Dollhouse: Joss Whedon's Newest TV Project
Eliza Dushku Stars in Buffy Writer's Latest, Strangest Creation
Feb 20, 2009
Television auteur Joss Whedon’s new FOX series Dollhouse arrived onto the TV landscape last Friday evening with an arresting in media res opening. Through a surveillance camera’s point-of-view, we see an attractive-looking young woman and an older female doctor sitting across from each other, and the latter utters the episode’s first line: “Nothing is what it appears to be.” You can say that again!
A witty fusion of the verbal and visual this is, and that entire opening scene with the doctor (Olivia Williams) and the young woman (Eliza Dushku) does show some of that familiar Whedon-esque spark of clever quips loaded with poignant subtext. The rest of its rather lackluster pilot never really lives up to that eerie and mysterious opening, but it does suggest some genuinely interesting possibilities for Dollhouse in the coming weeks…provided its Friday-night timeslot doesn’t doom it to poor ratings and television oblivion.
Starting From the Middle
Telling, perhaps, that Whedon—who wrote and directed the pilot—decides to simply throw us into his Stepford Wives-ish universe without bothering to properly acquit us into that universe; like the main character, Echo (Dushku), we’re put in the position of not comprehending the big picture, knowing only what we’re allowed by the writers to know moment-by-moment. Presumably, of course, Dollhouse will explore the main character and the intrigue surrounding her, carefully delving into her backstory even as it comes up with increasingly wilder missions for her to tackle in each episode.
The premise involves a covert, illegal operation in which people are basically turned into human “dolls” hired to do whatever one wishes, whether it’s acting as a person’s weekend date or saving a man’s daughter from the Russian mob. Each “doll” is imprinted with bits and pieces of the personalities and abilities of others in order to carry out the specific task at hand; when the task is completed, those personalities and abilities are erased and eventually replaced by new ones for a different task.
Iffy Pilot For An Intriguing Premise
This sounds like an interesting concept, one fraught with all sorts of moral and ethical implications. Hopefully those will be duly explored in later weeks. The pilot, however, was frankly a bit on the dull side, for all its narrative fireworks. Its serviceable dialogue mostly lacked the usual snarky/witty edge previous Joss Whedon creations like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly displayed right off the bat, and its kick-off mission was fairly clichéd and unremarkable. (One subplot—featuring an obsessed FBI agent, played by Tahmoh Penikett, trying to bring down the Dollhouse operation amidst the exasperation of his superiors—feels terribly old hat as well.)
As for its star, Eliza Dushku: she may have struck considerable sparks as the tough, corruptible “bad girl” vampire slayer Faith on Buffy—but in a role like Echo, in which she will no doubt be required to assume a wide variety of personalities, one wonders, on the basis of her (deliberately?) uneven performance in the pilot, whether she has the range to pull all of those personalities off convincingly. (Gabriel Crestejo, the man who asks Dollhouse for help to rescue his abducted daughter, certainly wasn’t the only one who found the idea of Dushku as a hostage negotiator difficult to swallow.) Other cast members—especially Harry Lennix as Echo's faithful, concerned handler—seemed much more comfortable in admittedly more limited roles.
Still, this is just one episode, and there are some intriguing and potentially explosive ideas floating around here. The simple idea of being able to erase one’s own memory and implant new ones is chilling when one reflects on it, and its inherent promise of an eclectic mix of missions and styles will probably bring about more engaging narratives in future episodes. Hopefully "Dollhouse" will stay on long enough to realize its promise; until then, this viewer will wade in with cautious optimism.
A new episode of Dollhouse airs tonight on FOX at 9 p.m.
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