Dollhouse

[katie_m]

Having now seen the whole season, I think my fundamental issue with this show is that given the setting, the questions I'm interested in are fundamentally ethical and the questions the show's interested in are fundamentally about identity.

Comments

[wishfulaces]

Aeryn and Crichton both had mommy issues, though Crichton's daddy issues tended to be more prevalent, I think.

Adam had mommy issues on Joan of Arcadia--so did Grace--but considering they were all teenagers and had a whole slew of other issues as well, they weren't a main focus.

Ace in Doctor Who had serious mommy issues. She got the entire last season of the show to deal with them, in fact, though particularly "Curse of Fenric." Fitz Kreiner, a character from the books, also had pretty hefty mommy issues.

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head; I'm sure there's more, though.

[katie_m]

Okay, here's a question: Does the Doctor have a Mommy? How do Gallifreyans reproduce, anyway? Do we know?

[wishfulaces]

Ha! Ahem. That is another one of those incredibly fanwanky conundrums that crop up so often in DW. Throughout the tv show the Doctor sometimes vaguely mentions family, usually in pretty generic terms; he had his granddaughter with him in the beginning of the show, and Tennant's Doctor has specifically mentioned being a dad a couple times. In the infamous TV movie, the Doctor claimed he was half-human on his mother's side. In the books, there were the Looms.

So, yes. Lots of fanon, not very useful canon at times. He's never particularly displayed any mommy issues, though, except perhaps in the occasional fic that follows the tv movie canon.

[minnow1212]

>One other thing I've thought about the show is that if it were a fannish production, people would be a lot less cranky about it. Because Your Kink Is Okay!Hmm, yeah, point. Two things that would make me less cranky if it were fanfic, though, than I was with the show

[katie_m]

The knowledge of probable triumph and reclamation at the end--if Dollhouse were a 6-episode limited run show, I probably could have gone with it for a longer time, because I would have been expecting a narrative arc that led more swiftly to the Dollhouse being overturned.

Yeah. I really wish American TV worked more like this; I mean, I'm sure there are excellent financial reasons that it doesn't, but artistically I think that a greater space carved out for miniseries(es?) would be really great.

[raincitygirl]

yes, yes YES. This, exactly what you said. I'm not just fangirling this post, I'm now obsessively fanning your comment.

[thepouncer]

Catherine Parker is actually revealed, over several seasons, to be probably the best person in the Pretender universe. She tried to get the kidnapped children back to their parents, and was likely killed for it. Her father is definitely bad news, but Miss Parker's mother was genuinely good and a large part of her character arc was learning things about her mother that she never knew because she was too young to be aware of what was going on at the Centre.

[katie_m]

Talking completely out of my ass, I'm willing to bet that the kind of active character that leads to Serious Issues is more likely to be a villain when she's female--I think it's actually easier in some ways to get a powerful villainess than it is to get a powerful heroine, since men are still much more likely to be put at the center of a story.

[danceswithwords]

I'm not sure you could make an ongoing series that focused on the ethics of the situation, but then again the PTB were not required to make the setting quite so much of a rapefest, either

I think the thing that got me, in the two episodes I watched, was the cinematography. Whatever the show was saying that was subversive about the dolls' situation was totally undercut by the actual viewpoint gaze--the lingering, exploitative shots. Maybe that changed at some point, I don't know, but I was grossed out enough not to stick around. I'm not encouraged to hear that they were trying to position Topher as a sympathetic character. And I think that would also undercut any ethical examination.

And then I tried to think of other shows in which there were Mommy Issues instead of the omnipresent Daddy Issues and all I could come up with was Alias, which I never watched but which must, from the decriptions, have given Sydney Mommy Issues. Any others people can think of?

As people mentioned above, Farscape leaps to mind immediately. In Alias,

[katie_m]

I'm not encouraged to hear that they were trying to position Topher as a sympathetic character. And I think that would also undercut any ethical examination.

It was pretty clear that the show was trying to... make the audience complicit by inviting them to empathize with the people running the Dollhouse, and that actually didn't bug me--we got some additional insight into and humanization of Adelle, too, and that didn't bother me. But there were a couple of bits with Topher that made me think the writers wanted me to feel sad for the poor wounded nerdboy, which, if true, NO. NO, I do not feel sad for you, Topher.

[thepouncer]

I agree that Dollhouse is more about identity issues than ethics, but one thing that makes me disgruntled is that I didn't find the exploration of identity to be done well. There was rarely a clear point of view, and the question of what makes a person a *specific* person was never answered. Even if I accept it as more of an open-ended question instead of a polemic (and I'm usually averse to preachiness in shows), I'm still not satisfied with what the episodes did.

The ethics are horrible, of course. Totally shudder inducing.

I've been thinking about whether or not I'd watch the second season, and I think it's going to be akin to my Heroes S3 position: I'll watch the first few episodes and see if it improves radically. If not, I'm gone.

[radiotelescope]

What thepouncer said, re identity. The finale simply didn't do anything cool with the contrast between Catherine and Echo, Echo and Alpha, the imprinted personalities and the original personality. No comparison of the self-constructed identity with the identity that others construct for us. Come on, show, it's right in front of you! Do something with it!

The treatment of Topher and Dewitt was uneven at best. Okay; uneven, period. I don't mind having a charming sociopath as a main character -- even a fuzzy Whedonesque-dorky sociopath -- but you have to do some work to make them *understandable* before you can present them as protagonists. The show went straight from "shadowy manipulators" to "protagonists" without doing that work.

I will keep watching it, but not because I expect the second season to do that stuff better. At this point I expect to see a few good episodes (as S1 had).

[katie_m]

The show went straight from "shadowy manipulators" to "protagonists" without doing that work.

Yes, exactly that. And it was frustrating, you know? It could have been really interesting! But no.

[katie_m]

No, I agree--I don't think they went much of anywhere interesting with it, sadly. I mean, they seem to have come down on the idea that even with memories and a lot of personality removed, there is a core self that continues to be meaningful. We saw that in the "keep their memories but give them back their personalities" episode, as well as the two-part finale. But that's... not all that interesting, really. I'd be more interested in the personhood of the imprints, if it comes to that.