Dollhouse 2.13 "Epitaph Two: Return"
Feb. 5th, 2010 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkLast week I thought I’d discovered the best viding trick ever. Accidentally forcing the programe to compress an entire clip into 0.88 seconds, instead of simply blurring through at warp speed the rendering software decided to playback a random selection of 22 frames but they looked good! They made sense, they told a story. Tried it again and got the image salad I deserved but that one time it did work. Thing is the difference between a salad and a story is very much in the eye of the beholder. It’s all in the interpolation but then so are real vids and real movies right down back to the Lumière brothers and their Cinematographe.
So the Dollhouse finale. Everybody knows it was 5 seasons worth of story smushed into 5 (estimates vary) episodes but was it a fine day? Did we have salad? I didn’t much care for the last but one outing and more or less swore that if they ended by waving a magic wand and undoing the hooker apocalypse then I was done but they did and I didn’t. Turns out cyberpunk and fairy stories are two great tastes that taste great together. Either that or I’m just a sucker for eucatastrophes. Not saying it was great or capable of erasing all the bad that came before but in and of itself it worked. It was as if they finally arrived at a story they really wanted to tell so at least it was honest.
I think that was always the problem with the show – it was never able to figure out what it was supposed to be about. It started with the back of a pizza idea to tell Echo’s story, the actress’s story. That became Echo - the unaired pilot with its key image of her sinking down to the bottom of the pool. The network didn’t care for that and I’m not sure the writers did, maybe they should have let Eliza write it, it was never their story to tell. So Echo became a Ghost and the focus switched from the dolls to the clients or rather the fantasies ordered by the clients. What would you do? If you could make a person who would you make, who would you bring back? It could have been interesting, like looking at the wriggling things revealed when you lift up a stone is interesting but none of the fantasises they came up with in the five not!pilots were worth turning over stones for or even novel. The only one that worked at all was Joel Mynor’s recreation/desecration of his dead wife and in Man on the Street the show had taken a new turn. Not the dolls, not the clients, it’s all about the system baby! Finally, an idea with some traction to it. Lasted through Needs, Briar Rose and most of all Epitaph One but petered out there. It could have been a show but not, I think, a Joss Whedon show. Maybe a Ron Moore show or a David Simon show (if he did genre) but Joss doesn’t build political worlds with any substance. The system, W&H, the Alliance lurk at the edges of his stories but only turn out to be a bunch of stunt guys in rubber suits if the narrative gets too close.
So S2 started and looked as if they were trying again for the original premise. Echo searching for Caroline. Superpowered disturbed brunette with a daddy figure who turns out the be the big bad, it could have been a classic. The man who saw the 97% future and couldn’t unsee what he saw. He loved her like a daughter, like flesh, like genetics and when she found out she sent his flesh into the fire. It didn’t work, they needed book Denethor and ended up with movie Denethor, the Paul story got in the way of the Boyd story, Echo meeting Caroline happened off stage. It was a mess and ultimately filler, something to pass the time, a red herring apocalypse because they’d already given us the back story to the real thing in Epitaph One.
The real thing, the storyteller’s story, Topher’s story mostly (although not entirely). Joss apparently didn’t see himself in Topher until the audience pointed it out but by S2 the scenes between him and his Galatea were the most bitingly written in the show. Topher caused the apocalypse, he wrote it. From one perspective his story is the most egrerious example of writer self-insertion in Mary Sue history. The boy wonder with all the snappiest lines, smarter than an attic full of brains souped up on adrenaline, sadder than Green Lantern and Dr Horrible combined, madder than Wesley, guiltier than Angel. Echo had the good father turn bad Topher had the bad mother turn good. Topher so loved the world he blew himself up to save it. It could have been terrible, maybe it was but I didn’t mind in the end. They played it low key, the only lines of his I remember are “Thank you” and “Huh!” I felt he was punished, the boy wonder grew up.
Echo said she had no fantasises and by the end they’d all proved unworthy. None more so than her masters becoming the fat gay roman emperors of Neuropolis, so lacking in imagination that having handed themselves eternity on a plate they’d doomed themselves to spend it in a never ending office party. Priya and Tony’s fairy tale romance went sour but still wasn’t gone. Not soulmates but someting worth doing the work for. Adele led the dolls out into the world to face the non-recognition in their waking eyes. Echo herself returned underground with a head full of other people’s stories and was finally allowed to let one she wrote herself in. Tall dark and clichéd, recently refrigerated but still hers.
So the Dollhouse finale. Everybody knows it was 5 seasons worth of story smushed into 5 (estimates vary) episodes but was it a fine day? Did we have salad? I didn’t much care for the last but one outing and more or less swore that if they ended by waving a magic wand and undoing the hooker apocalypse then I was done but they did and I didn’t. Turns out cyberpunk and fairy stories are two great tastes that taste great together. Either that or I’m just a sucker for eucatastrophes. Not saying it was great or capable of erasing all the bad that came before but in and of itself it worked. It was as if they finally arrived at a story they really wanted to tell so at least it was honest.
I think that was always the problem with the show – it was never able to figure out what it was supposed to be about. It started with the back of a pizza idea to tell Echo’s story, the actress’s story. That became Echo - the unaired pilot with its key image of her sinking down to the bottom of the pool. The network didn’t care for that and I’m not sure the writers did, maybe they should have let Eliza write it, it was never their story to tell. So Echo became a Ghost and the focus switched from the dolls to the clients or rather the fantasies ordered by the clients. What would you do? If you could make a person who would you make, who would you bring back? It could have been interesting, like looking at the wriggling things revealed when you lift up a stone is interesting but none of the fantasises they came up with in the five not!pilots were worth turning over stones for or even novel. The only one that worked at all was Joel Mynor’s recreation/desecration of his dead wife and in Man on the Street the show had taken a new turn. Not the dolls, not the clients, it’s all about the system baby! Finally, an idea with some traction to it. Lasted through Needs, Briar Rose and most of all Epitaph One but petered out there. It could have been a show but not, I think, a Joss Whedon show. Maybe a Ron Moore show or a David Simon show (if he did genre) but Joss doesn’t build political worlds with any substance. The system, W&H, the Alliance lurk at the edges of his stories but only turn out to be a bunch of stunt guys in rubber suits if the narrative gets too close.
So S2 started and looked as if they were trying again for the original premise. Echo searching for Caroline. Superpowered disturbed brunette with a daddy figure who turns out the be the big bad, it could have been a classic. The man who saw the 97% future and couldn’t unsee what he saw. He loved her like a daughter, like flesh, like genetics and when she found out she sent his flesh into the fire. It didn’t work, they needed book Denethor and ended up with movie Denethor, the Paul story got in the way of the Boyd story, Echo meeting Caroline happened off stage. It was a mess and ultimately filler, something to pass the time, a red herring apocalypse because they’d already given us the back story to the real thing in Epitaph One.
The real thing, the storyteller’s story, Topher’s story mostly (although not entirely). Joss apparently didn’t see himself in Topher until the audience pointed it out but by S2 the scenes between him and his Galatea were the most bitingly written in the show. Topher caused the apocalypse, he wrote it. From one perspective his story is the most egrerious example of writer self-insertion in Mary Sue history. The boy wonder with all the snappiest lines, smarter than an attic full of brains souped up on adrenaline, sadder than Green Lantern and Dr Horrible combined, madder than Wesley, guiltier than Angel. Echo had the good father turn bad Topher had the bad mother turn good. Topher so loved the world he blew himself up to save it. It could have been terrible, maybe it was but I didn’t mind in the end. They played it low key, the only lines of his I remember are “Thank you” and “Huh!” I felt he was punished, the boy wonder grew up.
Echo said she had no fantasises and by the end they’d all proved unworthy. None more so than her masters becoming the fat gay roman emperors of Neuropolis, so lacking in imagination that having handed themselves eternity on a plate they’d doomed themselves to spend it in a never ending office party. Priya and Tony’s fairy tale romance went sour but still wasn’t gone. Not soulmates but someting worth doing the work for. Adele led the dolls out into the world to face the non-recognition in their waking eyes. Echo herself returned underground with a head full of other people’s stories and was finally allowed to let one she wrote herself in. Tall dark and clichéd, recently refrigerated but still hers.