TV Review - Dollhouse Episode 1.10 - Haunted
Echo plays Miss Marple, while Topher has a Play Date
Apr 26, 2009
Joss Whedon's most famous TV creations, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, lasted a combined total of 12 seasons. They live on in countless novels, comic books, and even midnight movie sing-along screenings. His follow-up, Firefly, lasted a grand total of one season, and a truncated one at that. The Fox network notoriously did not lend its support to the show, clashing with Whedon about design and plot elements, dumping it in the Friday night ratings wasteland, and finally canceling it before all episodes were aired. In a way, though, this had the effect of actually martyring the show; die-hard Whedonites vehemently spread word of its greatness and made the DVD set a commercial success, leading to the release of the movie Serenity, which continued the story in higher-budget, blockbuster fashion.
Those same rabid fans couldn't help but feel a bad case of deja vu as Dollhouse came closer to fruition. Who's airing it? Fox. When? Friday nights. Alrighty, then. But fear not, says Mr. Whedon. The studio is treating me and my project with the utmost respect! Re-tooling the original pilot, making it the second episode, and creating a whole new one was my own idea, not theirs! We're fine!
The aired pilot was then beaten in ratings by Supernanny. Since then, viewership has gone up slightly, staying fair for its slot, but at this point, its future is still uncertain.
Dollhouse premise
The high concept of Dollhouse may be what's kept people away. It doesn't bear an easy description like "a cop show in L.A.", or "a vampire solving crime". In a bloated nutshell, the Dollhouse is an underground business that provides their clients with actors, known as "dolls", who perform all kinds of services, mostly involving sexual or emotional fantasies. But the "dolls" are more than just actors; their brains are programmed with interchangeable personalities, memories, and even abilities, actually believing they are this new person with each assignment. After a job is complete, their minds are wiped of all characteristics, leaving them in a child-like, vapid state. Eliza Dushku plays Echo, a doll who might not be getting wiped so clean of her previous life in the real world.
Imagine trying to explain all this to a co-worker by the water cooler and you see the problem.
Even more problematic is that this concept may turn out to be higher than we thought; the true nature of the Dollhouse is being slowly revealed as something grander and more sinister through the investigations of FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), on the trail of missing persons believed to be recruited as the dolls.
This means the first few episodes, the ones supposed to hook in viewers, in which we follow Echo on some of her typical assignments,aren't even an indication of what the show is supposed to be. This is actually a blessing, though, albeit mixed.
Eliza Dushku vs. the Ensemble
The complexity that might initially turn people away from the show has at the same time improved its quality. The episodes that rely solely on Eliza Dushku fall flat for a couple of reasons. For one thing, she's just not a good enough actress to carry a show on her shoulders. She's not terrible, just uneven, doing better with personalities that don't stretch her too far. It's also very hard to effectively write new, believable, fleshed out characters for her to interact with each time. Finally, it's hard to care about Echo when we are told very little about the real girl she was before the Dollhouse. How do we empathize with someone we don't know? How do we even know she's worthy of our concern? It's not until the latter part of the season that we learn anything substantial about her character, so we should care...retroactively?
When we focus less on Echo, and more on Ballard's investigation and the dealings of everyday existence elsewhere in the Dollhouse, the show gets a lot more interesting. The rest of the cast, while nothing special individually, do work well together. The recent reveals of the various other dolls and their surprising assignments, as well as the mole attempting to contact Ballard, have been well handled and effective.
Haunted
This episode, however, returns more to the Echo's assignment format, and suffers as a result. A rich matriarch friend of Dollhouse CEO Adele DeWitt (Olivia Williams) has died mysteriously, and we learn she had earlier paid to have her personality imprinted temporarily on a doll to attend her own funeral and investigate what she was convinced would be murder by someone in her family.
Several characters make much of the idea that the Dollhouse technology, in this application, allows for a kind of immortality, but that doesn't really hold water. It's only a copy of the dead person's personality and memories that gets transferred to someone else, not any actual awareness. The original dead person doesn't experience anything beyond death.
Dushku does an okay job here, as she doesn't have to be overtly seductive in this role, something she never does comfortably. The murder mystery isn't particularly interesting, or surprising, and the audience is oddly left for more than half the show without even knowing what the established cause of death was.
What stands out is actually the b-plot for Topher (Fran Kranz), and his "annual maintenance" of the Dollhouse technology. The surprise meaning of this gives a poignant glimpse into his life and just how much he has sacrificed to take this job as the Dollhouse's resident tech genius.
Joss Whedon himself has written very few of the episodes, and he needs to take a more hands-on approach to bring some of his trademark verve to the series. If he does, and if there is more focus on all the characters, this show could find its audience in a second season.
