Dollhouse episodes 1 & 2

[seriousfic]

I’m going to take off the feminism hat for this one, for two reasons. One, feminism is subjective. And it’s very hard to separate personal squick from capital-F feminism. It’s even harder to separate art from artist. There are as many people who think that Joss Whedon can do no wrong as there are those who think he’s not nearly as feminist as he claims. So reviewing the show on its own merits, especially from a feminist standpoint… maybe I’ll tackle it in another post, but I think the major perspectives have already been tagged by prozacpark and resolute and man, I don’t even have an opinion.

And second, it’s hard to tell from two episodes where they’re going with it. They’ve just barely established the premise. So I, personally, am not ready to fault Joss or praise him just yet.

But what really surprises me about both episodes is how vanilla they are. I feel like you could take the premise to Michael Bay or any semi-talented hack and they’d give you much the same product. After hearing the premise, I thought it’d be almost an anthology series, with each week having a new genre, but with an overarcing story and metaphor. Joss does hostage drama! Joss does slasher movie! But all the quirky characters and quotable dialogue and subversions of cliché are MIA.

Even when he has his thumb jammed down on the tragedy button, Joss’s works are at least fun to read. But here we’ve gone from stuff like Spike MSTing one of Angel’s rescues to an FBI agent being told to back down, then it cuts to a boxing match when he gets up from the mat and wins. Whose high school writing assignment did that metaphor come from?

I think the real problem is that none of the characters have that distinctive Whedon personality. Echo’s a blank slate, Adelle’s British, Claire’s hideously scarred (which must be fun for the Angel fans in the audience), Boyd and Ballard are stiffs, and Topher’s creepy, but not in a way that’s fun to watch. The crew of the NX-01 Enterprise were better company.

Coming around to the feminism thing… Supernatural is misogynistic, but it’s entertaining. And while Eliza Dushku is nearly as pretty as Jensen Ackles, her show, sexist or feminist, so far isn’t worth the time it takes to watch it.

Comments

[potatoko.livejournal.com]

Hmmm . . . i agree with what you're saying, but at this point I'm still inclined to chalk up the show's faults to executive meddling. Joss Whedon has said he had to compromise viciously with the Fox bosses with episodes 1-6 (the current pilot being a total rewrite, as the higher ups felt the original was "not accessible"), but that in 7 the show came into its own. It's Joss, so I'll stick with it till then at least.

But yeah, that boxing thing was weeeeak.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Well, the good things about Joss shows is they're canceled so quickly you can stick through to the bitter end and it's, what, a lost weekend? Now, something like Heroes, that's a time-sink.