Reading Joss Whedon

Dollhouse: An Introduction

201 Dollhouse An Introduction D A V I D L A V E R Y At a Paley Center “Inside Media” evening devoted to Joss Whedon’s “brilliant but canceled” fourth television series, Dollhouse (Fox, 2009–10), the show’s creator—tongue, characteristically, firmly planted in cheek—wonders out loud about the origins of his diegetic surrogate Topher Brink, the scientist who programs the Actives (or Dolls): “That Topher—what’s wrong with him? He just creates these character people and then he just puppets them around, and he thinks it’s OK to do that. Who’s he based on? What monster?” (“Dollhouse ”: Cast and Creators 2010). Neither Whedon nor his cast and crew knew then that Dollhouse would, to pretty much everyone’s surprise, be renewed a month later, but in the series finale, the jury was still out on the driven-nearlymad -by-guilt, neural-apocalypse-causing Topher, as the following exchange makes apparent: PAUL BALLAR D: The point is Topher thinks he can flip it. Create a pulse to restore all the wiped minds. ZONE: Yeah? He also thinks he’s a little teapot short and stout. ADELLE DEWITT: Topher Brink is a genius! And you will keep a civil tongue in this house or we’ll put your tongue in a stew. (“Epitaph Two: Return” 2.13) Shakespeare, John Keats once insisted in an 1819 letter, “led a life of allegory : his works are the comments on it” (2011, 226). Whether we understand Joss Whedon—who would in 2012 turn to adaptation of the bard’s Much Ado about Nothing as a relaxation project after wrapping the third-highest-grossing 202 ✴ Dollhouse film of all-time—as an allegorical monster or genius,1 Dollhouse is not likely to make or break his reputation. With an origin myth that includes a sit-down at lunch with career-in-thedoldrums Eliza Dushku (Buffy’s bad girl Slayer Faith), desperate for a project, Dollhouse was never pure Whedon from the outset. The idea he came up with (according to some versions, during a visit to the men’s room) was a science fictioner set in a (literally) underground Los Angeles company, a division of the ultrasinister Rossum Corporation, offering for hire for very large fees “secret agents,” Dolls, both male and female, able to take on almost any role or task after being reprogrammed by futuristic neurological technology. Originally intended to be a network-friendly, relatively free from seriality, episodic series, Dollhouse was to give us Dushku (Echo) performing a different Active each week, thereby showcasing her acting talents. From the beginning, however, Dollhouse was a troubled show. Its “rough takeoff—the scrapped pilot, the uncertain early episodes, the Friday death slot”—singled out by Scott Tobias in the Onion A.V. Club (2010) was a disconcerting development but basically déjà vu all over again: had not Firefly faced the very same obstacles? More significantly, complaints, troubling in regard to a show from “Joss Whedon: Feminist,”2 were heard from the beginning about the show’s questionable messages: were not the Dolls, as critics understandably asked, being sold into sexual slavery in some episodes? Many found fault as well with Dushku’s acting, and some of the stand-alone stories were weak, to say the least. But the remainder of the ensemble cast was uniformly excellent, especially Olivia Williams as Adelle DeWitt, the head of the Los Angeles Dollhouse; Harry Lennix as Boyd Langston, Echo’s “Handler” (and eventually much more); Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman as prominent Dolls Victor and Sierra; and Fran Kranz as Topher. Being a Whedon show, Dollhouse became, of course, much more than merely episodic. Echo faced her weekly challenges—as, to name only a few, a crisis negotiator (“Ghost” 1.1), backup singer and bodyguard (“Stage Fright” 1.3), burglar (“Gray Hour” 1.4), blind cult member (“True Believer” 1.5), a dead woman (“Haunted” 1.10), an FBI agent (“Vows” 2.1), a mom 1. See “The Genius of Joss Whedon” (Lavery 2002a), my afterword to Rhonda V. Wilcox and my collection Fighting the Forces (2002, 251–56). 2. The title of James Longworth’s interview with Whedon (Lavery and Burkhead 2011, 42–63). Dollhouse: An Introduction ✴ 203 (“Instinct” 2.2), a college student (“Belle Chose” 2.3). But in multiepisode story arcs, we also followed investigation of the Dollhouse’s improbable existence by rogue FBI agent Paul...