Poor Joss Whedon!
From the way they talk about him, you’d think he was Brian Wilson: already gone through a lengthy period in bed. Past it; lost it. Never be the same again.
But I don’t think that’s true.
Let’s talk about Dollhouse, his latest television effort…that seems to have produced uniform head-shaking all across this world of blogs. Now let it be known: I don’t think anyone’s accurately identified any of the problems that this show has, and I’m not even sure they’re problems, exactly exactly…because they’re what’s keeping me watching.
To go through it: there are things about this show that are glaringly and disturbingly not-quite-right. But none of them are to do with the question “why wouldn’t you just hire a real person instead of a fake one?” This, at least, seems straightforward: a fake person comes with a guarantee. You’re paying for the mind-control, not the brand-name. You’re paying for the expert-system, the anonymity, the security, the rapid response. You’re paying for an untraceable gun, at the end of a two-minute phone call.
In fact the only thing that doesn’t make sense about this is that you could pay for it. Consider: billionaires buy lots of things we mere mortals would think of as, well, not even proper products. The FBI guy (more on him in a minute) is quite right, if — unfortunately — not actually convincing: people like this operate in areas of commerce centred not on need but on novelty. They buy shit that doesn’t make sense, all the time. Apologies to Charlie Stross, but this is the real Economics 2.0; if you’re not in it, you’re not going to understand it.
Mind-control. To you and me, it’d be just about worthless. We don’t need it; we wouldn’t want it.
But to some in this world, it would be of very great utility.
Only one problem.
There ought to be no way on earth for them to get it.
Here’s the first and most glaring problem with the SF set-up of this show: this is an organization to which large dollar-figures mean next-to-nothing. This is an organization that has back-up satellites. Back-up satellites that are just a small part of their humongously super-high-tech operation that issues kill-orders on billionaires as Option “C”, instead of Option “Are You Fucking Joking Me”, this is an organization that runs a mind-control farm…and not just any (!) mind-control farm, but one that supplies, not just programmable soldiers, but one-time-only weekend hooker excursions for the ultra-rich…
And that, if you think about it for a minute, is just not possible.
Even the way this show is set up: not possible.
NOT. POSSIBLE.
Unless there’s something really really really important, that we don’t know yet.
There would have to be: the people who “volunteer” to be Actives may choose it, but the Actives themselves cannot choose it, and thus they are actually, in actual fact, incontrovertibly, SLAVES…
And do you see our friend Paul signing up for that?
Look, let’s be real: this is a Joss Whedon show. This guy has a backstory. Every one of these people has a backstory. For fuck’s sake look at how obviously damaged they all are, all the handlers and technicians. But it cannot just be the damage that makes them work for this joint, unless Joss really is Brian Wilson. There must be something else in play.
Weekend mind-controlled hookers at a billion a pop?
Let’s just be fair to Joss: he does in fact know how to write a science-fiction drama in the old-school style. And in the old-school style what we would have is a client of the Dollhouse that leverages them into providing him with submissive weekend sex toys, even though that’s not what the science is for, and he would be the villain, he would be doing shit to them while he has them, he would be fucking dangerous, and he would be their problem. But, that isn’t what’s happening here.
These people have satellites they can spare.
And, what would you use mind-control for?
And, how could mind-control like this even be developed? How could the Dollhouse even start operating, in the first place?
Who would ever program a person to be a compliant adorer one day, and a brutally precise killer the next? It’s asking for trouble, right. And remember, these skill-sets don’t fall on the Dollhouse out of a clear blue sky, they have to be made…and it probably costs a hundred million dollars to make each one. And how they can even make them is a whole other story.
With respect: you folks are not really seeing the flaws, here. Whedon gave it to you, in this second episode: there’s a hell of a lot of physical plant involved in this bullshit. These people are beyond the billionaires. Does Richard Branson have spare satellites? This league is out of this league. There are inconsistencies here, and they’re the kind you can fall into. They’re crevasses.
The billion-dollar brothel. But you only get one shot. Oh and by the way sometimes we program them with extreme assassin skills. Come on, everybody. What you’d order up would be a tax lawyer, not a perfect girlfriend or a perfect assassin, and you would want the tax lawyer to be on long-term contract, and for that matter if you ordered up the perfect girlfriend you’d want that to be long-term too! None of these things are new SF tropes. This has all been done before.
None of it makes sense.
That’s problem number one: these problems aren’t problems. They’re deliberate challenges.
Let’s look at the FBI guy. Who the hell is this guy? How is he even permitted to work on the Dollhouse? They have satellites…how do you think they launched them? You can’t hide a space-shot. This show is three or four things under its skin: it’s the X-Files, it’s Nikita, it’s The Questor Tapes — don’t think Joss hasn’t seen The Questor Tapes, because you know he has — and it’s Logan’s Run. Look at the Actives’ creche, look at the show’s main titles! It’s Logan’s Run.
And maybe, it’s a little bit of “In The Barn”, too.
Look that one up, if you’re not familiar with it.
Back?
Okay.
Nobody’s lying, by the way; nobody’s stupid. This is, indeed, a deeply problematic show. Forget the pop-culture references and the snappy banter, this is classic Whedonian dialogue and character work here. This is his Babylon 5, if you like. This is all groundwork. This is pretty much him pushing right out of his comfort zone. In my opinion. Hell, it must be so, or else he has lost it, lost it, lost it, LOST IT. This isn’t even about if you like Joss Whedon. This is about does he have a brain. Oh, and I forgot to mention: it’s also a bit of (dare to mention it) Jack L. Chalker, too.
Jack L. Chalker!
Now there was a conflicted dude! The William Moulton Marston of our time! Though I’m sure he would’ve rather been the Robert A. Heinlein. But he stole the Creepy Crown from Heinlein! Because Heinlein was Marston too. And now here comes Joss Whedon a-riffing. And who better.
At least: I hope so.
Seriously, don’t you want to know, aren’t you curious, just how fucked this is all going to get? Because surely — surely, surely — that’s exactly what it’s going to get.
Or Joss Whedon’s really drugged-up Brian Wilson, just like you all seem to think he is.
I don’t know: for its fucking extreme creepiness as well as its (at the moment) unlimited potential to surprise me, this is my favourite Whedon thing ever. The FBI guy is Alpha, I think, he just doesn’t know it. And there’s a reason the Dollhouse does the crazy things it does. The technology comes from somewhere. I dread finding out what Topher’s backstory is. Paul’s backstory I am sure involves shitloads of blood and guilt. I’m not sure the main security guy isn’t an Active himself, whose programming is subtly malfunctioning. We do not know what is happening in this show.
Or, it’s just crap, and there’s nothing to know.
But if it isn’t crap, then there’s a reason for the B+W kickboxing. There’s a reason for the Lasagna Girl. There’s a reason for Echo’s importance. There’s a reason for all of it.
If it isn’t just crap…then this is the comics story Whedon should have been writing, all this time.
Homework: Quarantine, by Greg Egan, which is another thing I think I can guarantee Joss has read.
And if I’m wrong about it all…well then I’ll post a picture of…what did Val D’Orazio say? A sad orangutan, or something?
I don’t think there are any sad orangutans. Just living ones, and dead ones.
It’s us who get sad.
I remember reading Chalker in middle school and HS– but I think I must have missed something and my Google-fu seems to be weak– not to stir up a debate, but what is the high weird/creepiness you’re talking about with him?
I suspect you are seriously overestimating Whedon if you think that the basic financial/scientific improbability of the setup is supposed to be a clue. This is the guy who thought a solar system could have “hundreds of Earths”, and that a giant bullet could be fired from another star system at non-ftl speeds could hit in a short period. Science and logic are not particularly his forte.
I’m just not interesting in watching a show that justifies its titillation at women being the tools and toys of men with a pretense of horror.
“Brian Wilson: already gone through a lengthy period in bed. Past it; lost it. Never be the same again.”
You’re just trying to get me to comment now, aren’t you? ;)
If you have the technology to erase and duplicate and transfer whole identities, using it for such small ends is ridiculous. It’s like me as a kid thinking “If I had a time machine, I’d go back to the year 1938 and buy a stack of Action Comics #1 at a dime each and sell them in the present day for $1000 apiece!” Eventually I realized there might be better or more lucrative uses for a time machine! Or the notion in every space travel show that the proper use of artificial gravity is to make everyone stand facing the same way up on starships, instead of…colonizing suns or moving planets into better orbits or spitting out easily controlled black holes to order.
I’d have suggested Joss go back and read Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered for a similar yet completely different treatment of the same concept, and then ask him to reconsider all the work he has to do in order to give us a lead character who is by design a non-entity.
On an unrelated note, blogger The Groovy Agent just did a post about a certain Saturday morning cartoon close to our respective hearts.
Yeah, I saw!
Hmm, reading that over, I seem to think Langdon’s first name is Paul, don’t I? And yet I can’t remember anyone calling him that…
Lowell: Chalker was very interested in exploring body/damage/identity/power issues in his books, and he did not shirk the sex…not that I’m saying any of that’s wrong, but if you read a few of ‘em you do start to think “hmm…not sure you and I are on exactly the same wavelength there, buddy…”
Tavella: No, I get that, I really do. But I’m bound to say, one, you’d have to be an idiot to make this show and not see that’s what’s in it…and two, this stuff is not exactly new in this kind of drama, so if it were me, I’d be riffing on all that stuff to expose how fucked-up it all really is. Like I said, you’ve got your Nikita in there…and how is Nikita better? Well, it isn’t better, it’s just slightly veiled for the comfort of the audience’s deliberate un-seeing. I’m not ready to say “Whedon gets science dreadfully wrong so he’s probably not aware of what he’s doing”, at this point…right now, what unsettles us both about this show is what makes me interested in it: if it is by design, then what’s the design? Not yet ready to claim that I definitely think there is one, but it would surprise me if there were somehow not one, because this thing bloody well cries out for a design! I found this second episode clunky in several respects, thought moments that were supposed to hit just missed a little…but in principle I don’t see anything wrong with doing something about victimhood that we’ll never see on Law & Order, never see on techno-thriller of the week. I’m already fairly sure that if this is a pretense of horror to anyone, well…I don’t want to have a beer with that person. Echo’s a sex-slave at least part of the time, probably most of the time. NO ONE SHOULD BE OVERLOOKING THAT. I mean, but people ARE, all over the web: “are we supposed to root for the Dollhouse?” Motherfucker, if you are rooting for the Dollhouse at this point there is something WRONG with you…
There are lots of gaps in the information this show is feeding us. Start with number one: what was the deal with the fake billionaire and his “shoulder to the wheel” crap? Seriously, what was that about? If it never does make sense, that’s one thing: it simply means the show sucks. But should it end up making sense, I don’t know exactly what that sense is going to be yet. Right now, to me, it looks like most everything in this show secretes a complex intention,,,or, it’s just plain lazy. Either or.
Totally understand your distaste, though.
Here’s the thing – and I know people will jump down my throat for this, but… – Whedon may be aware of all these things and choose to ignore them for the sake of his “bigger” themes, the drama, the simplicity, whatever. There are too many smart, educated writers besides Joss working on his shows NOT to address the issues you’re discussing. Ultimately, it’s a matter of choice. Someone like Whedon spends as much time weeding out the shit that isn’t germane to his point as he does fine tuning the shit that is. Does that mean he makes the right call 100% of the time? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Sometimes the things he finds interesting are the loopiest, most pedantic shit in the entire piece. It’s a crap shoot. Angel Season 5? Great fucking season, and also full of missed opportunities that were overlooked/ignored in favor of, in my mind, shit that was far less interesting. I take that for what it is.
The man ignores the realities of science, politics, etc., when it suits his narrative and his themes. Every writer does that, but Joss is far more reckless about it – I mean, who can forget crippled Charles Xavier driving the semi into Danger? That’s wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind…
I guess my point is, we can give him credit for having thought these issues through, but I wouldn’t automatically assume that they were of any relevance or interest to him when it came time to construct the final piece.
I haven’t watched this show and didn’t really have any interest, and I am merely a casual Joss Whedon fan (love Buffy, like Angel, Astonishing X-Men was good, not into Firefly/Serenity). So it might be silly to have an opinion at all, but here it is.
If all the show’s flaws are by design, I feel this is kind of a crummy way to run a serial narrative. In commercial television, each episode ought to act as its own unit in some sense, because you are not only asking the audience to invest a set amount of time in your fiction, but you’re also asking them to do so at regular, measured installments (although with TiVO and TV on DVD, adhering to a network’s programming schedule is perhaps becoming less of a problem). In a novel or movie, the audience agrees to invest time and/or money in advance; on TV and in comic books, you’re asking people to COME BACK.
Assuming there IS a master plan behind the show’s supposed flaws, might the problem be a lack of explicit foregrounding? That, at least, would allow the show to enter a contract with its viewers — that all of these weird things will pay off, eventually. As it is, the show’s mysteries are apparently indistinguishable from a bad premise/bad writing, so the show is asking viewers to take an incredible leap of faith that things are “broken on purpose.” I couldn’t fault anyone for not wanting to make that leap if there was no clear promise of a payoff.
Again, this is all based on not having seen a single minute of the show, but a similar argument has been applied to certain comics these days. If you don’t like a first issue, people tell you to “keep reading,” but I feel that a serialized narrative ought to sell you on picking up that next installment, particularly when there is money involved.
Sean: Oh, that’s a fair point about Whedon, for sure…he’s definitely got an inner Bendis, what he thinks is cool is always paramount, and so yeah, this may all be just window-dressing for that…
But man if that’s the case he’s chosen some fucked-up window-dressing right from the start, hasn’t he? To the point where, if it’s all to be glossed over, it would be an absolutely enormous failure. I don’t know, I’m not Mr. Blind Faith, but Whedon’s given himself such a boatload of (unnecessary) jarring implications to deal with here, it’s hard for me to imagine he could fuck up so bad as to think of them as mere “backdrop”.
And Justin: well, the shows are “done-in-one”, certainly…this isn’t the land of superhero event crossovers…but more than that, I would say that all the inconsistencies are most definitely foregrounded for us, it’s just that in our zeal to apply the magic decoder ring of genre conventions to them, we may gloss over them ourselves. There’s a ham-fisted flashback boxing-ring sequence showing that the FBI agent on the trail of the Dollhouse won’t give up…but at the end of the fight he doesn’t just get up off the mat and deliver the knockout punch, he does some extreme Ang Bok high-flying Super-Death Kick instead…and we think we’re watching a boxing match, but suddenly then we’re clearly not. So, okay, if you assume the person making the show isn’t paying attention…well, that just means our man kicks ass, that the choreography was deemed “cool”, “fresh”, etc. But if you do assume the person making the show was paying attention, that is a crazy thing to have happen, and it’s not made any better by the fact that the FBI agent doesn’t have the slightest bit more character than that….so what’s going on? Either it’s simply a ham-fisted parallel between the characterless asskicking FBI guy and the characterless asskicking protagonist, or it’s something else. But the more inconsistencies there are, that are right in front of our faces, the more likely it seems that taking things at face value is the true “most dangerous game”. They have surveillance satellites in play to monitor a date…surely we don’t need one of the people in the big techno-complexes to actually come right out and say “hey, maybe this is a dumb way to use all this gear, ya think?” Or even “hey, what the fuck is this operation even about, anyway?” There are people with vast resources trying to get to Echo. She works in a super-secret, super-scientific lair of programmable Agents, protected by a small army of guys with flak jackets and big-ass guns. Everything about this screams “spy show” at the top of its lungs, except the “your dream girl for a night, only a million dollars” shit that doesn’t even make sense anyway if you think about it for more than two seconds. Two episodes in, everybody thinks all the inconsistencies are bad premise/bad writing, but so far we really have very little reason to think that. They might just as easily be the product of a good premise, and good writing…just because we don’t have any character actually voicing the words “this doesn’t add up” doesn’t mean we’re supposed to think it does add up, does it? So far, none of these characters has a character at all…some of them exhibit personalities, but the personalities are all very mysterious, and give nothing away about their motivations. So to people who don’t think it’s a good bargain between show-maker and show-watcher…doesn’t that just mean they aren’t intrigued by the mysteries? But I think I’d argue that the vast majority of people knocking this show are simply not interpreting the mysteries as mysteries. And I don’t know why that should be, but it seems as though that’s what’s happening.
Or, I’m wrong, and it’s just a stupid show that makes no sense, and nothing will ever be explained any more than it’s already been explained. I’m not saying that’s an impossible outcome. But it would be a shocking waste of materials. I don’t know, do people feel like they signed up for Knight Rider and got Final Crisis instead? To me, this is a very adventurous pre-loading of expectations…both ways…
I mean…and even Knight Rider fought bad guys…
Oh, and okay, I just saw a link to here…from someone saying I’m being an apologist for the show. I’m not taking the slightest bit of offense at that, mind you — but I would like to point out, I’m not offering apologies, either on Whedon’s behalf or my own. I’m just saying, look: these aren’t bugs, they’re features. Either that, or this is the shittiest show by far that Whedon has ever produced.
I’m not apologizing for the inconsistencies; I’m saying that’s what’s keeping me watching the show. It’s the mystery, that interests me!
So…what is it, that everybody else is interested in?
Oh, and, but seriously…it isn’t the guy who linked to me I’m talking about here, but HOLY SHIT it amazes me that people can be such FUCKING ASSHOLES on the Internet…I know, I know, I’m so sheltered, but really. Dickfaces. It’s horrible.
Sorry I’m so late to the dance, but this wouldn’t be the first time I ended the discussion with a thud.
If it’s worth anything, Eliza Dushku said this is a story that’s being told in chapters and that there is definitely an endgame in play for the season finale.
Now, will it address the frakked-uppiness of the premise itself, which is definitely creepier than your standard Femme Nikita, a show I never could watch all the way through?
(Except for the inevitable evil twin episode. I’m such a weirdo)
Who knows, but the possibility of what is to come definitely makes the show more interesting than the latest failed Heroes revamp. Even if it fails, it’ll be a failure worth discussing.
That said, I think the problem with the show so far is definitely the EXPECTATIONS rather than the actual product. People were looking for TV to be reinvented, or maybe just waiting for the opportunity to lambaste Whedon when he (of course) fails to totally reinvent TV.
Which brings us to the final point: People on the Internet can definitely be dicks.
I used to call up a friend on the phone, who LOVED Nikita…he would say hello, and I would say:
“Nikita…don’t you know you can never leave Section…no seriously Nikita, that’s the point of the show…”
Another Canadian production “For Export Only”! Sheesh. Although I must say, the guy who played Michael does a pretty mean Rocket Richard. He was good in The Barbarian Invasions, too.
I want to know who sent the homicidal bowhunter! And I want to know what is that woman who runs the show thinking, for God’s sake!
…Aaaaand, the third episode did not exactly inspire me with confidence, that anyone is planning to reveal these things…
Maybe tomorrow will be better! If it isn’t, that legendary sixth episode is going to start seeming like a desperation bet…
Much much much better tonight. Hardly a WTF moment at all.
Well…one or two, and I won’t lie: they made me grit my teeth. But I’m believing again, that someone may be at the wheel with this thing.