I’d really been looking forward to this episode. In fact a couple of days before I dreamed that I’d watched it and in my dream I thought “That was good, but not as much Sierra as I was expecting”.¹ As we were sitting down to watch Belonging I said “At this stage my expectations are so high that if this episode doesn’t change my life it’s going to be a let-down.” I’m not saying it changed my life, but it certainly wasn’t a let-down.

********************

You know how good this episode was? The fact that it contained 0% Paul Ballard isn’t even on my top ten list of awesomeness. But, before we begin, lets have a moment of ‘Yay’ for the absence of Ballard. I don’t even need to choose my favourite character of the episode by who insults him the most.²

Everyone was their best in this episode, including Eliza Dushku. I know some people aren’t interested in the character Echo – but I always have been. From the first episode I have liked both Echo and Eliza’s performance. And this was a very fine episode on both counts. There are real subtleties in the differences in the way Echo interacts with people now. I loved that they drew out Echo’s growing understanding of language with Topher’s ‘they’re in my shirt’ line.

This season she’s been a bit closed off and inaccessible – as Boyd said she’s learned how to lie. How deep a game is she playing? How much is she conscious of what she was doing. Did she just want to help Sierra, or did she also want to change Topher? Is she using the doll persona as an act? It’s a challenge, both acting and directing, to take this path of her development, but at the moment I’m finding it very satisfying.

My favourite aspect of it all is that Echo is doing a great job of organising in the dollhouse – she’s got Boyd and Ballard completely committed to covering for her, Victor and Sierra developing their solidarity,³ and she even seems to be able to get Topher to do what she wants. After her individualism in Echoes and Needs, I’m really appreciating that. Next I’d like to see her actually talk to Sierra – there’s so much potential just sitting there with that friendship – make it happen writers.

Although in this episode, I even appreciated her individual acts of resistance: reading and writing. The leaf as her only book mark, really emphasised how much what is taken from people is the ability to experience time, to grow and to learn – to read one page and then another. The notes that she left herself on the lid of her pod are heart-breaking. Not just because they’re so simple - the ‘Victor loves Sierra’ ‘Sierra loves Victor’ couple could have been written on a school toilet. But because of how hard she’s fighting to retain what was done to her. “Friends help each other”

I finally liked Boyd again – give that character something to do other than punch people and pass moral judgements and I start to enjoy him. Although I felt like he was given a little bit too on the nose dialogue “so she can remember”, “now the lies begin” and “She does [belong in the dollhouse] now”. From an episode of TV point of view all of this felt unnecessary and a little insulting to the audience. As a character trait it makes him pompous – which doesn’t go well with morally judgemental (and completely hypocritical). But I’m so happy he got something to do that I’ll ignore it.

Dr Saunders was being felt in her absence this episode. We learned that she had projected her own feelings on to Sierra. Claire hated Topher so much, that she missed what was happening to Sierra. In turn, Topher was driven, on some level, by proving the absent Claire wrong, and that desire not to be the bad man took him far further than he knew how to deal with.

The whole episode was very well shot (and I don’t usually notice that sort of thing until I’m listening to a DVD commentary and Joss tells me that a scene is a oner and I go ‘oh’ and feel knowledgeable), but the first Topher scene where we saw him through his magnifying lens was particularly brilliant. The dialogue and image worked together to make it clear that he is on the path to Epitaph One. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the events of this week affect him.

And a special shout-out to ‘this is your brain on drugs’⁴ Fran Kranz is just amazing in every way – to deliver such a silly line so perfectly in the same ep as he signalled Topher’s eventual downfall, and his present uncertainty followed by pain, is skill indeed.

I’ve always found the relationships between the staff at the dollhouse fascinating, and I love that they developed Topher by developing his relationships. I was glad that they built on Boyd and Topher’s relationship, it brings out the interesting in both of them. As for Adelle and Topher - I found Adelle’s creepy maternal/sexual vibe with him just as disturbing as it was supposed to be: “You have no morals so I’m going to touch your face.” I can’t wait to see where they take that.

I was unsure, at first, what I felt about our main characters being ignorant about what had happened with Sierra. The end of Needs was obvious Retconned – when Dr Saunders and Boyd talked about the man who took away Sierra’s power, they meant Nolan. And the new interpretation is a bit of a stretch. But that wasn’t my problem – I felt unsure about all of them being so clearly anti-Nolan. It felt a little clean, a little artificial, a little like they couldn’t slip below a certain level on the ‘likeability scale.’

The more I think about it, the more I’m glad the writers did it this way. I think it was stretching credulity a little bit for everyone to be “I know we took dolls from prison, dolls who explicitly said “I have no choice” and dolls so ill that they couldn’t possibly give consent, but we must do something about Sierra.” But (as Joss Whedon says on the DVD commentary to the Serenity pilot) everyone believes their righteous. Not jut in the dollhouse, everyone who is exploiting or abusing someone is a hero in their own life. To be able to tell a story that shows the range of ways people can react when they discover that they were wrong – that their abuse and exploitation is just that – is what makes Dollhouse so great.

Priya’s origin story (as Adelle and Topher saw it originally), also tells us a lot about the Dollhouse’s view of consent. Of the six dolls that we have any idea why and how they came to the dollhouse three (Caroline, Alpha and the guy from Echoes) were facing jail. The other three all appeared to the Dollhouse to be mentally ill, and not coping with that. We don’t know how lucid either Madeline or Victor were, but it’s clear that they took Priya when she was completely unable to give informed consent. Adelle is used to this, she is the one who give Caroline the contract after she says “I don’t have a choice” She is at least partially aware of the lies she is telling herself. That is why she chose not to fight on this one, even if she couldn’t do it sober.

Another interesting aspect of the relationship between the staff and the dolls was in the tiny call-back to Haunted. Topher told Sierra she was allowed beer – on special occasions – the last time we’d seen her with beer was at his birthday – when she was his friend. Like Adelle, Topher seems to protect, to care for, to identify with, the dolls that he’s interacted with. Even interacting with an imprint that has been constructed for their needs, makes the workers in the dollhouse see the dolls as more human.

But this story wasn’t about Echo, or Adelle, it wasn’t even about Topher or Sierra, it was about Priya. We’d only seen snippets of her before, but they’d been very compelling snippets, particularly in Epitaph One. From the very beginning of this episode, with the jewelry selling scene on the beach, Priya seemed so real. When she said to Nolan: “I don’t have a work visa ‘do-do-do’” – it was such a silly, little, normal moment. It made the rest of the episode even harder.

When I mentioned that this episode was going to be about Sierra, my friend was all ‘Does she get to kill Nolan?’⁵ Dollhouse is, among many other things, a story about the nature of fantasy. This episode didn’t have an engagement, but it did have a fantasy –– the fantasy of killing your rapist. Or, in the case of the viewer, watching someone else kill their rapist. Dollhouse has given this before – the fact that Mellie was being controlled by Adelle didn’t make it any less satisfying when she broke Hearn’s neck. But that was the fantasy of killing a rapist – we didn’t watch Mellie dealing with the body, the police, or the effects on her of killing someone.⁶

Belonging wasn’t the fantasy of killing a rapist, there was a body and it traumatised Priya even more. The fight was messy, Priya had a normal person’s strength and was lucky. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who shouted at the screen “Topher couldn’t you have helped by providing her with Kung Fu skills. But it wouldn’t have worked if he had. And after there was blood, a body, and very few options. There were still fantasy elements – Boyd arrived on cue with body disposal skills, but it was the reality, not the fantasy that we were left with. The scene, or story, didn’t end with her stabbing him.

I’m not saying it’s not satisfying to watch women killing rapists, because it is. But it fills an emotional need, an expression of our anger, life doesn’t work that way. I was really glad we saw just a bit more of the picture.

In an episode this brilliant, there was only one moment missing. Why did Priya go back to the Dollhouse? When I think about it, I can see why she would feel as if going back was her only option. But as I was watching it for the first time, I kept get pulling out of the story and asking why?

I think there are lots of answers to that question – actually that’s the problem, there are too many reasons (she was coerced by Topher and Boyd, she didn’t feel able to go on the run, she wanted out of her life). When I first watched the episode, it felt disjointed and unsure. When I thought about it (and rewatched it a fourth or fifth time) I put myself in Priya’s head, and going back made emotional sense to me.

I think conveying to the audience that Sierra was going to go back to the dollhouse in a conversation between Boyd and Topher was a mistake. We should have learned that with Priya – then her reasons would have been our reasons, and I think it would have made more sense. It could have been as simple as Topher telling Priya that she was microchipped – we only needed a beat, but the beat they gave us didn’t work for me.

Which isn’t to say Priya going back was simple, or should have been portrayed as such. The scene between Topher and Sierra at the end was so powerful, because thre was so much going on (and both Fran Kranz and Dichen Lachman kicked their incredible performances up a notch for that scene). She wanted her memories gone, and she didn’t care about the price (‘if you wake me up again’), but there was also determination, and even hope. In the end her story was about the complexity of survival.

It wasn’t ‘empowering’ (how I hate that word). But it was real, which is far more important.

As well as having just the right amount of Paul Ballard, this episode had almost enough Victor and Sierra. I’m obviously on record as a Victor/Sierra Shipper (Vierra? Sictor?). But my one concern has been the way the relationship was set up. It seemed to rinforce men as desiring/women as desired dynamic. I always believed that the relationship was reciprocal, but there was little textual evidence of that. There had been a scene of Sierra enjoying looking at Victor in episode 4, but they cut it out.⁷

Which was what made the art gallery scene so glorious. It became clear that Sierra been attracted to Victor, just as long as Victor had been attracted to Sierra. ⁸ Everything about their interaction was charming, without being ridiculous ‘love-at-first sight’.

But, sweet as it was, that was nothing compared with what followed. As I said during Man on the Street, one of the most powerful aspects of Sierra’s storyline is the portrayal of institutional abuse. Even more importantly, Sierra’s pain would have remained invisible if she didn’t have friends. The role that Echo and Victor played in making Sierra’s experiences public⁹ and supporting her was beautiful.

Echo wasn’t the only one who had a plan; Victor saw the black paint as something he could deal with (and probably his plan was less likely to have negative effects of Sierra than Echo’s). The scene in the shower was lovely in so many ways, his earnestness – their playfulness.¹⁰ Then we saw Victor’s vulnerability as well, and Sierra comforted him.

They have such an equal, reciprocal relationship (particularly now they’ve shown us the origins). I really like that. Just like I was relieved when Victor didn’t ‘invent rape’ I love the idea that in a world that doesn’t use gender as a system of control, relationships would look different.

But what was most powerful about this episode was it’s depiction of love. What I think is so beautiful about Sierra and Victor’s love is it’s simplicity. “I’ll wait here” and he does, and until she comes back every time the camera cuts to him it breaks your heart. They like being together, they want to help each other, they make each other feel better. On some level love (and I don’t just mean romantic love or love paired with sexual attraction here) is that simple.

In real life, the simplicity of love is often only really apparent in times of great stress, or absolute relaxation. All the rest of the time messy life stuff gets in the way. But the feeling is still there. The feeling that you would get the black paint pots of your friends, families and lovers and wash them out if only you knew how, the desire for someone to wait about the bottom of the stairs – those are the reasons Victor and Sierra’s relationship resonates.

The episode is incredibly sad, but the ending is beautiful. The way the dolls walked into their pods at the end of Needs was heartbreaking. They’re not doing that anymore. Their acts of resistance are intimacy and retaining information. It won’t be enough – the dolls won’t bring down the dollhouse this way. Like most institutions they’ve learned if they loosen their control it makes it easier to maintain their power. But in the meantime, it keeps Echo, Sierra and Victor strong enough to keep fighting.

1. I never used to dream about television, but since watching the Joss commentary on Restless where he describes having dreams where you watch movies and they’re weird as, I’ve had dreams like that twice. That Joss is part of not just the content, but the form of my dreams is probably just predictable at this point. (back)
2. If you didn’t know who my favourite character of the episode is you a) haven’t been paying attention to my reviews and b) Didn’t watch that episode. (back)
3. in fact she seemed to be working the Anger-Hope-Action technique with Victor pretty well – not that he needs much proding to any of those things when it comes to Sierra (back)
4. It makes me want to search out the 90210 scene from the Peach Pit where Andrea is explaining this to Brandon. Television gold that was (back)
5. One of the things I’ve loved about this season is the consequences for the Johns. Of the people we know have, or planned to have, sex with an active, we’ve had two stabbings and one jailing. That’s the sort of ratio which is fun to watch, even though it throws the profitability of the whole operation into more than a little bit of doubt. (back)
6. Buffy, of course, was designed around fantasy killing rapists. The bodies went poof – there was no stress no trauma, and when men got really misogynist she cut them in half from the balls up (back)
7. If you ask me it’s worth buying the DVD just to see that scene. I’d have cut the scene of Echo being remote wiped, before I’d have cut that (back)
8. There may have been a call from the cheap seats ‘You can ask me many boring questions. It may have come from me (back)
9. and the fact that that publicity didn’t result in unmitigated improvement for Sierra’s life was very realistic (back)
10. Small quibble the ‘indian chief’ line rang a bit false to me. So far we haven’t seen dolls have any cultural references. So far dolls comprehension seems limited to the idea that Dr Saunders is nice, and they should try and be their best. Victor didn’t understand Echo’s metaphor. The idea of ‘an Indian Chief’ that Victor and Sierra seemed to share was far more specific than that (back)

Debbie Schlussel is best known for her rabid hatred of anything that can even tangentially be connected to Islam, up to and including falafel. So it’s nice to see her branching out into some good old-fashioned hatred of other things.

What has made Debbie angry? Well, it seems Disney’s messing with a character. You’d think it would be their positive portrayal of Aladdin as essentially a surfer dude that would have Debbie upset, but no — it’s far worse.

Either Disney is trying to appease “modest” Muslims or they’ve gone the way of the rest of Hollywood and are trying to make their feminine characters more masculine.

Quelle horreur! Disney’s making their feminine characters more “masculine!” Snow White has taken up the chewing tobbaccy! Ariel is arm-wrestling Aurora! Disney princesses are acting like three-dimensional characters with thoughts and desires of their own!

But worst of all…the most nefarious act…the unkindest cut…is what they’ve done to Tinker Bell!

Yes, that’s right! They’ve given Tinker Bell a different outfit to wear!

Now, you may look at that picture and say, “Wait — uh, isn’t Tinker Bell still pretty much dressed like, say, Tinker Bell might be if it was cold out? And mightn’t that be because in the new movie, it’s supposed to be fall?” Well, sure, those would be good points if you weren’t looking for proof that Hollywood is secretly trying to turn our children into the gay. But Debbie’s way ahead of you.

Yes, Disney claims that it’s new Tinker Bell release, “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure,” out on DVD on October 27th takes place in the fall when weather is cooler, but the weather has never affected Tinker Bell couture before. It’s a cartoon character, not a weather dependent human.

Yeah! She’s a cartoon character! Therefore, there’s no reason to try to make any attempt at a realistic portrayal of her. After all, if girls see that even fairies can get cold when it’s cold out, they might start questioning whether they too should put on tights with their skirt, maybe switch to boots when it’s slushy out, or put on a hat when the wind’s blowing. And it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump until they’re moving to Taxachusetts and marrying their girlfriends. Which the Muslims are, evidently, in favor of. Or something.

Now, you might be sitting there at your computer, banging your head against the keyboard, saying, “Jeff, I mean, not only is Tinker Bell not dressed like a linebacker, she isn’t even dressed in such a way that challenges conventional beauty norms! Far from being dressed like a lumberjack, she’s dressed…well, actually, still pretty scantily!” Well, sure, but Debbie thinks she’s not dressed scantily enough, and this will turn your daughter gay.

There’s nothing wrong with rebranding something to keep up with the times, but turning a charming, cute girly character into some masculine, butch action star is stupid. Unless your audience is strictly WNBA. And that’s called mass-market suicide.

See? Debbie doesn’t want your daughters becoming butch or masculine, and for that reason, we need to make sure that Tinker Bell is displayed in as sexy a way as possible, so that girls can see how hot she is. Because…that will keep girls from becoming fans of the WNBA, like those people.

If you’re a parent who thinks the new covered up version is a welcome change in a sexualized world, think again. Tinker Bell has been wearing a skimpy dress for decades (watch the slide show). That’s what nymphs who fly around with magic wands do.

Um…Debbie? Yeah…there aren’t actually nymphs. They’re mythical creatures. Also, even if nymphs did exist, that wouldn’t mean much, as Tinker Bell is a faerie. They are also mythical. Disney is telling a story about a character that they have nearly as much ownership of as J.M. Barrie; they can kinda, sorta depict her however they want to.

Oh, and I did view the slide show, and guess what? Even Disney worked through a number of different designs before settling on the Tinker Bell we know today. Not all were dressed in skimpy outfits, some were depicted as “tomboyish,” some as akin to the Blue Fairy, some almost alien. Not to mention that Disney was adapting her from Barrie’s characterization, in which she was portrayed as a tinker, hence the name. Funny, when thinking of traditionally “feminine” jobs, tinsmith is not the job that comes first to mind.

I can’t imagine Disney redoing the cast of “The Lion King” and dressing them for the North Pole.

You can’t? I can, if they were really going to do a “Lion King Meets Santa” Christmas special. Of course, they’d never do that, because they’re in the pocket of Big Islam.

This isn’t about putting your girls in a less sexually-saturated world. It’s about putting them in a more emasculated one, where the men are girls and the Tinker Bells are men.

And that’s never a good thing. As I always say, matriarchical societies die. They simply don’t have staying power. Butch Disney characters for girls is not a positive development.

Yes, Tinker Bell is a man, because she wears leggings. And men are totally women, because…well, we never got to that, but I’m sure it’s probably because now we can’t masturbate to our children’s videos anymore. Alas.

The fact is that Tinker Bell is a female character, and would be if she was wearing hockey gear. She would be if she cut her hair in a buzz cut. She would be if she took up a job as a truck driver. She would be if she were gay. None of those things affect her gender. They only affect our picture of what gender roles are supposed to be.

Well, to hell with gender roles, if they tell women that they can’t wear warm clothes when it’s cold out. To hell with gender roles if they tell women they can’t be adventurous, can’t be athletic, can’t be “tomboys,” because that will make them less female. To hell with gender roles if they say that men must always break the paths, and suffer in silence, because it’s not a man’s job to feel. To hell with gender roles if it says anyone has to behave or dress or think or feel a certain way to simply be the person they are.

Ironically, Debbie can’t help but throw anti-Muslim barbs into even this misogynist post. Ironic, because in truth, Debbie believes exactly what the most hardened adherent to Shari’a Law believes — that men and women are fundamentally different, and that straying outside the defined gender roles for either is something that must be proscribed. It makes me wonder why she fights so hard against those with whom she so clearly agrees.

(Via S,N!)

Definites:

13 12 Monkeys.

Leading contenders:

Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Time Bandits

The “Future Echos” episode of Red Dwarf.

Groundhog Day

The “Time and Punishment” segment from Treehouse of Horror V

“Blink” from Dr. Who

Maybes:

Primer

Time Crimes

Peggy Sue Got Married

The Terminator (or maybe T2)

Back To The Future

The Prisoner of Azkiban

I’m interested in more suggestions. Eventually, I’ll whittle it down to 4-6 items.

Also, if you’re in Portland and interested in attending, let me know. :-)

Bruce Jenner is terribly, terribly upset at Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And for some reason, the Politico cares.

I think it’s only fair to run this trailer for the 1980 film Can’t Stop the Music, starring Bruce Jenner and The Village People.

The ratings aren’t looking good for Dollhouse, which is making me sad. If you’re not sold on the idea of the show this is a great fanmade site. If you want it to stay on air then they’ve got ideas of what you can here

Sorry, for the advertorial in the beginning. I can’t do anything myself you see (except write ridiculously long reviews), and I’d be really annoyed in they didn’t air episode four.

Read the rest of this entry »

In her review of the second season premiere of “Dollhouse,” Maia wrote “the scene that owned this episode was Fran Kranz and Amy Acker in a room,” but didn’t end up saying that much about the scene. (Which is fine, what Maia wrote about the rest of the episode was great).

PetPluto, in contrast, spent about half of her review discussing The Scene. I especially liked this observation: Read the rest of this entry »

So currently Dollhouse is watched by less people in Fox’s target demo than the total number of followers Felicia Day has on twitter. If you enjoy the show (or even just my reviews), then think about watching in a way that will get measured, because I can’t.

Read the rest of this entry »

This. For the win.

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen Der Untergang, I highly recommend it. It’s a masterful portrayal of the pitiful, puny end of the Third Reich — in many ways, the sort of end a megalomaniac like Hitler must have despised. I hope so, anyhow.

The following post contains an extended discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds. There will be spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film, please enjoy this short video from the 1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers. Otherwise, feel free to click below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Wright gives us a little bit of sublime:

Incidentally, that is William Shatner talking about the opening to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a movie that most fans of Trek argue never actually happened. (Much like Rocky V and both Matrix sequels. They never happened. It was all a dream. Don’t you feel better now?)

Still, even in a movie that is best disappeared down the memory hole, the scene Shatner describes is a particularly egregious bit of suck. As you may recall, the movie opens with Capt. James Tiberius Kirk climbing El Capitan, only to fall off to certain doom. Spock, in an amazingly blunt bit of foreshadowing, uses anti-gravity boots to intercept the falling Kirk just before he hits the ground. Hooray!

Except, of course, for physics, the laws of which ye canna’ change. Kirk was probably falling at close to terminal velocity when Spock grabbed him by the ankle; assuming that his ankle wouldn’t have simply pulled off, Kirk’s brain most certainly wouldn’t have stopped moving at the same time his body did, leading to almost certain death from blunt force injuries.

Granted, Trek has never worried about physics when it got in the way of a good story, Montgomery Scott’s protests aside. But even so, this was a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, one that set the tone for the dumbest of all the Trek movies. The only good thing about the movie was that it gave us this exchange from “Futurama”:

Leonard Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.

William Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me because I respected me so much!

Truer words were never spoken.

This post uses Dollhouse as a way of examining some ideas. If you haven’t watched Dollhouse, but want to, then I recommend avoiding it, since it has some significant spoilers, and the show really will be better if you don’t know. But if you’re never going to watch Dollhouse then read ahead, you don’t need to know anything about the show to understand the post. Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to point out two excellent Dollhouse posts you should read (after you’ve read all of Maia’s Dollhouse posts here, I mean).

At Asking The Wrong Questions, Abigail discusses the original, unaired pilot episode, “Echo,” and also the unaired “Epitaph One” episode, and what they tell us about Whedon’s intention for the show (before Fox’s executives have at it).

“Echo”’s emphasis on free will or its absence has the effect of downplaying the sexual aspect of the dollhouse. My biggest problem with the seemingly endless barrage of criticism directed at Dollhouse for allegedly failing to acknowledge that the dolls are being raped is that it seemed fairly clear to me–especially from those episodes intended to move the overarching story forward like “Man on the Street” or “A Spy in the House of Love”–that in the story Whedon was trying to tell sexual rape was merely a specific instance of the greater act of rape being committed against the actives–the rape of their mind, the complete stripping away of their personality and free will.

Via Abigail, I read this excellent post at Tiger Beatdown, which is a feminist defense of Dollhouse.

Whedon has done a lot of shows about magically powerful women and the men who protect them (Buffy had Giles, River had Simon and Mal), which is sweet - hey, at least they aren’t actively seeking to take power away from those women - but also paternalistic and troubling, and in Dollhouse he seems to know and specifically address just how creepy it is. Lots of parallels have been drawn between the “handler,” Boyd, who is a protective father figure to Echo, and Giles, who is a protective father figure to Buffy, and those parallels are correct. However, this time around, Boyd is also directly invested in keeping Echo powerless: he’s the guy in the creepy van, who takes her back to the Dollhouse to have her self taken away once she’s served her purpose, and if she were a whole person, she might not need him at all. The question of whether he loves her enough to help her free herself is continually raised. Paul Ballard, the FBI agent who wants to “save” Echo, is also implicated: a hero, sure, but also weirdly and sexually preoccupied with “saving” a girl he doesn’t know so that she will love him, a person just as involved in projecting his desires onto a blank slate as any Dollhouse client. The show doesn’t steer around that fact. You don’t hate these men - you love them, in fact - but Whedon is far more willing than ever before to implicate them in the oppression that he condemns. He’s toyed with ambiguity and complicity before, but this time around, ambiguity and complicity are what the show is about.

Because then, there’s Topher, the programmer, who is responsible for constructing the artificial personalities and implanting them in the dolls, who is a dorky blonde guy just like Whedon and who speaks in distinctly Whedonian cadences and lines, and who we are encouraged to dislike more than almost anyone else in the series. What you hear, when you hear Topher speaking about how difficult it is to construct a believable personality, how all of his creations have to be full and nuanced and have reasons for how they behave, how achievement is fueled by lack and he gave her asthma because that made her a more complete person and blah blah blah, is noted feminist auteur Joss Whedon reflecting, very consciously and very obviously, on his life’s work - hiring gorgeous women and making them into who he wants them to be - and saying that sometimes, he feels kind of icky about it.

Dollhouse is interesting on all these levels, and Sady’s defense of Dollhouse is the most convincing defense I’ve read.

But I still think the show is, on the whole, kind of a failure. Fascinating themes are set up, but not stuck with and sometimes pointlessly undermined, replaced by boring cliches. For example, Sady is right that the character of Paul, in season one, is a brilliant and vicious critique of the male rescuer-hero. So why did they completely undermine that in the season finale, letting Paul become a conventional, and boring, heroic figure?

And no matter who’s fault it is (Fox’s or Joss’s), it’s impossible to ignore that too many Dollhouse episodes are not just filler, but extremely conventional filler.

Still, even though it’s a failure, it’s an interesting failure, which for me makes it TV worth watching. I’m looking forward to season 2.

Years ago, my favorite part of the Drew Carey show was the opening credits, which featured Drew, who is fat, dancing.¹ (Apparently Carey liked dancing — dance scenes were crowbarred into the story of several episodes, e.g..)

So if there’s a show featuring fat people dancing, I’ll give it a try, even if it’s a goddamn fucking weight loss show.

The dance part of the show is entertaining enough. The dancers aren’t as good as the dancers on So You Think You Can’t Dance (most of whom are professional dancers), so the choreography can’t be as interesting or challenging. But it was fun and perky, and often a lot of fun to watch.

So what about the fat politics? Well, for the most part, they’re awful. Being fat is constantly spoken of as the opposite of being healthy; that dancing, moving and eating well could be a good thing even for people who don’t lose weight isn’t even on the radar here. And, of course, the contestants are graded (or eliminated) based not only on how they dance, but on how much weight they lose. There are lots of tearful confessions connecting life goals (teaching their kids well, getting a girlfriend or boyfriend, etc) to losing weight, and the inevitable close-ups of the fat people eating fries, donuts, and the like.

So does it “work”? Do they lose weight? Of course they do. These fat people, for the weeks they’re on the show, are essentially full-time weight losers, in the most unrealistic environment imaginable. They don’t have jobs; they don’t take care of kids. They have a nutritionist, a work-out room with a dedicated trainer, and when they’re not in the work-out room, they’re dancing.

Like most weight-loss plans, it’ll work… for a while. The dancers will lose seemingly incredible amounts of weight — I’m guessing the ones who make it to the end will be 50-100 pounds lighter than their starting weight. But it’s not sustainable. Because, for the vast majority of fat weight losers, nothing is sustainable. Weight-loss plans don’t work. ²

And because this show is teaching contestants to measure victory mostly by their waistlines — not by a sense of accomplishment, or joy in movement, or good health measured in any way but weight — I worry that this will actually be bad for the dancers, in the long run, if they gain weight back and it makes them feel they’ve failed.

But it’s not all bad. Inevitably, despite itself, the show includes fat bodies moving, fat bodies being sexy, fat bodies being competent. Fat bodies, in short, dancing. It’s impossible not to notice that some of the fattest dancers, like Mara, are also the most talented. Heather MacAllister once said:³

Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it’s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.

I wouldn’t call “Dance Your Ass Off” revolutionary, or even really fat-positive. But it has fat-positive elements despite itself.

1. Actually, the show had a bunch of opening credit sequences over time, but at least a few of them were dance numbers. (back)
2. The show includes a professional con man — I mean, weight-loss doctor — as part of the cast. I’d really like to see a complete accounting of all his patients from prior to 2004, and how his services have helped them in the years since. (back)
3. Yeah, this is the second time I’ve quoted this in a month. (back)

I don’t understand my blogging habits anymore. I have thoughts, and half composed posts. Big events, blog-storms, and repulsive media trials come and go, but I just don’t prioritise writing them. But then comes a new episode of a Joss Whedon show and I’ve written thousands of words before I even know.¹

Epitaph One is the mysterious 13th episode of Dollhouse, exclusive to DVD. Why is there a mysterious 13th episode of dollhouse I hear you ask? Because Fox has spectacularly bad taste in TV. Fox didn’t like the original pilot of Dollhouse. They thought interesting might confuse people and the skirts were too long (the unaired pilot was also included on the DVD and I’m going to be reviewing that next). So then Joss wrote a new first episode (the not very good Ghost) and the original first episode was scrapped for parts (many of scenes have been inserted in subsequent episodes). Fox (the network) had ordered 13 episodes of Dollhouse, but they included the scrapped pilot in that 13. Fox (the studio) wanted 13 actual episodes to put on the DVD. They were talking about a clip show, but instead Joss and Jed and Maurissa wrote Epitaph One. It was written to be cheap (it cost half of what a normal episode cost), to use existing sets, but not to rely on the main cast (who were busy shooting the actual series).

It is an exponentially better season finale than Omega, and worth the price of the DVD. Read the rest of this entry »

1. This is one of the reasons why the ‘why do people write about X and not about Y arguments never really work for me. I think writing, and what people have something to have something to say about is a complicated process (back)

(Spoiler warning!)

1) We paid the extra couple of bucks to watch in 3-D. The 3-D was so well-done, so utterly natural and looked so good that we all stopped noticing it after the first fifteen minutes. Not really worth the money.

2) Why is everyone saying this film is such a weepy? Yes, right at the start of the film (in the film’s best sequence), the main character meets a girl, falls in love, gets married, has a long and happy lifetime with his love, and then she dies once they’re both in old age. We should all have misery like that.

Because I had heard so many “bring a hanky” comments, I really expected a major character (maybe the dog?) to die at the end of the film. This probably improved the film for me, since I actually thought a major character might die.

3) The bad: Even for Pixar, the lack of female characters in this movie is extraordinary; of two important female characters, one is the protagonist’s wife who dies in the first fifteen minutes, the other is a bird named Kevin. Why is Pixar unable to imagine a story with a female lead? Needless to say, it fails the Bechdel Test.

4) The good: The main character is elderly, which makes UP the only children’s flick I can think of to feature an old protagonist.

5) The even better: The secondary protagonist, Russell, is a fat little boy — and there isn’t a single joke about his size, anywhere in the film.¹ A positive, non-buffoon fat character with no fat jokes — That’s pretty much illegal in a children’s movie, isn’t it?

Heather MacAllister once said:

Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it’s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.

6) In addition, Russell is a positive, non-stereotypical Asian character, and the actor who did Russell’s voice, Jordon Nagai (who was seven years old when they cast the part), is also Asian-American. In a more reasonable world the race of actors doing the voices in animated films wouldn’t matter at all; but with major live-action movies casting white actors to play characters that were originally Asian (as in “21″ and “The Last Airbender”), it’s nice to see Pixar go the other way.

7) And by the way, good story, good animation, and lots of great visuals. The dog characters were pretty consistently funny, as well.

1. He does have trouble climbing a rope, but the way they depicted that didn’t emphasize his fat. (back)

While I was watching Omega I enjoyed it quite a lot. The pacing was good, and the dialogue was great – at times it was fantastic. But at the end, with the montage and music, I felt nothing. And when writing this review I’ve had very little interest in watching the episode, or even any of the individual scenes, again. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like the first part of two-part episodes. It’s fine when you’re watching them on DVD (unless it’s late and you know you shouldn’t watch another one, but you do it anyway and then it turns out to be a cliff-hanger so you have to watch the next one as well), but a week is a long-time between Echo walking out the elevator with Alpha and finding out what the hell is going on.

Or at least I don’t like the first part when I haven’t read spoilers, which has happened to me exactly once (I’ve been spoiled for every show that I was a fan of since 1995). I’m not sure that’s a good sample. But I’m sure I hate it.

But reviewing the first part of a two-parter is particularly difficult. So much of the meaning and point of this episode depends on what happens next. This episode raised far more questions than it answered, and while there is a lot to talk about, there’s a lot I won’t comment on (like who was Echo when Alpha left with her. We’ll all know in a couple of days, and speculating on it wastes precious review time that should be spent laughing at Paul Ballard). So consider this the first part of my review as there are many things that I am reserving judgement on, although my cliff-hanger won’t be as exciting as the show’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Post whatever you like, including links you like, to yourself or to someone else. If you love a link, set it free.

* * *

Kip emailed this to me, warning me that it was worth suffering through the introduction in order to see the video, which features (alleged) monks who have taken vows of silence, performing the Hallelujah Chorus. If you want to just skip the intro, skip to 1:30.

At this point, I think the character I feel most engaged with is Mellie. She doesn’t know what’s going on, she doesn’t know that she’s a doll that was programmed not to understand the word left-over. I want her to be happy and free, and she could never be either, let alone both at the same time.

I think they needed to show Paul raping November, and they definitely needed to make it that ugly. I’m glad that they showed that he had a choice, that he made a choice, but I think the story needed to turn him into what he hated, and I think it was that hatred for himself, not the dollhouse, that drove him.

What I found most powerful, about those scenes, was the speech Mellie gave

I like being with you, I love it actually. And you say everything is fine and so I’m going to stop asking if it is. If that means lying next to you while everything is not fine, then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll give you what you need, and let you take it from me. If you want to give back, give back, but it doesn’t have to mean anything.

I doubt Topher had to work hard when constructing that imprint. To find a woman who believes that love is one way, and her only role is to give. We’ve all been imprinted, after all.

The first time I watched the scenes with Topher/Sierra¹ I was filled with anxiety about where they were going to go. To me having sex with Sierra, knowing that she was forced into the Dollhouse, is a whole level of vileness. I didn’t necessarily mind the show going there; I like hating Topher, but until I knew what they were doing I was anxious.

But instead the story was infinitely more pathetic. Topher wasn’t looking for someone to have sex with, he was looking for someone to play Laser-force and eat cake with (some people never got enough 9 year old birthday parties). All the employees of the dollhouse seem so atomised, some to the point of complete derangement. The abuse they’re carrying out doesn’t make the happy, or fulfilled, or whole, it just gives them power. And power won’t eat birthday cake with you.

The parallels between Topher and Paul were emphasised by the way the scenes were paired together throughout the episode (in the beginning of the episode scenes with Paul directly followed scenes with Topher). By the end of the episode the white night has chosen to rescue. Whereas it becomes clear that the amoral dick doesn’t want to rape and active. Which doesn’t make him virtuous or even sympathetic, but it does make him interesting.

I do have theory I want to share with the world, so I can say ‘I told you so’ if I’m right. I think there are many signs that Topher didn’t just construct a friend, he imprinted Sierra with himself (which just ups the pathetic level). I’ve wondered why Alpha would have been imprinted with the skills to construct imprints, in order to use them in a composite. I think that Alpha was Sierra last year, or the year before, and had been imprinted as Topher to help Topher celebrate his birthday. That’s why he can do remote wipes.

You may notice that I haven’t yet talked about the main plot of this story. There’s a reason for that. The idea of Dollhouse having the capacity to provide eternal life was a fascinating one. But in this episode I felt that they squandered it on un-engaging characters and incredibly cliched jokes (‘she was nothing like mother’). While I appreciated the thematic unity around connection and isolation, it didn’t make the story of the very rich dead woman interesting to watch.

I remain uninterested in the problems of rich people. Particularly as clichéd problems as ‘I’m not sure if my much younger and poorer boyfriend married me for love’ and ‘I never showed any love to my children and now they resent me for it’ (clearly not just a rich person’s problem, but I find the story much less interesting when the origin of the distance is an abundance of money).

I could maintain interest in monsters of the week stories on Buffy (sometimes I’m not going to stand up and defend ‘go fish’), because they always involved with or related to to the characters that I knew. I think actual procedurals, the stories that make an episode of House, or the interminable cop shows, require a different sort of story-telling, one that the people of Mutant Enemy aren’t necessarily very good at. The episodes where we dealt with the woes of a one off character, were never the strongest episodes of Buffy, Angel or Firefly (Inca Mummy Girl, She, or The Message, for examples). How to introduce, make us care about, and resolve a person’s story in 25 minutes or so, is a really big challenge. The Dollhouse one shots I’ve enjoyed so far, I’ve enjoyed because there’s been some glitch in the imprint and we’ve seen Echo or Caroline underneath (The Target, Stage Fright and the Grey Hour). If they can’t do that each week (and they probably can’t) they need to work on making the stories great.

1. Dichen Lachman was, again, fantastic (although she could do with a little more to do). I particularly loved the way she talked about the ‘sleepies’, and the whole sequence was hilarious. (back)