Dollhouse go boom

[calimac]

Did anyone else watch the final episode of Dollhouse last night, or were B. and I the last people left in the room after everyone else gave up and left?

This dismal cross between the "demons have taken over" alternate histories of the Buffyverse and John Varley's "Phantom of Kansas" period got a lot of "huh? I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what" from me, until after the show ended and I looked up Felicia Day and some of the other actors on IMDB to see if they'd been on the series before. And sure enough, I was missing something: what I was missing was the phantom unaired episode from the end of the first season, to which this one was an immediate sequel - the episode that appeared only in the DVD set of the first season, which I never got because I lacked any desire to watch this series again.

I rewatch Firefly, like, all the time. I rewatch parts of BTVS too. I've even been known to rewatch Dr. Horrible, though man, it's not holding up as well as I'd hoped. I don't rewatch Angel, though I have some of that, nor Serenity, nor this. The historical sorting process between mash and trash in Joss Whedon shows is going on very quickly as far as I'm concerned.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

My TiVo died last week and took the last half-dozen episodes of Dollhouse, which we hadn’t watched, with it. Sounds like it won’t be worth the effort to track them down later...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should introduce you to spacecrab.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was sure I was missing an episode, and now I know.

I thought the last few Dollhouses were pretty bad, but I never bought into the series in the first place. I watched 'em, and felt dirty afterward.

Very few tv shows pass the Rerun Test. Some of that is the episodic nature of most shows, where following the story arc is as important as the one one hour. Even shows that I follow, such as House, don't really work when you pull a show our of sequence. I've seen 'em all, but very few more than once.

At the moment, the only show that I go out of my way to watch in reruns is The Simpsons. It's still brilliant, even cut up for syndication purposes. The critics who say the only good shows are from the first few season are weenies.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I watched it, and mostly liked it. But I had seen "Epitaph One" on DVD at least twice before. Which enabled me, for example, in the scene where Echo is sent into the Attic, to recognize that the scene of combat in the streets of Los Angeles was choreographed identically to such a scene in "Epitaph One" that involved Felicia Day's character.

My one complaint about this final episode is that it undid the ballsy thing Whedon did in "Epitaph One" of making this a series that was not leading to a happy ending. After "Epitaph Two" the story is an Averted Apocalypse, which is a plot Whedon has done over and over: In nearly every season of Buffy, in Angel more than once, and in Serenity. Of course, it's probably the prototypical horror plot. But I was more impressed when I though Whedon had given us a radical technology that would change everything and wreck the human race—and actually did, past reversal.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, the happy ending at the end of the previous episode didn't hold, as witness the two epilogue episodes, which depict a not exactly cheerful world. So I don't see why the happy ending at the end of this episode, which is equally abbreviated, needs to hold either. Besides, they both involve letting bombs off, sure to brighten any day.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

You could make up such an interpretation. But the ending as Whedon wrote it signals the end of danger and the renewal of hope. And in this case I wasn't looking for eucatastrophe. Sometimes tragedy is more satisfying. I find the tragedy of Whiskey in "Epitaph One" more powerful than the happy ending of Echo in "Epitaph Two."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Make it up? The ending of the previous episode sure "signals the end of danger and the renewal of hope" to the casual viewer. But something the sure heck happened.

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

Well, you already know about my mixed feelings about Buffy. (Although I would never argue that Buffy was boring. A number of episodes just made me angry.)

By not seeing Epitaph One, you may have missed a number of levels of story development that were inserted into the last four or five Dollhouse episodes. I found the episodes that were shown two at a time to be much more watchable than any presented before the Fox cancellation announcement. But I cheated by zoning out whenever I was bored and reading backstory at: http://dollhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Dollhouse_Wiki

The high point, for me, was the multiple-identity stuff that kind of peaked in 2x08 ("A Love Supreme") with the interjection of a great song "Your Ghost" (You were driving circles..). I felt that Whedon's recognizable tricks came together to punctuate larger observations about frustration and irony in the human condition. (It was almost as if he decided that he was going to illustrate the song by building some episodes of Dollhouse around it.)

All that considered, for me, the last three episodes (after the Christmas hiatus) were too mechanically contrived. They didn't hold my interest enough for me to want to rewatch the tapes I made, while "half-watching."

But I thought some of the stuff aired in December was about as good as TV science fiction ever gets. coffeeandink does a pretty good job of dissecting them over here.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

odds bodkins, I don't have time or compelling desire to read all that stuff, besides which it'd only stick in my head if I rewatched all the show anyway, which is what I'm trying to avoid.

Wiki plot summaries of shows or movies I know always, always leave out key elements necessary to make the plot make sense, to the extent that I know I'd be baffled if I were using it to find out the plot.

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

I thought some of the episode guides on this Wiki were pretty good (cross-indexed with character descriptions, McGuffin links, etc.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I took a look at the plot summaries for the last two episodes, which I could still barely remember. They made my head hurt.