The House Is Closed

It was a good run and a valiant effort. I "hmmed" a good bit when the news came out no episodes of Dollhouse would air in November - it's sweeps time, after all and that's when all-important advertising rates are set. But now it's official - Dollhouse will finish its run (the finale will most likely air in late January) but it's gone to the scrap heap of canceled shows.

Whedon has assured fans that we'll know about his next project by the time the final episode airs and we'll see what direction he'll be going in.

Many fans are understandably upset about this, but no one is particularly surprised. Friday night is the "death slot" for network television and Dollhouse never attained stellar ratings. As I've posted here, I found the show to have flashes of nigh-brilliance, but also some anvil-heavy storylines, characterizations, and direction.

Back in 2003, Whedon said in the New York Times interview that his "favorite fictions . . . are about the getting of strength and that's probably the most important theme in any of my work" and Dollhouse wanted very much to be going in that direction. Alas, the path through the woods has been barred by a Fox, but I can't much blame the Fox for acting according to his nature.

Maybe this frees Whedon up a little - they're in the process of filming Episdoe 11, meaning there are still two to film - plenty of time to jazz things up, especially now that there's no worry about Pleasing the Network Masters. Amazing how freeing that can be. Let's go out with a bang - or at least a loudly slamming door.

Then again, I've always been a sucker for the idea of toys (Dolls, if you will) becoming real - a concept Whedon must have a liking for as well, considering his writing credit for Toy Story and certainly one he's been working with here. So let's end with this from the classic for children of all ages, Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit:

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.

But the Skin Horse only smiled.

Watching with Scholars

The conference wraps up today - I'll post final thoughts later. Wilmington has been good to us - and it's been a good conference. One of the delights of a popular culture conference is how interdisciplinary it is. Rather than just going to media studies panels, I have choices from panels discussing Shakespeare, the material culture, technology, and so on. The hard part is choosing!

Of course, another key of conferences is having a chance to get feedback on your own work and see what's going on in the field. My panel (which was yesterday) was a very strong one. We had all worked independently, but had bridges for the other speakers, so it felt very organic and unified. Not all panels have that - especially when the speakers haven't met and are preparing in a vacuum, as it were. And (naturally) many presentations are of works in progress - mine changed a good bit from the proposal to the presentation, due to time. But I had one nugget of information that seems to be my shiny new unique contribution to the readings of Dollhouse and I've been asked to develop that further for publication, which is always a kick. There are some other bits of news, but I need to scurry to catch the final two panels today, so it'll have to wait.

Anyway, a gang of us (what's the collective noun for a group of academics? A dissertation? A theory? Hmm.) gathered after the closing reception and dinner (in the hotel - hardly ever anything to write home about, yet a substantial hit on the credit card. And you wonder why I cook at home most nights) to watch Friday's episode of Dollhouse.

Well.

I hate to say it, but it felt phoned in. There were cliches galore and they weren't being used as ironic commentary. (Lightning storm? Spilled milk? Shiny butcher knife? Really, was all of that necessary?) The core concept was interesting - the maternal instinct is just too strong to be "wiped," even if it was implanted in the first place - but it just didn't hang together for me.

I want to like this show; I really do. And there are glimmers, but so far, they seem more like foxfire luring me deeper into the swamp than glittering Truth. I'll stick with it, but I will continue to point out when the emperor appears to be nekkid.

The Coast with the Most!

For the next few days, I'll be posting from Wilmington, NC where the annual Popular Culture/American Culture Associations in the South conference is being held. I've attended this conference before and it's always a lot of fun. Academics - full-time eggheads, eager grad students, and dewy-eyed undergrads - we're all here and we're all presenting on the subjects that get us fired up to go in front of yet another classroom of maybe-not-totally enthused students. I have a chance to hear papers on subjects ranging from religion & culture to the Age of Obama to television studies to teaching Shakespeare.

My particular paper is up tomorrow afternoon - it's the one I've been working on tying Whedon's Dollhouse back to its Roman roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It's been an interesting vein to mine and I'm hoping for some positive feedback on the angle I'm using. It's not a complete paper - reading time here (as at most conferences) is limited to only 20 minutes, so some very interesting material had to be cut. But I plan to put it back in for publication when I expand the work.

We - I'm traveling with FryDaddy, who you may know from my more general blog - arrived late, late, LATE last night - there's just no short way to get here from home, since we have yet to master wormhole technology. And since this trip is totally out of my pocket (the school has always been very generous in supporting my conference presentations, but the economic meltdown and budget logjam brought that lovely perk to a screeching halt last year), I'm not worrying about attending every single session.

Still, there are some very interesting presentations happening and I'll be telling you about them, as well as some tidbits about presenters, conference life and Wilmington in general.

For now, though, I go in search of fresh coffee. More later!

Dollhouse, Take Two!

The Dollhouse is back. That creepy, hi-tech, Zen-like spa environment that exists to provide the super-rich with whatever their fantasy might be (Tempura Joe? That pushes the envelope on ewww!) returned last night on Fox.

We're entering a very important few weeks in Whedon-land. Ratings were less than stellar last year and the show had an uneven beginning that never really managed to widen the circle of viewership beyond the Already Converted. So here's the test - can Whedon make Dollhouse sing to those who aren't already in the choir loft? Well - let's see how we started.

Last night's episode was titled "Vows." The title referred to a number of vows taken by characters - we see Echo getting married as part of a convoluted engagement (Ha! "Engagement" has a whole new meaning here that I didn't see until I started writing that sentence!), Paul is cruel to be kind in keeping his vow to protect Echo, and so on. The episode (which you can view for free here) was sharply written ("What if she goes over your head?" "I'm very tall."), fast-paced and overall continued the upward trajectory of the end of last season.

By the way, the Whiskey/Topher dynamic was easily the most interesting aspect of the show last night and I want to see more there! One of Whedon's strengths is his ability to craft strong ensembles and this is the time to let his stars shine. Dollhouse has tremendous potential to ask hard questions about identity, freedom, and our ability to compromise our principles while telling ourselves that we haven't and I want to see him explore all of that.

So I really don't want it to turn into "Who's Echo this week?"

And welcome to the world, Charlotte Grace Prinze!

Finally!

For those of you who are fans of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (and really, who isn't?), there is great joy in seeing the good Doctor and crew win the Emmy award for "Outstanding Special Class: Short-Form Live Action Entertainment Program." (Wow - even the title's quite a mouthful!) This being Whedon, there's irony in the win - Dr. Horrible won a television award despite the fact that it's never been shown on television; it was an Internet-driven sensation. Well, you take the win however you can get it, I suppose. And it's good to be able to post a picture like the one on the right. Not only because I'm a Nathan fan, but - let's face it - Captain Hammer would so totally smooch his Superhero of the Year Award, probably between choruses of a power ballad.

So there's that news. Aside from that, I'm trying to both gear up for the Sept. 25 Season 2 premier of Dollhouse and finish preparing my "classical Echo compared with Whedon's Echo" paper for its early October outing in Wilmington, NC. That's the location of the Popular & American Culture Associations in the South conference this year. It's always a fun time and I'm very much looking forward to going. Here's the conference link, if you're interested in the sorts of things you can see at such a thing. From that link, there's a link to the "almost final" conference schedule.

See you there!

Box Set!

So I recently obtained the Dollhouse box set and sat down to watch the much-heralded "Epitaph One" as well as the unaired pilot "Echo." Spoilers, of course, follow - but I think I can manage to keep major plot details to myself.

Beginning with the end, "Epitaph One" had been regarded as the Holy Grail of Dollhouse and fans were hurt and angry at Fox's decision to not air the episode. That worked out this way - Fox saw it as an "extra" episode beyond the 13 they had paid for - 12 episodes aired; the unaired (but already shot) pilot "Echo" was counted as the 13th. I hate to side with Fox (really) but in my opinion, they were right to keep this one in the box set only.

That's not because "Epitaph One" is a sticky mess; it's not. In fact, it has some extremely intriguing developments and what may be my favorite scene involving Topher in the entire run. But setting an episode ten years in the future and counting it as canon leaves you only a little wiggle room - I know, I know; it's counterintuitive. Overall, the episode has the feel of "I'm not letting them pull another Firefly on me; I'm tying up loose ends in case we're not back in September."

But they are back in September (and yay! I'd like to say), so let's not assume that 2019 is how things will be, nor that the future is anything but mutable. Nothing in the show has indicated that time is less than linear, so don't tell me that what I saw is where things inevitably wind up. (As Fred once said on Angel, "Nothing is inevitable as long as you can look at it and say, 'You're evitable.'" I always enjoyed that line.)

On the other hand, "Echo" was a much stronger narrative opener than "Ghost" was. It had issues - it felt rushed and probably gave away too much in one episode, for example - but it had fast-paced humor (a Whedon trademark that was woefully missing from much of the first five or so episodes) and I cared far more about what was going on. I can understand why Fox wanted parts of it re-shot and you'll find "Echo" scattered throughout the first season, but of the two "missing episodes" on the box set - this is the one that should have hit the air.

Of course, I'm not a Fox executive, so it's easy to armchair quarterback. And we do get another season (beginning Sept. 25; mark your calendars!), so there's that. But Dollhouse has to deliver this year, which means pulling in viewers that aren't already Whedon fans. It's a delicate balance figuring out how to continue with a complicated story arc and not lose newbies. It can be done (24 springs to mind, although I must confess that I don't watch it), but the time slot of Dollhouse might be working against it.

Then again, things are never what they seem, are they? That's why we keep watching.

Season One Re-Visited

OK - I'm caught up and back home for a little while, so I finally have time to comment. Overall, I think Dollhouse found its footing and I'm very glad Fox made a show of good faith in renewing the show. That said, I think the show has some problems to overcome in Season Two.

Let's see . . .

1. The show became far stronger once it moved away from the "who's Echo this week?" idea. That stands to reason; a common focus of Whedon's work is the formation of chosen families, which is a concept that lends itself to strong ensemble shows. Heck, even Season One of Buffy had to get past the "monster of the week" model. Once it did, the show blossomed, as Dollhouse did.
2. I like the murkiness of the show. Not all of the clients are nasty-bad people, which gave us some interesting explorations of what motivates the customers of the Dollhouses. (Sidebar: I recently saw the Liam Neeson thriller Taken as was repulsed by the subject matter, even as I enjoyed the action/adventure side. There, the bad guys were definitely one-dimensional bad guys. I not only didn't mind them being handed ugly death, I was rooting for it. I'm not exactly a sweetness-and-light sort with some topics, including human trafficking.) Whedon doesn't let me off so easily.
3. It's common for writer/directors to develop their own cadre of actors they work with over and over again. Whedon has done this so often that fans delight in naming the "hat tricks" who have appeared in multiple Whedon shows. Casting Alan Tudyk and Amy Acker in their respective roles was a stroke of brilliance. Just as Cary Grant was born to wear a well-tailored dark suit, Tudyk seems to have been placed on this earth to wear Hawaiian print. Then to make that quirky personality the Big Bad - wow! And Amy Acker had no trace of either Fred or Illyria, but instead brought something new to this role. Not to mention, the two of them together - well. That was something entirely else.

In short, Dollhouse has tremedous potential. Audiences have shown their willingness to enjoy (not just put up with) complex story lines with the success of shows such as The X Files and Lost, so it is not beyond possibility that Dollhouse will find an enthusiastic audience that goes beyond Whedon's fanatically loyal fanbase (and I'm including myself in there. In fact, I'm writing about Echo and the classical Greek Echo for an upcoming conference). But placement is everything and ratings are the sword that a show lives or dies by. It's not enough to be innovative and thought-provoking - eyes have to be glued to the screen on a regular basis.

So watch already!

In other news, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is available on DVD now from major retailers, such as Best Buy. If you don't have a copy of this, really - you should consider it. Not only is the story a lovely twist on the usual triangle of hero/girlfriend/villian, but it's a musical. With a musical commentary. For about ten bucks. Really.