Dollhouse

Donna Bowman

I’ll bet I’m not alone in making multiple runs at Buffy The Vampire Slayer before finding a way through the first season or so. Noel and I knew we ought to be watching BTVS at the turn of the millennium, when every geek source we knew was obsessed with it. (I’ll never forget a special Buffy issue of Entertainment Weekly that showed up on our doorstep during this period; if EW, for crying out loud, was celebrating the comic and dramatic intricacies of the Buffyverse, then we were clearly missing out on a huge part of the pop-culture conversation.) I’d seen the silly movie version and readily admit that I couldn’t grasp how that was going to translate into must-see TV. When the episodes started airing in order in syndication in our local market, we set ourselves the task to catch up. But understandably, it didn’t grab us from the beginning, and we reluctantly gave up on it despite our friends’ assurances that it would start to turn awesome in a score of episodes or so. Thank goodness for TV Club Classic, which was custom-engineered for our embarrassing blind spot. Now I finally understand what’s so special about this show, and can’t imagine life without its characters, tropes, and themes constantly circulating in my head. There’s so much meaty goodness past those first episodes that stymied us a decade ago that I’m retroactively ashamed of our too-quick bailout. And I’m grateful to the fans who knew all along, but nevertheless gently welcomed us latecomers into the fold in the comment section of Noel’s weekly write-up — not to mention the debt of gratitude I owe to Noel, who made sure to time his viewing so I could join in and follow along.

Emily Guendelsberger

“Huh, more like you-know-what house,” was the disapproving sniff I got from my mother in response to my evangelizing about Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. My parents watched the first few episodes when they came out, but were turned off by the premise, a near future in which the young, attractive, and desperate can sign five years of the use of their body over to the Dollhouse, an organization that’s half brothel and half unrealistically attractive A-Team. A new technology allows for the hotties’ minds (or, debatably, their souls) to be extracted and kept on a literal shelf while their bodies are imprinted with various fantasy personalities of the Dollhouse’s millionaire customers; in exchange, the “dolls” wake up with no memory of the last five years, a huge trust fund, and all their horrible problems taken care of. The tone of the first several episodes (not to mention Fox’s ads for the show, which are mostly a half-clothed Eliza Dushku with bedroom eyes and very little clothing) is off-puttingly sexy for a show with some pretty heavy ethical stuff going on, and not much about those early episodes suggests that the writers intend to even scratch the super-sexy surface. Given that, plus the kind of wince-y one-off adventures Dushku goes on, it’s pretty understandable that people like my mom who hadn’t seen a Whedon show before might have found it stupid or creepy and given up. But the eventual utter, off-the-rails insanity of the show’s back half is almost better for the way it seems to evolve from a mediocre, vapid sexy-spy show. Wish they’d stuck the landing a bit better, but there’s a reason I even tried to talk my mom into watching.