Dollhouse is Joss Whedon’s latest TV show, which began to air this past Spring. Season 1 is coming out on DVD this week and includes and extra episode that wasn’t broadcast.
The Dollhouse is a secret facility with technology that can read, edit, and rewrite people’s brains, essentially treating the brain as a computer with swappable software. The residents of the Dollhouse, or “Dolls,” are people whose bad luck or circumstances led them to “volunteer” their bodies for service in the Dollhouse. While inside, their brains are loaded with a trusting, naïve, child-like personality. When the Dollhouse’s managers hire out the dolls’ services to high paying clients, the doll is “imprinted” with whatever personality and skills the job requires: assassin, negotiator, thief, body guard, or (all too often) dream date. The dolls (called “actives” by the staff) are completely immersed in their new personality and unaware of their actual condition.
Meanwhile a ridiculed FBI agent, Paul Ballard, has heard of the Dollhouse’s existence and is consumed with the search for clues to its location and operations. He’s convinced that one particular missing girl, Caroline, is imprisoned there as a doll.
The more we learn about the Dollhouse the easier it is to see themes that tie to Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Paul is very similar to Malcolm Reynolds: he’s a man with strong drive and principles who has found a powerful enemy that he must fight to take down, even though he’s practically alone in the fight. The enemy is a very secretive organization, and we only gradually start to understand their depravity.
Best of all, Joss develops every character, showing sides that you never thought about, but make them genuine and captivating. Like the playful and vulnerable sides of the egotistic scientist, or the conflicted, rebellious side of the stern overseer. The main character, Caroline, is the hardest to learn about because she’s become a doll, but it becomes apparent that her true personality is irrepressible, a significant insight in itself.
My main beef with the show is that the first four episodes felt repetitive and didn’t move the story along very much. Arguably this was meant to give us a sense of normality, a baseline for routine Dollhouse operations, but it felt like standing still and I expected more. An ongoing concern is that the go-to plot twist will be to reveal that some heretofore “normal” character is a doll, similar to the way Battlestar Galactica could reveal someone to be a Cylon whenever they needed to shake things up. So far this has been used a few times, but not overdone, and I have reason to believe Joss has planned the story enough that he won’t need to fallback to this sort of crutch.
In summary, compelling, multidimensional characters combined with technology that brings and endless stream of ethical dilemmas, and plenty of action and intrigue make for a really exciting show. And Joss did something really cool for the unaired 13th episode that shows he’s really thought out the whole story arch; that’s awesome, ’cause a story that’s going somewhere is a beautiful thing.
Spoiler alert: if you’re not up to speed on the BBC’s Robin Hood television series and would rather not have anything spoiled, read no further.
