Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

It’s true. Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse has been cancelled, to the surprise of no one. To a certain extent we can blame Fox for ordering truncated seasons and sticking the show on Friday nights, when no one, not even me, is watching television. But the fact is that Dollhouse was—and the use of the past tense here is disconcerting, since I intend to watch the remainder of this doomed season—a frustrating experience, at best. This was clearly not Whedon and Company’s best work. It had none of the outright brilliance of Firefly nor even the self-aware fun of Buffy. Dollhouse tried to do big things with a cool idea and, for a number of reasons, usually failed.

Prime among those reasons is Eliza Dushku. I loved her as Faith, but she ain’t Meryl Streep. Dushku just doesn’t have the range to be the protagonist of a show where the characters can become anything or anyone at the press of a button. Dollhouse was at its best whenever it stepped away from her to shine more light on the ensemble cast. One wonders if Dushku’s producer credit might have mucked things up here. Season 2′s intro credits are an endless Dushku montage, which is awfully strange given that her character is sometimes barely present (as in the excellent “Belonging“). Never mind the insane difficulties of writing a show in which the main character has no stable identity.

I can’t help but compare Dollhouse to Whedon’s last doomed sci-fi outing, Firefly. One thing (among many) that strikes me in retrospect is the sheer detail of the series; the universe teems with languages, locations, mercenaries, courtesans, soldiers, con men, ruffians, traders, priests, culture, and class, all from day one. Every single scene of Firefly evokes a larger world, a rich future history that I would have loved to see revealed over, say, eight or nine seasons. Dollhouse seems claustrophobic in comparison. There is the eerie tranquility of the House, the seemingly endless parade of super-wealthy, super-bland clientele, and the threat of Alpha lurking in the shadows. That’s the length and breadth of it, really, and Echo’s weekly identity switches were rarely interesting enough by themselves to sustain me. We constantly received glimpses of something Big and Dark and Awful and Evil operating behind the scenes, but the glimpses were too little and too slow to maintain an audience.

In fairness to the show, everything improved as time went on (here be spoilers). Gradually the writers spent less time trying to craft interesting jobs for the Dolls and instead focused on the hard questions that this kind of technology would raise. This led to some great moments, as when Paul Ballard discovered that the “mobster” he’s been investigating and the “neighbor” he’s been romancing are both Dolls (I only wish the show had spent more time exploring his reaction in a more organic way, instead of just letting his stoicism intersect with his obsession). Or when Dr. Saunders realizes that she herself is a Doll, but doesn’t want to have the personality removed, because she’s afraid it would be too much like death. Powerful stuff, to say nothing of Alan Tudyk’s show-stopping performance as Alpha, or the DVD-only episode “Epitaph One,” which shows us in no uncertain terms what Big and Dark and Awful and Evil really mean.

We may lament that Dollhouse looked like it was growing into something great, and that it was cut down prematurely while ‘Til Death somehow remains on the air. But when all is said and done, Dollhouse‘s problems were simply greater than the sum of its better moments.  In their blank states, the Dolls will often ask, “Was I my best?” The line is child-like, a simple question loaded with meaning. It’s one of my favorite parts of the show. For Dollhouse, the answer to that question is an unfortunate no. But they sure did try.