My wife and I are big Joss Whedon fans. We have the entire series of
Buffy, 3 of 5 seasons of
Angel (we have watched the last two seasons!),
Serenity,
Firefly. I watched
Drive last year (or was it the year before?) only because Nathan Fillion was starring. I like
Dollhouse partly because of its playing with the concept of memory, which is something that surfaces in my current doctoral work. Oddly, many of the ways they are looking at memory are at least 100 years old (the minor French philosopher Henri Bergson beat them to the punch), but it's still nice to see it as an explicit tool in action. It seems that Whedon is taking this concept (especially from Bergson's
Matter and Memory) and dramatizing it, which can be somewhat of a difficult pill to swallow since it is steeped in 19th-century scientific research as well as the French rebound from German philosophy. To put it simply, we're just not there anymore. And yes, I am probably reading waaay too much into Whedon's backgrounding here.
I think I may have enjoyed the first episode more than my wife because of this background, but I think she's liking the series as the
Dollhouse-universe is created. I think it has the potential of having a lot of the intricate backgrounding that
Firefly had (e.g. Book's identity!) which will make the series interesting. The one thing that Joss really needs to do is to finish his "setup" faster than what he did in
Firefly so that it keeps a viewership greater than a cult following (e.g.
Firefly).
X-Files played this well with jumping between the "mytharc" that ran beneath most episodes and provided the overlying plot to the series while also playing in the "monster of the week" category so that not every episode was crucial to understanding the series, as well as allowing room for characters to develop.
Firefly spent a lot of time going through its own
mytharc without really getting to that MOTW filling. A series like
Buffy was able to jump into the MOTW plot line quickly because the concept of a "vampire slayer" was easily imagined by the audience. The concept of a River Tam is a lot harder to cover in a single episode, especially when in connection with a volunteer crew of
Serenity that had significant reasons for being on board (which each got their 15 minutes of storytelling).
Dollhouse will do better if it gives the audience just enough to accept the concept of "reprogrammable humans" and lets the characters develop naturally through some MOTW episodes (or perhaps Identity of the Week, meaning not always having a bad guy to catch). It would be great if there are some relatively comical episodes (something like Echo as a artist but cannot actually paint so that it does play on the limits of the "imprints"...I have in mind here Yasmina Reza's
Art).
