dollhouse: the runner stumbles

It's not that Joss Whedon has lost his talent, --we know that from last year's humble but effervescent Dr Horrible's Sing-along Blog, which was funny, strange, vibrant, and pretty much unlike anything else the world has seen. Filmed in six days on a budget of five bucks and a case of beer, its world felt cohesive, and its characters, although comic book figures, were fully engaging, with subtle asides, virtuous flaws and flawed virtues. Its twists were unexpected and its lines funny. Who could not love that baddest of all supervillains, Bad Horse, the Equestrian of Crime?

Dollhouse, on the other hand, that long-anticipated return of Joss to the slightly-bigger-but-still-small screen, has little or nothing to recommend it so far. The inner halls of the actual Dollhouse bear a vague and unimaginative resemblance to Angel's Wolfram & Hart Building, and the exterior scenes might be shot on the set of any of a hundred cop/forensics/whatever shows. These halls are filled with non-characters and vague half-characters, none of which had a funny or insightful line in the first ep. Some big breakout seems to be in the works for Amy Acker's Dr. Saunders, but it'd better hurry and break out or we'll be outta there before it manifests sufficiently to catch our interest.

One of Whedon's many supernatural talents has always been for taking very limited actors and playing to their strengths to the extent that his characters emerge full-force almost in spite of the performer. With some notable exceptions, much of the casts of Buffy and Angel fit this description, and those were both exceptionally good shows for most of their runs. Eliza Dushku, possibly one of the most beautiful women in the world, shone as the badassed tomboy supervixen psycho vampire-slayer Faith in Buffy because it played exactly to her strengths and gave her room to stretch. Echo, her Dollhouse non-character, does exactly the opposite. No chameleon is Eliza, who depends on a change of hairstyle and the addition of glasses and asthma to indicate an entire personality change in this shape-shifting world of highly-protected superdolls who get their minds wiped after every job and start each day with a new personality tailor-made for each new mission. She holds her own just enough that if she had brilliant lines to speak I'd have no complaints about her performance. Now is your cue, Joss, to bring on the brilliance, or at least some sign of life.

The wonder is why Whedon is working for Fox again, the evil supertyrant who mangled and cancelled the magnificent Firefly. Until further evidence is introduced, I'll assume that it's Fox who's wringing the life out of Dollhouse to conform the show to its renowned fascist agenda, or else I'll have to figure that Joss just isn't very interested in the whole venture. I'm sticking with the show for a month, and hoping to eat these words on a platter later on.