Paper (Thin) Dolls: An Advance Review of Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse"

"'The doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Joss Whedon's latest television series, Dollhouse, seeks to explore the shifting nature of identity--how we perceive ourselves and how others do--through a complex story involving a clandestine organization called the Dollhouse, which wipes the personalities of volunteers (or so we're told) and imprints them with various personas specifically selected for an array of missions or "engagements." Clients with money to burn can pay these Actives (or dolls) to engage in a variety of tasks and everything, from the criminal to the sexual, is on offer at a price.

The service is expensive, confidential, and highly exclusive (or so we're told). It's also highly illegal. Which is why the the bosses at the Dollhouse--embodied by the icy Adele DeWitt (Olivia Williams) have a particular interest in one of their Actives, Echo (Eliza Dushku), who is allegedly the best of the best (or so we're told). Once an Active completes an engagement, they're programmed to immediately return to the Dollhouse, a cross between a luxury spa, military barracks, and Wolfram & Hart, where their memories are wiped and they are returned to a fugue state.

(Still with me so far?)

Echo, unfortunately, has begun to remember things about her life before the Dollhouse and about events that transpire during her engagements. Is she becoming self-aware? Is this a good thing? Or is it placing her in grave danger? It's these questions that the early episodes of Dollhouse seek to answer as Echo unwittingly finds herself on a crash course with a dogged FBI agent named Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) who is searching for the mythical Dollhouse.

I had the opportunity to watch three of the first four episodes of Dollhouse, which launches this Friday. Longtime readers of this site will remember how I waxed enthusiastically for creator Joss Whedon's original pilot script when I read it last April. So what did I think about the finished product, which has gone through a rather, er, difficult birthing process? Let's discuss.

I'll start by saying that I loved the themes that Whedon sought to explore in his original pilot script. The notion of identity is a fascinating one and Whedon seeks to use the Actives' experiences on engagements to make a statement about the roles we all play in our daily lives, our own programming, and our own quest to understand our true natures. And these themes still exist in Dollhouse's finished product, albeit in a more jumbled and surface way. There's a nice symmetry between both Echo and Paul's quest for understanding as one seemingly seeks to escape into oblivion and the other searches in order to bring this dark thing into the light.

There are little things that I love about the series: that the Actives' codenames come from the NATO phonetic alphabet (i.e., Alpha, Echo, Sierra, Victor), the hints at some Big Bad that came out of the Dollhouse's naïveté and hubris (the creation of Alpha), an ambitious metaphor that's a dark mirror to our self-obsessed society, and the strength of the series' supporting cast: Olivia Williams, Dichen Lachman, Amy Acker, and Harry Lennix. (Lachman in particular is such a standout that I couldn't help but imagine what Dollhouse would be like with her as the lead.)

However, one of the main things hurting this project is its reliance on a more self-contained style of storytelling. With a concept as rich and challenging as this one, it just screams out for serialized narrative, but that apparently was never on the table at FOX, which was looking to develop a series in the same mold as Fringe: one with an overarching mythology but with episodes that wrapped up their procedural plots each week.

The result is that there's very little throughline to keep the audience invested week after week, a real major issue in a series where the series lead is in fact playing a different character from week to week as well. It's difficult to root for Echo because we know just as little about her as a character as she does herself. In the first few episodes alone, she's imprinted with the personality of a near-sighted asthmatic negotiator named Miss Penn (more on that in a bit), then she's an extreme-sports-loving girl, then she's a kick-ass master thief named Taffy in "Grey Hour." While it's interesting to watch Dushku attempt to play such a wide array of characters, it's not easy for the audience to associate with a character who's as shifting and quixotic as mercury.

And as much as I loved Dushku on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, I don't feel that she's able to carry off the burden of carrying a series by playing an infinite number of characters. Dushku seems to work best when she's in Bad Girl mode (i.e., Faith or Taffy) but otherwise she seems more or less to be channelling the same personality imprint the rest of the time... and she also doesn't quite pull off the "blank slate" aspect of the Actives either. (Unlike Dichen Lachman, who as Sierra, nails it in her first scene.)

Which is a shame as Dollhouse as a concept has definite potential. But there's a real messiness to the execution, which leaves itself open to significant head-scratching criticism. Why does the client, in the pilot episode, hire an Active to serve as a hostage negotiator in order to get back his kidnapped daughter... when it would be easier, not to mention cheaper and less problematic, to hire an actual negotiator? Why does the super-wealthy couple in Episode Four ("Grey Hour") hire Echo to be their midwife when they could use an actual midwife?

There are times where an Active would be the ideal candidate for a job--especially when dealing with anything illicit or illegal--but I couldn't wrap my head around these fairly innocuous assignments where other professionals would have been much more suited for the task at hand. And the fact that Topher imprints the Actives with real people's personalities--and their innate flaws--is worrisome, especially as those very flaws seem to undo Echo in the field. Miss Penn's asthma actually leads to the client getting shot and the kidnappers getting away with the kid AND the cash. This is a problem when the clients are meant to be hiring someone better than anyone in reality... why would anyone pay for a vessel that seems as cracked as this?

These Actives are supposed to be the best, embodying a Nietzschean ideal, yet three engagements go haywire when the imprints fail Echo (as in the pilot), the client isn't properly vetted (as in the second episode), or the Dollhouse's allegedly unbreachable programming is hacked (as in the fourth episode). I understand that things need to go wrong somewhat in order for there to be dramatic tension, but the Dollhouse seems so fallible on more than one occasion that it's difficult to take them seriously as a impenetrable and shadowy organization that only seems to employ one programmer (FranKranz's Topher) to imprint the dolls and where things keep going Very Wrong indeed.

Additionally, "Ghost," the series' new pilot (which was written and shot after the original was scrapped) doesn't set up the scope of Dollhouse's clientele especially well. We're shown Echo's first engagement, as a motorcycle-driving perfect date for a guy celebrating his birthday weekend, but it doesn't seem as if this guy is a multi-millionaire with the cash necessary to hire Echo for the weekend; instead he seems a run-of-the-mill frat-type who probably would have been more likely to hire a hooker than an Active with a billion-dollar personality imprint. And the Dollhouse's main adversary, Paul Ballard (Penikett) is terribly under-developed in the early episodes. We're told that he's dogged and won't back down (hell, a turgid kickboxing montage painfully proves it) and that he's not well-liked by his colleagues but that sadly seems to be the extent of his character for now. He seems as much of a blank slate as Echo or the others.

Dollhouse's second episode, entitled "The Target" (which, as Joss Whedon said last week, was meant to be the series' fifth or eighth episode), written by Steven DeKnight, is at least a step in the right direction as it features flashbacks that explore how Harry Lennix's former cop-turned handler Boyd Langton came to the Dollhouse and flesh out the Incident with rogue Active Alpha. Lennix adds some nice shading to the role and lends a much needed gravitas to the series; it's through his eyes that we see Echo emerging as a more fully developed character and it's obvious that he cares for her in his own way.

But there's definitely a kitchen sink mentality to Dollhouse that's more than a little offputting, especially as the series seems to tread water for far too long, offering up what could be construed as a series of putative pilots in its first few episodes that don't advance the characters or plot more than a few inches, rather than feet. In just the first few episodes, there is a creepy naked man, a Deadliest Game hunt, a vault heist, that kickboxing montage that seems to go on endlessly, a scarred doctor, haywire machinery, a shadowy employer, conspiracies and fabricated identities, group showers, threats of being sent up to the Dollhouse's secretive attic, etc. There are so many MacGuffins, red herrings, and technobabble thrown in to the mix and so little actual characterization that the end result is a jumbled feeling rather akin to the Actives' own mind-wiping sessions.

Ultimately, it feels as though the early episodes of Dollhouse are lacking Whedon's trademark blend of wit, humor, and emotional depth that marked his other series. Despite being intrigued by the series' overall concept initially, I found it extremely difficult to accept Dollhouse's numerous conceits and obvious flaws and, like an old moth-eaten sweater, Dollhouse seems to unravel the more you pull at the loose strings. What's sad is that if you look at it in the right light, you can see the traces of something that could have been far better constructed. A shadow or an echo, if you will, of something bolder and better.

Dollhouse premieres Friday, February 13th at 9 pm ET/PT on FOX.