Spoilers. Writer-director Joss Whedon amassed a huge, dedicated following in the mid-'90s with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Dollhouse is his latest series hoping to achieve the same level of success. The unfortunate victim of creative problems behind-the-scenes, Dollhouse now arrives as a mid-season replacement in the so-called "death slot" of Fox's Friday night. Can Whedon's fan-base help make it a Buffy-level success, or is it doomed to failure?The premise is certainly appealing. Eliza Dushku (Buffy) plays a young woman referred to as Echo, one of many "actives" in the titular Dollhouse; a person whose mind can be imbued with personalities and knowledge to suit specific "engagements". The opening episode, "Ghost", starts with Echo in the middle of her latest mission – to be the perfect date for a millionaire. This involves riding alongside her date in an expensive superbike, and dancing the night away to Lady GaGa's "Just Dance" in a tight white dress.
A more pressing assignment comes to bare, when the daughter of a billionaire called Gabriel Crestejo (Kurt Caceres) is kidnapped for ransom, forcing her father to contact the Dollhouse's owner Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) about hiring an "active" to be his kidnapping negotiator. Echo is selected and sent out into the field, with back-up from her handler Boyd Langton (Harry J. Lennix), to help Crestejo deal with the Latino kidnappers. However, it soon becomes clear (during the exchange at a pier) that there's a problem with Echo's current mind-patch: the personality she's been given was that of a woman molested as a child, and the culprit is one of the men involved in the Crestejo case!Meanwhile, a hard-faced FBI Agent called Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) has made it his sole purpose to find and expose the "Dollhouse" (revealed to be a secret, illegal, almost-mythical operation), because the company are essentially erasing the memories and personalities of innocent people, making them malleable for the process.
Dollhouse definitely has a lot of potential. The premise sounds like great fun, although it doesn't make too much sense when you start picking it apart -- although it's not as swiss-cheesed as the similarly-themed My Own Worst Enemy. But still, a big problem is trying to explain why "actives" are actually required. There doesn't seem to be any persuadable reason why you'd hire a negotiator from an illegal agency like Dollhouse, when there are genuine negotiators that exist in the world...
Agent Ballard gives a speech intended to plug the gap in this logic, claiming that millionaires are willing to pay for "perfection" – but, in this first episode, Echo almost blows the whole operation because of her unfortunate latent memory. And, surely, a big feature of the series will involve the dolls trying to reassert their own identities. It may have been a better idea to suggest that the actives have knowledge and skills far in advance of regular people's -– a patchwork of a dozen specialists in one mind, say. Maybe future episodes will give us a better explanation for how and why the Dollhouse exists and operates.Still, it's a concept that gives its star Eliza Dushku an enviable chance to flex her acting muscles, as she effectively becomes a different person each week. I do worry that default-Echo is so intentionally emotionless and bland, though –- because, if the series is going to be about Echo slowly realizing what her life has become, then we need to feel invested in the real girl's plight. If she just takes communal showers and drifts placidly around the spa-like Dollhouse facility, then that will become very boring. Of course, the alternative would be making Echo fully-aware of her lifestyle and willing to have her mind altered before going on missions –- which would work fine (a show built around The Matrix's "I know kung fu" scene) –- but it would drastically shifts the series into Alias-meets-Joe 90 territory.
A excellent cast are a definite plus point, though -- particularly Lennix as Echo's handler, Amy Acker as Dr. Claire Saunders (why is she scarred?), Penikett as the investigating Fed, and Olivia Williams as the Dollhouse's CEO. I'm not convinced Dushku is the acting-chameleon she'll need to be for this role, though. The "actives" themselves don't change physically -- so, while Echo makes a plausible party-girl at a birthday bash, she looks a bit silly in a pencil skirt with spectacles as a go-getting negotiator. I mean, wouldn't a real Dollhouse have "actives" of various ages so the disparity between the physical and the mental isn't noticeable?
The storyline for this episode was rather awkward and not especially good at drawing you into the series. I wanted to spend more time getting to know about the Dollhouse and exactly why Agent Ballard is so interested in finding it, but instead we spent the majority of the time on a rather unremarkable kidnap story. Fortunately, the last ten minutes were tense and exciting enough to give us a better flavour of what Dollhouse will be all about, and there were some excellent parallels drawn between the kidnapped girl and the doll's existence -- with Echo rescuing the girl from her makeshift prison (a chained-up refrigerator laid on its side), before returning to a similar-looking "prison" to sleep in after her hard day's work.Overall, I have enough confidence in Joss Whedon to give this pilot a free pass. The characters and ideas were set up quite well, the cast are very appealing, and the dialogue was generally very smart. Story-wise, it just felt like a very poor introduction to this universe, and nothing grabbed my attention as tightly as I'd hoped. Still, it's very early days. If Whedon can overcome the obvious flaws in Dollhouse's concept, and Dushku can convince us of her weekly identities, this has potential to become something very good.
13 February 2009
Fox, 9/8c
Writer & Director: Joss Whedon
Cast: Eliza Dushku (Echo), Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard), Olivia Williams (Adelle DeWitt), Fran Kranz (Topher Brink), Harry J. Lennix (Boyd Langton), Enver Gjokaj (Lubov), Dichen Lachman (Sierra), Amy Acker (Dr. Claire Saunders), Reed Diamond (Laurence Dominic), Brett Claywell (Matt), Kurt Caceres (Gabriel Crestejo), Haley Pullos (Davina Crestejo), Oscar Orlando-Torres (Chui), David Doty (Dir. Sam Zimmerman), Vincent Laresca (Mr. Sunshine) & Tim Kelleher (Detmer)
