Vintage

Dollhouse is a creation of Joss Whedon's, who was the same producer to grace us with such memorable shoes like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Movie then TV,) Angle (the Buffy spinoff) and Firefly/Serenity.

The star of this show is Eliza Dushku who was introduced to us in the third season of Buffy as “Faith” and has gone on to do work in a number of movies and less than stellar TV.  (Tru Calling was an interesting concept but wasn’t particularly exceptional overall.)

I do want to warn you that Dollhouse is clearly an Avant Garde piece of work.  Generally when I refer to something as being Avant Garde (it means “Advanced Guard” or on the fore-front) it means that someone is trying out new techniques for film making and its ultimately just crap.

In the case of Dollhouse, they have a meta story concept which is brilliant.

Under the microscope, you have a series in which the main character Clarise/Echo spends most of her free time as a blank slate person without a personality or any memories.  She’s technically had her mind wiped blank.  The company that is “taking care of her” then programs her with requisite personality traits as needed by their client base.

This being Joss Whedon, this means that a lot of exposition goes toward Echo being farmed out as a prostitute.

But that’s not a terribly interesting show.  The real fun in when you have a need for a specialist, with highly specialized skills, who needs to do a very difficult job perfectly.

Ah, in that case, Echo gets programmed to fulfill that mission, say that of a Hostage negotiator during a high profile kidnapping (This was the plot in the Pilot.)

As a highly skilled widely versatile actress, this is a dream gig.  Eliza Dushku literally gets to play a different character EVERY WEEK!

Let me just say, that this is pure film making genius.

That being said, expect the show to be canceled after its first season. 

To date, I’ve seen the first three episodes.

Episode One was terribly confusing for the first 20 minutes.  You get a lot of expositional sequences and at first nothing seems to fit together.  When the kidnapping mission is finally laid out, though, the show begins to fall into place.

Episode Two was pure platinum.  In context, this was awesome.  After you watch episode one look forward to an incredible thrilling show.  (No spoilers for this one.)

Episode Three was fun but unfortunately the victim/protagonist is a whiny diva rock star with a suicide complex and by the end of the episode, you’re quite happy when Clarise/Echo throws her over the side of the lighting catwalk and are disappointed to learn that Echo tied the Diva (my goodness the character was such a looser that I don’t EVEN want to know what the character’s name was) to the railing with a safety line.

I continue to expect good things from this show so I’m going to rate it as a keeper.  On my own personal scale between 1 and 7 with one being “Please, God, make it stop!” and Seven being the euphoric bliss that only comes from the telling of a great story by a phenomenal story teller; I’m going to give Dollhouse a 6.  Maybe even a 5.5.