Dollhouse Ends

And it's an awfully strange ending. In a lot of ways, the second-to-last episode felt like the real ending to the series. The final episode is a sequel to an episode that never aired--the infamous extra episode that was added to the DVD--that felt almost like an imaginary possible future. Much of the second season is filled with portents that only make sense if you've seen that episode, and in the final episode, that imaginary, possible future becomes established history, and we see the aftermath.

And once more (with feeling), Joss does the same thing he did with Tara in Buffy and Wash in "Serenity" and proves himself the master of the out-of-nowhere beloved character death. Bastard.

Dollhouse was not a show that I was looking forward to before it premiered, but it was amazing how this show about high-tech prostitutes convincingly morphed into a show that addressed basic concepts of personhood and simultaneously became an action-drama about the end of civilization. And if the final episode featured some Frank Miller-style over-the-top silliness, it also contained some touching drama and a fitting end for a series that became much more than it appeared to be at first.

I look forward to Joss's next project.

Dollhouse Winding Up

Watched the latest episode of Dollhouse yesterday. All I can say is...

Dude.

I'm sad that Dollhouse is ending after this season. But one perhaps-positive side-effect is that it has forced Joss Whedon to get his story moving. So many shows with an overall mystery arc pad and stretch that story unbearably, hoping to make it last for as long as the show needs to last.

The first halves of both seasons of Dollhouse had touches of that. In a sense, we needed that gradual build-up, especially in the first season, to ingrain the basic concepts in us and let us get to know and like the characters before it started hitting us with all the action later. The first half of this season slowed down some, and it's necessary to slow down sometimes. And maybe Whedon thought he had time to take it easy. Maybe he thought that the word-of-mouth buzz that saved the show late in the first season would let him continue for a good long while.

But it didn't happen. Fox announced they were canceling the show, and now Whedon is rushing through the second half of the season, trying to wrap up the story he meant to tell over a period of maybe years.

And in one sense, maybe it's going a little too fast. But in another sense, you wish other shows had felt the same type of urgency (I'm looking at you, Prison Break--yeah, don't try to hide in the back, you know I'm right). And I've got to admit, the ride is exhilarating.

Oh, yeah, and Chuck returns tonight. I'm afraid the shark, she has been jumped with this one, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Jazzed

Came back from my Monday night game to discover that both Dollhouse and Chuck have been renewed for next season. So I'm pretty pumped. I'll miss Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Life, but really, having these two back when I'd almost given up hope more than makes up for it.

Seems like someone at Fox finally figured out that it's better to have a show like Dollhouse with a small, but devoted fan following in the Friday night death slot than keep wasting time and money spinning the wheel, trying to find something that hits big. And I mean, let's face it, part of the reason the ratings were so low (and going lower) for Dollhouse this season was not due to the show itself, but due to fans' lack of confidence in Fox to give the show a fighting chance. Several Whedon fans I know refused to watch it this season, simply because they were convinced that Fox would stomp it deader than Firefly as soon as they got hooked. Maybe they'll actually be tempted to watch now that the show has been given a reprieve.

On the other hand, Chuck (which came to a roaring climax this season) is either poised for greatness or standing on the dock with rope in hands, waiting for the speedboat to tow him out to the shark. Seriously, the final twist of the season has great potential to ruin the show. But I sincerely hope not. The show has been a ridiculously fun bright spot on Monday nights, and I hope this new direction doesn't kill its charm.

Dollhouse

Season one (and possibly only) of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse is now over, and I have to say, damn!

By which I mean the good kind of damn, because the show turned out much better than I expected (I was underwhelmed by the premise), but also the bad kind of damn, because it is almost certainly cancelled, although there's been no official announcement as far as I know.

In some ways, it's tempting to blame Whedon's strategy for rolling out this show. In reaction to what happened to Firefly (where Fox showed the episodes out of order in an attempt to hook the audience early with more action-packed episodes), Whedon structured season one of Dollhouse with several self-contained storylines up front, attempting to run a series of "mini-pilots" that could stand alone no matter what order they were shown in. And it's true that early ratings weren't very good and critical reaction to those standalone episodes was mixed.

But when the series really started to hit its stride and bring together the separate threads of those first few episodes, the ratings continued to drop steadily. So whatever hooked me in and got me geeking out over a show I thought was fairly ho-hum at first apparently did not have the same effect on the vast majority of the audience out there.

It's too bad, because the show hinted at a lot of possibilities that I'd like to see them explore. And the characters revealed unsuspected depths in the final few episodes that cry out to be developed further.

TV Round-up

I still haven't watched last night's shows, so the Chuck and Heroes impressions aren't completely up-to-date, but oh well...

I don't watch Bones, but I have enjoyed some of the episodes I've watched. However, the other day, I decided to watch the recent episode involving the death of a woman in a Renfaire-looking outfit. Turns out, it was a booth babe from a science-fiction convention. I can't believe how awful it was.

The main character, Brennan, is supposed to be this brainiac who's a little out of touch with the everyday world, but they were having her miss even the most obvious of "Star Wars" references, like some alien in a 50's B-picture. I mean, I halfway expected her to say, "Is this one of your Earth jokes?" Plus, the vibe around the convention and the characterization of the fans bore only the slightest resemblance to any kind of fan activity I've ever seen. Chuck would have gotten at least a little of it right.

For instance, Chuck's big episode after the break, "Chuck vs. the Third Dimension," had Chuck protecting a rock star. Now the rock star just happens to be played by the most famous hobbit rock star ever, Dominic Monaghan of "The Lord of the Rings" and Lost. But the rock star's name is Tyler Martin, which was just incredibly weird, because the day before I watched this episode, I listened to an interview with Tyler Martin, web-cartoonist and developer of the Comicpress plug-in for Wordpress, which I use on the Hero Go Home site (Boom! Review of TV show turns into reference to obscure geek hero turns into plug for my own site! Trifecta!). Maybe they weren't giving a nod to that Tyler Martin, but Chuck is just geek-aware enough that they could have been.

Interesting nod toward plausibility in the newest episode of Chuck. One of the problems with Chuck's premise is that he was infected with this huge intelligence database that was then destroyed. Now Chuck's got all the intel in his head. But intel goes stale after a while. What you knew about someone three weeks or months or years ago might not be relevant to what they're doing now. So Chuck has to get updated every now and then or else all he's got is a head full of old secrets that are currently useless.

So in the latest Chuck, he gets reinfected with an evil version of the Intersect database. However, this one comes from a computer with the latest high-speed datalines running into the building, not from an email attachment sent from a cell phone. Better.

Fox has a new show called Lie to Me. It's a mystery series starring Tim Roth as a guy who has spent his life studying lies and the way people act when they're telling them. So the camera is always focusing on twitches the actors make as they deliver their dialogue. It's a pretty good show, but the dialogue between the main characters gets awfully tiresome. (note: this is not actual dialogue from the show)

Character 1: What's wrong?

Character 2: Nothing.

Character 1 (pointing at 2's face): No! See? Right there. Mouth shrug indicating deception. You're lying. And I know what you're lying about!

Character 2 (pointing back): Ha! One-sided shrug! You don't know and you're just fishing.

Character 1: Maybe I don't. But something's wrong and you want to tell me.

Character 2: No, I don't. I'm fine.

Character 1 (pointing): Ha! Smiled with your mouth and not your eyes. Liar!

God, give it a rest.

Heroes continues to be Heroes, half-awesome, half-annoying-as-all-get-out. The characters are now fugitives from a government pogrom, which is led by the The Flying Senator who has turned Judas Goat. They've managed to make Suresh less ridiculous than in the "Villains" arc, but they've stolen Hiro's powers and turned him into a petulant whiny brat. I don't want petulant whiny Hiro. I want a Hiro who's on his way to being the ass-kicker we saw back in Season One, with the silly soul-patch and the katana slung across his back.

Other than that, Terminator is back and Dollhouse has premiered. I like what I've so far of Dollhouse, but I'll wait until after the third episode before I give my impressions.