Battlestar Galactica: 'Islanded in a Stream of Stars' (4x18)

Watching this episode, it really started to hit me that the show is ending. Like Babylon 5, I’m guessing the series will end with the destruction of its titular ship. If Hera’s play is to be believed, the ship will plunge into a basestar, and we may see some of our characters going down with the ship. But, that’s the future, and the three hour finale we’ve got waiting for us. This episode was largely about moving pieces into place, but did so in a mysterious and compelling manner, full of really great images and moments along the way.

The Boomer/Hera plot was my favorite part of the episode, starting with the surreal visions of Hera running through the opera house, and continuing during Hera’s jaunt through Boomer’s imaginary dream house. Hera clearly has some kind of great power, but she’s also still a kid. She imagines a cupcake in her hand, and probably imagines Boomer as her mother, Athena. Unlike Helo, she can tell the difference between the two.

When they finally get to Cavil, he’s housed in a prog rock album cover demonic fortress. That scene just brought me joy, seeing this massive space station, and Boomer’s small ship working its way through it. This show usually avoids those more fantastic flights of sci-fi, but I love that they made Cavil’s fortress so over the top. And, Cavil had a great subtle menace as he took Hera and promised to make her more playmates. Cavil most likely wouldn’t want to create more cylon/human hybrids. He’s seeking to eradicate the humanity from his makeup, so I’m not sure exactly what he needs Hera for. I suppose part of it is ensuring that the other cylons don’t find a way to reproduce.

Another moment that wowed me in this episode was Sam’s transformation into Galactica’s hybrid. First off, I loved the production design on the room he was in, the red code snaking its way up the walls, the interior of the Galactica becoming more and more cylon based. And, Sam waking up and speaking the hybrid code was such a perfect fusion of thematic, narrative and visual development. The Galactica is struggling to cling to its humanity even as it becomes more and more cylon based. Anders struggles with the same fate, as Kara says, the human life he has is fading away, replaced by something new and uncertain.

Kara herself continues down that path. She has died and returned from the dead. There’s not much conclusive from this episode, but I love the moment where she speaks to Baltar from the toilet, and her uncertain feelings at being held up as an angel for the fleet. If she can return from the dead, what does that mean for the fates of all these people who died aboard the ship? Did they simply not want to live enough.

It’s hard to make definitive conclusions from an episode like this. The function was to put all the pieces in place for the finale, and these are often problematic episodes. In Buffy, the third to last episode of the season was often underwhelming because it’s all about laying groundwork for the big finale. I think what made this episode work so well was the fact that the individual scenes were so well executed. Narrative purpose and payoff doesn’t matter so much when you get scenes as visceral as Adama spreading paint around and realizing that he has to abandon Galactica, or the Six being sucked out into space. As such, what lingers from this episode is not its contribution to the mythos, it’s the individual scenes.

I particularly loved Adama and Roslin sharing a joint and reminiscing about their time on New Caprica. With Adama fearing the destruction of Galactica, she tries to convince him that home isn’t a physical place, it’s a community of people, and though the fleet has survived because of Galactica for so long, humanity is now evolved enough to survive without it. The Galactica was a relic of the first war with the cylons, when things happened again as they did before, it served humanity again, but the time has come to abandon warships.

This entire ending is very Invisibles, with the hardliners on both sides being eradicated, leaving a new, more united populace in its wake. My issue with the handling of it is that we don’t get that much insight into the cylon side. The cylons make all these compromises, and seem to be totally benevolent in serving humanity, I want to see more of what’s going on within their group, particularly some more time with Leoben and D’Anna, who have been frustratingly absent. Is not Leoben just another manifestation of the absent father that Kara seeks? Surely he holds the final answers for her destiny.

I loved this episode, as the camera pulled back, I was wishing that the episode was going on. It’s reaching that point where I’m more aware of the series ending, where each moment with a character could be their last. It’s always tough to watch a story you’ve watched for years come to an end. Two weeks from tonight it will be over. I’ll talk more about the legacy of the show in those next two reviews, but I want to say that though this show has frequently frustrated me, it’s also produced some of the most profoundly beautiful and challenging cinema of the decade. This is a show that used visual storytelling in ways that virtually no other series in the history of the medium has, and for that alone, it deserves commendation. And, a great finale could make up for a lot of the rough patches along the way.

Watchmen

It’s impossible for me to offer anything close to an objective review of the Watchmen film. Watchmen the book was a massively important work for me, a work that cemented my interest in comics, and showed me how much they could do as a storytelling medium. Watchmen was the work that made me realize that there were things only comics could do, storytelling methods that drew neither from film or prose, but were unique the combination of words and pictures. So, to attempt to create a film from the most distinctly comic book of comic books is no easy task.

The film is neither colossal failure, nor smashing success. Tasked with condensing such vast source material into a film length running time, the movie loses a lot of the things that make the book so special. It’s not the narrative that makes Watchmen such a legendary work, it’s the way that it builds a world and plays in it for twelve issues. The much lauded opening sequence conveys all the narrative information we need to follow what’s going on, but it doesn’t give us the emotional connection that we get from Hollis’s first person narration in the “Under the Hood” excerpts.

I could go on along these lines for a while, but I want to address the issue of audience expectations in assessing the film. I don’t to be one of those fans who simply reviews the film in terms of its similarity to the book. If your only concern is narrative faithfulness, the movie’s a smashing success. It does a fine job of condensing the book into a film narrative, but I’d argue that’s not enough to make for a satisfying viewing experience. That said, it’s impossible for me to assess the film from anything resembling a new viewer’s perspective. I’ve read Watchmen many times, I know the book, and watching this film, I saw it more in similarities and differences to the source material than as a separate entity unto itself. The film’s consistent faithfulness makes it impossible to view in any other way, it changes some things, but adds very little to what’s already in the comics?

This film follows in the tradition of Sin City and 300, works that exist as little more than replications of the graphic novels they’re drawn from. They’re works that exist largely because the creators love the books, and want to expose them to a larger audience. That’s fine, I want more people to read Watchmen too, but I think those earlier films struggled to justify their existence as anything more than curiosities. Sin City was faithful to a fault, bringing nothing to the screen I hadn’t already experienced in the book. Watchmen feels that way to some extent, though I think it is a more satisfying viewing experience than 300.

I think there’s some things that did work well in the film. Doctor Manhattan was really well realized, he was totally believable as an alien, powerful being who’s more than human, but still rooted in a human reality. I never once felt that he strained credibility, and I particularly enjoyed the recounting of his origin as he stands on Mars. I also thought Rorschach was wonderfully realized. When I heard him speak in the trailer, I didn’t totally buy it, but seeing him in action, I totally believed in the character, and his personality shone through even though he wore a mask for nearly the entire film.

In terms of performance, I had serious issues with two characters, Veidt and Laurie. As Laurie, Malin Ackerman doesn’t bring the humanity that the character had in the book, largely because I didn’t buy her as someone with the weight of a troubled past as a hero. I always imagined her as someone who’s older, and more troubled. This Laurie felt like a rather generic love interest torn between our two male heroes. I do think that the moments with her and Dan in Dan’s basement worked really well and were pretty sweet. Those smaller, human moments are what make the book so special, and occasionally I’d see sparks of that humanity on screen. But, in general, her performance didn’t do much for me, which is a mix of performance, and of a lack of background for the character. She’s much less in her mother’s shadow, which means that both her and Sally’s character arcs are less compelling.

But, my biggest issue was with the dismal performance of Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt, whose sometimes British, sometimes Hans Gruber accent tips him off as the villain pretty early on. Judged solely from the film, he’s a boring character whose motivations don’t quite hang together. But, bringing the book into it, the film completely misses the charisma that Veidt had. In the interview backup segment in issue 11, Veidt is described as the man every woman wants, more than Jagger, more than JFK. And, his inherent likability and charisma is sharply contrasted by the scheme he’s developing. Here, Veidt is treated as such a heavy, dire character, you get no sense of surprise when he’s revealed as the villain, and little of the emotional pull of the book. There’s no joy in the character in the film, and without that joy, he simply becomes a villain in hero’s clothes. You have no sense that he really does care about humanity.

The ending is where the film really doesn’t work for me. I guess there’s not that much more background on Veidt’s plan in the book, but the groundwork is laid by the subplot about the missing artists, which gives the final revelation the feeling of a whole bunch of threads coming together. Here, it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make that much sense. I see people say the “squid” ending is plausible, but I think it makes perfect sense, and the very alien weirdness of the squid is the whole point.

But, beyond plausibility, what makes the ending of the book work for me is the fact that we’ve seen this entire society built up over the course of the series. We’ve spent so much time with Bernard the news vendor, Bernard the kid who reads comics, Joey and Aline, Malcolm and Gloria, and the detectives that seeing them all destroyed for Veidt’s dream makes it a real moral conundrum. Intellectually, I can sympathize with Veidt’s point, but when Rorschach walks out in the snow at the end, promising never to compromise, I’m with him. Watching him getting torn apart is such a visceral, emotional moment in the comic, and in the film, it just dies there on the screen.

The absence of the peripheral supporting cast basically kills the emotional impact of the ending. My favorite moment in the whole book is those scenes at the end of issue 11, when everyone comes together to break up the fight between Joey and Aline. Even after being scarred by his time with Rorschach, Malcolm is still going to break up this fight. Watching everyone converge, it becomes clear how much we’ve gotten to know these people over the course of the book, and how heavy the weight of Veidt’s plan is. All their lives will be wiped out for Veidt’s utopia, is it worth it?

None of that is in the film. The moral conundrum is entirely intellectual. That’s a prime example of the film losing “inessential” background detail that removes the emotional impact of storylines. It’s possible to tell this story in 160 minutes, but it’s not possible to make us feel it.

My other major issue with the film was the fact that it’s so oppressively heavy. It never seems to stop raining in the world of the film, and the color palette was all greys and browns, nothing popping. It’s not an easy world to spend that much time in. The book was certainly heavy, but there were jokes and warmer moments as well. Most of those jokes have been excised. A lot of the jokes in the film were from the juxtapositions of images with different captions or narration. The biggest one is the Black Freighter story, but there’s also smaller stuff like juxtaposing Veidt’s charity performance with Dan’s failure to perform. I think Moore does get a bit too clever from time to time in the book, but I think for a book that’s so much about using that juxtaposition, the film missed a big opportunity by not attempting to do something similar.

In the case of the Black Freighter, it’s pointless to make it as a standalone story. The point of it isn’t to give us a nice pirate story, it’s to comment on Veidt’s plan, and criticize it. While that’s not apparent on the first read, it does subconsciously prepare us for the reveal at the end of the film, a preparation that’s not there in the film.

Other, more nitpicky issues include frustration at the fact that none of the characters can smoke. I think there’s a major free speech issue brewing with the ban on smoking in films. I understand the need to “protect the children,” but this is an R rated film, with myriad examples of bad behavior, surely Laurie could have a cigarette after beating up the gang with Dan? Taking the cigarette out of that scene kills the gag. Of course, that may be a calculated maneuver, since Synder chooses to not have Dan and Laurie in their costumes when they have sex on the Owl Ship. This takes away the subtextual tie between the costumes and Dan’s sex drive, and instead makes it seem like he just had to reassert his manhood as a hero to get his potency back. That whole scene was handled in a really weird way, with the use of “Hallelujah” on the soundtrack. It was so over the top, it bordered on comedy, and I’m not sure it was intentional.

Ultimately, I can’t view Watchmen as a movie. It’s a filmic replication of a comic that I love. It doesn’t bring much that isn’t already in the comic, and is by no means as deep or challenging a work as its source material. It exists primarily as a curiosity. I do think it’s well worth seeing simply for the experience of looking at one man’s interpretation of the comic, and the time passed quickly. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s essential in any way.

What will the film be to someone who hasn’t seen the comic? I’ve got no idea, Will it feel like a jumble of unrealized ideas that don’t quite hang together, or will it play better, a badass hardcore superhero story? I’m curious to see the public reaction once the film passes beyond the fan community. I have no objectivity on this film. I can appreciate what’s there, but the film exists in the shadow of book, and it cannot match its source material. And, I’d argue that it’s precisely its fidelity to its source material that holds it back. Would I have wanted a less faithful film? Probably not, but at the same time, that would have opened up the possibility of making something newer and more artistically vital. For now, this film has the surreal feel of people acting out a predestined script, struggling to find humanity in an elaborate recreation of something that was already done right and didn’t need to be done again.

Dollhouse: 'Stage Fright' (1x03)

The good news is each week of Dollhouse has gotten a little better, but none of the episodes have been total winners yet. As with much of the series, this episode has a lot of interesting ideas and thematic content, but the ideas just sort of sit there and don’t really integrate into the narrative in any way. The show has an intellectual interest, but most of the time it doesn’t have the emotional impact or Joss’s best work, or even his middling work.

The basic idea here is to juxtapose the gilded cage of pop star Rayna with Echo’s similar situation. Both have what some people would consider a utopian existence, free of worry and choice, with someone worrying about and caring for their every need. Normal people want to live that kind of life, but for the people living extraordinary lives, sometimes the thing they want most is normality. The confrontation between Rayna and “Jordan” in her dressing room hits the similarities home, perhaps a bit too hard on the nose.

The problem is what does this parallel really say? I suppose on one level it’s a way to explore the way that women are treated as commodities, defined by their relationships to others. That’s how Echo is used, an object to project fantasies on, and Rayna is the same thing. But, just saying that doesn’t make an interesting story, and it’s hard for the show to condemn that attitude when most of the female characters in the episode are shown in the minimal amount of clothes whenever possible.

I have no problem with that, these are good looking people, but I feel like the line between implicating the audience in the same attitude that the characters in the show have and just using sex to sell the show has been crossed. I think part of the problem is that we’re left with no place to view the show from. We’re made to look at Echo in various states of undress, and are still meant to condemn the fact that she’s being used by her handlers. It’s hard to have it both ways. I don’t think there’s anything inherently misogynist about showing women without many clothes. Look at a film like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which keeps its sexuality fun and empowered. But, here, there’s such a mess of viewpoints, it’s hard to know what to think, and my takeaway is simply that sex is being used to sell the show even as it’s being condemned from within the narrative. The show’s trying to have it both ways, and not quite pulling it off.

Anyway, I will say that at least this week’s mission made sense to use a doll on. I don’t understand why they led off with the hostage negotiator story, since these past couple of episodes have done a much better job of saying why someone would use a doll on a mission instead of a regular professional. I’m not saying this should have been episode one, but even more than last week, it pointed to a kind of viable type of future storyline, and was a bit more creative with the premise than we’d see previously.

I also really liked Echo’s interactions with Sierra. More than Dushku, she could easily swerve between personalities, selling us on the meek “number one fan,” then switching back to impersonal doll mode. That said, I’m not sure why she didn’t activate her backup personality when she got kidnapped, surely that would be the kind of emergency she’d have been programmed to get out of.

Also interesting was the revelation that the Russian guy is actually a doll, messing with Ballard, presumably on behalf of his Dollhouse superiors. This raises the interesting idea that the dolls could be used as the ultimate sleeper agents. Think of an Infernal Affairs type situation, where a doll is planted in a criminal organization and doesn’t even know they’re being used as a surveillance op for the police.

Back at the dollhouse, Boyd and Claire get a bit closer. I’ve got a bad feeling about Amy Acker’s future since I believe she’s been cast in a new pilot and is still credited as “guest starring” even though she seems to be a main character. But, for her time on the show, she’s a nice human presence in the dollhouse. Things aren’t totally working on that side of the storyline yet, but I want to see more, and at this point in the show, that’s what’s needed.

While I did enjoy the episode, I think the climax evidenced one of my major problems with the show, and that’s the fact that it feels a bit dated in its production value. I feel like I saw that same above the stage climax in a Buffy season one episode, and TV has come a long ways since then. In a world where you can have shows that are shot as well as The Sopranos, or produced on the scale of Rome, this competent, but unexceptional direction just doesn’t do it. Shooting a show as well as The Sopranos doesn’t require money, it requires great directors. Perhaps they have to shoot this show faster than The Sopranos worked, but still, the lack of production value and technical skill shows.

But, I’m still liking it. This was my favorite episode yet, and we’ll see where things go. Episode six is supposed to be the big “game changer,” so if they can stay this good until then, I’m excited to see how big the quality jump is.

Battlestar Galactica: 'Someone to Watch Over Me' (4x17)

My biggest problem with Battlestar throughout its run has always been its frustrating inconsistency. After an incredible premiere, they rambled through most of this chunk of episodes, before returning to greatness here with an episode that focused on a lot of neglected characters and had some really chill-inducing moments like only this show can do.

I really loved this hour, I think all the stories in it worked, and it built things up to a level of tension where I can really believe that we’re three episodes from the finale now. But, let me first address some of the issues I’ve had with the show since its return from hiatus. There’s been a major shift in purpose and focus since the show returned from the strike. I feel like the cylon/human alliance plot was set up nicely over the course of the first half of season four, but we sort of jumped forward to the point where it’s a foregone conclusion without really seeing the growing pains it would have. I suppose that’s what the whole putting goo on Galactica and munity subplots were supposed to do, but those all skirted around the issue, they didn’t deal with the alliance itself. Where’s D’Anna? Where’s Leoben? They’re the strongest cylon personalities, and I’d like to see how they’re dealing with all this.

I think the biggest issue is that Moore and co. realized that they had to wrap up all the storylines and actually pay off a lot of the mysteries. That led to the construction of the whole the final five were humans who became cylons who then could reproduce so they were indistinct from humans who then got into a war with cylons and traveled across the galaxy to make the skinjob cylons and then got trapped in the human world by Cavil story. It’s a really complex thing, and just explaining it took an entire episode. I loved that episode, but the show, don’t tell problem has been there going forward. All that information just closed off old storylines, it didn’t open up that many new possibilities, and to a large extent, it made the fleet we’ve been following for all these years just pawns in a parent/child conflict between Cavil and the Five. I suppose the point is to have the people of the fleet and the rebel cylons break the paradigm that’s doomed humanity for so many years, but it takes away some of their agency.

Here, the five talk about not wanting to be gods, but what it’s really done is remove character agency. All these people were placed into roles, and their motivations are determined by vague memories of the past. We don’t have a sense of them creating their own story, they’re just playing off of a script written long ago that they can’t quite make out. This has all happened before, this will all happen again was interesting when it was about Kara, because she always maintained agency, but feared getting caught up in trying to live out her destiny. At the end of The Invisibles, Jack says predestiny doesn’t matter, we’re here and we’re living out our lives in the moment. That’s what Kara was doing, with the five, it’s impossible to tell, and that makes them subject to writers’ whims rather than defining their own story.

But, they spent most of this episode sitting at a bar, so it wasn’t a huge problem. We thankfully got to spend some time with Sharon and Kara, two of my favorite characters who have been out of the spotlight for a while. Kara apparently hallucinates a ghost version of her father to talk to, and uses him to process her own issues about her parental abandonment. I like the way talking to the pianist is a way for her to try and understand her father’s point of view. He was committed to his art, and didn’t want to be held back by his wife. That sounds at least somewhat admirable, but how does it feel to Kara, who’s the one left behind. Is she less valuable than his art?

This storyline ties in nicely with the way we previously saw Kara abused by her mother. Her mother broke Kara’s fingers, a way of preventing her from following her father’s artistic path. That’s a well done retcon, enhancing what we saw before without contradicting any of it.

The question that arises now is whether Kara’s father is Daniel the missing cylon. That would knit a lot of things together, and would explain why her father knows the cylon song. That moment was absolutely brilliant, like only this show can do. Hearing the song gradually become the cylon revelation All Along the Watchtower piece, accompanied by that slow zoom on to Tigh and Kara getting lost in the music was perfect. It was something you can only do in cinema. A moment like that makes up for a lot of the troubled elements throughout the season. It’s also part of why the show is frustrating, they can be so good, why can’t they hit that level all the time?

Tyrol and Boomer had some great stuff too, but did raise some questions. The impression I got from season one was that Boomer honestly believed she was human, and was horrified to find out the truth. Even after they killed her, she teamed up with a Six in “Downloaded” to help the humans, so I’m not sure why she’s turned into a hardline Cavil person, who’s this ultimate femme fatale operative here, taking joy in messing with everyone in the fleet. Maybe I don’t remember something from the lengthy hiatus the show took, but the motivation doesn’t seem quite consistent.

But, I did enjoy pretty much everything she did, and if you accept the character development, her manipulation was great. You buy into her and the dream life she’s built for herself and Tyrol. I also loved the skeeviness of making sure to fuck Helo where Athena could see. That’s the kind of scene you can only do in sci-fi.

And, her escape from the Galactica with Hera kicked the story into high gear after it lagged for a bit. Halfway through this episode, I was thinking this did not at all feel like a show that was three episodes away from its finale. But, by the end, the pieces start to come together, even as the Galactica starts to fall apart. I’m guessing like Babylon 5, the titular space ship won’t be making it to the series finale. And, I’m also assuming we’ll be seeing the return of Cavil shortly.

The juxtaposition of Roslin’s collapse with Hera’s departure was evocative. We’ve already seen them tied together in the opera house vision, what will Hera’s departure mean for the future of the fleet? Can the Cylon/Human alliance continue without the embodiment of that alliance.

Ultimately, I’m less concerned with the narrative resolution than with getting more of the great character moments we got in this episode. I loved the Kara story, and I hope we get more moments of beauty like hearing her gradually build the song. If there is a final space battle, I hope it’s a trippy, evocative one. The show’s got itself back in a good place, I hope they bring it home strong.

Friday Night Lights: 3x01-3x06

I’ve talked a lot about my mixed feelings on two Friday night shows this year, Battlestar and Dollhouse. And, amidst their troubled runs, a show I’d kind of dismissed has just come back and started killing it every week, and that’s Friday Night Lights. After a second season that could be most kindly described as “troubled,” the show has been consistently getting close to season one highs every week. Right now, it just might be the best show currently airing on Friday nights.

Whenever a veteran band comes out with a new album, it’s invariably hailed as “a return to their roots,” a throwback to the spirit of their most loved album. Every new Radiohead album is at least rumored to be a throwback to the style of OK Computer, every Depeche Mode album is a callback to Violator. And, Friday Night Lights season three was treated as a return to the style of season one. Season two isn’t exactly wiped out of continuity, but most of its story developments are conveniently disregarded.

Grant Morrison proposed the idea of hypertime continuity for the DCU, in which all the stories are true, but some are more true than others, depending on the quality and staying power of the story. Batman’s origin will never change, that’s a fundamental piece of the character’s makeup, but various details about it can change, and the best way to figure out the “true” origin is to look at which version of the story is strongest. That way, if someone writes a story in which it turns out Batman’s parents were really murdered by space aliens, it can fade in to the background, technically still part of the mythos, but far away from the core timeline.

The hypertime concept is a good way of explaining how season three deals with the series history because what it boils down to is the stories that people like are the most true, and the ones that people don’t like can be forgotten. So, developments like Lyla and Riggins getting together can continue, but Matt and his maid sleeping together and the Landry murder plot fade away. Technically, the Landry murder still exists, but it’s drifting somewhere in limbo, hopefully never to be mentioned again.

At first, I felt like the show was just replaying its greatest hits. I have mixed feelings about U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind album because so much of it feels like a conscious decision to sound like what people think U2 should sound like. So, even though there’s great songs on there, it feels almost like a covers album, U2 covering themselves. The first few episodes felt this way, the emotional beats and style were right out of season one, but I was conscious of the show revisting those great storylines, and that distracted me from surrendering to the emotion of the stories.

But, starting with the last episode of the Smash arc, the show has just been nailing it on all counts. The first season of the show was brilliant because they would do moments where intellectually you knew what was going to happen, but they managed to maintain a huge amount of tension, and then give you a huge emotional payoff when the victory you were waiting for finally came. In the Smash storyline, we saw the amazing scene where Coach Taylor and Smash are told that they’ll have to come back for the next practice, which leads to Coach making a plea to let Smash on the field, for a moment there’s tension, then Smash gets his chance and the emotion just soars. The stakes have been delineated so clearly that just seeing him get out on the field is a huge emotional payoff.

I loved the end of that arc, it was an unabashed happy ending, one that skirted through sadness but made it in the end. Because we saw Smash really suffer, the payoff is much more satisfying. Particularly effective was the possible Alamo Freeze job, which made the practical considerations vs. following his dream conflict very clear.

The show has also focused more on the smaller details of life in Dillon, recalling the early days of the series. I loved Riggins’ tour of the seedier side of town in the last episode, and the contrast between the world weary senior and the totally naïve freshman. In high school, you have these kids who have already lived a hard life and done it all and you’ve got some people who are totally under the wings of their parents, and never really done anything. And, that’s conveyed well in those scenes. I also liked the detail of JD having a crush on Lyla.

Another beat that really worked in this episode was the Matt and Julie story. This show has always been one of the most beautiful on TV, and their trip to the lake felt dynamic and visual in a way that TV rarely does. It felt more like a Malick movie than a network drama. Compare to the look of the forest on Dollhouse, where it almost felt like they were on a giant soundstage. The scene on the lake made you feel like you were in nature, the sun sparkling and cutting through the trees to create an absolutely beautiful space. Even in the weakest days of season two, the show always looked great, and this season, they’ve been knocking out as well. My favorite shot of the episode was Julie and Matt driving back home in the glow of the rising sun.

This season has also brought Landry back to the character who first stood out in season one. I don’t mean to imply that all change is bad, but season two got away from everything good about the show. To go back to the style of season one, but continue to evolve the characters is what’s made the show so satisfying this year. I really like the band storyline, particularly the way that the band he’s in feels so specific to the town he’s living in. It sounds just like high school bands sound, all jumbled noise, with some snatches of skill struggling to rise above the mess.

So, I’m really excited to see the season continue to develop. The JD McCoy storyline is great, uniting a lot of the characters, and putting Coach Taylor in an interesting place. But, most importantly, the world feels real again, and it’s great just to spend time there. I thought season two had killed the show, but it’s back.

Battlestar Galactica - 'Deadlock' (4x16)

The entire backhalf of season four has been problematic in a lot of ways. I’ve loved pieces of it, the premiere particularly, but since then, the show has been drifting and struggling to find an emotional focus. Last week’s controversial info dump hour was thought provoking and really challenging like only this show can be. This episode reverts to a weird kind of soap opera, as character motivations are thrown around in service of an overarching narrative that’s making sense on a thematic level, but doesn’t seem to have the kind of drive that a series entering its final four episodes should have.

A lot of shows are rejuvenated in their final seasons, having the liberty to make lasting character change and tear the premise apart in dynamic ways. Six Feet Under is a great example, the final fate of Nate is the obvious example, but even before that, the show broke out of the soap opera drift of its weaker fourth season, where you feel like plots are spun just to keep characters on the show, rather than because they’re stories that need to be told.

This show hasn’t really taken advantage of that freedom, sure last week’s episode revealed most of the big mysteries surrounding the show. But, I’m not the kind of viewer that’s as interested in the answers to questions as in how characters grow and change. In most cases, mysteries are more interesting than their answers, and those answers are primarily interesting as a device to lead us to new, more compelling stories. In this case, the answer to the great mystery of the Final Five has worked on a thematic level, and was really compelling to hear last episode, but hasn’t led to a particularly interesting story in its followup.

My major issue with this episode was that the Tigh/Caprica Six relationship felt like kind of an afterthought last season. It was interesting in the context of Tigh exploring his new role as a cylon, and a continued exploration of his grief over Ellen’s death, but I never thought that he really loved her. So, Ellen claiming that Tigh must love her because she’s pregnant didn’t work on an emotional level. It makes sense on a mythology level, but we know that Tigh loves Ellen more than her, or at least that’s what the scenes we’ve actually seen have led us to believe.

The last season of The Sopranos drew a lot of fire for its slowed down pace and dedramatized style. I think they’re trying for something similar here, cutting character beats to their core, and skipping over scenes that would seem like big dramatic moments to instead focus on the daily routine of the fleet. It worked on The Sopranos because there wasn’t that much narrative baggage to deal with. Sure, the war with New York was in play, but the show was always extremely character driven, so you could have no narrative resolution and still feel satisfied.

Here, the narrative has become so convoluted, just telling us what’s happening takes up a ton of time, and doesn’t leave a lot of time for character beats. Another central issue for me this year is that they’re hitting the exact same character beats in every episode, and neglecting a lot of the cast. Yes, Olmos and Hogan are great actors, but how many scenes of them bonding do we need to see? It feels like they’re the only two characters who get any real screen time and development now, everyone else just does whatever the narrative requires.

Tyrol is a great example of this. In one scene, he’s urging Adama to use the cylon goo to fix the ship, and doing everything he can to save Galactica from Gaeta and his rebellion. Then, this episode he’s saying that they should abandon the fleet and fly away on the baseship. It could make sense if we’re given any insight into his motivation, but we’re not, and are left to piece together a complex set of motivations without anything onscreen to back it up.

Plus, I think last episode’s revelations throw into question the whole notion of these characters as “cylons.” They’re technically cylons, but on Earth, they were the equivalent of humans. Couldn’t this have been a key moment to say, see we’re the same as you, accept us again. Instead, it’s just glossed over and he and Tory decide to go back to the baseship, seemingly ignoring everything we learned from Anders last week.

Why is Tory so resolutely committed to the cylons? What makes her different from Tyrol and Tigh? There’s so much potentially interesting stuff there, but instead we’re spending all our time on the same three characters who have been the subject of every other episode this season.

Along those lines, the Baltar storyline in this episode is disappointing because, while often hilarious, it doesn’t make any sense in the overall story, and basically invalidates everything interesting about his arc in the early part of the season. I found Baltar really interesting as someone who’s decided that all these voices he’s been hearing in his head are a message from God, and that’s his purpose in the fleet. He may enjoy the attention of his harem, but on some level, he has to believe to make that story interesting. Here, we see him as the same goofy guy from earlier in the series, but inexplicably Adama decides to arm him with guns, a mere episode after a similar civilian force overwhelmed the ship and caused mass chaos.

It’s frustrating to watch the show hit the same beats again and again because it can be so great. The scene where Tigh talks about letting his love fill the frakkin’ room is awesome, but the story it’s in doesn’t have an emotional impact to match the impact of the scene itself.

I guess my central issue is that the show has just abandoned any attempt to evolve most of its characters, and decided to focus exclusively on Adama and Tigh, with the convoluted cylon mythology as a backdrop. There hasn’t been much interesting work done with Sharon, Helo, Baltar, Tyrol, Tory, Leoben, D’Anna or even Kara this season, and that’s frustrating because they’re all great characters, and could have great stories. When they do appear, it’s merely to serve the plot, and that’s frustrating.

This wasn’t an awful episode, but it’s symptomatic of a lot of the problems the series has at this point in its run. I think it was a huge mistake for them to ever leave Earth. As the show often does, I was all excited about a new status quo. How would they try to rebuild Earth and make it livable? Instead, we got the same Galactica on a search that we’ve already seen. I know there’s budget issues with filming outside, but I just see the end product, and I know that the show’s most exciting episodes were the New Caprica arc, where everything was different and we saw the characters in a new light. Let’s see that again before the end.

My 2009 Academy Awards

The real Oscars have happened already, but what would happen if I was giving out the awards. Here's what...

Best Actor
Josh Brolin – W.
Clint Eastwood – Gran Torino
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Synedoche, New York
Brad Pitt – Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler

Rourke became this guy. He’s done a lot of hard living, and that all reads on screen. Like a lot of great movie star performances, it’s a role that uses his off screen narrative as a supplement to the performance, such that the performer and role become inseperable, and mutually supporting.


Best Actress
Cate Blanchett – Benjamin Button
Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
Nicole Kidman – Australia
Lina Leandersson – Let the Right One In
Ellen Page – The Tracey Fragments

Anne Hathaway also had a tough year off screen, but she nailed it onscreen with a great performance at the center of a really great film that’s unfortunately been sort of forgotten here in awards season. She’s the wild heart of the movie, and makes a really memorable, strong character.

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Downey Jr. – Tropic Thunder
Aaron Eckhardt – The Dark Knight
James Franco – Pineapple Express
Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Brad Pitt – Burn After Reading

This one was the most locked category in a pretty locked Oscar field, and understandably so. I didn’t like Batman Begins, I loved The Dark Knight. What’s the difference between the two? It’s Ledger’s performance. He injects a degree of chaos in to Christopher Nolan’s sealed world, and utterly owns the movie as a result.

Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Rosemarie Dewitt – Rachel Getting Married
Catherine Keener – Synedoche, New York
Natalie Portman – My Blueberry Nights
Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler

This one’s a decidedly unconventional choice, but no other female supporting performance this year gave me the joy that Cate Blanchett’s manically over the top Indiana Jones villain did. Her accent wasn’t convincing as any sort of real accent, but it was a lot of fun. She didn’t go deep into character, but she was incredibly entertaining. What’s wrong with pop fun in a movie?

Best Animated Film
Rebuild of Eva
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Wall-E

All three of these are great films, but Rebuild of Eva’s devastatingly emotion and potent character psychology put it over the top. It’s a really smart reinvention of a brilliant TV series, updating and refining what was already good to make it not necessarily better, but something different and worthwhile.

Art Direction
Australia
My Blueberry Nights
Synedoche New York
Sukiyaki Western Django
Wall-E

No movie looked as sumptuous and glam as Australia. Baz always makes great looking films and his art direction team excelled on this one.

Cinematography
Australia
Let the Right One In
My Blueberry Nights
Rachel Getting Married
Speed Racer

The most deliberate and haunting film of the year, the film’s cold, lifeless look fits perfectly with its vampiric subject matter.

Costume Design
Australia
Speed Racer
Sukiyaki Western Django
Synedoche New York
Repo: The Genetic Opera

It’s a bit of a cliché to give the costume design award to a big period piece, but the characters looked great, and an entire world was built on screen in the highly underrated Australia.

Editing
Australia
Let the Right One In
Rachel Getting Married
Rebuild of Eva
Speed Racer

It’s hard to assess an editing award because so much of an editor’s job is to create the rhythm that a director wants. But, I like to reward films that use editing to expand what cinema can do, and no film did that more this year than Speed Racer. Not all of it worked, but the experimental editing style was exhilarating to see, and made me more excited about the possibilities of cinema than anything else I saw this year.

Foreign Language
Let the Right One In
Rebuild of Eva
Sukiyaki Western Django
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
The Machine Girl

As I said earlier, this is a masterful reinvention of the TV series, distilling what worked in to the shorter running time of cinema.

Makeup
Benjamin Button
Blindness
Let the Right One in
Syndeoche New York
The Dark Knight

So much of the film hinges on playing with our perceptions of Brad Pitt the movie star, of watching an old man become the star we know now, and then become the star we knew fifteen years ago. The makeup team pulls it off, and the film’s success really hinges on them.

Score
Australia
Let the Right One In
The Dark Knight
Rebuild of Eva
Wall-E

So much of the film is wordless, the score carries an even greater burden. But, the score makes Wall-E work.

Song
“Another Way To Die” - Quantum of Solace
“Beautiful World” – Rebuild of Eva
“Jai Ho” – Slumdog Millionaire
“The Wrestler” – The Wrestler

The closing credits track for Rebuild of Eva nicely sums up the themes of the film and does so with a catchy J-Pop flourish.

Sound
Australia
Rebuild of Eva
Speed Racer
The Dark Knight
Wall-E

Ben Burtt built Wall-E’s voice, and so much of his character through sound. Great work.

Visual Effects
Benjamin Button
Speed Racer
Synedoche New York

As I mentioned earlier, the makeup is a big piece of character, but here so are the effects. We’re on the road to a post spectacle effects world, where effects are subtle and designed to be invisible rather than call attention to themselves. Benjamin Button is a step on that road.

Screenplay – Original
Australia
Rachel Getting Married
Synedoche New York
Wall-E
The Wrestler

Robert Siegel builds an entire world in the shadows of a man’s failed life. The film feels rambling and full of the little moments that real life has, but most movies don’t.

Screenplay – Adapted
Let the Right One In
Rebuild of Eva
Snow Angels
The Dark Knight
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

It’s odd to think that Anno should be rewarded for adapting his own work. But, his work as a screenwriter here is very similar to what a writer has to do when adapting a novel to film, distilling more rambling plots and character arcs into a single, driven narrative. That’s what Anno does, creating a film that’s in a lot of ways stronger than the series it’s drawn from.

Director
Baz Luhrmann - Australia
Hideaki Anno - Rebuild of Eva
Wong Kar-Wai - My Bluebery Nights
Tomas Alfredson - Let the Right One in
Darren Aronofsky - The Wrestler

Luhrmann’s films have a distinct voice and feel no matter what the subject matter is. Here, he manages to create emotional moments that hit me like no other movie this year. He understands that movies are in many ways like dreams, they exist in a place removed from reality, and here he creates a film that recalls the best of classical Hollywood in its pitch perfect creation of emotional moments.

Picture
Australia
Rebuild of Eva
Let the Right One in
Rachel Getting Married
My Blueberry Nights

Australia is also the best film of the year. No movie engaged me emotionally like it did, building up, receding then building again to a devastating finale. It was a transporting cinematic experience, and a hugely underrated film.

Nominations (Wins)
Australia – 10 (4)
Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0 – 9 (4)
Let the Right One In – 9 (1)
Synedoche New York – 7
The Dark Knight – 6 (1)
The Wrestler – 5 (2)
Rachel Getting Married – 5 (1)
Speed Racer – 5 (1)
My Blueberry Nights – 5
Wall-E – 5 (2)
Benjamin Button – 4 (2)
Sukiyaki Western Django - 3
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - 3
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 1 (1)
Blindness - 1
Burn After Reading - 1
Gran Torino – 1
Pineapple Express – 1
Quantum of Solace – 1
Slumdog Millionaire – 1
The Machine Girl
The Tracey Fragments – 1
Tropic Thunder - 1
W. – 1

Dollhouse: 'The Target' (1x02)

The second episode of Dollhouse is a major improvement over the first, addressing a lot of the issues I had with that episode, and providing some welcome arc elements, but also still suffering from the basic problem that the premise still doesn’t make much sense, and dealing with the premise leads to a lot of people behaving in ways that feel contrived and don’t make much sense in a real world emotional context.

The good thing about the episode was that it worked well as a mix of standalone and arc stuff. The scenes in the woods were generally exciting, and I particularly liked the evolution of Echo’s imprint as time passed, and the encounters with the earlier versions of herself. I do think a major opportunity was passed up by having that canteen she drank from laced with some unspecified poison instead of LSD or something like that which could have provided the perfect excuse to send her on a journey through her own memories, and do some more creative filmmaking.

Whedon’s shows have never been known for their filmmaking merits. Outside of his last period Buffy showcase episodes, like “The Body” or “Restless,” the shows were directed in generic TV style. The writing and performances were strong enough to overcome that, but here on Dollhouse, the show often feels distinctly like a generic Fox series, and the woods setting here felt like something that would be on a syndicated fantasy series circa 1998. There are striking images from time to time, particularly the overhead shot of the dolls going to sleep, but in general, the show isn’t doing that much groundbreaking visually.

The twists in the woods story did genuinely surprise me at times. The revelation that the park ranger was after them was great because the scene was set up as a way to show us how prepared the Dollhouse team was. It didn’t feel arbitrary that he would appear because the purpose of the scene was to show that Boyd was prepared for any contingency.

The other thing that did impress me about the episode was how much background we got, along with the development of the season’s “big bad,” the rogue doll Alpha. The scene where Boyd is bonded to Echo was particularly interesting, probably the best scene of the episode.

But, there’s still a lot of issues. Topher, the programmer guy, feels like a character that Whedon has beat to death in previous stories. He’s like a recast for maximum genericness version of Warren. Buffy was a show that was ostensibly much goofier than this one, but even in one episode, “I Was Made to Love You,” we had a much better understanding of the emotional stakes that drove Warren to invent April. The feelings were right on the surface, and even though it treated in a goofier way, the whole sexbot concept felt sleazier and more interesting there.

Warren was understandable as a very real person, the kind of guy who was never able to connect with women and because of his robot building genius, was able to make the perfect woman for himself. It’s a wacky story, and not exactly realistic, but it’s emotionally understandable. Here, everyone is in this weird business secret agent mode, and there’s not much recognizable humanity on display.

And, the problem is, the show’s concept basically demands a constant diet of illicit sex and violence to make sense, but is there any point to a show about a woman who’s constantly raped, then brainwashed to forget about it? That ostensibly makes a statement about women’s role in society, and the perception of female value, but what is that statement. The single Warren robot story said a lot more about that, and did so in a way that was absolutely heartbreaking in a way I find hard to believe this show will reach.

Joss has always been at his best when he uses the action side of a story as a device to turn individual emotions in to a larger than life struggle. I never watched Buffy for the narrative, I wanted to see how the characters were affected by what happened. That’s why even a bad Buffy episode can be really enjoyable, because it’s nice to spend time with those characters.

And, the problem with Dollhouse is that Joss has created a show that explicitly makes impossible the thing he excels at, extended character development. Now, it is hinted that Echo will remember her past selves, and struggle to rediscover her true self. That’s possibly interesting. I don’t really care about the mystery of who Echo is, but I think there could be a great story in Echo trying to invent a new self after living for so long with the comfort of imprinting.

But, even if that happens, we’re still left with a bunch of characters at the Dollhouse who don’t have any clear motivations for what they’re doing. Boyd seems like a nice enough guy, so why would he get involved with this operation? Is it just for the money, or do they have something on him too?

Ultimately, I think the biggest issue is the tone. This episode had a lot of good things about it, but there’s still the fact that the premise makes no sense, and no one acknowledges that absurdity in the way they did on Buffy. There’s some jokes with Ballard, but because we’re emotionally aligned with Ballard, and we know that the Dollhouse exists, those guys come off as the delusional ones.

This was certainly an improvement, but the show’s still got a way to go. We’ll see what happens next week, at least it looks like it will be a more fun than portentous episode.

Battlestar Galactica: 'No Exit' (4x15)

On this busy TV night, I jumped right from the premiere of Dollhouse, a show in its infancy to Battlestar Galactica, a show on the slow path towards death, though death may be the wrong word. No show ever dies, that would imply the total extinction of the universe and the people within it. As we saw on The Sopranos, a show simply chooses a moment to cut to black, the world and its people go on. Even after Six Feet Under’s parade of death finale, we’ve seen a new generation that will live on and carry the legacy of our main characters forward.

This is particularly apt in an episode that’s largely concerned with past lives and an unending cycle of war and violence that will continue as long as humanity pushes out of that primordial swamp and reaches for the stars. It’s an episode that reveals much of the central mysteries that were set up with the introduction of the Final Five, mysteries that trace all the way back to the miniseries. It’s a very intellectual hour, one that juxtaposes the rambling narrative of Anders with flashbacks to Ellen Tigh and “John”’s discussions about the creation and future of the cylon race.

After a few clunkers, this episode brought the series right back to the place that I love, pondering questions of identity and humanity in really fascinating ways. It was interesting to watch this right after the Dollhouse pilot, since both series deal with core sci-fi questions about how much of our identity is our own and what elements go in to the construction of a human. Is someone like Echo still human? Is Cavil more human than machine? At what point does a construct personality become something real? How can creators maintain control over their creations?

The issues all have a very Blade Runner feel, and the Cavil/Ellen confrontation feels like an echo of Roy’s interrogation of Tyrell. Both are asking why they had to be the way that they were. Most people like to think that they’re the architects of their own identity, even as they blame specific inadequacies on the way they’re raised or genetics. But, what would it mean to know that you were created for a specific purpose, with all your flaws and personality traits decided by a group of five people. The reason the cylons have such reverence for the five is that the five made them. What does it feel like to meet your maker? There’s an element of awe in it, but there’s also a blame as you recognize that they built you flawed.

To some extent, we all have met our makers, our own parents. The Cylons’ desire to meet the five feels a bit like an adopted child’s desire to meet their birth parents, there’s this belief that meeting your creator will explain what you are. But, aren’t we more than the sum of our parts? I don’t see myself as a random combination of traits from my parents, I think there is something new and different that emerges out of that combination, in the same way that blue and yellow make green, a color that has a resemblance to what it came from, but at the same time is something completely new and different. In philosophy/religion, that’s what you’d call a soul, that essential thing that makes you you. We are built out of the parts of our parents, but we can become something more and transcend those origins.

But, let me briefly interrupt this philosophical line of thinking to discuss the most bizarre element of an episode that featured a lot of bizarre things, and that’s the inexplicable cameo of Daily Show correspondent/PC John Hogman as “the brain guy.” It felt like he had won some kind of contest that gave him this part on the show since he felt totally out of place in the world of the series. This wasn’t even a case where it’s a guy legitimately trying to act, but laboring in the shadow of a past famous role. He wasn’t acting, he was just there reading the lines, and doing everything short of winking to the audience to remind us that yes, this was John Hodgman. I don’t understand what happened with that casting. It felt almost like a comedy sketch, that’s how off he was in this universe.

Anyway, back to the substance of the episode. The basic idea of the Final Five, as I see it, is that they started out as essentially human on Earth, perhaps a future version of the society we currently live in. Sensing the imminent destruction of the planet in a nuclear holocaust, they brought back the technology to transfer consciousness to other bodies, rather than reproduce organically, and used this to preserve themselves after the planet was destroyed. Then, they jetted across the galaxy and created the human looking cylons in an attempt to stop the cycle of human/cylon violence that has waged for an eternity.

They attempted to do this by creating what is essentially a human/cylon hybrid in the existing seven, or perhaps eight, models that we know. But, Cavil is not happy with this form, and sees only the limitations of human perception. He wants to feel more, but is unable to do so inside the “cage” that his creators built for him. As he says, he has more in common with the centurion side of the family than the human one. He wants that mechanical certainty, but is stuck with the burden of being a human.

It’s interesting that Ellen designed John/Cavil after her father, particularly considering the fact that she had sex with him to save Tigh on New Caprica. The choice of who will be the Final Five was essentially random, and I don’t think that the Ellen we saw previously has much in common with the character here. I suppose that’s part of the point, that Cavil and the Cylons chose to punish these characters by forcing them to experience the humanity that the five forced on their creations. Wouldn’t Cavil’s ultimate revenge be to turn Ellen, the creator/god of their race into a lush, a woman who falls prey to all the vices and flaws that humans can deal with?

This background information also explains why the cylons were so interested in creating a cylon/human hybrid. The goal of the Final Five is to bridge the gap between humans and cylons, so Hera would serve as a literal representation of that alliance. The reason that Tigh and Six can have a child is presumably because Tigh isn’t like the cylons he knew, he came from a place where people could reproduce regularly, not just through the resurrection ships.

The other notable fusion in this episode is Adama’s decision to let the Galactica be fixed with Cylon technology. This is a literal representation of the gap bridging process that the Five exist to do. They are designed to end the endless cycle of human/cylon war, and integrating the two cultures via the Galactica is a perfect way to do that.

I love the episode and all the philosophical points it raises, but I’m curious about how this new information will be integrated into the story, and how the mission of the Final Five relates to the overall direction of the series. This episode implies that the whole point of the series is to overcome the differences between the two races and come to an alliance, the point that we reached when they reached Earth. But, what does that mean for our characters, and where will they all end up when the series reaches its close?

To some extent, I wish this cyclical war stuff had come in a bit earlier. We’ve always had the cryptic “this has happened before and will happen again,” but it was so vague that it didn’t have emotional traction. It was an interesting question to ponder, but not until now do we really understand the full scope of what it’s referencing. Perhaps they’ll be able to knit it all together in the other Final Five, the last five episodes of the series, we’ll see. Even if it doesn’t all quite hang together, if the episodes are as dense and challenging as this one, I’ll be satisfied.

The episode ends with the question of what’s happened to Anders. I’m guessing that he suffered a brief “death” during his surgery, and has been resurrected with Cavil’s people. That would lead into a final war with Cavil, and an attempt to break the cycle of violence. At the beginning of the series, the Cylons functioned largely as a metaphor for terrorism, and the cycles of violence that rage between the Western world and the Muslim world. In that respect, this story is a perfect allegory for the conflict that’s happened before and will happen again here in our world. What will it take for us to end the cycles of violence that have raged in the Middle East for years? It’s probably precisely the kind of cultural hybridization we see here, a breaking down of borders until the differences between us are so minimal as to not matter at all. But, that process will not be easy, and there will always be the hardliners. We saw the human hardliners dealt with last week, now they will have to deal with the cylon hardliners.

I’ll just add that even though the episode was largely dialogue based, there were still some awesome visuals. I still love the look of the Cylon baseships, the water droplet lights and eerie neon strips of red. There were also some awesome starburst explosion effects during the flashbacks. While the show is largely about gritty, “realistic” visuals, they still manage to get some of the most beautiful images ever seen on TV in there from time to time.

So, the show is back running strong. I’m eager to see where it goes next, and after all the darkness, there’s a new feeling of hope that this all might turn out okay in the end.

Dollhouse: 'Ghost' (1x01)

After nearly five years without a Joss Whedon TV show on the air, he finally returned tonight with the first episode of Dollhouse. As with most Whedon series, it’s a problematic pilot, one with some great moments, but also a lot of flaws. The greatest flaw is the premise itself as presented now, one that seems destined to run up against a wall of irreconcilable elements unless some major changes happen.

Let me start with the flaw, then delve into what I liked about the show. The basic flaw is that I just didn’t care about the standalone plot. I had no stake in the characters involved, and the entire situation was clichéd with nothing to distinguish it from movies we’ve seen countless times before. I was reminded of Man on Fire, which turned a similar situation into an over the top hallucinogenic haze of insanity. The reason it had to do that was because we’ve seen this story many times before. And, because the show has to split its time between the various ongoing subplots, the time at the Dollhouse and the standalone of the week, all of the standalone stories will probably draw from archetypal elements we’re already familiar with.

Typically, our interest in the situation would stem from seeing how our main character engages with that story. But, in this case, the actual identity of our main character is the central question of the series. So, to see a “Miss Penn” succeed at her job every week just doesn’t seem like something that will be particularly interesting, particularly because she’s always going to mess up the mission in some way than manage to pull it off in the end.

Why did they program her to have asthma here? That question is addressed by Topher the programmer when he claims that having the human flaws gives them a drive to acheieve their mission that they wouldn’t have if they were “perfect.” He says that they’re not the “greatest hits” versions of people, but wouldn’t have the “greatest hits” model be precisely the reason you’d use this service? They’re offering the service of someone who’s beyond human, so why not play that up? In the case of this episode, wouldn’t it be more interesting to create the ultimate infiltrator agent, and have Echo get at them that way, rather than going through the typical channels.

The problem is that the show is built on a premise that should be all about exploring the sleaziest, dirtiest side of humanity. Each week should be a wallow in an activity so criminal and heinous that the people involved don’t want anyone to know about it. But, the network standards, and our rooting interest in the show hinge on putting the characters in essentially “heroic” situations.

But, I think the most interesting aspect of the show was the juxtaposition of these childlike, sheltered characters with the immoral behavior of their “parents” who run the dollhouse. The actives are commodities, they are designed to be used, and the most interesting standalone missions would be ones that put the characters in situations that stretch the boundaries of societal acceptability. As we’ve seen from the Elliot Spitzer scandal and countless others, people in power are willing to risk all they have for thrills, sexual and otherwise. So, a lot of the missions should involve Echo being built out as someone’s idealized girl, the one who will do things that no one else will. But, I don’t think we’re going to see a show that sends our hero on a variety of prostitution missions, so that’s not likely to happen.

But, there’s other ways that we can have her transgress societal rules. My mind flashes back to Salo, a film that I disliked, but raises essentially the same questions we’re addressing here, what would you do if you could use people with no consequences? I don’t think the guys from Salo had hostage negotiator anywhere near the top of their list.

But, I shouldn’t judge the show on what I want it to be, let me address more what is actually there. As I said before, I didn’t care much for the standalone story at all, and my fear is that this show will be one where you’re forced to sit through a half hour of fat to get to what’s really interesting about the story every week. It’s definitely reminiscent of Angel season one, where the show went through a variety of different scenarios trying to find its voice. Joss just isn’t great at writing standalone stories like this, and I’m not particularly interested in watching them. The only really cool moment in that section of the story was when Sierra burst in all business at the end to retrieve Echo and the girl.

That said, there was a lot that was great about this episode. I love the atmosphere in the Dollhouse, the slightly stilted way that everyone speaks, and the dreamlike way they move around. I also loved the final shot of them all going to sleep in their little cocoons, juxtaposed with a more hopeful ‘Caroline’ in the past. That video brought back memories of a similar juxtaposition in Cowboy Bebop’s classic “Sleep Like a Child,” which juxtaposed Faye’s videotape message to her school friends with her in the present day trying to sleep in the hollowed out ruin of the home where she grew up.

I liked Amy Acker’s character, and the uncertain way that all the higher ups treated the actives. There’s a lot of questions of identity and morality involved, and I’m sure they’ll be explored in more depth down the line. I want to see more of the actives’ world, and understand better how they interact with each other and view themselves. Is it an idyllic existence for them? Would they want to leave if they could? Those are the questions lingering now.

I also liked the setup of a couple of subplots, with Helo’s (he’s still Helo to me…) search for the Dollhouse, and the mysterious Alpha. But, I feel a conflict between what feels like the core of the story, breaking down the Dollhouse and trying to find an identity outside of it, and the long term future of the show which hinges on the Dollhouse existing. It feels like The Prisoner if Number 6 never tried to escape and instead just went along doing his thing every week. It was that need to escape that drove him, and that’s what needs to build in Echo. The case of the week is quite literally irrelevant to her character, as it’s erased every week. I’m sure there will be some lingering consequences occasionally, but it feels like those stories by definition will cease to matter after they happen.

So, I’m uncertain about the show’s future after seeing this first episode. I just didn’t care at all about this standalone story, and it’ll take a really good one to make me care about them in the future. I think most of the interesting stories that stem from this premise lie in places that will be difficult to fully explore. But, I’m hopeful that all the random pieces will knit together as time passes and we’ll see more of the world and get to the more long term character development that is Joss’s forte. Joss knows what he’s doing, and I’m sure once this show gets through its first few episodes of growing pains, it’ll be something great.

Big Love: 3x01-3x04

Big Love is a show I’ve always had mixed feelings about. That cast is full of actors I love, and the premise raises a lot of potentially interesting issues. In its first two seasons, the show had some really strong episodes, but never made the jump to great TV. The ‘Golden Age’ HBO series, like The Sopranos or The Wire or even Six Feet Under, all did things that you didn’t see anywhere else. They were full of incredibly rich characters and explored huge issues within their continous, novelistic plots.

In short, those shows justified the “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” tagline because they are like virtually nothing else in the history of TV. When I see people call Showtime the new HBO, I cringe because all the Showtime shows I’ve seen are essentially edgier versions of classic network shows, and like a lot of FX shows, they’re more interested in being edgy for edginess’s sake than in building compelling stories and world. Weeds is a particular offender in this respect, but Dexter also suffers from the fact that at its core, it’s a CBS style procedural. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being like a TV show, Buffy is very much a TV show in style and presentation, but the writing kept the characters evolving and that’s what made it such a great series.

In the post Sopranos era, there’s a lot of highly serialized shows, but there’s very few shows that enact real change in their universes. Shows like Rescue Me, 24 or Alias are full of ongoing plots that make them seemingly incomprehensible to new viewers, but really what they’re doing is variations on a theme. 24 will always spin back to the mole, the nuclear bomb, Jack going rogue, just as Alias perpetually wound its way back to Sydney working for Sloane. Rescue Me has extended stories, but after the stories resolve themselves, the characters are essentially the same as they were before. The problem with this is that you wind up with a merry go round of couplings and scenarios such that by the fifth or sixth season, everyone has fucked everyone, and there’s nowhere left to go.

But, the best shows only get better as time goes on. To some extent, The Sopranos repeated itself narratively. The structural plot of all the middle seasons can be summed up as a new family member comes into town and causes problems for Tony until he crosses the line and has to be whacked at the end of the season. It happens to Richie, Jackie, Ralphie, Tony B, and to some extent, Vito. But, within the repetition, there’s an evolution of Tony’s character, and a deepening of our understanding of his world and what’s going on around him. The weight of what’s happened weighs on the character in believable ways. You can’t honestly believe that Jack Bauer has been through all he’s been through on the series, but Tony’s continuity seems plausible.

All of this is a way of saying that what separates good shows from great shows is the capacity for real change, to deepen and expand the universe as time passes. Big Love’s third season is doing just that, telling its best stories yet in a really focused, intense opening run.

Part of what makes the season work so far is the way that Roman’s trial has served as a structural centerpiece for the whole show. One of the things that’s hurt the show in the past is that the stakes are smaller than we’re used to on TV. At their core, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are just about a family and their struggles to deal with the world, but the backdrop of the mob and the gravty of the funeral home helped make those shows feel deeper and more significant. In the case of Big Love, the stories at home can sometimes feel frivolous or soapy without that sort of heavy grounding. I hate to say that on some level, because that sort of if it’s not life or death, it doesn’t matter logic is what contributes to our glut of doctor and lawyer shows, but that’s the way it feels.

But, the presence of Roman’s trial as this looming threat for the family makes it easier to appreciate the less dramatic b plots. It also alleviates the disconnect between the compound and Bill’s family that has caused problems for the show in the past. The family’s courtship of Ana is a great story, but is it a strong enough centerpiece to unite all the show’s disparate characters? Perhaps not, but now it doesn’t have to carry that load, it was able to simmer in the background, amidst a variety of other stories.

That’s not to say that the Roman trial was even the most compelling story on the show. What’s interesting is how it’s forced the other characters in to different and challenging positions. Nikki in particular has gotten stronger material this year than ever before. I find it a little implausible that Roman Grant’s daughter could so easily infiltrate the D.A’s office under an assumed name, but once you get past that, her story there is great. For one, it’s always interesting to see her drop the Compound style and try to fit in with regular society. But, it also forces her to explicitly confront the outside world’s view of the compound without being able to instantly snap back with her usual defenses. The condemnation simmers there, and by the end, she’s forced to confront the fact that she is a victim of the abuse that Roman is being tried for, and no matter how much she may love him, her father is guilty of the crime. And, her own feelings about the marriage she was forced in to prevent her from spouting the party line defense.

The high point of this is her tearful collapse on to the D.A’s shoulder after she sees the photos of her in the Joy Book. But, her loyalty to her family is such that she still assists in sabotaging the case. I like the way the arc played out, the way her inevitable assistance to Roman is juxtaposed against our desire for her to speak out against him. I want her to move into our world more and leave those old values behind, but she can’t do that so easily. The Sopranos was brilliant at juxtaposing our hopes for what would happen against the characters’ inevitable moral weakness and this story pulls off something similar. And, Sevigny thankfully gets to explore new dimensions of the character as time passes. The revelation that she was married once before is the perfect retcon, something that adds new depth to a character without contradicting anything that’s come before. In act, it goes a good way to explaining why she’d be willing to move off the compound in the first place.

Our moral alignment with respect to the various characters is one of the most complex things about the series. Watching it, I can’t relate at all to Bill and his family’s belief that the reason they’re on the Earth is to churn out kids and have more and more wives. The revelation that Nikki’s on birth control made her even more sympathetic to me because I think it’s perfectly understandable that she would want to have more control over her own life. Her work at the D.A’s office may have began as espionage, but I think by the end she legitimately enjoys it.

So, the question arises, are we supposed to believe in what Bill and his family are trying to achieve? Because they’re the main characters of the series, ostensibly we’re behind them in their quest to woo Ana. Certainly it was tough to watch Nikki and Margene squabbling during their “date” with Ana because I wanted Ana to like them. And yet, at the same time, the values of their world are so distorted and incompatible with how I see things that my attachment and general positive feelings towards the characters are juxtaposed with this dislike of their value system.

That’s why I like that the show has confronted this head on, both with Sarah’s total rejection of her parents’ lifestyle, and with Nancy and Lois’s shock at Bill’s plan to take on a fourth wife. Sarah is one of the most interesting characters in this season, clearly just biding her time before she can get out and move on. She started out growing up in a ‘normal’ family, how would she feel when all of a sudden she winds up in a zoo of children and a messy hierarchy of three “mothers” looking out for her? What control does she have when they seek to add another wife. She’s got none, and that makes her want to get as far away from that world as possible.

Throughout the series, I’ve found the kids’ storylines among the most interesting, and the addition of the bizarre compound people gone wild flophouse adds another layer. Frankie and his fellow Compounders seem to have a kind of “what happens outside the compound stays outside the compound” mentality and are living it up. I’m not sure how that jives with one of the girls chastising Sarah for dressing in a way that pleases Satan, but I suppose that’s the bizarre moral world they live in.

The central question of the season seems to be how much can you compromise on the road to salvation? Roman and his crew use coercion, threats of violence and bribery to ensure that he goes free. Bill’s entire casino business is a way to preserve his lifestyle and protect him from risk. But, is he morally compromising the very sanctity he’s hoping to preserve? If he sacrifices those morals, does that mean he’s just a guy with a bunch of wives because he can? That’s the question raised by Nancy in the last episode, the idea that he’s dabbling in this and is adding another wife because he can.

There’s no easy answers there, but this season’s first four episodes have been stronger than any in the show’s prior history. I’m hoping they can keep that up without Roman’s trial around to act as a structuring element. At least there’s a bunch of other interesting plots in development that will be able to pick up the slack.

Batman #686: "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" (Part 1)

Picking up where Grant Morrison left off, Neil Gaiman’s Batman #686 presents yet another spin on the death of Batman. This one also appears to be taking the “It’s all true” approach to Batman, mixing elements of pre-Crisis Catwoman with post-crisis Barbara Gordon and a reincarnated Joe Chill for a pretty mysterious opening. Is this a dream like trip through hypertime that Batman takes on his journey between worlds? Are the various deaths he experiences a piece of his journey through Darkseid’s Omega Sanction? Or is it just an excuse for Gaiman to get a bunch of characters he likes together and tell some fun stories about Batman.

I haven’t written that much about Gaiman on this blog, but I do love his work. Sandman was the first long form comics series I read, and I still think it’s one of the high points of the medium. I was debating at the New York Comicon who the fourth best writer in comics is, with everyone having the foregone conclusion that Moore, Gaiman and Morrison are the top three. I can’t argue with that, Gaiman doesn’t write that many comics, but what he writes is usually really strong. 1602 didn’t work so well, but I’ve liked pretty much everything else I read by him in comics.

I’d still love to see Gaiman get to conclude his Miracleman run. I’ve only read “The Golden Age,” and there he did the near impossible of following up on Alan Moore’s legendary run in a way that didn’t step on what Moore had created, and only served to deepen and expand the universe. It’s a shame the series has been trapped in legal limbo for so long, one day, hopefully Gaiman will be able to finish the story.

When reading a Grant Morrison comic, the thing that overwhelms you is the amount of ideas. In Final Crisis, there’s a dozen cool concepts littered on every page and you can’t believe that he has this vast store in his mind to draw from. With Gaiman’s work, what has always amazed me is the huge amount of stories. Sandman knitted together its larger story with countless standalone stories. Where do they all come from? This issue is similar to a lot of Sandman arcs in that it uses a gathering of a bunch of people as a framing device for various smaller tales, each from a notable member of Batman’s supporting cast.

I’m not sure what the end result of all this will be. How can all these different incarnations of the characters be there together? I think it’s the perfect thing to tie in with the Omega Sanction, that this is Bruce’s hallucinatory journey through a series of different lives and deaths, watching all his friends betray him and leaving him utterly alone. Selina, particularly this Earth 2 version, and Alfred have always been allies of Bruce, why would they kill him?

The Selina story covers a piece of the Batman mythology that I love, but hasn’t really been touched on in either of my two favorite comics Batman stories, Morrison’s Batman RIP or Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again. The uncertain flirtatious relationship between Selina and Bruce, Batman and Catwoman, can be great because it explores the thin line between Batman and the criminals he hunts. If Catwoman can so easily switch sides from good to bad, why can’t Bruce do the same thing, and, could he find himself on the other side without even meaning to be there?

The relationship is most brilliantly explored in what is still the finest Batman film, Batman Returns. There, we see Bruce go one step further than he does in this comic and offer to throw away the Batman persona and settle down with Selina, only to have his image of an idyllic homelife rejected. The two of them need that fire to be together, they aren’t normal, and can only really be together as Batman and Catwoman. One of the things I love about the film is Selina’s defiant rejection of his offer of a classic heteronormative dream life, marriage to the most eligible bachelor in Gotham, a good looking guy who’s also incredibly rich. She has moved beyond that world now, and doesn’t play by their rules.

Wonder Woman is so messed up in a history of bondage and power/subservience, I’d argue that Catwoman is DC’s real feminist hero. Sure, she may be a villain some of the time, but the character argues for a rejection of traditional feminine roles, and the embrace of a new kind of independent lifestyle. I’d really like to see Morrison’s take on the character in his next batch of issues.

Catwoman’s story here is largely about the impossibility of being together with Batman, primarily because he has his way of doing things, and doesn’t see much room for someone with her own approach. He is attracted to her when she’s a criminal, but when she tries to fight crime, he just chastises her for doing it “wrong.”

Here, Selina does achieve the kind of domestic dream that she rejected in Batman Returns, but she gradually loses the fire that drove her as time goes on. In letting Batman die on the couch, she is making it possible for her to kill herself. As long as he was out there, there was always the hope he’d come back to her, and things could be like they were. When he comes back and she finds out that he knew she was there all the time, but never chose to see her, she decides that it would be best to let them both die together. Only, she’s too scared to do herself, and instead she just watches the man she loved, a piece of herself, die.

The Alfred story is also extremely interesting. It works fine as a straight up elseworlds type story, but I’d argue it functions more as Alfred exercising his guilt for enabling Bruce’s delusions over the years. In letting Bruce become Batman, Alfred indirectly upped the ante in the crime stakes, and paved the way for supercriminals like The Joker. We see that dramatized here with the story of Alfred literally creating supervillains as a way to make Bruce feel better.

The whole story feels a bit like the portions of Watchmen that discussed how much better it felt to go out in costume when the villains were wearing costumes too. If Alfred hadn’t created ‘The Riddler,’ Bruce might have gotten over his depression naturally and given up the illusion of being Batman. But, Alfred kept raising the stakes to keep him happy, and eventually the illusion he’d constructed spun out of control.

And, as time went on, the illusion became real, which is discussed in the scene with Bruce and Alfred at the window. The fight against evil is real, therefore the evil itself must be real as well. The whole story is interesting in light of the rampant speculation that Alfred was the force behind the Black Glove, and also in light of the idea that Bruce was his own worst enemy, another possible candidate for Black Glove status. Batman RIP was largely concerned with the idea that only Batman himself could come up with a villain powerful enough to defeat him. This story would take place early in Batman’s career and play off the idea of Batman and The Joker as symbiotic entities, each becoming more violent and powerful in response to each other, riding together on an inextricable path towards destruction.

I’m still not sure what the overall setup for the story is, but this was a great, really dense issue that brought back memories of just how good a comics writer Gaiman can be. This is stronger than 1602 or Eternals, and it made me wish that he’d jump back on an ongoing, or just do some more work in the DCU or anything. I want more Gaiman comics. But, for now, this two parter will do.

New York Comicon 2009: Day 2 and 3

Besides seeing the Joss Whedon panel yesterday, I saw a bunch of other stuff at the comicon. On Saturday, I went to the Torchwood panel. Eve Myles and director Euros Lyn were there. They screened a trailer/EPK type promo piece for the season. To be honest, it looks okay, but not that impressive.

I’m not that big a fan of Torchwood in general. It feels stuck in that Angel season one mode of heavy, way too serious and self consciously dark standalone episodes that never really add together. The second season had some good episodes, but the finale was botched by condensing what should have been a two or three episode arc into one episode. Angel found its voice by going more operatic and over the top, which huge, sweeping arcs and sustained character development. This season is one big story, which could work. But, the trailer looks like more of the same.

Still, it was nice see Eve Myles there, and she was pretty funny throughout. There wasn’t any huge news out of the panel. PC Andy will be in the season, and Rhys will have a bigger role. No Mickey or Martha though, disappointing after the tease in the Who finale. I’ll definitely be watching, but Torchwood just isn’t as good as I’d like it to be.

On Saturday, I also had the chance to speak to Chris Claremont for a little bit. He was promoting his new series, X-Men Forever. He said that the series would explore the question of why no mutants ever get old. The promo material looked pretty nice, I’ve got a signed poster on my wall now, and it’s got the best X-costumes since Quitely’s. These outfits find a nice balance between the superhero style of the past and the civilian style Morrison had. They look like regular clothes versions of the characters’ old style spandex outfits. So, Gambit’s got a black coat, a suit and a pink shirt instead of the pink body armor thing. Rogue wears a green vest over a black shirt, that sort of thing. I wish the poster was online, but I can’t find it anywhere.

He also had pages from an upcoming series called X-Women with Milo Manara. It’s supposed to be out in the summer, and the preview art looked gorgeous. I read Manara’s story in Sandman: Endless Nights, and this story has the same really detailed line work as he had there. Claremont’s worked with a lot of journeyman artists, but he’s also had some great collaborations with people like Art Adams or Paul Smith. It’s nice to see him get to work with a real topline talent on this one.

I also spoke briefly with Louise Simonson and heard a few stories about working on X-Men back in the day. Since I was there ostensibly to work with Sequart and promote my Invisibles book, I didn’t go for any sketches or anything like that. Trying to keep it professional now, y’know?

Anyway, part of that is the next book that I’m working on. Expanding significantly on my blog posts from a while back, I’m going to be doing an analytical look at the Chris Claremont X-Men from Giant Size to X-Men #3, with side looks at relevant sections of X-Factor and New Mutants, and the various minis. It’s a huge project, but I think it’s a hugely important piece of comics history that hasn’t been thoroughly covered, so I’m taking on the task. I’m planning on interviewing Claremont and Simonson, and hopefully other relevant people, as part of the process, and possibly doing a companion documentary as well. We’ll see what develops, but I’m hoping to have that book completed and available for purchase at the next New York Comicon in 2010.

As for The Invisibles book, the title is now going to be Our Sentence is Up: Seeing The Invisibles, it’ll be in the August previews, and available in stores in October. So, look for that.

So, this weekend, I picked up a ton of X-Factor and New Mutants issues to fill in the gaps, and I’m pretty close to having all the books I need to cover for this era. I also got two volumes of Frank Miller Daredevil, which I’ve never read, and am excited to check out.

The con was certainly missing something without Morrison, but it was fun nonetheless, and just zipped by. I was really tired at the end of it, but it was a great three days.

Dollhouse: The Ten Minute Preview

I’ll cover more general stuff about the New York Comicon later today, but I first wanted to write up the Joss Whedon panel, and in particular, the ten minute opening act of the Dollhouse pilot that was screened.

It’s been a long time since Joss had a show on TV. I didn’t watch Buffy until after the series had ended, but I did catch up to Angel in the last season, and I remember how awesome it was to be able to see new Joss every week. That feeling will be back this Friday, a night that will feature one of the best blocks of TV of all time, with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles segueing in to either a rejuvenated Friday Night Lights or Dollhouse, then on to Battlestar Galactica. That’s a lot of TV for one night.

I think expectations are very high for Dollhouse. The longer someone’s away, the more you forget about their flaws. Buffy and Angel, great as they became, all had very shaky and uneven first seasons. Watching on a weekly basis, I doubt I would have made it through the first year of Buffy, but seen as part one of a much larger narrative, it’s easier to accept the flaws and move along. But, with Dollhouse, we don’t know what it will become, and people will be judging it against the heights and depth of Buffy or Angel right from the beginning.

That said, it does start very strong. The series begins with a slightly stilted scene that shows us a brief glimpse of the pre Dollhouse Echo, then plunges us right into the world of her missions. I really like the energy and immediacy of the pilot. Eliza Dushku, as Faith, had an energy and reckless abandon that no other character in the Buffyverse did. She was all action, not introspection, and that quality comes across in the first few minutes, where we condense an action packed weekend into one scene that shows us the kind of life she leads.

From there, we delve into the Dollhouse itself and see the process of wiping her memory. The scenes do have some flaws. There’s some obviously expositiony dialogue, the kind of “As you know” style of characters telling each other things they should all know already. There’s also a few forced Whedonisms, like when Echo talks about the flaw of the clean slate metaphor, the fact that no slates actually are clean. And, a reference to a carriage turning into a pumpkin that bothers me since I feel like it’s an overused cliché.

That said, the thing that jumped out to me about the series was the ambience and aura surrounding everything. The premise is full of interesting philosophical questions, and I think that the first ten minutes bring these to the fore in an interesting way. There’s a line where one guy says that they wipe their minds, and the ‘dolls’ can live a worry free life, everyone’s dream. Is it better to just forget the bad parts of your life and exist in a happy haze? Probably not for everyone, but for some people, most definitely.

A lot of my favorite works of fiction combine heavy philosophical questions with over the top pop action. The Invisibles or The Matrix: Reloaded both walk that line, the former more skillfully than the latter. I’m more interested in characters and ideas than imposed narratives, and if this show can manage to work the way these first ten minutes do and downplay traditional narrative in favor of compressed hyperpop moments that raise questions to think about, it could be amazing. I’m guessing that the main show will have a more normalized feel, and according to promo material, at least the first seven episodes are standalone stories. But, with Whedon, I’m sure they have building consequences and purpose beyond simply the need to fill an hour.

When I say narrative doesn’t interest me, I mean that I don’t want to see a story of the week that raises some questions and then answers them. I hate procedural shows and most mysteries because they’re all about a constant character interacting with elements that change over the course of the episode and then disappear. To some extent, that sort of storytelling is intrinsic to this series. The character that Eliza plays will always disappear at the end of an episode, and she won’t remember what happened. How is it possible to make us care about her then, outside of an abstract interest in her as a philosophical object? That’s the trick of the show, and I’m sure a lot of her arc will involve her gradually rediscovering her own humanity, and having to deal with the consequences of that.

Speaking after the clip, Joss and Tahmoh Penikett did a bunch of joking around, and fielded the usual “I love your work…oh my god I’m so nervous…you’re awesome, ok, um, I’m a screenwriter, what should I do to make good scripts?” type questions, but along the way Joss talked quite a bit about the inherently contradictory nature of the material, how it can simultaneously be perceived as a feminist critique of a culture that objectifies women, and an objectification of women. Certainly, the promotional material plays off of this, using a naked Eliza in the context of what looks almost like in universe advertising for the Dollhouse itself, but also sells the show as a similar experience to what the Dollhouse itself offers, an hour with this beautiful woman who can be anything you want.

The concept is full of contradictions like that, and you could easily read the real Dollhouse as Joss himself, putting people through their paces in roles created by him to play out what are to some extent his own fantasies. I’ve talked a lot before about the similarities between Chris Claremont and Whedon, and this premise feels right out of that dirty recess of Claremont’s mind that keeps going back to mind control and submissive/dominant role playing type scenarios. Whedon is a bit more upfront about his feminist intentions, and exploring the contradictions, but he’s in that same place as Claremont, simultaneously creating strong female characters and then putting them in situations where they’re made utterly powerless.

I also think that there’s nothing wrong with exploring those things in fiction, or real life if it’s between consenting adults. Our identities are all constructs, created to fit the mold of what’s acceptable in society, and what happens when our desires conflict with society? In the case of Dollhouse, it seems that the rich and powerful will be able to play out their fantasies through these people, and in that sense, the clients are just as interesting, if not more so, than the dolls themselves. In reality, you’d probably wind up with a bunch of old, ugly, rich men hiring these people, but in TV, it seems that you’ve got more eccentric, wealthy young men doing the hiring.

So, I’m a lot more excited for the show than I was before seeing it. The first ten minutes were far superior to any Whedon pilot to date. It almost feels like an entire episode is compressed into that first act, and I think by that first commercial, the major ideas and narrative drive is laid out, so we can then segue into something like the second episode when we presumably see more of the characters and they go on another mission. The show is already begging for analytical treatment, and even more than Whedon’s other works, it’s got a complex philosophical question at its center. He said that his other shows were about conveying messages and he was clearly behind those messages, but here, he’s a lot more uncertain about the central mission, and the show doesn’t exist as a polemic to convince you of anything.

Other highlights from the Q&A included him and Tahmoh riffing on some Battlestar stuff, a promise of more Doctor Horrible in the future and the advice that if you want to make a movie or write for TV, don’t wait for someone to hire you, just make it. Very sage words. He also mentioned that the retooling process happened partially because he didn't know the show yet. But, elements of the original pilot are sprinkled throughout other episodes, and that by the end of the season, they sync back up with the original plans, and that the season apparently ends on a really high note. It sounded to some extent like the first few episodes are a network concession, and that the real core of the show comes out at the end of the season, when the storytelling becomes more serialized. He also said that, much like with Buffy, the end of the season brings things to a solid resting place, so if the show doesn't continue, it doesn't sound like we'll be stuck with an awful cliffhanger. Well, I’m eager to see the rest of the Dollhouse pilot on Friday, look for a full review then. If the ten minutes raised this many questions, I’m sure the full episode will raise even more.