there’s no Willow or Kaylee or Cordelia

TV I spent yesterday watching Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (season one). Yes, I know it’s thirteen episodes and that’s an awful lot of television for one day, but the day was free and I was excited. As I’d been warned, the series really does find focus after the initial five episodes and by the concluding episode, the mythic, legendary, Epitaph One, it’s very easy to fall in love with the series, in a range of unusual and indistinct ways. Predictably my favourite character’s Adele, played with delicious ambiguity by Olivia Williams and I suspect by the end of the run (whenever that is) she’ll turn out to be the most heroic character of them all.

Plenty has already been written online by better writers than me about what went wrong, the extent to which studio interference wrecked Whedon’s vision (again) and how he keeps working for Fox Television even to an extent his relationship with them is somewhat like Michelangelo and the Pope in the film the Agony and the Ecstasy when the artist was trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with the Holy Father continually making his job more difficult by suggesting some new things, here and there.

Hackles greeted the announcement that he would be working with them again after the Firefly debarkle and as Whedon listed the problems himself on Whedoneque, it looked like we were watching the slow death of another of Joss’s series. Having visited the whole series then the (largely) unaired pilot I think problem was, and neither Whedon or the studio saw this, that having decided upon an exciting and interesting concept, no one seemed to know how to communicate it without the result looking shallow, dirty or hateful and mumbled.

[Spoilers ahead, by the way, if you haven't watched the series yet. Great big ones.]

As Whedon admits on the commentaries, he has a set of political beliefs as well as ideas on how quality television should be (no boats) which means that in the unaired pilot he’s desperate not to make the Dollhouse look like it's simply peddling in rubber women made of flesh. So we see Echo in all kinds of non-sexual “parts” and there are long discussions about the implications of what the doll house is and how altruistic it could be. And does all of that whilst introducing the ensemble and setting up the idea of an FBI agent trying to discover if the place really exists.

It doesn’t work. There’s too much information and none of the characters get a proper entrance and importantly by the end of the episode we don’t really care about any of them, there’s no Willow or Kaylee or Cordelia for us to sympathise with. It should be Echo, but because her personality is wiped and she has no sense of identity, and we don’t know who she was before she joined the Dollhouse, the viewer is oddly divorced from the action. These are probably the notes which the studio gave Whedon and a ton of others as he went into production on the rest of the series, main one being “slow down”.

Which he does with plenty of correctives. Elements of that pilot are smeared all over the rest of the series. We do find out about who Caroline is, more about the Dollhouse, and the conspiracy elements are injected. But even in the opening five episodes of the series however superficially entertaining they are, in a desperate attempt to not make the show anything like the rest of dramatic television, they toss out, at least initially, all of those tropes which make the rest of dramatic television immediately accessible, which is brave, exciting, experimental, but ultimately self defeating in terms of building audience confidence.

Here’s what Dollhouse needed at the beginning, which would have solved all of the problems.

An origin story. Forgive me if all this looks a bit rushed. It is.

Since Eliza Dushku is essentially the lead, the first episode should have been the story of how Caroline became Echo. The teaser would have been the animal lab break-in from the Echoes episode.

The first act Adele attempts to convince her to join (with security guy Lawrence as the expositional spring board). She’s shown about by Adele and Boyd, after perhaps seeing the altruistic benefits the house can have and hearing about the death of her boyfriend she decides to take the treatment.

Act Two is the first treatment, introducing Topher and the Doctor and the concepts of what will happen. But we cutaway before the treatment is complete and importantly nothing is said about the vacant version of Echo. In other words, it implied that what we're seeing is The Matrix skillset additions with added personality or what we see during the Russian language lift scene in Epitaph One.

Acts Three-Five Echo’s first mission which looks like the kind of thing which might help with her grief over the death of her boyfriend. But there’s no La Femme Nikita montage showing her being trained which should show that something is very wrong and we do not give away that when she’s not Caroline, that she’s a void, until the very end, the last scene being the usual “Was I asleep?” conversation.

And threading through that the FBI agent’s story demonstrating that the Dollhouse is something of a mythic organisation, but noting that the reason he can’t make progress is because the high status clients who are using the service are also protecting it.

Yes, I know that looks hackneyed and like everything else on television. It’s the pilot of Alias and to an extent Torchwood and any number of series and if done badly it might suggest that the Dollhouse is some kind of sinister organisation like SD6 who are now taking advantage of Caroline/Echo. But Boyd’s presence grounds it somewhat – how bad can this place be if he works for it – and there is still the same level of ambiguity as to the premise. It’s used often because it works and sometimes you have to make the status quo to break it.

It also has a point of view, someone introducing us to the world, Rachel in first episode of Friends, Xander and Willow in Buffy, River and Simon in Firefly, the Doctor's companions. That’s what the show lacked at the start (something like Battlestar Galactica doesn’t need them because they’re about the shift from one status quo to another, all of the characters are essentially point of view figures for the audience). Another approach would be to have Boyd somehow entering the status quo and it being the story of how he becomes Echo’s handler.

That's all past and gone, old news. The show is active so to speak and heading into its second year. It's to Whedon's credit that even with the confused opening he has made the show as gripping as it is by the end even though like Torchwood we're ultimately being asked to sympathise with characters who work for a very dark organisation. Dollhouse deals with massive thematic questions related to identity and belief and fantasy and slavery and the implications technology has on society. There aren't many shows prepared to think about these issues on a long term basis.