Dollhouse – Funny, but not funny-haha
Over the weekend, the big TV news was that after examining the DVR ratings, Dollhouse has 50% more viewers. Of course, there has been a lot of question and speculation about what that might mean for Dollhouse’s future, including some tentative hope among fans that the show might be a bit longer-lived than previously supposed. The consensus seems to be that there’s not a lot of hope in that direction. At the most, it might assure that the full season will actually air and not get shelved away in some deep dark recess until a DVD release. For one, 50% more of a small number is still a pretty small number; for another, just the fact that it’s DVR viewers insures that very few of those eyeballs are watching advertisements.
So that’s a shame. Dollhouse is interesting television, far more ambitious than anything else on right now, and I would love nothing more than to keep watching it and see how it develops. At the same time, even a relatively successful episode like last week’s still signals to me that there are problems the show has yet to overcome. The premise of last week’s identity-of-the-week was more complex than in the past – a client pays the Dollhouse to transfer a comatose man’s identity into a new body, but Dollhouse employees realize the man is likely a serial killer and end up waking him up so that they can interrogate him about the location of his victims. In the plot hole of the week, somehow the serial killer’s uncle manages to sneak him out without anyone noticing, but the blip allows for some remote identity wipe snafus and result in the serial killer identity getting swapped into Echo.
Now now, Aunt Sheila, don't run away... (AAAAAHHH!)
Long story short, Echo wakes up and tries keep the killer identity at bay long enough to save his victims, and meanwhile Victor lets loose on the dance floor after getting transplanted with Echo’s naughty student/Wife of Bath personality. The best parts of the episode were the creepiest: the show opened with scenes of the serial killer manipulating his victims, women he stole and paralyzed so he could dress them up, rename them, and play with them. This is the sort of image that sells the show’s underlying eeriness. There’s a man playing with live women as though they were dolls, stuck in life-sized body holders used mannequins or stands to hold up your Barbie. Disgust, revulsion, gross gross gross. And then we cut to the Dollhouse, and we get it. Ugh.
The problem here is that the classic Joss Whedon show is never just that deep, scary serial killer reality. Buffy and Firefly and Dr. Horrible are amazing because they link strong emotional plotlines about death, fear and morality with humor. They use silly quips and goofy nerd humor, and sometimes they don’t take themselves all that seriously. Unlike many previous episodes of Dollhouse, Belle Chose strove to inject that kind of humor several times, primarily through Echo’s professor fantasy subplot. First there’s Paul Ballard waiting while Echo gets all tarted up, then we get the many scenes of good Chaucery sexy fun time, and finally the wacky gender swapping that leads to Victor on the dance floor and Paul Ballard’s defensive “You got a problem?” These scenes are meant to be funny, and several of them were – Tahmoh Penikett’s performance was strong, and sure, I’m always going to find Canterbury Tales jokes funny, because, you know, obviously. Ultimately, though, the humor was never able to puncture the overwhelming sense of creepiness. It’s too uncomfortable watching Echo as Kiki flounce into her dressing room and preen in the mirror to feel anything other than nervous laughter. And maybe I’m just too sensitive about anything that suggests gay bashing, but as soon as Victor walked onto the dance floor in his argyle sweater I just started to cringe.
Not so much funny-haha as funny-queasy
It’s great people are watching the show, be it live or on DVR. I just wish Whedon could figure out how to recreate the required balance of gravity and levity given such a weighty starting point.