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Epic Dollhouse Review of Doom: Why I Am Calling It Quits

by Dan H

Monday, 22 June 2009

Dan on Dollhouse, The Sopranos, and Slow Builds~

Previously on Ferretbrain: I started watching Joss Whedon's Dollhouse and was doing an episode-by-episode review.

I kind of stalled on it, because I've come to the realisation that part of what the show is trying to do is to make you, the viewer complicit in the activities of the Dollhouse, trying to draw a comparison between you watching the show and the clients hiring the Dolls. Just as the Dollhouse caters to their needs, so this show caters to your needs. Do you see.

Eight episodes in I decided I was no longer going to be complicit in anything. I can take being bored. I can take being annoyed. I can take having Joss Whedon masturbate in my face. What I can't take is being bored and annoyed and having Joss Whedon masturbate in my face all at the same time.

Just to be clear. I did not stop watching Dollhouse because the dolls are all rape victims. I did not stop watching Dollhouse because I was uncomfortable with a television series where human traffickers are sympathetic viewpoint characters. I did not stop watching Dollhouse because its damning insights into the human condition were outside my comfort zone. I stopped watching Dollhouse because it was preachy, inconsistent, condescending, self-aggrandising, clunkily written, boring, exposition-heavy, mcguffin-driven, shit with the intellectual sophistication of a sixteen year old's GCSE essay about how we should totally abolish money, because that would make everybody equal.

So here are my final thoughts:

A Very Specific Level of Evil

One of the “memes” I'm trying to spread around the internet is

A Very Specific Level of Tired

. For those who don't want to read the link, the salient exchange (from a hypothetical D&D game) is this:

“No, you have just enough energy to climb this hill, but not enough energy to go on or look for someplace else to camp.” “That is a very specific level of tired.”

I like to use the phrase “very specific level of [blah]” to describe any situation in a work of fiction where a character or institution is supposed to be sufficiently [blah] to do what the plot demands, but not quite [blah] enough to do all the things that a [blah] person would do that might wreck the plot. Voldemort is a classic example of this. He's evil enough to kill helpless babies if they get in the way of his plans (or at least, fail to kill helpless babies) he's evil enough that he routinely uses torture and violence to get what he wants, but somehow he is not evil enough to – say – round up all of Harry Potter's friends and start killing them until Potter shows himself.

The Dollhouse (the institution rather than the show) has a similar problem. The Dollhouse is evil, it takes people and scrubs their brains and programs them to do things for rich people.

But it's a very specific level of evil. It takes the time and energy to provide its Dolls with comfortable living conditions, even though doing this pretty clearly makes them harder to control. It seems to vet its assignments extremely thoroughly, so that the Dolls only get sent out to do things which are basically okay. It gives the Dolls names – admittedly names based on military callsigns, but they're clearly designed to function like English Proper Names, not codes. They seem to encourage their handlers to form an emotional bond with their actives and if the handler abuses the relationship, that handler is actually killed.

It's the most naïve representation of human trafficking I can possibly imagine.

Now the counter-argument to this is that the Dollhouse is only superficially nice, and that in fact they are just as evil as you would expect from an institution which (as we discover in episode seven) is run by an evil biotech company that does experiments on babies.

There are two problems with that argument. The first is that the “good” parts of the Dollhouse are most assuredly not superficial. They do in fact take genuine care of their actives, they do in fact try to make them as happy and comfortable as possible. They do in fact use them to help people (sometimes, apparently, for free).

The second problem with this argument is that evil institutions do not look superficially attractive because they do not need to. There were no Callisthenics classes in Auschwitz. Josef Mengele didn't have cutesy conversations with his Jewish prisoners before pouring bleach in their eyes. Guantanamo Bay isn't full of happy, smiling Muslims with slightly vacant grins on their faces. The Dollhouse's veneer of respectability is not for the benefit of the staff (who shouldn't care) or the clients (who shouldn't care, and who never see inside the building anyway) but for the benefit of the audience.

It's another incarnation of what the girls at

Boils and Blinding Torment

used to call “the Misdirection Fairy”. Joss Whedon is chronic for having characters in his shows behave in ways which only make sense if you assume they are consciously performing for an audience. Classic examples of this in Buffy include Jonathan deciding to commit suicide by shooting himself with a sniper rifle in a bell tower (almost as if he was deliberately trying to fool the viewing audience into thinking he was about to embark on a killing spree) and several bits in season seven where Buffy persists in acting confused and frightened, even though everything is going exactly according to her plan. The Dollhouse keeps acting “nice” but there's no earthly reason for it to do so.

To put it another way: Joss Whedon fails at Atrocity 101.

If we are to accept that using Dollhouse technology on people is a genuinely atrocious act, then we have to assume that it works the same way all atrocities work. You start by dehumanizing the victim. Giving the Dolls names, making them comfortable, letting them socialise and caring if they get raped are all totally incompatible with wiping their minds and handing them over to the highest bidder. There's a reason that lab rats aren't given names (or, for that matter, toys). The Dollhouse treats the Dolls like people, and they shouldn't. Not if they're supposed to be genuine human traffickers.

There's a bit in Episode Eight (the last episode I saw, and the last I will ever subject myself to) where de Witt explicitly says that the Dolls should be thought of as pets. This is supposed to be chilling, I think. It's supposed to highlight how dehumanizing the Dollhouse really is. But it doesn't work.

Anybody who has ever worked in a laboratory should know that you absolutely, under no circumstances, treat your test subjects as pets. Pets are, in fact, treated as people. They are cared for and protected, they are given names and they are individualised – humanised, in fact. De Witt consistently singles Echo out for special treatment. One cannot treat a person in this fashion and then commit atrocities against them.

Show, Don't Tell, Dickhead

We spend a lot of time in The Dollhouse having people present the cases either for it (it “gives people what they need” and “helps people”) or against it (it is “slavery” and “human trafficking”). We do not ever see the Dollhouse behave in a manner that fits either of these descriptions, or at least not consistently.

In Episode Eight we finally discover that Sierra was wiped against her will (unlike all the other Dolls, who were volunteers) specifically because she turned a millionaire down for sex. De Witt later explains at the end of the episode (in which the Dollhouse arranges for its three primary Dolls to achieve “closure” or something – I was too bored and pissed off to care by this point) that she “needed to confront the man who took her power away.” Now hang on. You can't talk, sympathetically, about how horribly Sierra was mistreated by this guy when you run the organisation that made it possible. Not because it's hypocritical, but because you shouldn't care. The whole sequence seems to be designed to make you realise how awful the Dollhouse is, because of what it did to Sierra, while at the same time making you think that de Witt is an okay person, because she sympathises. It's not subtle, it's not complex, it's just fucking stupid.

A comparison that I've been wanting to make for a while now is with The Sopranos.

Tony Soprano is very seldom called a criminal. People very seldom tell him that what he does is wrong. He seldom justifies his actions, because he seldom needs to. But he does things that are demonstrably, obviously horrific, and we see them in harsh, unflinching detail, and we see the consequences that his choices have on ordinary people. We don't need trembly emotive speeches where people say “the Mafia is bad!” because we already know. We don't need Tony to say “we help people” because it would be completely stupid.

And we certainly aren't asked to question our own complicity in the work of the Cosa Nostra.

Dollhouse is two shows. There's the show Joss Whedon wanted to make, which exists entirely in the exposition, and is all about Big Serious Issues, and the show that Fox wanted to commission, which is an adventure show about a hot girl who wears a series of different outfits. What we are left with is a show about a girl who has crazy kung fu adventures which keeps stopping every five minutes to explain how it's really about human trafficking and free will and shit.

The Slow Build Fallacy

I once met somebody who said that the thing they hated the most about Buffy the Vampire Slayerwas the fact that they kept watching it, and not liking it, and everybody they talked to kept saying “yeah, well that season wasn't so great, but the next season is really good”. They gave up after season three, possibly because nobody could quite bring themselves to say that about Season Four.

People keep saying the same thing about Dollhouse “sure, the first three quarters of the season sucks, but then you see where it's all been going and it's awesome”.

This is bullshit.

Good TV is good TV from the start. No ifs. No buts. No exceptions. A series should not have to waste my time for upwards of eight hours before it starts displaying whatever dubious merits it is supposed to possess.

To put it another way, if you like a television program, and it shows consistent improvement in ambition, complexity of storytelling, and of course acting, you are going to see that as a show which gets better every season. If, like Buffy, there is also a marked change in style every season, you will also mark every season as the point where it really gets into its stride. I know that I've been guilty of identifying pretty much every season of Buffy as “where it starts to get really good” when talking to more sceptical members of my social circle.

Basically this is an elaborate piece of self-deception we engage in, convincing ourselves that our appreciation for a show is based on a slowly developing understanding of its many subtle advantages, when actually we just think it's a cool idea.

If you don't like Buffy Season 1, you will not like Buffy, period. The reason for this is simple: if you don't like Buffy Season 1 it's probably because something fundamental about the show doesn't work for you. Maybe it's the cutesy dialogue. Maybe it's Sarah Michelle Gellar. Maybe it's the whole idea of a cute blonde chick fighting monsters when she transparently doesn't have enough meat on her to open a stubborn jar of pickles. It doesn't matter how complex the arcs get, or how well they handle

the subject of bereavement

the nature of forgiveness

the whole thing is framed in cutesy dialogue and a blonde girl kicking vampires in the face and either you buy that shit or you don't. I personally bought it big time and Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains one of my favourite television shows ever.

I just don't buy Dollhouse. I don't buy the premise, I don't buy the boring, stilted, not-at-all-cutesy and therefore not-at-all witty and therefore not-at-all interesting dialogue. I think the show is heavy handed. I think the show is boring.

Nothing can change in the last four episodes of Season One or the first four episodes of Season Two to change this fact. My issues with Dollhouse are with the root and the core of the show, with the ideas behind it, the way the characters are presented, the way the dialogue is written. No penultimate-episode revelation will change that. Nothing the show can be building towards can change what the show is built on.

Which, from where I'm standing, is Joss Whedon's penis.Themes:

Damage Report

TV & Movies

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Whedonverse

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~Comments (

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Arthur B

at 12:47 on 2009-06-22

So what you're saying is that you're fine with Joss jerking off in your face, but you draw the line at him asking you to give him a hand? :P

Seriously though, awesome article. I think a lack of, for want of a better word, psychological realism can absolutely kill any hope shows like

Dollhouse

have of being appreciated on the sort of level Whedon clearly wants

Dollhouse

to be appreciated on. This isn't always true, but I think it's often true, especially if the show hinges on the internal psychological states of the characters, and having your show hinge on a mind control process means the mental states of the characters is

the

most important element of the story.

The Prisoner

did this sort of thing

right

. Even though most interrogation processes are vastly grimier than what Number Six went through in the Village, you still had the impression that people were behaving in the way you would expect them to behave in a paranoid schizophrenic Welsh village where Number Six never knows who's working for Number Two and Number Two isn't sure how much Number Six really knows. What's more, what goes on in the Village is an atrocity with a thin veneer of pleasantness which is

actually

a thin veneer. The various Number Twos and their lackeys were perfectly pleasant most of the time, but behind their kind words there was always a snare, and they never hesitated to knock people on the head and drag them in for a lobotomy if they felt the need.

I think part of the reason that the last episode is so controversial is that it abandons psychological realism for tripped-out 60s allegory, and whilst there's nothing wrong with allegory it does tend to involve unrealistic behaviour on the part of characters for the sake of making a point. I do wonder whether

Dollhouse

would work better approached as social allegory as opposed to a psychologically realistic study of rape and/or slavery, but I suspect not since it certainly sounds as though it were written as the latter, not the former.

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Andy G

at 13:57 on 2009-06-22Blackadder comes to mind as a counterexample to what you say about slow builds ... though I guess you could make the case that that is a slightly unusual case since so much was changed after season 1.

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Andy G

at 14:09 on 2009-06-22

And we certainly aren't asked to question our own complicity in the work of the Cosa Nostra.

I agree that the show isn't making some sort of didactic point, but surely it is very much about the uneasy relationship between mainstream American society and the violence that it either hypocritically condemns while supporting, or simply turns a blind eye to? Especially with the outsider liberal figures like Meadow or Dr Melfi.

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Dan H

at 15:46 on 2009-06-22

True, but there's a difference between making a point about society in general, and making a point about you, the viewer.

The Sopranos doesn't ask you to view the act of watching the Sopranos as making you complicit in the work of the Mafia, if you see what I mean.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 17:58 on 2009-06-22

Blackadder comes to mind as a counterexample to what you say about slow builds ... though I guess you could make the case that that is a slightly unusual case since so much was changed after season 1.

I'd say with Blackadder it's really the same all the way through. There are major changes b/w season 1 and the later seasons, but the basic idea is the same. I think the biggest tweak is in exactly how Blackadder fits with the world and the other characters. But a lot of the basic ideas are the same. The final episode isn't so much fantastic because it shows you where the show is going; it just applies the same formula to a part of history where it's most powerful imo.

The Sopranos doesn't ask you to view the act of watching the Sopranos as making you complicit in the work of the Mafia, if you see what I mean.

I agree. I just started finally watching

The Wire,

and interestingly, in the commentary for the pilot the creator talks about how the first chapter shouldn't be as good as the series is going to get--he's going for a slow build. But at the same time the first chapter clearly lays out what the series is about. And there too it's about society, but not in an accusatory way. Characters don't explicitly justify or condemn everything about themselves and others.

Also maybe another thing that also applies to the Sopranos and doesn't seem to apply to Dollhouse is that there's little need for characters to justify themselves because the world in which they live makes what they do understandable. We can see why being born a Soprano might encourage you to be Tony or AJ or Meadow, or how someone like Carmela would wind up this kind of wife. Likewise how the characters in The Wire become criminals or cops.

But is there any explanation why these people created and work at the Dollhouse--any human reasons with which a reader can identify? This is partly where the proble of all those nice guys working at the Dollhouse come from. We can see where a nice guy on the Sopranos or the Wire could get pushed to stay in a life that goes against their nature (and so probably slowly kills them) but when I read your descriptions of these characters I still wind up asking why they don't work somewhere else.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 17:59 on 2009-06-22Sorry about that strange comment--I didn't realize the whole thing was copied in italics!

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Jamie Johnston

at 18:18 on 2009-06-22Haven't finished reading the article yet but I thought I'd mention before I forget: the link to

Boils and Blinding Torment

doesn't work. It looks like it has the same problem I got when I was putting up my last article, namely the process of pasting into the Ferretbrain article editor and saving has somehow added "&8221" to the beginning and end of the URL.

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:04 on 2009-06-22Have now finished reading and very much agree, not specifically in relation to

Dollhouse

because I haven't seen any of it but in relation to your general thinking about how fiction should work and how it goes wrong.

Funnily enough the section on the 'slow-build' made me think of exactly the same bit of commentary on the first episode of

The Wire

that Sister Magpie mentioned. David Simon says several times in that audio commentary (and not without sounding just a little smug and patronizing about it, I'm sorry to say) that the series was very demanding of its audience in following a single complete story at a relatively slow pace across 13 episodes rather than the more usual thing of playing out a long over-all plot over the course of a series of somewhat self-contained one-hour-long stories. But you can get away with that if each episode, whether self-contained or not, is in itself enjoyable (which in the case of

The Wire

it certainly is). You can't use it as an excuse for boring your audience out of its collective skull for twelve weeks on the promise of something exciting happening in week 13.

I'm also put in mind of what Neil Gaiman has often said about

The Kindly Ones

, which is that it was the only sequence in the

Sandman

series that he allowed himself to write not as a series of 24-page monthly episodes but more or less as a single 312-page comic, knowing that the pacing and plotting would not really work very well when it was published in 24-page chunks and would only properly make sense in a trade paperback collection. The point here is that Gaiman knows enough about good writing that he clearly feels rather sheepish about doing this.

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http://skull-bearer.livejournal.com/

at 19:24 on 2009-06-22

osef Mengele didn't have cutesy conversations with his Jewish prisoners before pouring bleach in their eyes.

Sorry to disagree, but that's exactly what he did. But that's a case of reality being more screwed up than fiction, and that guy was an utter nutcase.

Sorry, carry on.

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Rami

at 20:52 on 2009-06-22

process of pasting into the Ferretbrain article editor and saving has somehow added "&8221" to the beginning and end

I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that -- it's the magic of Microsoft Word.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/ck5gg.gRlPbLG2WYCqrJ5k2.qjxalTVt0AHQ#14479

at 23:37 on 2009-06-22Dan Hemmens is a man after my own heart.

Okay, enough sucking up.

You make a good point, though about not liking Buffy because something doesn't 'click' with you about it, but I'll go one step further and say Whedon's propensity for not really understanding the underlying psychology of a given situation precedes Dollhouse by a country mile.

I was first totally turned off to the Whedon way of thinking during the "Graduation Day" episode of Buffy when I was insulted a total of three times.

The first was when Buffy was given an umbrella and the title of "Class Protector". First of all, are you kidding? If all the kids in high school knew about the growing vampire population, don't you think there would be a massive exodus of people from the town, not to mention a mass ostracizing of Buffy (in the same way people would avoid Fairuza Balk's character in The Craft)?

Most normal teenagers back away from things that are dangerous, even if there's an overall 'good' associated. Why? Because lots of people believe that if you lie with dogs, you get fleas. Hang out with Buffy, you're taking your life in your hands. Better to turn a blind eye to it also, if you know what's good for you.

The second was that the Scooby gang let same said high schoolers in on the plot to take down the mayor. Are you kidding? Are you seriously telling me that the same group of kids isn't going to stay home that day because they might just end up dead?

And third, and the most final and grating of insults, was that upon reflection of the day's events, Oz says, ponderously, "We survived high school."

I get the fact that Buffy was supposed to have been a metaphor, but seriously? The metaphor works best when you're not being beaten over the head with the fact that it's a metaphor.

Golly!

So, I'm not particularly surprised that Whedon has this odd base in non-reality that quite a few people seem to think is clever. (What can I say, I'm a sucker for sci-fi, even if I hate the creator, and yes, I have daggers for Whedon the same way Dan has for JK Rowling - who I also have daggers for.)

So, I made it a point to watch Dollhouse. Hey, if Adam Sandler can have "The Wedding Singer" in him, surely Whedon could have something interesting (and good!) to say at some point, right?

But only three episodes, two of which after the mythical "game-changer" episode. The first was the pilot. Oddly, I didn't see much difference in between the former and the latter, no matter what the fans say (I think the fans have convinced themselves that they're seeing something that isn't really there...I just thought everything I've seen was unilaterally bad in all the same ways).

What constantly annoys me about Whedon's work is often a complete lack of understanding of how people actually work. And this is the point that Dan makes very well above. There's Dollhouse, which tries to give everyone, no matter how 'evil' a supposedly sympathetic edge, and then there's The Sopranos, where the writing goes so far as to make you understand why the characters do what they do, instead of relying on plot contrivances to masticate pathos out of them.

I certainly wouldn't have, for instance, pegged Topher for 'lonely', and if I did, I would think he'd be sneaking dolls more often than just for his birthday (he being a 'genius' and all). Reminds me of that episode of Firefly where Jayne 'betrays' the crew and Mal threatens to throw him off the ship, or into a turbine or something. The rest of the episodes (of either) don't seem to have a thread that bears out these particular plot contrivances; they merely exist to demonstrate what Whedon wants us to see in the characters.

And Adelle, being Miss Lonelyhearts? Why can't she just be ruthless? Or is it not empowering for women to have blind ambition and nothing else? Or is that too cliche for Whedon? (I'll save my rant on why what Whedon writes isn't feminism for some other time because I'm sure I'm just rambling now.)

But yeah, I totally agree that there's just no "there" there with Dollhouse. It's insulting pseudo-intellectual garbage.

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Dafydd at 00:37 on 2009-06-24

"Dollhouse" is indeed boring, but as for Whedon wanking in our faces?

You need a Klein bottle to turn Whedon through 180 degrees.

http://www.kleinbottle.com/

Whedon's head is stuffed so far up his arse, that he will need to be rotated at right angles to reality before it is anatomically possible for him to wank in our faces.

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Robinson L

at 05:15 on 2009-06-26So, being annoyed, bored, and having Joss Whedon's rather malformed and immature "messages" and "insights" shoved down your throat all at the same time is too much for you? Reasonable. Dunno if I'll ever watch another episode. It ain't going to get any better.

If you don't like

Buffy

Season 1, you will not like

Buffy

, period.

Gonna play Hack's Advocate for a second here and point out the "Growing the Beard" phenomenon. I suppose the counterargument is that people who like, e.g.

The Next Generation

even before it gets good, and people who hate it when its bad will still hate it when it gets good.

the intellectual sophistication of a sixteen year old's GCSE essay

I seriously doubt that. My sister was sixteen last year, and I know she could right more sophisticated stuff that

this

back then.

One of the “memes” I'm trying to spread around the internet is A Very Specific Level of Tired.

Oh yeah. Good one. (

Love

that comic.)

Jonathan deciding to commit suicide by shooting himself with a sniper rifle in a bell tower

I saw this episode long before I began critically engaging with my entertainment media, and even then I knew this sequence was bunk.

True, but there's a difference between making a point about society in general, and making a point about

you, the viewer.

Actually, I've always thought one of the things which could've made

Firefly

much better would've been if Whedon had made his feminist message about how ordinary, well-meaning nonsexist (in their own minds) people (by implication

you, the viewer

) are complicit in systemic sexism, rather than scapegoating it all on the Misogynist-of-the-Week.

Josef Mengele didn't have cutesy conversations with his Jewish prisoners before pouring bleach in their eyes. Sorry to disagree, but that's exactly what he did. But that's a case of reality being more screwed up than fiction, and that guy was an utter nutcase.

very

hostile territory in the middle of the night. Some people, apparently, really

are

that sick. (Or that desperately in need of a real human relationship and that screwed-up about how to go about it. Don't mind me, rosy-tinted ocular sensors filtered by a rose-tinted brain.)

"We survived high school."

Again, watched the episode before I got my critical thinking in gear. At the time, I just thought it was a good joke. (

That's

what you consider the bigger accomplishment?)

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:59 on 2009-06-26Keeping the ever-riveting technical side-discussion alive:

I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that -- it's the magic of Microsoft Word.

Surprisingly I got it even with Mac TextEdit. But I'm not complaining - it's no trouble to fix as long as one remembers to check for it, and the only reason I mentioned it was to alert people to the need to check.

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Jamie Johnston

at 20:01 on 2009-06-26Actually, having said that, I started writing in Pages rather than TextEdit, so composing

ab initio

in a plain-text programme might well solve it.

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Rami

at 00:33 on 2009-06-27

Surprisingly I got it even with Mac TextEdit.

Word is the most common offender but pretty much any rich-text program will screw up HTML. Starting out plain-text will fix this for sure :-)

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Arthur B

at 02:09 on 2009-06-27

Word is the most common offender but pretty much any rich-text program will screw up HTML. Starting out plain-text will fix this for sure :-)

Wise words for sure. Should there in fact be a note in the article writer's guide - or, indeed on the main article-editing page - strongly suggesting that people use plain text editors such as notepad to compose their articles for best results?

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 15:55 on 2009-06-29

On a somewhat-less-evil (though perhaps only because of opportunity) scale, Bull Connor apparently had a quite friendly and pleasant conversation with a couple of Freedom Riders on his way to dumping them in very hostile territory in the middle of the night. Some people, apparently, really are that sick.

Definitely. Though I think when people show them in fiction that comes through. Like, there'd be a difference in deciding *why* Mengele has these creepy cute conversations that make him even more evil before he hurts a person. What Dan's talking about seems to be more people being portrayed as genuinely normal and well-meaning and nobody seeing any disconnect between that and human trafficking.

Maybe an even better example would be something like slavery where you had a slave owner who was sentimental with some of his slaves, but that just makes the rancidness of the relationship all the more clear. They're not really being nice the way they would be nice to a real person. It seems like Dollhouse thinks you can genuinely have it both ways where the human trafficking genuinely doesn't inform other interactions.

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Robinson L

at 03:30 on 2009-06-30*slaps forehead* You know, I think I'd meant to say something like that and then forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me, Sister Magpie.

While I was pedantically pointing out a minor argumentative error that somebody else had already pointed out like the arrogant little prick that I am, I agree with the general point that the Dollhouse staff do not behave at all realistically for a human trafficking organization. In all these cases the victims are being dehumanized--that's just about a tautology for someone who's a slave or in a concentration camp or even a second class citizen: they are viewed as less than human. Their masters/overseers may still have affection for them, but not the affection you'd have for a fellow human being--an equal.

Despite continually mind-raping their subjects and stifling their free will to almost nothing, the Dollhouse executives still show a distinct tendency to treat their "actives" as human equals, or near-equals.

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http://tabaquis.livejournal.com/

at 03:58 on 2009-06-30

There's a reason that lab rats aren't given names (or, for that matter, toys).

Loved your review as always, but just to nitpick: http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/enrich/rodents.htm

Lots of lab rats are in fact given toys, because it stimulates their health and reactions in a positive way so that you get more out of your experiment with them.

Just sayin'! ;)

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http://wemblee.livejournal.com/

at 06:30 on 2009-07-06

Good TV is good TV from the start. No ifs. No buts. No exceptions.

I... what? Star Trek: The Next Generation isn't a good show? Because I thought it was... starting with season 3, because anything before that is a

wasteland of unimaginable suck

. And Deep Space Nine? That was an even better show... except for pretty much the entire first season, which was horrible. And Farscape, which didn't find its way until the end. And Torchwood had a terrible beginning, but found itself in its second season. And Moonlighting's pilot is slow and awful. And pretty much no sitcom, ever, has had a pilot that was as good as the episodes that came later. And and and.

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Robinson L

at 08:06 on 2009-07-10Mm, yes wemblee, although I think what Dan

meant

was that people who enjoy a bad programme will enjoy it even more, but people who don't enjoy a bad programme probably won't like it even when it gets good. I suppose he could be right.

I can enjoy Next Generation and Deep Space Nine even before they got good, and Torchwood, too (although I'll have to see the second season to believe it gets any better), so I'm open to them being good. Maybe people who dislike them do so for reasons more to do with taste than quality.

Although if that is the argument, I agree that particular passage was unfortunate.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 19:31 on 2009-07-10I thought it was also more like saying that if you don't like the basic idea of a show, that basic idea getting better isn't going to do it for you. Iow, there was always some good fundamentals there, it just took a while for them to be used in the best way. Somebody turned off by those fundamentals isn't going to suddenly like the show when they get used better.

Blackadder I think is a good example since there's such a marked change between S1 and S2-4. I much prefer 2-4. The characters significantly shift their dynamics. But there's still stuff in S1 that I like that sound like the Blackadder of 2-4.

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Dan H

at 22:47 on 2009-07-10

I... what? Star Trek: The Next Generation isn't a good show?

Sister Magpie pretty much sums this up. All the things that are good about Star Trek TNG are things that are part of the show from its inception. All the things that are bad about Star Trek TNG are things that are part of the show from its inception.

Everything that's good about DS9 is in it from the beginning. Everything that's good about TNG is in it from the beginning. You might have thought that the first three seasons of TNG sucked, but you obviously weren't turned off by the premise of the show, you didn't think the idea of flying around in space seeking out strange new worlds was stupid, because if you did you wouldn't have liked series four onwards either.

TV series don't get better they just get better executed.

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Niall

at 23:55 on 2009-07-11

Everything that's good about DS9 is in it from the beginning.

I think I would be prepared to make the case that (a) the Dominion, (b) the Defiant, and (c) Worf are substantial parts of what made DS9 good, and they were grafts onto the original concept, not a part of it.

I would also be prepared to make the case that Torchwood is a counter-example here. Children of Earth is good in large part because it discards or transforms most of what was characteristic about the first two seasons.

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Arthur B

at 00:33 on 2009-07-12

But would the Dominion, the Defiant, and Worf be enough to make you enjoy the show if you couldn't stand the Bajor/Cardassian conflict, Sisko's accidental messiahism, Odo and Quark's frequent run-ins and all the other elements which were important to the show from the start?

Arguably, each of the things you mention is simply something that enhances a pre-existing element of DS9. The Dominion is an added complication to the "interstellar politics" dimension of the show. Worf is an addition to the "ensemble cast with complex interrelationships" element. The Defiant is a plot device for moving subsets of said ensemble cast to off-station locations. They embellish the show, but they don't actually change the premise of it: it's still a show in which an ensemble cast with complex interrelationships have to deal with tricky questions of interstellar politics.

And I'm sure that there's a number of people out there who actually liked the first two seasons and are completely livid about

Children of Earth

, although they may well be in the minority. Major changes to the very premise of the show are an

enormous

gamble, and the BBC is arguably one of the few broadcasters who are really in a position to attempt such a roll of the dice, and even

then

they may still not have considered it if

Torchwood

wasn't a significant part of their grand plans for the

Dr Who

franchise. I suspect 9 out of 10 broadcasters out there would rather scrap a series and commission a new one with a new premise rather than alter an old series to fit a new premise.

It remains to be seen whether Whedon will, in fact, do anything similar with

Dollhouse

, but it would be stupid of Dan to keep watching merely in the

hope

that Whedon will undertake such a drastic retooling.

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 04:08 on 2009-07-12Um - just chiming in as a Niner, to say that shows certainly can develop. But much of what I absolutely loved about DS9 was there from the first season. And that included the Dominion. Yes, they were introduced in the first season! (at least, I'm pretty sure they were - or very early in the second).

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Niall

at 09:01 on 2009-07-12Mary, you're right; I'd remembered "Rules of Acquisition" as being late-S2, not mid. Nor am I saying, actually, that DS9 wasn't good until S3; I have a substantial amount of affection for S1 and S2. But the *perception* exists that DS9 didn't get good until S3, with the appearance of the elements I mentioned. And while Arthur is in a sense correct that the grafts are more organic than I allowed in making my point, I dispute that it's still the same show: it changes complexion radically, from a show about building peace to a show about fighting war. It's as radical as the change in Torchwood, just done more gradually.

Arthur:

And I'm sure that there's a number of people out there who actually liked the first two seasons and are completely livid about Children of Earth

Yes, there are. The arrogant, superior part of me finds them hilarious. But if you're going to make "some people like the early version" your counter-argument, well, that could apply to any TV show. I'm sure plenty of people were pissed off when the Dominion showed up, too (probably pissed off for reasons not a million miles away from those behind my dislike of the recent Trek film, come to think of it: a betrayal of the Trek vision). That said, as it happens I think Children of Earth would have been better as an original production -- the ending is hampered by the need to fit into an ongoing continuity.

but it would be stupid of Dan to keep watching merely in the hope that Whedon will undertake such a drastic retooling.

Indeed, and I wasn't suggesting he should. I was disputing his general argument. Angel is yet another example: later seasons bear very little resemblance to the format they started out with (indeed, you may remember how vocal fans of the initial help-the-helpless-of-the-week concept were when the show moved away from it). But there are plenty of fans who joined the show at S2, or S4, or S5, who don't like seasons earlier than those points because of the ways in which they are different from the version of the show that they like.

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Arthur B

at 15:54 on 2009-07-12

And while Arthur is in a sense correct that the grafts are more organic than I allowed in making my point, I dispute that it's still the same show: it changes complexion radically, from a show about building peace to a show about fighting war.

There I think we just have to disagree - the threat of war was

always

present in DS9, it's just that we were led to expect trouble to break out between Cardassia and Bajor. (If war wasn't

potentially

about to break out at any moment, the whole "building peace" thing would have fallen flat after all.) The fact that the war turned out to be against the Dominion instead was a misdirection, but not one without precedent in the sort of story being told. (In fact, it's a lot like the similar misdirection in

Babylon 5

, where at the beginning we're all expecting shit to kick off between the Centauri and the Narn and the Vorlons to remain steadfastly neutral.

Speaking of B5, in fact, you could equally argue that the early seasons of that are about building peace rather than fighting a war, but the war was still planned from the very beginning.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 21:03 on 2009-07-12

Angel is yet another example: later seasons bear very little resemblance to the format they started out with (indeed, you may remember how vocal fans of the initial help-the-helpless-of-the-week concept were when the show moved away from it). But there are plenty of fans who joined the show at S2, or S4, or S5, who don't like seasons earlier than those points because of the ways in which they are different from the version of the show that they like.

Supernatural in S4 became a war vs. heaven and hell with the main characters in the middle story. There are fans who don't like this direction and wish they'd go back to MOTW. Others have gotten more interested tihs season.

However, I would never say this is a fundamental change of show. It's still imo a disagreement over the most enjoyable way to deal with the same characters and general idea. I liked the original premise of 2 brothers running around fighting demons. I'm more grabbed by what's going on now. But what's going on now is still dependent on the exact same brother relationship that was always at the center of the show, the family drama played out with supernatural beings is still the central idea. If I'd hated that premise the shift to angels and the apocolypse would not change that. The Wincesters are still the same family. If I like them now I can't help but also like them in S1 (and that would be true even if I hadn't cared for them as much back when S1 was first-run). I'm still expected to care about these characters and what's important to these characters is still their family.

The move from MOTW to a mytharc is pretty common since The X-Files, actually. Many mytharcs basically are MOTWs where it's personal played out over many episodes instead of just one.

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Robinson L

at 18:36 on 2009-07-14

TV series don't get better they just get better executed.

All right Dan,

now

I see what you're saying, but I think you're treading on some tricky linguistic ground, here.

Sure, it might be more accurate to say that tv shows don't get better, it's the

quality

of the shows which gets better. Just as it would be more accurate to say that the Earth revolves so that the sun is more/less in view, rather than "the sun is rising/setting." But who the hell talks like that? It's not even that good a comparison, anyway, because just saying "the earth revolves" doesn't mislead 99% percent of readers, whereas saying "good TV is good TV from the start, no exceptions" can be

very

misleading, as we've just seen ...

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Viorica

at 03:43 on 2009-07-27

The Wincesters

*sniggers*

There are people who were pissed off by

Children of Earth

, but not really because of any change in tone. They're raging because a very popular character/pairing was killed off, and this fandom has some truly deranged 'shippers. However, this is a good example of a series that fundamentally changed when the tone shifted. Torchwood's first two seasons are about a secret alien-fighting organisation that's only slightly less campy than

Xena

, where no one really has to make serious decisions beyond "Who would I rather sleep with?", and death can be reversed with a magical robotic arm.

Children of Earth

is about an alien-fighting organisation that's extremely serious and dark, where agonising choices have to be made, and death can't just be undone. Same premise, very different show.

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http://matthew.wilson.myopenid.com/

at 14:40 on 2009-08-02Buffy had a plan in season 7?

#Ferretbrain #Dollhouse #Joss Whedon #Dan H

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