Pajiba

He's smart, self-deprecating and a little bit scathing.
What's not to love?

Dollhouse had moments! Patton Oswalt was great on it. It just had a bad beginning and a terrible finale. And not a lot of chemistry between the leads.
But Topher was good. And the guy who played Victor really deserves more attention.

Why I keep forgetting to put SMG on my five freebies list, I'll never know.

Sorry to disappoint Uda, Epitaph One was the single good episode in Dollhouse. I mean 'good' in the relative sense of course, where every single episode shat all over any and all episodes of X Factor, Shit My Dad Says etc, but weren't as good as any of the episodes of Firefly.

I don't disagree, Ender. I just meant, they were going to get the second season anyway, so I'd have preferred if it followed the alternate time line instead for a couple of episodes before its ultimate cancellation. Fox would've made a better choice if they kept Terminator for another season over Dollhouse and even that show wasn't Television's finest.

Also, I would argue that Dollhouse sucked the first beginning episodes and then once it knew it was going to get cancelled (2nd season on) it began to really rock.

Dollhouse was awesome if you replace Eliza Dushku with a talented, charming actress. In your mind. Because she was the only reason the show sucked (until it got the ax & they had to rush explosively through the ending).

They need to do it right and reboot the tv show to be like the original movie!! (Sorry, Joss!)

...I actually really liked Dollhouse. It had such a good premise. It could have gone really far. It took a few episodes to get there, but I loved it.

*silence*

*shifty eyes*

...and I kinda liked Eliza Dushku...

Please don't hit me!

Joss (also Josh) Whedon desperately needs adult supervision. (There, I said it.)

Unconstrained, his three obsessions - curvature-free arcs, wrackings without end and adolescent girls with super powers eat his otherwise promising fiction alive.

I am looking forward to his work on The Avengers which the many constraints render more like his script-doctoring than his own mythology-building. BUT Buffy the Lesser will be less without him, and would be less with him.

/Long form

Whedon has skillz, yo. (Hair flip. Adjusts rack.) He's been my homie since I got into this business, and has always seen more in me than "hot, kick-ass chick in leather pants."

Please, Godtopus, no more. I'm sorry, I just can't hold character. Eliza will have to go on playing herself, on and off-screen.

I'm a fan of Joss Whedon. He has made some epic, best-of-its-kind television. I still bleed brown for what 7 years of Stagecoach in Space might have been. (Good god, look at that cast!) And Dr. Horrible is the most amazing flight of ad-hoc whimsy I've seen.

Except ... um ... it's just ... um ... ah ...

Oh, hell, it's just that Joss (also Josh) Whedon, honorary Mayor of Comic-con, maker with the zippy dialog, and every true nerd's true master desperately needs adult supervision. There, I said it.

With the discipline and constraints of, say, a weekly hour-long series on a second-tier network, he has to get somewhere every week. Under threat of annual cancellation he has to make an arc that, you know, curves. Left unsupervised his id-monsters run amok:

- The Mythology doesn't ground out and we stop caring.

- Character wrackings never end, and we stop caring.

- Stories that are about something else become about, adolescent girls with super powers. Yes, the River / Raver shot in Serenity is "the joy" as he said. BUT you have to earn it, as so often secondary characters growing like kudzu over the story do not: Fred, River, Echo and I'll argue Dawn, for four.

("The Rise of Penny-Dreadful" which I sketched back on a "Dr. Horrible II" thread here was intentionally about the girl. Yes, a pretty cool possible story but that's what he does. It's always ends up about the girl. Not that one, the other one. And the super-powers.)

Joss Whedon is an oftentimes amazing writer who rises to his level of incompetence when allowed to be his own visionary without constraints. His obsessions, BTW, are the nub of all the bad series starts with networks, too. What they thought they were buying was never what he thought he was selling because he gets stuck in his own obsessions and doesn't frakking listen until they threaten to cancel the show.

Godtopus, I hope he figures that one out, because I believe there's another 10 seasons' of brilliant fiction in the man. That note of his above about Buffy The Lesser is an example of what he can do when he has constraints. In this case, not a lot of time, and the need to stay on point.

I finished Dollhouse last night, and I didn't even know we were talking about it over here. Weird.

The show certainly wasn't Whedon's best, and definitely not his most consistent. But the highs were exceedingly high (which, of course, means the lows were almost numbingly low). I think the premise, once they started telling/showing us what the series was actually about, was his best, yet. At least, in terms of building on previous ideas to get to something very, very new. It was a brutal show, even by Whedon standards, but that's one element I loved. Once he thought, or knew, they were getting canceled (in seasons one and two), the show did some of the most exciting, and interesting, television I've ever seen. And, I've seen a lot of TV.

That said, it doesn't have the simple elegance of Firefly, which is what makes that show sing from Serenity (the pilot) to Serenity (the movie). And it doesn't have the instantly recognizable tropes and themes of specific genre fiction like Buffy (horror) and Angel (detective/Buffy) to play off of. Dollhouse is about big ideas, about a future that is much more real and possible and frightening than the adventures of Malcolm Reynolds and his crew. Maybe it shouldn't have been a TV series, but I think it was a story that needed to be told, and I'm glad Joss Whedon was the one who told it.

That said, I don't know what to think about the last two episodes. They sort of encapsulate the entire series. WTF moments all over there place, some good, some bad (SPOILER ALERT: "Family," Boyd? Really? REALLY?!), and I did get a kick out of having a straight throughline to the Apocalypse. But Epitaph 2 left me wanting something more. Or, well, something else.

Oh, and whoever made allusion to Rossum being a stand-in for Fox? Brilliant. I actually do think the series had some purposefully meta elements, and Rossum = Fox is the most easily applied. Topher = Whedon is another good one, as someone said. See? There's so much going on! (It's just not always done well.)

Oh, oh, and if you're getting your panties in a bunch over Joss doing "yet another" show about super powered women, why are you a Joss Whedon fan? It's part of what he does, what makes him an auteur. He fell in love with Kitty Pryde when he was a teenager, and he's been writing stories for her ever since (including one in an actual X-Men comic). It's like ragging on Tim Burton for his obsession with German expressionism and chiarascuro (sp?) lighting. There are plenty of other creators who don't do what Whedon or Burton do, let them do their thing. No one's forcing you to like it every time.

This is getting to be way too long (and already way too late, probably), but one last thing, about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: It is a shame that got canceled, too, as the season 2/series finale left so much on the table for at least two more seasons, and it probably would have been very entertaining. But, I'm glad we got an ending to Dollhouse. It needed one. We know how Terminator ends.