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marinessSo I was trying to figure out exactly what bothered me about the Dollhouse finale, :
Partly it was the quality. In its short run, Dollhouse has been perhaps the most uneven of any of Joss Whedon's shows. Perhaps, because season 6 of Buffy included both the glory of "Once More With Feeling" and the disaster of the rest of the season…ok. I take it back. Including season 6, Buffy was considerably more uneven. But anyway. The finale encapsulated that: brilliant stuff between Topher and Dr. Saunders/Whiskey, intercut with surprisingly dull stuff (much of the stuff between Alpha and Echo/Omega just seemed to go on way too long, completed with huge plot holes. Sorry, but if a former FBI agent actually calls in a bomb threat, he'd be arrested. Immediately. Actually, anyone calling in a bomb threat – and confessing to this – would be arrested. Because it's illegal. And for crying out loud, he was confessing this to the FBI. But moving on.
The larger problem: Dollhouse keeps spewing up brilliant ideas – and then going nowhere with them. What would you do with 38 minds besides wildly swing an iron pipe around and speak with the nearly identical voice and intonation? What would it really be like to face your body when it's possessed by trailer trash? If you can preserve your mind, so it survives after your death, would you do anything beyond participate in an Agatha Christie ripoff of your personal murder mystery? And – a thought briefly vocalized, and never picked up on – can you really and truly completely erase the soul? What does "soul" mean to someone like Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, presumably, like the rest of the dolls, under a five year contract, a contract that also presumably guaranteed that her face would be intact at the end? And since Whiskey/Dr. Saunders presumably knows something of the questionable backgrounds of many of the dolls (Alpha was on his way to being a serial killer; we know November/Madeleine had some kind of FBI record; Echo/Caroline was breaking into private labs and so on) what does her "I know who I am" mean to her, knowing, as she must, that she became a doll only through some form of trauma/crime? Network interference in earlier episodes did cut down their time to explore this sort of thing – but then, why tease us, only to go to other, less interesting places?
I did, however, like that Ballard freed November/Madeleine at the end; his earlier decision to just leave her in her pod since she was a sleeper agent…well, for all he knew, Echo/Caroline could have been programmed as a sleeper agent as well, and it was nice of him to finally show some emotions towards the body he was sleeping with. (I'm somewhat saddened to realize that this is the end of November/Madeleine, though, since I liked her storyline.)
Bottom line: if this show returns in the fall, I'll watch, but I won't be overly shook if it fails to return, either.
Partly it was the quality. In its short run, Dollhouse has been perhaps the most uneven of any of Joss Whedon's shows. Perhaps, because season 6 of Buffy included both the glory of "Once More With Feeling" and the disaster of the rest of the season…ok. I take it back. Including season 6, Buffy was considerably more uneven. But anyway. The finale encapsulated that: brilliant stuff between Topher and Dr. Saunders/Whiskey, intercut with surprisingly dull stuff (much of the stuff between Alpha and Echo/Omega just seemed to go on way too long, completed with huge plot holes. Sorry, but if a former FBI agent actually calls in a bomb threat, he'd be arrested. Immediately. Actually, anyone calling in a bomb threat – and confessing to this – would be arrested. Because it's illegal. And for crying out loud, he was confessing this to the FBI. But moving on.
The larger problem: Dollhouse keeps spewing up brilliant ideas – and then going nowhere with them. What would you do with 38 minds besides wildly swing an iron pipe around and speak with the nearly identical voice and intonation? What would it really be like to face your body when it's possessed by trailer trash? If you can preserve your mind, so it survives after your death, would you do anything beyond participate in an Agatha Christie ripoff of your personal murder mystery? And – a thought briefly vocalized, and never picked up on – can you really and truly completely erase the soul? What does "soul" mean to someone like Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, presumably, like the rest of the dolls, under a five year contract, a contract that also presumably guaranteed that her face would be intact at the end? And since Whiskey/Dr. Saunders presumably knows something of the questionable backgrounds of many of the dolls (Alpha was on his way to being a serial killer; we know November/Madeleine had some kind of FBI record; Echo/Caroline was breaking into private labs and so on) what does her "I know who I am" mean to her, knowing, as she must, that she became a doll only through some form of trauma/crime? Network interference in earlier episodes did cut down their time to explore this sort of thing – but then, why tease us, only to go to other, less interesting places?
I did, however, like that Ballard freed November/Madeleine at the end; his earlier decision to just leave her in her pod since she was a sleeper agent…well, for all he knew, Echo/Caroline could have been programmed as a sleeper agent as well, and it was nice of him to finally show some emotions towards the body he was sleeping with. (I'm somewhat saddened to realize that this is the end of November/Madeleine, though, since I liked her storyline.)
Bottom line: if this show returns in the fall, I'll watch, but I won't be overly shook if it fails to return, either.