I won't be watching it again soon, anyhow.
Look, let's just get this out of the way, shall we? I'm not that fond of Joss Whedon. I don't know if it's still cult-chic to LOVE his work, or if it's too mainstream for any self-respecting nerd to like anymore, or whether it's gone full circle to rediscovering his GENIUS now that everyone's panning him. I don't know where we are on the popularometer, but I don't really care that much.
The man makes me uncomfortable, partly because he can't settle his level of clever. He's too fixated on a few themes, and too determined to be Insightful and Iconoclastic, to be really brilliant, and yet he can craft some truly engaging characters. I can't quite leave him in the "seen there, done that" basket, but I can't get on the cheer wagon either. So he just sort of lurks around the background of my viewing habits, surfacing every now and then, to make me go "... huh". And then go find something else to watch. Except there are always those parts of his shows that you wish he'd spent a bit more time on, damn it, and stop feeding the Little Miss Special plot over and over again.
Case in point: I just finished watching the second season of Dollhouse. I've been sketching, and I wanted something on in the background, and the whole lot was on Netflix. I think I must have finished watching the series before, because nothing was really that new to me, but I think last time I was too sick of Whedon to be paying that much attention to what I was watching. Just, "Check, check, check, check, that's completely nonsensical, check, check, oh she's being special again is she you don't say, check, check, check...." Although I don't know if I'd actually ever seen Epitaph One before. I tell you what, Epitaph Two makes slightly more sense once you've seen One.
And, yes, I am tired of the LMS story. We get it, Whedon, there's a special girl who's the specialist special who ever specialled. Thank you. But on the upside, he manages to find some really good music, or at least find someone who finds some really good music, for his shows. Dollhouse, for all it's sad overcomplexity, is no exception. I don't know what he would have done if he'd had more seasons to explore the many different threads he was setting up, whether he would have drawn them all together masterfully or whether they would have just multiplied out of control (my money's on the latter), but it really was something of a hot mess. However, Whedon's strength is the emotional ride of his story. He lands that pretty much every time (despite the corny), and the music he uses has a lot to do with that. Visuals, too, although his love affair with slo-mo kind of makes me uncomfortable. What the man really needs is to be a music video director. That way he'd stop getting lost in his own cerebrum when he tries to tell a story.
Upside: each series he seems to get better at nuanced secondary characters. You can track the evolution, actually. And Dollhouse gives us Topher, Adelle, Sierra and Victor (hooray, a Whedon couple who made it!), Dominic (who was awesome), Zone from the Epitaph episodes (well, okay, I just really like him) - and Alpha. DearsweetAlanTudyk, ALPHA. It is wrong to find a psychotic multiple identity construct so thoroughly, wickedly and adorably delightful, I know this, but so help me, I do. And it wasn't just because of the way he just switched on Paul, when breaking into the House, and because Paul was kind of endlessly jaw-clenchingly irritating. (I mean him with the jaw-clenching, not me. I'm more eye-glazy.)
I guess one-note noble-and-earnest doesn't do that much for me. Obviously I prefer my men violently unstable, hyper-competent and character-arc-y. The redemption arc was a nice bonus, although I suspect it may have been done for the "They'll never expect this!" astonishment value which Whedon loves so much, and which he threw in at every conceivable point of the series. It worked beautifully for the character, though, so I'll give him that one. Although hey while we're on it, Whedon, why on earth do you think Echo is the interesting composite? Because she built herself without going crazy because there's something Special (special special special!) about her physiology? Hey, how about we spend just a little time with the one who it DID drive crazy, who swan-dove off the cliff of sanity and somehow pulled a functioning human being out of the mess with absolutely no genetic advantage? Because that's INTERESTING, DAMNIT.
But what really compelled me to write this post was that with all the tangled, meandering meh-ness of the second season limping toward a hasty denouement, Epitaph Two nailed me. I was crying by the end. I think it was largely Topher, Adelle and Alpha's doing, but still. And that annoyed me, that he could make such a mess of a set of tv episodes and then pull a coda like that out of his butt. Although that is one of his strengths. Say what you like about the man, he can wrangle a damn good ending.
ALSO! I updated the last of the answers to the quote meme; the answers no one got are italicised.
The man makes me uncomfortable, partly because he can't settle his level of clever. He's too fixated on a few themes, and too determined to be Insightful and Iconoclastic, to be really brilliant, and yet he can craft some truly engaging characters. I can't quite leave him in the "seen there, done that" basket, but I can't get on the cheer wagon either. So he just sort of lurks around the background of my viewing habits, surfacing every now and then, to make me go "... huh". And then go find something else to watch. Except there are always those parts of his shows that you wish he'd spent a bit more time on, damn it, and stop feeding the Little Miss Special plot over and over again.
Case in point: I just finished watching the second season of Dollhouse. I've been sketching, and I wanted something on in the background, and the whole lot was on Netflix. I think I must have finished watching the series before, because nothing was really that new to me, but I think last time I was too sick of Whedon to be paying that much attention to what I was watching. Just, "Check, check, check, check, that's completely nonsensical, check, check, oh she's being special again is she you don't say, check, check, check...." Although I don't know if I'd actually ever seen Epitaph One before. I tell you what, Epitaph Two makes slightly more sense once you've seen One.
And, yes, I am tired of the LMS story. We get it, Whedon, there's a special girl who's the specialist special who ever specialled. Thank you. But on the upside, he manages to find some really good music, or at least find someone who finds some really good music, for his shows. Dollhouse, for all it's sad overcomplexity, is no exception. I don't know what he would have done if he'd had more seasons to explore the many different threads he was setting up, whether he would have drawn them all together masterfully or whether they would have just multiplied out of control (my money's on the latter), but it really was something of a hot mess. However, Whedon's strength is the emotional ride of his story. He lands that pretty much every time (despite the corny), and the music he uses has a lot to do with that. Visuals, too, although his love affair with slo-mo kind of makes me uncomfortable. What the man really needs is to be a music video director. That way he'd stop getting lost in his own cerebrum when he tries to tell a story.
Upside: each series he seems to get better at nuanced secondary characters. You can track the evolution, actually. And Dollhouse gives us Topher, Adelle, Sierra and Victor (hooray, a Whedon couple who made it!), Dominic (who was awesome), Zone from the Epitaph episodes (well, okay, I just really like him) - and Alpha. DearsweetAlanTudyk, ALPHA. It is wrong to find a psychotic multiple identity construct so thoroughly, wickedly and adorably delightful, I know this, but so help me, I do. And it wasn't just because of the way he just switched on Paul, when breaking into the House, and because Paul was kind of endlessly jaw-clenchingly irritating. (I mean him with the jaw-clenching, not me. I'm more eye-glazy.)
I guess one-note noble-and-earnest doesn't do that much for me. Obviously I prefer my men violently unstable, hyper-competent and character-arc-y. The redemption arc was a nice bonus, although I suspect it may have been done for the "They'll never expect this!" astonishment value which Whedon loves so much, and which he threw in at every conceivable point of the series. It worked beautifully for the character, though, so I'll give him that one. Although hey while we're on it, Whedon, why on earth do you think Echo is the interesting composite? Because she built herself without going crazy because there's something Special (special special special!) about her physiology? Hey, how about we spend just a little time with the one who it DID drive crazy, who swan-dove off the cliff of sanity and somehow pulled a functioning human being out of the mess with absolutely no genetic advantage? Because that's INTERESTING, DAMNIT.
But what really compelled me to write this post was that with all the tangled, meandering meh-ness of the second season limping toward a hasty denouement, Epitaph Two nailed me. I was crying by the end. I think it was largely Topher, Adelle and Alpha's doing, but still. And that annoyed me, that he could make such a mess of a set of tv episodes and then pull a coda like that out of his butt. Although that is one of his strengths. Say what you like about the man, he can wrangle a damn good ending.
ALSO! I updated the last of the answers to the quote meme; the answers no one got are italicised.