages for paragraphs, or even pages. There are limits to what even a pacifist French missionary priest can be expected to tolerate, as he points out.

Re: My part of *England*?

[mollyringle]

Yes! "My part of England?" lives fondly in my memory too. Such perfect icy contempt.

We had an Irish waiter here in Seattle for a big family dinner at a restaurant once. Someone asked him what his accent was, and he invited us to guess. I eventually said "Irish" when everyone else went quiet in contemplation. He said yes. "I was going to guess Scottish," someone added. To which he said, "That would have been all right, ma'am, but had you said English, we would have had a chilly evening indeed."

French v. English, yeah...I learned early on, in my stay in the UK, that most Brits do *not* like to be called Europeans. Even though they're in the E.U., as I innocently pointed out. Heh. Tender subject.