The ratings aren’t looking good for Dollhouse, which is making me sad. If you’re not sold on the idea of the show this is a great fanmade site. If you want it to stay on air then they’ve got ideas of what you can here
Sorry, for the advertorial in the beginning. I can’t do anything myself you see (except write ridiculously long reviews), and I’d be really annoyed in they didn’t air episode four.
I seem to be having two completely contradictory reactions to Dollhouse at the moment. Half the time I think:
“This is the best show and concept that ever has, or ever will be made. I can’t believe how amazingly brilliant it is and want to watch it for ever and ever and ever.”
But then I also think:
“This show is irrevocably, structurally flawed”
After watching Instinct, I decided they were probably both true.
I’m not a fan of stand-alones or procedurals. Television is a medium that is built for serialised storytelling (the most powerful narrative form ever invented), I don’t understand why you’d squander it by not telling a story. But I also think you can take things too far in the other direction. If you don’t have stand alone plots that finish off each episode, you actually have reset TV of a different sort, as the plotlines come and go, and they’re never given due weight. You get Gossip Girl, where killing someone can be fixed in half an episode, or BSG, where they’d be these dramatic changes for a few episodes, but they’d always be reset so the captain was still the captain the president was still the president and so on. If all your plot is on-going then that makes it very difficult.
That was one of the many things that was so great about Buffy. There was a perfect balance between serial, and So even a relatively mediocre episode could still have interactions between our core characters1 and at the same time something like your boyfriend going evil could be given the emotional significance it needed
Dollhouse’s on-going story is so powerful, resonant and exciting, that I will be devastated if they cancel it. But they haven’t figured out how to tell interesting short-term stories, and I don’t think it’s possible (because the short term stories involve only new characters).
So an episode of Dollhouse is either going to make everything right with the world for ever more, or not be that interesting. There is very little in between. Even Vows, which is I think the closest Dollhouse has come to middling, was actually just some scenes that would cure cancer, intermingled with some other scenes that there’s no reason to re-watch.
It think exacerbating these problems, is that Fox does not want to the best version of this show.
This is all a long winded introduction to the fact that I wasn’t particularly sold on this week’s episode.
Although having written all that, I’m not as sure as I was that the problems are structural. I wonder if the problems with the execution with this episode were actually about the episode itself. There were so many clichés. The most inexcusable was the father finally bonding with the child towards the end.
But rewatching it, I think maybe the problem was more that they focused on the most boring aspects of what could have been an interested story. There was an inordinate amount of time wasted on ‘what is going on’ from Echo’s point of view. I didn’t find this particularly interesting, because we knew it was an engagement, so her point of view on her husband trying to kill her always felt ridiculous.
And now is as good a time as any to say how annoyed I was with the portrayal of ‘mother instinct’. If you are going to spend the teaser talking about how amazing it is that you’ve used the brain to trigger lactation and then you show the lactating woman being paranoid, and saying people threatened to kill her when they didn’t. Then that’s pretty offensive, and reinforcing derogatory harmful ideas about women and mothers.
I think maybe I would have been more interested in the engagement if rather than focusing on the ‘have baby: go crazy’ angle they had told it from the husband’s point of view. Because to me that was interesting – the dollhouse couldn’t provide what he needed. It could have been a critical interrogation of the Patton Oswalt engagement in Man on the Street. If someone you loved died, would having them for one day a year or even longer really help? But rather than getting any of him we got boring scenes setting up false tension (and on the Sierra rating scale this episode fairs very poorly – she probably had more screen-time last week, but there was no purpose to her character. Come on people)
I thought the central scene in the police scene was amazing. 2 Eliza was fantastic, and the impact and horror of what they were doing was very clear. From there the episode definitely had more of a purpose.
A purpose that was built on with the awesome [punch] “Can I Go Now?” That’s just the sort of pay-off that the rituals around the dolls was made for.
The final scene between a confused Echo and the boy’s father had some great stuff (and again I was impressed with Eliza’s acting). But then I there were the same tone and focus problems as earlier in the episode.
The switching to horror felt completely unearned. Why did someone who thinks a car is driven by saying ‘go’ cut the lights and electricity?3 Why does she have a knife? Why does Echo say “Mummy’s home”? None of these things make sense in the world they set up. They also didn’t add anything to the scene. Why didn’t the writers trust themselves to write a powerful scene between two people without the irrelevant pyrotechnics?
So maybe, in the course of writing this review, I’ve persuaded myself I’m wrong. Maybe the structural problems with the dollhouse are not inherent. Maybe this could have been a very satisfying episode, and the problems were in the execution. If it’s possible to do good engagements of the week, then they better learn fast.
That all sounds as if I didn’t like the episode at all, and it had some great moments. But it feels such a waste to go from Topher and Dr Saunders to something completely incoherent about motherhood instinct.
In the dollhouse itself, I have a new rule: whichever character insults Ballard the most in any given episode is my favourite character of this week.4 This week Topher wins the prize – go Topher – like I said last week Fran Kranz is amazing and Epitaph One is adding so much depth to the character.
Obviously the most exciting long-term development was the return of Madeline (and Miracle Laurie rocked in a very different role). I don’t quite know what I think of it yet. I enjoyed the scene with them together, because it’s all about what an asshole Ballad is (well it is in my head anyway). But from a narrative perspective it’d be very annoying if she reappeared just to help Ballard learn about the Dollhouse.
Although I strongly suspect they’re going somewhere far more interesting with this. Because she’s spent her time finding the perfect dress, and the perfect apartment, and now she’s ‘not sad’. Her grief that was so strong in Needs has been taken away. The parallels between her and Echo, who chose feeling something over being asleep were obvious. But I wonder if there are also going to be, in the end, parallels with the father, if the Dollhouse won’t be able to give her what she needs.
The final scene, between Echo and Ballard was very powerful. She undercut the lies he’s telling himself (and Madeline) about it not being real. I really love that they’re exploring Echo’s agency, and that she’s making a choice to keep everything she’s feeling. I think it even offered an alternative explanation to the ‘mothers are crazy’ idea that dominated the episode. I don’t love that the only person she’s bonding with is Paul, but he’s at his least obnoxious when he’s actually talking to Echo, since that’s when he comes nearest to treating her like a human being.
- My friend dissed Inca Mummy Girl the other day – and I reminded her that was the origin of the genius “I didn’t choose yet” exchange [↩]
- Although the police officers seemed deeply implausible to me – if only women who were scared were taken that seriously [↩]
- And it’s even more unearned if that’s supposed to be a coincidence [↩]
- And I know everyone disses on Eliza’s acting, but Tahmoh Penikett has so little range it’s embarrassing. [↩]
This episode sucked donkey balls. I was completely exasperated and disappointed with the whole warmfuzzy-maternity-womb-gaia-lactation crap. Do you do reviews of the Buffy season 8 comics, by any chance? I read Predators and Prey today and it was also re-heally bad, as in incoherent and unconvincing. Which is sad. I can deal with whedon-suckage on Dollhouse, but the ruination of Buffy is just…sigh. SIGH.
Honestly the police taking her seriously pulled me out of the episode for a while, it was too implausible for me.
I’m in the midst of watching tonight’s episode, and I think you’re right. Joss is both deeply brilliant and deeply flawed. And that means that I’m prone to watching him because most shows are just plain mediocre.
And yeah, S1 had some misogyny. And it’s there in S2. But… it’s there in pretty much every show on television, because it’s what we live with and breathe. Dollhouse actually talks about it, so he creates texts that oddly interrogate themselves. And that sometimes makes them collapse (that, or the holes you could drive that proverbial truck through).
The main problem is that many feminists are so far ahead of Joss’ 101 stuff that they roll their eyes (I saw lots of, “Oh! Joss, I didn’t know that rape was bad. Thanks for telling us, you nice guy, you!” sarcasm after S1) Meanwhile, everyone else (who isn’t even up to 101 yet) is likely to be made deeply uncomfortable with the things Joss says and does through his characters.
I’ve just about given up, though, since if I like a show, it tanks. But I’m still watching, because there’s not enough good sci fi on TV nowadays, and, after a dismal start during which Joss’ voice was muted, he’s picked up the rhythmic Jossian wisecracks I so enjoyed in Buffy.
The episode was myeh, IMO. Eliza Dushku had bits where she was great (she does scared & angry pretty well) and bits where she was just lost (the shouts of, “Jack, Jack!” in the police station were the shouts of somebody hoping for Jack to run to her instead of wails of anguish).
The direction was lacking. Did nobody on the show realize that infants don’t breastfeed from the armpit? Things like that really took me out of the show. Or maybe they took the show out of me.
On the plus side, it seems to be moving more towards an ensemble performance. That’s a good thing since they’ve got a lot of good actors mixed in with the middling ones.
I find myself wishing they’d do less shows with “engagements” since I find the engagements boring and ridiculous most of the time and the Dollhouse to be fascinating. The engagements rarely seem to advance the story and to merely be action (or suspense!) for action’s sake.
Hmmm. I guess this episode kind of annoyed me.
Jerad – me too – although the woman who sounded like she worked quite a bit with women in abusive relationships was over-ridden by her male supervisor who sided . I thought that was more plausible.
Miriam Heddy – I’m not sure I think the concept of 101 is a useful one to look at narratives. Stories are not only (or mostly) educational devices. They should one some level be about telling the truth about the world we live in. There was so much more to Man on the Street or Needs than rape is bad. To compare with Ghost – which was much weaker – here they were saying ‘rape is bad’ but they were also saying ‘rape is a plot device’ (and don’t get me started on Buffy season six).
Flukycoda – I do read the Buffy comics – I’ve been meaning to review them. I liked some predator and prey comics and hated others. I’m deeply sceptical about the current direction – and feel like it is undercutting everything that was so glorious about Chosen. It’s possible that it’s going to have a glorious point to it. But I’m worried that they’re going to pull a ‘yeah magic used to be a metaphor for women’s sexuality, but now it’s a dangerous drug – why do you have a problem with that?’
On rewatching I decided that the motherhood instinct was more ambiguous/incoherent than I’d first thought. Emma never talks about motherhood instinct. It’s just Topher and Ballard – who aren’t necessarily right, and Ballard has a really strong motive to give any other explanation than “echo remembers everything now”. I think it’s a symptom of the episode’s overall incoherence.
Jake – Oh God I can’t believe I didn’t mention the breast feeding by the armpit.
Hmm. I think you’re saying what I’m saying, sort of. For those people who don’t know rape is bad, Joss is playing “teacher.” For those who watch who want the truth of our lives shown on tv, it’s frustrating to sit through the educational portion when it seems not to go far enough. Or maybe it’s simply that Joss isn’t always aware of how often he’s telling the truth about the world he lives in (that is, he’s often extremely and embarrassingly unaware of his own straight male privilege).
Joss plays a bit of a touchy game with his audience (perhaps as a result of feeling the need to cowtow to Fox’s requirements at the outset). He delivers a show that seemed all about a largely unquestioning het-male gaze and audience. And then, when he finally breaks free of that enough to seemingly question the conditions of the setup, he does so in such a way that seems to often pay lipservice to a feminist 101 critique of rape culture while continuously feeding into it. (And again, that’s more that most, but…. there’s a big but there).
Last night’s episode did much the same thing, demonstrating (again) that Joss is far more comfortable with pseudo-lesbian displays (put on for the presumed het-male gaze) than he is with actual gay or lesbian characters or an actual gay and lesbian and bi audience (who I think he’s thought much about). Even in the midst of a potentially interesting plotline (what happens when a male consciousness is in a female body and a female in a male?) he ends up playing gay bashing for laughs and centering that transfer of minds around the old trope of the suicidal queer sociopath.
Again (and again and again) I find Joss interesting and complicated and far and away better than most. But I’m also forever feeling like I’m not sure whether to give him a cookie or bash him over the head with a box of cookies because he comes so close to getting it and then veers sharply into WTF.
Next week, it’s Sierra’s episode at least according to the previews. That should be interesting.