Dollhouse, Firefly, Angel, Buffy : news, photos & videos

What Will Joss Whedon Do Next ?

Webmaster — 2009-11-21T11:20:18Z

It's been a dark couple of days for TV genre fans. Despite the public's obsession with vampires (evident in the just-announced People's Choice Award nominations), Eastwick was axed, Fringe and V have taken a ratings tumble, and Dollhouse has been cancelled. (The Hollywood Reporter broke the news this afternoon.) After one and a half seasons (well, two half seasons to be exact), the sci-fi thriller about a mysterious team of all-purpose programmable human beings for hire has been given its walking papers by Fox, the same network that pulled the plug on Whedon's late lamented Firefly. Anyone who's been keeping up with the show can't be surprised. The ratings were weak in its first season, and they only got weaker this season. It was a much bigger surprise when Dollhouse was renewed. (Hulu, apparently, helped. A lot.) This begs the question of course, "What will Joss do next ?" After all, he may have a full year to kill.

Cabin in the Woods — the Whedon-scripted, Drew Goddard-directed spin on the hoary cliche of teenagers stuck in a you-know-what — is in the can, though its release has been pushed back to 2011, supposedly in order to reformat it for 3-D. (Will it be more exciting this way ? Probably not. Will it be more difficult to pirate ? You betcha. MGM wins, while we, the fans, just get a longer wait.)

Goners, the sci-fi epic scripted and to be directed by Whedon, is still on the backburner at Universal. It could be there for a while longer, as the studio's most likely still wondering how to promote a film from the director of its underperforming Serenity.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is probably the most succesful project Whedon's worked on in recent years, at least in terms of critical acclaim and profit-versus-cost (aside from the Buffy : Season 8 comic book from Dark Horse that he oversees and sometimes writes). So it's no surprise that a follow-up online series has been discussed. And it may be the next thing we see from Whedon, judging by his remarks today on Whedonesque about Dollhouse's cancellation. "I'm off to pursue internet ventures/binge drinking," he says. "Possibly that relaxation thing I've read so much about. By the time the last episode airs, you'll know what my next project is."

(It's uncertain when that last episode — a big finale intended to wrap up the show's storyline — will air, but Fox has announced it plans to release all produced episodes. Episode 11 is in production now, with two more to go, for a grand total of 13 for season 2.)

But it's hard not to look back at Whedon's two greatest ratings successes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (in their strongest seasons they represent — to my mind — his finest work), and wonder if Whedon shouldn't, with his next project, revisit the horror genre. His SF work has its admirers, but he's never quite tackled that genre with as much confidence and finesse as he has horror, possibly because Whedon tends to write from the heart more than the head. Horror, at its core, is about human emotion. Whereas SF, when it lives up to its potential — as it so rarely does on TV — is essentially a medium of ideas.

Ironically, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie that's in development at Fox, sans Whedon's involvement, may be the project to improve his fortune in Hollywood. This town is, after all, in the business of selling. And there's nothing it likes more than trumpeting a project as coming from the creator of another successful project.

Whatever Whedon tackles next, his legion of devoted fans will follow. But for his sake, and the sake of those who value quality genre entertainment, let's hope it reaches everybody else too.

"Gone too Soon" Sci-Fi Show list with a Joss Whedon focus

Webmaster — 2009-11-16T18:51:27Z

Joss Whedon has become something of a tortured artist since 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' ended its highly successful seven-season run in 2003. Since Sunnydale was destroyed and 'Angel' got pulled right when it was finding its own identity post-'Buffy,' Whedon has yet to find another long-running hit. It's still hard to believe that a show as great as 'Firefly' only lasted one season !

Whedon's bad luck continues with the recent announcement that Fox is pulling the plug on 'Dollhouse,' a series that had enough of a following — and potential — to warrant another season. Would 'Dollhouse' have really hit its stride further down the road ? We'll never know. Here are some other sci-fi television series that met their makers too soon.

'Angel'

Number of Seasons : 5 (1999-2004)

Number of Episodes Aired : 110

Number of Episodes Unaired : 0

Network : The WB

Yes, 'Angel' did just fine, running for five seasons and enjoying a fan following that was almost as large and powerful as that of 'Buffy''s. By all means, 'Angel' was a success — the problem is that it was canceled just when it started to get really good. By season 5, 'Angel' was its own show, not just "a 'Buffy' spin-off," and it could've gone in some very interesting and exciting directions if it had stayed alive — or undead, as it were.

(...)

'Firefly'

Number of Seasons : 1 (2002)

Number of Episodes Aired : 11

Number of Episodes Unaired : 3

Network : Fox

Another Joss Whedon Special, 'Firefly' was actually top-notch science fiction, mixing swaggering Western elements and high Space Opera melodrama with the trademark Whedon sarcasm and attitude we've come to know and at least sort-of love. The ragtag crew of the good ship Serenity was good company for all of 11 aired episodes — Whedon, however, ended up having something of the last laugh, as DVD sales of the series were good enough to warrant a follow-up feature length film, the equally excellent 'Serenity' (2005).

(...)

Click on the link for more :

http://insidetv.aol.com/2009/11/14/sci-fi-shows-that-were-cancelled-too-soon/

Whedonverse Shows in The best TV episodes of the decade

Webmaster — 2009-11-15T17:44:25Z

(...)

Angel, “Smile Time” (Feb. 18, 2004)

Angel, often the black sheep of Joss Whedon's TV universe, spent most of its run in danger of cancellation for one reason or another, which meant the constant wheel of retooling essentially made Angel into a new series every season. All five of those series were compelling to varying degrees, but what it became in its final season—a workplace drama about the employees at a demonic law firm—proved the most durable. This episode, wherein the hero investigates an evil children's show and is transformed into a puppet, is both screamingly funny and surprisingly sophisticated in its examination of adult sadness.

(...)

Dollhouse, “Epitaph One” (July 28, 2009)

Dollhouse, “Epitaph One” (July 28, 2009)Another sign of the times : Some of the best episodes of the decade showed up only on DVD, including this one, wherein Joss Whedon's latest, most troubled series lays all its cards on the table and shows that it knows where it's heading after all. Shot on the cheap with handheld DV cameras, “Epitaph One” creates a beautiful, believable post-apocalyptic future, fills in the gaps between that future and the show's present-day timeline, and deepens and darkens all the series' themes about the nature of identity and the problems that arise when we trust corporations with potentially world-altering technology. The final moments—as a trio of survivors make their way into an uncertain future—are surprisingly powerful.

(...)

Joss Whedon - The End ? Or the Start ?

Webmaster — 2009-11-14T15:14:03Z

Fox Pulls the Plug on Joss Whedon's 'Dollhouse,' but Viral Marketing Teases Fans

Chalk up another short-lived series on the Fox Network for envelope-pushing producer and writer Joss Whedon, whose ideas for monetizing Internet programming were featured in a Knowledge@Wharton interview in February.

Fox announced yesterday that it would cancel Whedon's series, "Dollhouse," a science fiction thriller, because of falling viewership. His previous Fox series, "Firefly," also science fiction, was dropped after 11 episodes in 2002. But "Firefly" got a second life as a feature film, "Serenity," in 2005.

Now, Whedon's cult-like followers are spotting what appears to be a viral marketing campaign for something new from the mind of Whedon, perhaps an online game (known as an ‘alternate reality game' or ARG) based on the series. The campaign was first reported on Tuesday, a day before the cancellation announcement, by two web sites : io9, which is widely read by science fiction fans and ARGNet, which caters to the interests of ARG players. Web sites for a fictional corporation that plays a central role in the "Dollhouse" series are part of the campaign.

Whedon is no stranger to cross-media production. Dark Horse Comics will publish a comic book based on Whedon's online musical comedy series, "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog." As Whedon said in the Knowledge@Wharton interview : “I'm not terribly interested in repurposing things I've already done. Obviously, I made a TV show out of one of my movies and a movie out of one of my TV shows, so it sounds like a crazy thing to say — except that I didn't tell the same story in either of them. I just took the story I had further.”

The A.V. Club lists Buffy and Firefly in its top 30 shows of the decade

Webmaster — 2009-11-12T21:33:25Z

17. Firefly (Fox, 2002-2003)

Firefly (Fox, 2002-2003)Like Joss Whedon's other shows, Firefly sported some serious flaws. And like Whedon's other shows, it fought to stay on the air long enough to address them. But unlike Whedon's other shows, Firefly failed, and given how good it was apart from those flaws, it seems churlish now to focus on what could've been. Instead, let's stick with what was : a clever, funny, exciting, original outer-space Western with an unforgettable cast of characters and a palpable sense of fun. Whedon assembled what may be his best-ever group of actors, created a compelling (albeit unfinished) fictional universe, and wore his heart on his sleeve in creating one of the best science-fiction shows in a decade crammed with them. Buffy achieved its own Peter Principle, and Dollhouse bought itself a second chance ; mourn Firefly as the great Whedon that wasn't.

Essential episodes : “Jaynestown,” “Out Of Gas,” “Objects In Space”

25. Buffy The Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997-2003)

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (The WB/UPN, 1997-2003)Heading into the decade in the middle of its fourth season, Buffy The Vampire Slayer was one of TV's most acclaimed series, even after it left the high-school setting of its earlier seasons behind. In the first few years of the '00s, though, Buffy and her friends wandered through dreamscapes, battled a god, lost people dear to them, and sang and danced. While more uneven in those seasons than it had been in high school, Joss Whedon's series would still get at truths about the pain of growing up, the sheer struggle of mere living, and the formation of ad hoc families. And in its willingness to innovate stylistically, the series also proved itself a surprisingly adept chameleon : a ribald comedy one week, a musical the next, and a quiet art film the week after.

Essential episodes : “Restless,” “The Body,” “Once More With Feeling”

It's time for Joss Whedon to change the world

Webmaster — 2009-11-12T21:23:47Z

THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE : IT'S TIME FOR JOSS WHEDON TO CHANGE THE WORLD

So Dollhouse was canceled. I watched a couple of episodes and it never grabbed me ; the second season numbers indicate I wasn't alone. But maybe this is actually good news for Joss Whedon. Maybe this is what it takes to get him into the business of changing the way we consume media.

It's obvious that the stuff that Whedon does isn't built for a mass network television audience. Firefly and Dollhouse have proven this fairly conclusively ; I don't doubt that Whedon could change up what he does to make it more mainstream, but why should he ? Not everything should appeal to everybody. It should appeal to somebody, and Whedon has that somebody down pat - he has a certain audience that follows him from project to project, loyal to him and what he does. That audience isn't quite enough to keep a show on a network alive, but it could still be harnessed in really exciting ways.

Whedon needs to fully leap into the world of direct to DVD and On Demand programming. He's already dipped his toe in those waters with Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog, which was an artistic success and apparently fiscally successful enough to warrant an impending sequel. Instead of going through a network, dealing with their interference and their programming whims and the need to appeal to a very wide audience so as to sell time to Viagra advertisers Whedon can concentrate on serving his fanbase with his vision.

He's the perfect creator to make a major leap into this arena because he's likely the creator with the most ardent fanbase today*. There's a certain number of Whedonites out there - probably in the hundreds of thousands - who will plop down money to buy/rent/download anything Whedon puts out. Starting from that base Whedon can market his product out ; while Dr. Horrible started as something specific to Whedonites it definitely crossed over, and that was a project that started as a lark.

It wouldn't be easy. Whedon would have to adjust the way that he creates, and his budgets would, at first, be much lower than they are with network TV. But if he is willing to put the work in he can change the entire paradigm of how we consume content from our favorite creators. Striking deals with as many On Demand platforms as possible - cable companies, Xbox Live, Playstation Network, iTunes - and possibly hooking up with a DVD company, Whedon could reach markets and niches that Fox simply never serves.

Of course there are people already in those trenches - web series are becoming a dime a dozen. And the best bets for Whedon to move into this world - direct to DVD or On Demand movies featuring characters from Buffy and Angel - are out of his hands, since he doesn't own those characters. But Whedon has a creative well that hasn't run dry yet, and he has a fanbase that will support him in the first stages of creating something new.

This is the direction that things are headed no matter what, and Whedon can serve as the person who breaks down the wall, who takes the shameful connotation off of content created just for DVD or On Demand or the internet. If Whedon brings his A game, gathers his usual band of collaborators and gets his fanbase fired up and involved (which he did for Dr. Horrible), he could drag the rest of the industry kicking and screaming into a new world where niche programming can find its level and survive. I'm not in denial about how tough it would be or how slow it would start out, especially budgetarily, but it's beyond time that someone major took a serious step into bringing content directly to fans instead of relying on a middle-man.

Imagine a world where a show like Arrested Development or Battlestar Galactica isn't constantly in fear of getting the axe, where shows don't have to dumb it down to reach the widest audience, where creators don't have to worry about skittish advertisers, where fans put up or shut up by supporting what they really like.

* Obviously the real person who could make this happen would be George Lucas, but as long as he gets to dictate his terms to studios and TV networks, there's no reason for him to take his stuff On Demand just yet.

On Mutant Enemy And Social Media

Webmaster — 2009-11-12T19:50:22Z

The original incarnation of this commentary, not previously published, was written prior to the sequence of events which started with Dollhouse being taken off the air for November sweeps month and ended with today's news that the show has been canceled.

I've not made any particular effort to rewrite what follows to place Dollhouse into the past tense, and so some instances of urging action might no longer be directly or immediately relevant at present. I simply trust the reader will take into account when this was written, since the case study provided by Dollhouse in a social media context remains valid as an example, as does (I believe) the overall argument presented here.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive examination of Dollhouse-related social media activity. Examples and comparisons provided along the way represent my own contributions in that regard primarily because they were the examples with which I am most familiar.

It is entirely possible, of course, that there are convincing reasons why the below is not already happening. It also is entirely possible that in fact there are plans and intentions about which none of us have heard. Whatever the case, I thought I'd offer for perusal my take on Mutant Enemy and social media.

An Intro

In the age of social media, traditional “marketing” must adapt not only to providing information, but to engaging in discussion and problem solving as well. In a very concrete sense, marketing must become customer service, which increases both presence and reputation — core goals of marketing.

In most, if not all, of these newly-necessary activities, FOX Broadcasting has fallen down on the job when it comes to Dollhouse.

It is my assertion not only that Mutant Enemy can step in to fill that gap, but that it should, in part because Dollhouse needs some sort of official social media presence, but also because it will establish a presence for Mutant Enemy itself, benefitting it in the future for other projects.

What follows describes what I believe should be possible, not necessarily what is possible within the contractual rules and obligations of Hollywood (an issue mainly raised by the YouTube section). For me, it's always been best to start with “in an ideal world…” and work my way back to the real, rather than artificially restrict ideas from the start.

On Twitter

FOX Broadcasting's presence on Twitter when it comes to Dollhouse has been next to non-existent. Other shows not only have received routine mentions through FOX's own account (@FoxBroadcasting) but have their own dedicated accounts as well (@FRINGEonFOX, @GLEEonFOX, @HOUSEonFOX, et cetera). Dollhouse, in the meantime, went almost completely unmentioned all Summer, until the day before the season premiere when @FoxBroadcasting seemed suddenly to remember.

Even then, the attention they paid it amounted to a few tweets linking to news stories and the pawning off of some promotional activities onto a fansite willing to do FOX's job for free.

Weeks beforehand (in a reply to an inquiry of mine), @FoxBroadcasting said that an official Dollhouse account was “coming soon”. It did not materialize until much later, and even once it did was scarcely an improvement. And given the track record, I don't believe it that was a surprise. @FoxBroadcasting is all too prone to errors, such as tweeting that Eliza would be on a radio show “tomorrow” when it had already happened earlier that day, and all too likely to treat Twitter (and all social media) as a broadcast medium.

Compare this with the months-long activity out of my own @watchdollhouse and then @UnofficialME accounts, and you'll find that where @FoxBroadcasting fails at providing information, engaging in discussion, and problem solving, those efforts have excelled. They also are free from the restriction of having to only discuss FOX Broadcasting and have become involved, for example, in international discussions surrounding the show and its availability.

From the launch of @watchdollhouse back in May, one of my primary tasks has been to search Twitter repeatedly and routinely over the course of the day — every day — for relevant keywords to see if there are questions that need answering or problems needing to be solved. Compare that to @FoxBroadcasting, which barely (if ever) acknowledges anyone who tweets messages to them unless said anyone happens also to be a FOX-controlled account. On occasion, they'll retweet a news story. That is not social media. And that is something people notice.

The opportunity being missed here can be illustrated by imagining if the activities of @watchdollhouse and @UnofficialME had been engaged in by an official entity. It would have built a positive reputation for Mutant Enemy online in the void left by FOX, amounting to a very real kind of marketing, in the sense that marketing in the social media age has become (for those doing it properly) synonymous with customer service.

Although @FoxBroadcasting was not directly at issue in the ordering process for the Comic-Con limited edition DVD and BD since that wasn't a network problem but a studio/Home Entertainment problem, it bears mention here. As everyone knows, the process was fraught with errors, and the inevitable site crashes that occur when this fandom is unleashed upon something.

But since this wasn't the network's issue, @FoxBroadcasting remained completely uninvolved despite Twitter being perhaps the primary service through which people were discussing the problem. With no Twitter presence from the studio or Home Entertainment, it was left to fans (including one who works at FHE but was completely unconnected to the DVD process) to try to provide accurate information as it arose.

Here again, having some sort of official entity present in the discussions would have benefitted all involved, even if it might not have risen beyond the “I feel your pain” of simply trying to keep the information flowing and actually conversing with the affected parties. Since Mutant Enemy has a stake in the existence of level heads in the community and the smooth flow of information regardless of whether the FOX at issue is the network, the studio, or Home Entertainment, it would be in M.E.'s best interest to have an official presence established before the next such crisis arises.

Setting aside moments of crisis (hardly the chief reason for having a social media presence) one of the single best relevant examples of Twitter usage is Craig Engler, the Senior Vice President & General Manager of Digital for Syfy, who runs (naturally enough) the @Syfy account. Actively engaged in the community, behaving like the actual human being he is, and coming up with interesting ideas as well as responding to those of fans, Craig is resoundingly respected for what he does online in this capacity. It's a good model.

The total sum of Dollhouse-related activity by the @FoxBroadcasting account on Twitter in the two weeks leading up to the premiere was not even a full page of search results, and in reality they all come from the day of the premiere or the day before — not one single other Dollhouse tweet during that two week pre-premiere period. All told, over those two weeks, the search results for all their tweets encompass about six pages worth of tweets — almost all of them about Cleveland and Glee, with a little Fringe and House thrown in.

On Facebook

FOX's activities on Facebook as they pertain to Dollhouse have been marginally better than they are on Twitter. Links are somewhat more regularly posted to their Dollhouse page, but various elements frequently end up completely out of date, and they spend no time involved in the comments threads generated by those links answering questions or addressing issues raised by fans.

Not to mention the fact that after the sudden decision not to air Dollhouse during sweeps month, FOX posted to Facebook a link to an old article whose very first paragraph referenced an air date that no longer was valid. In doing so, FOX made no effort to present that new context, leading to confusion in the ensuing comments thread.

Little in the way of Facebook-specific issues need to be discussed here, as most of the points addressed regarding Twitter are applicable when it comes to Facebook as well. Let it be said, at the very least, that in the absence of any FOX presence in the comment threads on their own Dollhouse page, an official Mutant Enemy voice pitching in to answer the inevitably-arising questions certainly couldn't hurt, and (a common argument here) would let M.E. itself capitalize upon FOX's own inactivity.

It could also be held that establishing an official Mutant Enemy presence on Facebook now, during Dollhouse, benefits M.E. later on. But the most important point is that FOX's current run of activity is the exception, not the rule, and Mutant Enemy could (and should) ensure a continually active presence even when FOX is neglecting its own.

On YouTube

Since most of the lessons and arguments I'm presenting here can be extended to all of the various social media sites, I'm not going to be exhaustive. But we need to address YouTube due to its importance and uniqueness. There's further FOX failure on YouTube, and it's the site which most raises the aforementioned possible problems in terms of the world of Hollywood contractual rules and obligations.

Heading into season two of Dollhouse, FOX utilized its YouTube account not at all until the day of the premiere. No teasers, no trailers, not even any of the television commercials once they started airing. This remained true at least until the day before episode two. Fans have been left with next to nothing to share and/or embed. In fact, the first thing released was a “sneak peek” via iTunes — which no one could share because you can't embed from iTunes and the file itself was DRM'd and so no one could rip it and post it themselves. A complete and utter failure to take advantage of social media.

While FOX finally posted two Dollhouse videos to their YouTube account on the day of the premiere (too late to be of any use to anyone), the prior instance of them posting anything Dollhouse-related to their account was four entire months ago, in mid-May.

In light of the relatively minor traditional ad spend for Dollhouse, this is all the more baffling, because social media sharing was the one place FOX would have been able to get some sort of bang for a comparatively miniscule buck. More than disappointing, it's actually inexcusable.

But there are smaller, no-budget, more guerrilla-style ways to use sites and services such as YouTube for marketing. While FOX itself would never take this approach, Mutant Enemy itself could, if it's able. Setting aside discussion of those potential contractual issues, let me detail two examples that did occur to me.

Back when Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles was cancelled and fans started to clamor for Summer Glau coming to Dollhouse, one TV critic tweeted that they'd be perfectly willing to just watch Summer read the phone book. Imagine, if Mutant Enemy had the leeway and was controlling its own social media destiny, grabbing a Flip HD camera (or whatever), a phone book, the corner of any random room at FOX (or even the Dollhouse set), and Summer, recording thirty seconds of her reading the phone book, uploading it to YouTube, and then tweeting “so-and-so asked for it months ago, so here it is”.

It doesn't spoil the show. It doesn't require a budget. It doesn't even require an advertising campaign strategy. It just requires being willing, at the drop of a hat, when the moment strikes, to respond to some stray remark online in a way that generates attention and, yes, amusement.

Or, there's a personal example. For the final week leading to the season premiere, I registered a domain and launched a site modeled after ones such as isobamapresidentyet.com, simply displaying “no” or “yes” as warranted (it displays something else now). Imagine, if this had been an official Mutant Enemy site, instead of displaying simple text, having a new embedded video each day, with some member of the cast delivering the “no”, culminating in a final video on Friday of all of them celebrating the “yes”.

Again, nothing about it spoils the show. It doesn't require a real budget (beyond domain registration, web hosting, and the time of whoever is responsible for M.E.'s social media presence). It just gets put together on the spur of the moment, launched, and generates attention and, again, amusement.

In an ideal world, there also would be more material like this EW video of Eliza and Fran touring the set and being generally dorky. It would be nice if it didn't always require a media outlet, and could simply happen “in-house” and posted to a M.E. YouTube account.

Some Bullet Points

* Social media is more akin to customer service than it is to marketing, and must be treated as a conversation not as a broadcast. * FOX's failure to utilize social media to promote Dollhouse (or failure to utilize it well in those rare instances when they bother) is detrimental to the show. * Since in the age of social media some sort of official presence should exist, Mutant Enemy should take it upon itself to size the opportunity to be that official presence in the face of FOX's failure. * Social media as customer service, combined with in-house guerrilla-style promotion, can be done on the (relative) cheap and without impacting any more traditional advertising campaigns run by FOX itself. * Seizing that opportunity benefits not only Dollhouse in the short term, but Mutant Enemy itself and its other projects going forward over the long term.

An Outro

In essence, I argue that it's necessary for Mutant Enemy no longer to be beholden to FOX's social media non-strategy when it comes to Dollhouse. Not merely because Dollhouse needs a real social media presence, but because Mutant Enemy itself can leverage this opportunity to establish for itself its own robust social media presence now, in advance of its future projects.

There is a kind of danger in Mutant Enemy not taking responsibility for its own social media presence in the face of FOX's own dismal example. FOX's failure to take advantage of social media to cheaply and effectively promote Dollhouse in the end has resulted in generating almost no publicity for the show in some circles, and (worse yet ?) negative publicity and negative fan attention in other circles. Dollhouse suffers because of that, but Mutant Enemy can, I believe, do something about it.

Such a social media presence, if sustained and engaging, would become a critical part of the conversation and the continuous feedback loop.

This is especially true in the case of Twitter, where the conversation moves extraordinarily fast and new ideas either blossom or collapse seemingly in a heartbeat. But if the former, it then quickly spreads outward to other social networks. It is my belief, in addition to all the other benefits, that an active official social media presence will help accurate information and interesting ideas blossom rather than collapse.

There are, you might notice, in a sense two different levels to what could be done. Ideas such as those discussed in the YouTube section are more involved and require effort by people actually on the ground around the production. If necessary, think of those ideas as a kind of Phase Two.

The foundation is simpler, in that establishing an active official presence on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook is easier to accomplish.

It's not especially difficult to envision what that Phase One (if you will) would look like, since it largely would resemble the activities of @watchdollhouse and @UnofficialME, but expanded to encompass something akin to what Craig does via @Syfy. Notwithstanding the usual necessary provisos and disclaimers that anyone tweeting isn't talking to Joss Whedon, Craig's use of the Q&A format to answer fan questions is something that easily could be adopted into an official M.E. account. In addition, an official M.E. presence on Facebook would allow for a credible voice with some authority to participate in the comment threads on FOX's own Dollhouse page precisely in the way that FOX itself does not.

Much of the information would be of the same sort provided, for example, by @watchdollhouse and then @UnofficialME (as well as others) all along, but with the stamp of official approval on them would be spread and become solidified as credible that much more quickly.

Various people involved in the actual creation of Dollhouse (or, for that matter, Dr. Horrible) obviously use social media pretty much every day on their own. None of that would be supplanted by an official Mutant Enemy presence, and in fact they would compliment each other. But day-to-day personal use cannot stand in for an official presence, if only because the primary mission of those people is to actually create the show. They can't also be, to use my formulation of social media, customer service. Someone else not from within the creative circles needs to have that as their dedicated task.

Of course, none of this matters in the slightest unless Mutant Enemy actually wants to do this, and the relevant parties might very well have good reasons why they haven't done so already.

Presumptive as it is, I believe the above outlines fairly well why Mutant Enemy should do this. What's more (and still just as presumptive an opinion on my part), I believe it shows why Mutant Enemy should want to.

Why is Joss Whedon on my shirt ?

Webmaster — 2009-11-10T18:49:51Z

The Leisure King has been on hiatus due to non-leisure commitments, namely, figuring out my future, and will continue to be until all grad school applications are submitted. But I am here to bring you a very personal and special blog post today that I just could not hold back. It was prompted last night when I was asked "Why is Joss Whedon on your shirt ?" Since I continually get questions like this by those who cannot understand my dedication to the man and his work, I have decided to briefly outline why Joss Whedon is so special.

Now I'm not going to discuss Joss's high level of integrity and dedication to quality that equals that of Pixar's. I'm not going to discuss his boundless creativity, originality, and media innovation. I'm not going to discuss his fully realized characters, immersive worlds and mythologies, or skills as a good old-fashioned storyteller. I'm not even going to discuss how his talents cross all media, from comic books, to cinema and TV, to music composition. I'm going to discuss the one thing that separates him from all other writers and contributors of pop culture : Joss Whedon knows that life really sucks.

No matter who you are, life is unrelentingly hard and filled with horrible, endless pain, but the moments and memories of happiness you can find in it make it all worth while. This very simple, universal idea is the crux of everything Joss writes and it is what makes his work so meaningful and endearing to his fervent fans. His characters are always in pain, anxious, fed up, scared, uncertain, and worried about the future, but they press on. Just like you and me and every human on this planet. Life never gets easier, it only gets harder and more complex.

For example, let's look at Buffy The Vampire Slayer because it is the most blatant allegory for life. The Hellmouth-topping-town of Sunnydale and the constant stream of demons and evil forces that attack it are the fantasy manifestation of the problems and terrible crap that we must face ourselves every day. It is Buffy's destiny to be the protector. There are no loop holes, no way out, her job for the entirety of life is to destroy demons and keep evil at bay. This is not unlike our own lives in which we have to constantly deal with the shit that life so graciously provides for us and there is no way out and no end. It is our destiny. In the Whedonverse, if someone tries to short cut out of life problems, everything gets much, much worse, and it's the same in real life. In an effort to keep this spoiler free, let's just say look at Willow's story arc for the best example of how terrible things are the result of cheating life. Buffy's greatest desire is to just be a "normal" girl and never have to deal with vampires again, but the vampires never stop coming. In most ways she is very "normal." Angel is constantly tortured by his past, Spike is always in love with women that he hates, Captain Mal is still fighting a war he cannot win, and Dr. Horrible, well, he's just really messed up. Every single Joss Whedon character is constantly battling their demons and their biggest enemy is always themselves, no matter if they are a hero or a villain, complete and total peace, happiness, and contentment is simply not possible in the Whedonverse and in life, despite our constant struggle to attain it.

In addition to the constant barrage of pain we must face, Joss also knows what the most painful thing of all is, and he exploits it for our entertainment, captivation, and reflection. The most painful thing is the universe is when we are hurt by the ones we love, or when we hurt those who love us. These are not complicated ideas I'm discussing here, it's just a simple truth and Joss Whedon expresses this pain more elegantly and humanly than any other writer I've ever experienced. This is why, in my opinion, Season Six of Buffy is the greatest season of television ever created. It's all about pain and love and the best and worst things we face everyday.

Now I don't mean to be such a downer and I'm not just a painfully tortured person, in fact I've had a pretty damn good life compared to a lot of people and I'm very grateful for that, but I still face my demons, I still face the fear and and discontentment that life's problems never stop sending me. But there is still another aspect to Joss's work that validates the pain, and that is hope and finding the good where ever you can. There are a lot of writers that can tell you how shitty life is (Noah Baumbach comes to find), but Joss also shows us hope and the merit of pushing on through all the crap, it's what we are made to do. There are still friends, and family, and joy, and laughter, and love, and it's all worth fighting for, even though the pain is around much more often than the good.

I think Joss's incomparable understanding of the human condition is best summarized by lyrics from the musical Buffy episode, "Once More, With Feeling".

"Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we'll go hand in hand,
But we'll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here."

I think that's pretty self explanatory. No one knows what the future holds, but we're gonna get through it with the help of our loved ones, unfortunately, the pain is always gonna be there and only you can face yourself.

So that is why Joss Whedon is on my shirt. That is why I truly respect and adore this man's work and can only hope to create something half as good. He expresses the painful reality of life in an earnest, non-condescending, and inspirational way that resonates with me and the millions of other Whedon-loving geeks out there. Joss is definitely one of the good things in this demon-ridden world.

Now I can't force you to be a Whedonite, but all I can say is that I've never met someone who disliked his work that actually spent some time discovering it. Keep on fighting the good fight for that leisure time, I sure will. Until next time...

"I will walk through the fire,
because where else can I turn.
I will walk through the fire,
and let it burn."

On shows created by Joss Whedon - Psychology Bad

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T20:03:43Z

In the Buffyverse, the bad guys are arch-demons and their minions. Their most potent and fearsome weapon is magic. In the Firefly 'verse, the bad guys are Alliance government higher-ups (“key members of parliament”) and their operatives. What is their most powerful and frightening weapon ? It's not military—armed conflict is fairly conventional, the unsuccessful war for independence is over, and the government maintains only an occasional military presence near the border planets. It's not information technology—Captain Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity fly beneath the government's radar and neatly elude detection at every turn. It's not genetics or cybernetics—Joss's vision of the future is refreshingly free of aliens, mutants, and robots (all the characters are very recognizably human). Instead, the really scary stuff in the series Firefly and the movie Serenity, the homologue to magic, the most insidious weapon, is neuroscience.

The two central mysteries that drive the larger story arc are the madness of a young girl on the run from Alliance agents (River) and the existence of the savage, demonic “Reavers” on the outskirts of known space. As it turns out, both of these story elements arise from abuse of neuroscience by the government. Neuroscientific manipulation is the most devastating form of personal mutilation (River) and the most destructive source of mass mayhem (Reavers). Like magic, it can also be used for good, but with unpredictable and mixed results, as exemplified by River's largely unsuccessful treatment by her physician brother Simon, using neuroactive drugs and neuroimaging.

By adopting neuroscience as a superweapon and dramatic engine, Joss follows a long tradition of extrapolating from current scientific frontiers to dystopian extremes. Nuclear physics, genetics, and computer/robotics technology have been mainstay dramatic devices since the 1950s. Joss's choice of neuroscience is relatively novel and very timely—brain research is on the verge of revolutionizing our world and our understanding of what it is to be human. Firefly and Serenity dramatize this revolution by making neuroscience seem nearly magical, personifying its power and peril in the character of River.

The reality of brain science is, of course, much less mystical and dark—modern neuroscience provides a biological basis for understanding human psychology and leads to unprecedented cures for neurological diseases. But it takes mystery, danger, and strife to construct a gripping story, and in Firefly and Serenity neuroscience provides those ingredients. That's okay—as in most dystopian fiction, Joss's dark vision of science still inspires a sense of wonder along with the dread. River makes us marvel at how our very essence depends on the neural mechanisms of the brain—a central truth emerging from current neuroscientific research with ever-increasing clarity (Crick). Most philosophers of mind now believe that human consciousness will be explained at its most fundamental level by neuroscience—that perceptions, beliefs, desires will be precisely identified with specific brain states (Dennett, Chalmers). We will need to reconcile and integrate that scientific revolution with our understanding of what we are, so that neuroscience enlarges rather than diminishes our humanity. In Serenity, River epitomizes this synergy of neuroscience and soul, by taking control of her own explosive neural potential and turning it into something miraculous and powerfully human.1 1. How Joss Makes Neuroscience Seem Like Magic

In Firefly and Serenity, Joss draws on his considerable dramatic powers to make neuroscience seem as dark, mysterious, and potent as magic seems in Buffy and Angel. Throughout Firefly, Joss deftly juxtaposed River's beauty, grace, and innocence with bouts of violent madness and flashes of preternatural power, the aftereffects of her psychic mutilation in a government research facility. Even in lighter episodes focusing on Mal's semi-comic heroism, we got troubling hints of the terrible force that River represents. In the beginning of “War Stories,” Kaylee and River chased each other around the ship, fighting over an apple and laughing gaily like the young girls they should have been. Kaylee won the apple away from River and exulted that, “No power in the 'verse can stop me.” Late in the episode, Kaylee was left alone to guard the rear in a gunfight. She looked horrified and lost, unable to do anything but hide behind a barrier. Then River, barefoot and clad in a flimsy shift, walked dreamily into the frame and gently took away Kaylee's huge revolver. River briefly scanned the scene, muttered some nursery rhyme-like mnemonic, stood up, and calmly shot three men dead in quick succession, with her eyes closed. When she then said to Kaylee, in her little girl voice, “No power in the 'verse can stop me,” the effect was chilling. River is a frail young girl, but neural manipulation had made her into a homicidal monster, and Kaylee stared at her, aghast. As River said (in the episode “Trash”) to the formidable fighter Jayne, after his previous betrayal of her and Simon was revealed : “I can kill you with my brain.”

River's outbursts in other episodes ranged from the comic and relatively harmless (cutting up Preacher Book's Bible and trying to rearrange it into something more sensible) to the clearly dangerous and seemingly demonic (suddenly slashing Jayne across the chest with a kitchen knife, declaring that “he looks better in red”). Her genius is not only for violence ; in various episodes she showed off hints of an unguessable range of abnormal talents. In “Safe,” she grasped a complex local Maypole dance in just seconds and joined in seamlessly, then elaborated, eventually becoming the center of the dance as everyone else clapped appreciatively. In “Shindig,” she seduced the petty criminal boss Badger by suddenly adopting a brash Cockney persona that convinced him she was a kindred spirit from the same slums. In “Objects in Space,” she outwitted and humiliated a Boba Fett-like bounty hunter named Jubal Early. Like River, Early was psychologically twisted in a way that gave him great power. He quickly and quietly overcame the crew one by one with his spooky ability to assess a person's weak point and apply the right kind of cruel, irresistible pressure. But River was spookier and more subtle-a spirit who seemed to take possession of the ship itself, and finally to inhabit Early's own mind.

In fact, River is a psychic. Perhaps this is innate, like much of her other genius, although Simon hinted that this too could be a “gift” from the Alliance—when Mal said, “I think she's a reader,” Simon replied, “They've definitely altered the way she reacts to things, even the way she perceives.” Her demonstrations of psychic ability earned her the label “witch” at several points, especially in “Safe” (where she was nearly burned as one), making the connection to magic explicit. By the beginning of the movie, the rest of the crew is clearly frightened of her and her unpredictable powers.

In the opening to Serenity, Joss treats us to a dizzying first-person taste of River's psychological dislocation. He steps the audience back through four levels of reality in a sequence that would do credit to Philip K. Dick (the master of layered realities, whose fiction gave rise to the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly). We begin with the familiar Universal logo unfolding to announce the feature. Next is the startling realization that we are already in the movie itself, looking at a computer display of the real planet Earth. We pull back to see River's childhood classroom lit in saturated nuclear white. That scene briefly establishes her youthful genius and conflict with authority, then subtly sours into a bad dream foreshadowing the holocaust on Miranda. We are violently jerked into the next reality—a densely equipped laboratory in dim blue light, our first glimpse of the scientific nightmare hinted at so darkly throughout Firefly. Here the adolescent River we know is restrained, struggling but still dreaming, with a steel probe inserted into her forehead. We are introduced to her chief tormentor, an Alliance scientist who describes his manipulation of River's brain with cold-blooded relish and obvious pride. This scene evolves into a thrilling (and deliberately parodic) rescue. At the height of the action, Joss pulls the rug out from under us again (and laughs at his own action sequence starring the more typically inept Simon) by freezing the frame, then rewinding. We are finally in current time, watching a holographic tape with the Operative, a Bond/ninja-like government agent in pursuit of River. As punishment for a serious breach of security, the Operative executes the sniveling scientist in a poetic and brutal fashion calculated to satisfy our thirst for revenge against River's captors. By the end of this opening sequence, we have an intimate sense of River's disordered mind, and we are left in no doubt about the movie's attitude toward neuroscience. It is the government's most insidious and powerful tool.2

How insidious, and how powerful, we will not fully realize until the neuropharmacological holocaust on Miranda is revealed. Miranda is neuroscientific mind control writ large and gone catastrophically wrong. It is the ultimate in disastrous utopian experimentation. It is the deepest explanation of River's madness, and her confrontation with the awful reality of it brings about a Freudian release that restores her sanity.3 Most surprisingly, it is also the explanation for the demonic Reavers. They turn out to be the tiny fraction of the Miranda populace with paradoxical reactions to the “Pax,” the neuroactive drug spread by the Alliance government through the water supply to control all hints of violence and rebellion. The Pax made everyone else simply “lie down” (as River's teacher commands in the dream), becoming so apathetic that they simply wasted away in place. As River says of the Reavers, “They never lie down.” 2. How Joss's Vision Relates to Neuroscientific Reality

In Firefly and Serenity, Joss has constructed a wonderfully human story, with the kind of emotion, action, and detail that makes us believe in, laugh with, and cry over a family of human characters. Yet this story points up a scientific truth that some find to be disconcertingly inhuman—that we are essentially neural creatures, nothing more and nothing less than our brains. In fact, referring to the brain as something we possess is inappropriate. We do not own brains, we are brains. That fact is vividly dramatized by the profound neural alterations to River's perception, cognition, behavior, and personality. Yet scientific reality can be even more bizarre. Brain lesions can strike at the heart of what it is to be human.

The one brain structure specifically mentioned in River's case is the amygdala, an almond-shaped nucleus in each hemisphere near the base of the brain that is involved in emotions and memory formation. Simon explained that repeated “stripping” of River's amygdalae had made it impossible for her to filter or control her emotions : “she feels everything … she can't not” (“Ariel”). In reality, selective damage to the amygdalae, which is very rare, has the opposite effect, blunting emotional reactions.4 Wider damage to the amygdala and other structures in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, produces amnesia, the inability to form new long-term memories. This condition (dramatized in the movie Memento) was first clinically described in a patient known as H.M., who underwent bilateral surgical removal of the medial temporal lobes in order to control debilitating epilepsy. As a result, H.M. lost the ability to form new long-term memories (memories that last beyond the point at which we are deliberately holding them in consciousness, over the course of seconds or at most minutes). H.M. lives in an eternal present, unable to extend his own personal narrative beyond what he remembers from before the surgery (Squire and Kandel).

Other brain lesions due to surgeries, mechanical injuries, strokes, or tumors can impact perception, cognition, and selfhood even more dramatically. Perceptual agnosias can be strikingly specific, eliminating a narrow slice of conscious experience and leaving the rest intact. For example, patients with lesions confined to the “fusiform face area” of the brain have perfectly normal vision, but can no longer identify individual human faces. Other specific lesions can selectively eliminate color or general form vision. Lesions of the parietal lobe (one of the four major divisions of each brain hemisphere) affect spatial cognition. Most brain functions are “crossed,” and thus lesions of the right parietal cortex impact perception of the left half of space. Awareness of the left half of objects or even the left half of the body can be wiped out. In a famous series of self-portraits, an artist who suffered a parietal stroke began by drawing only half his face ; the other half was added gradually in subsequent portraits as he recovered over a period of months. Parietal patients sometimes fail to groom or dress the affected half of their bodies, feeling that they belong to someone else. It is hard to believe that a thinking, functioning human being could cognitively disown half their body, but this goes to show that everything we experience and believe depends on some kind of neural information processing. When you destroy that neural process, you take away a piece of reality (Rapp).

Even the unity of consciousness can be disrupted by brain lesions. The two hemispheres of the brain, which are largely redundant in function, communicate via a thick bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. In some cases of intractable epilepsy, the corpus callosum is surgically severed to prevent the spread of seizures between hemispheres. Experiments on these patients have shown beyond doubt that the two hemispheres have separable conscious experiences and behavioral responses. If the two hemispheres are presented with conflicting cues in a visual recognition test, the patient will point to one answer with the right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere) while simultaneously pointing to a different answer with the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) (Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun).

These scientific observations present us with an inescapable truth : the brain and the self are one and the same. There is nothing about us that does not depend on some kind of neural processing somewhere in the brain. That is the reality dramatized by River's condition throughout Firefly. How can Joss reconcile this scientific reality with his own moral framework, defined as always by human individuality and self-determination ? For the answer, we have to examine the climactic battle in Serenity. 3. River Triumphant

We can see in retrospect how the entire Firefly story was always building toward the final battle in Serenity. This is where Joss weaves together all the longer threads of his story—Mal's cynicism, Alliance oppression, River's madness, the nightmarish Reavers. The setup occurs on Miranda, where River exorcises her madness by unearthing her searing memory of the holocaust, and Mal rediscovers his idealism when confronted by an Alliance crime too heinous to ignore. Both characters, internally conflicted throughout the series, are at last themselves again, Mal a hard-bitten freedom fighter, River a delicate teenage girl, though with a difference.

Many of Joss' final battles in Buffy and Angel take place on two planes, one physical, the other magical.5 In Serenity, Mal fights the straightfor ward physical battle, going one on one with an invincible opponent, using gun, blade, and fists, and calling on every combat trick and ounce of stubborn courage he's got. River must fight a battle that is physical but also entails another plane of reality, not magical this time but neuropsychological. The Reavers are transformed on this plane, gutted of human personality and inflamed into virtual demons by an accident of Alliance neuropharmacology. River herself has been transformed by Alliance neuroscience, into the ultimate warrior, a murderous automaton triggered by a subliminally broadcast Alliance signal in the bar on Beaumonde, unstoppable until Simon utters a safe word and she collapses. Her transformation into the perfect fighter cost River her sanity. After Miranda, she seems to have recovered her sanity, but as battle commences, she unfortunately seems to have simultaneously lost her will and ability to fight. She weeps over her fallen brother like a child losing a parent, plaintively crying, “You always take care of me.” Then, she straightens, and Joss turns the scene on its head with just two words : “My turn.”

Like any good Whedon apocalypse, this one forces the heroes to face imminent death under hopeless circumstances. Mal is run through with a sword, expiring on the floor, while the Operative dusts his hands off and walks away. River sacrifices herself to protect the rear, sealing the blast door but dragged into a pit of raving demons. On first viewing I believed at one point that Joss had really killed off both characters (okay, I'm gullible). But Mal drags himself up off the floor for one more round of punishment, and he has one more ruse de guerre up his sleeve. And River, miraculously, is dancing in a Reaver inferno, a slim wraith dealing death with balletic martial grace. This is the scene where Joss brings together everything Alliance neuroscience has created : the inhuman ferocity of the Reavers, the supernatural power of River's transformed mind.6 When the blast door opens again at last, it reveals River standing over a roomful of slain Reavers, eyes smoldering, blade dripping, the apotheosis of girl power. The awesome potential of her neural transformation is unleashed, but it is now hers to command. Her sword hand is retightening, in readiness to mow down the Alliance soldiers who have swarmed behind her, but when they are given the order to stand down, she exchanges a glance with Mal and drops her blade. The epilogue shows her whole again, a naturally curious teenage girl, innocently spying on Simon and Kaylee's lovemaking. But she is also the genius and the warrior, ready to take her place beside Mal at the helm of Serenity, in full control of herself and her power.

Thus endeth Joss's neuroscience lesson. Humans are neural creatures ; they can be destroyed at the neural level, they can be twisted at the neural level, they can even be enhanced at the neural level. But, as River exemplifies, those neural circuits contain a core of humanity, a kernel of self-determination that can overcome the agony and madness to assert itself as a courageous and loving human being. Science confronts us with the fact that our essential selves are neural—we are brains, nothing more. But that does not make us one bit less human.

1. There is a natural tendency to view scientific explanations of human psychology as somehow incompatible with our status as unique, individual human beings possessed of free will. If we are simply complex neural networks whose characteristics and actions are determined by physical processes, how can we also be loving, suffering souls, free to choose right or wrong, wisdom or folly ? I believe this longstanding philosophical dilemma arises from an impoverished conception of what a complete scientific explanation of human psychology would look like. We imagine that the brain works like a desktop computer or a B-movie robot, with simple input/output behavioral patterns and no internal life. But in fact our brains contain on the order of 100 billion neurons, each making on the order of 1,000 to 10,000 connections with other neurons. This makes the human brain by far the most complex sys tem in existence. Thus, our physical embodiment is not a constraint on human freedom, but instead a virtually infinite substrate that supports the ineffably rich and subtle variety of human experience. We should celebrate the brain as a miraculous source of human power, not bemoan it as a physical prison. River's story explores both the physicality and human power of the brain. She dramatizes how the brain is part of the material world—and thus subject to physical mutilation that can cause madness—but also how it is rich enough to embody love, courage, sacrifice, genius—all the personal qualities that are most essential to our concept of humanity. (Ed.'s Note : See Thomas Flamson's essay on free will.)

2. It is worth noting that, while neuroscientists are unsavory characters in Firefly and Serenity, in reality they are mostly a decent lot, more interested in curing disease and understanding the mind than in world domination. The technologies employed for evil purposes in Joss Whedon's fiction are beneficial or promising therapies in the real world. Neuroactive drugs provide our best approach to controlling depression and other debilitating or life-threatening psychological disorders. Brain stimulation is used to ameliorate movement deficits in Parkinson's disease and to relieve intractable pain (Perlmutter and Mink). Prosthetic sensory implants in deaf patients can support auditory perception up to the level of speech recognition (Wilson, Lawson, Muller, Tyler, and Kiefer). Neural implants in the frontal cortex can be used to read the brain's movement commands, and are expected to someday give paralyzed patients and amputees precise control over real or prosthetic limbs and hands (Barton). I imagine Joss appreciates much of this himself, and has no more real antipathy toward neuroscience than James Cameron (writer/director of Terminator) does toward computers.

3. Freud's classic conception of hysteria involved repression of a traumatic event into the subconscious. The psychic energy associated with that trauma manifested itself as the hysterical symptoms afflicting the patient. The cure, according to Freud, was to relive the event, bringing it into the light of consciousness and thus releasing the psychic energy once and for all. River's experience on Miranda follows this pattern quite explicitly. The mystery that Joss then teases his audience with is whether, in losing her madness, River has also lost her genius and power.

4. Ed.'s Note : See Bradley J. Daniels's essay, “Stripping' River Tam's Amygdala.”

5. In the Buffy season seven finale, for instance, the powerful fighters (Buffy, Spike, Faith) opened the Hellmouth and took on the First Evil's army of übervamps. Elsewhere, the magically gifted Willow was performing a spell to activate an army of Potentials as full-blown slayers, providing essential support in the physical battle. Willow had previously described this spell as the most powerful magic she had ever attempted and given instructions that she should be destroyed if the spell failed. Everyone fought bravely, but final victory again depended on magic, in the form of an amulet worn by Spike, through which the enemy was destroyed, though at the (temporary) cost of Spike's own life.

6. Joss professes to choose his character names with great care. The phonetic similarity between “River” and “Reaver” is no accident—the girl and the madmen are two sides of the same coin, both products of Alliance meddling with minds. I think of “River” as a reference to the “stream of consciousness,” psychologist William James's famous description of the continuous succession of states in one mind that we think of as the self or the soul. A “Reaver” can be one who plunders or pillages (from Middle English reven, to plunder) or one who tears things apart (from Middle English riven and Old Norse rifa, to rend, cleave, split, or break)—both apt descriptions for the savages in Firefly and Serenity.

All Your Characters Talk The Same - Joss Whedon can help !

Webmaster — 2009-11-05T19:34:29Z

All Your Characters Talk The Same — And They're Not A Hivemind !

It's one of the biggest problems plaguing fiction — and it seems to hit genre fiction especially hard sometimes : the characters who all sound exactly alike. How do you keep your characters from all having the same voice ?

This is something I've struggled with in my own fiction, and it's a much messier problem than you would think. Even when you feel like your tough woman space captain and your sensitive young astro-biologist are incredibly well drawn and full of character and neuroses, and nobody would ever imagine they were the same person. And then you're looking over your novel for the tenth time, and you realize that they're all sounding absolutely identical.

It makes sense, in one way — your characters are all aspects of you, after all. They all came out of your head, unless you based them on your friends or other fictional characters. (And even if they're based on someone else, they're still your creations, when it comes down to it.) You're speaking through their mouths. But that doesn't mean they're doomed to sound like you, or like the same person. This is totally a solveable problem.

Here are some solutions to the issue, ranging from least crude to crudest. If the least crude solution works for you, then you don't need to worry about the rest of them — but I've used all of these methods at various times, and there's no shame in using tough measures on your characters.

1) Listen to how people talk. I have a feeling this is what "real" writers do. Don't listen to how people talk on television or in the movies — go to a bar or cafe and just listen to the conversations around you, and try to hear how people are speaking. If you can write down snippets of people's conversations without being a total creep, then do that. V.S. Pritchett writes about doing this when he was a young writer — and one of those snippets of conversation even found its way into a short story that he later published. Try to get a feel for the rhythms of conversation, and the way different people form sentences. Bottom line is, if your characters all sound the same, then they're not sounding like natural dialogue at all.

2) Try to "hear" your characters' individual voices. This is not really cruder than the first one, actually. If your characters are really that vivid in your head — if you really feel like they're real, breathing people that you've brought to life inside a living story — then you should be able to hear their voices. And they don't just sound different because they choose different words to express themselves — they are saying different things.

Say Space Captain Starjumper makes lots of definitive statements, because she's got lots of points to get across, while Astrobiologist Second Class Sparrow is constantly raising tentative half-questions. Maybe Captain Starjumper has an undercurrent of insecurity, and that's part of why she has to make sharp statements all the time. And Sparrow really knows more than he's saying. The way in which people say the things they say also provides the reader with more information.

3) Realize your characers are not talking to you, or directly to the reader. Unless you're really doing some kind of post-modern fourth-wall-shredding exercise, your characters are talking to each other. And think about what kind of reaction your characters are hoping to get when they say something. Not the reaction they actually do get — it's too easy to jump straight to that — but the reaction they expect. Fine, Navigator Angstrom's revelation that he turns gay whenever the ship is in hyperspace meets with a stunned silence. But was Navigator Angstrom hoping for a stunned silence ? Was he trying to provoke an angry response, or some kind of accepting, reassuring statement ? Was he trying to guilt-trip the captain for making so many hyperspace jumps lately ? It sounds obvious, but it's often hard to remember : the response you're hoping for shapes the way you talk. And every one of these characters has a script in his/her head for how this conversation is going to go, whether it goes that way or not. You, as the author, know the way you want/need for the conversation to go, but you need to know what the characters want/expect as well.

Update : Zack Stentz, writer on Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe, points out another helpful way of looking at this : "Every interaction between two people is on some level a negotiation for status." Remember that, and your characters' speech will automatically get richer and more interesting. Apparently this advice originates with Terry McNally, co-writer of Earth Girls Are Easy.

4) Try giving each character a few unique verbal tics, or habitual words. Maybe Captain Starjumper says "I declare" a lot, in between all those declarative statements she makes. (Okay, bad example.) Maybe Navigator Angstrom makes lots of puns, or tosses lots of sarcastic jokes into the end of every comment. Give each character a few habits of speech, and maybe after a while those props will help you hear each character speaking differently. You may even be able to go back and take out some of these tics, if they get too repetitive, and if the speech around them has started to differentiate itself from the rest.

5) Go one step further, and give them catch phrases and stuff. This worked for Dickens, after all. A lot of Dickens characters basically have the same verbal habits over and over — the most famous of these, of course, is Mrs. Malaprop, who always uses words incorrectly, and gave us the term malapropism. (Update : Various people have pointed out this is not true. Sorry about the mix-up. I've read almost every Dickens novel, and somehow I believed this incorrectly. My bad !)

But it's true of a lot of minor Dickens characters. And especially if you're going for humor, there's nothing wrong with having a character who comes out with variations on the same funny line on several occasions. Maybe your astrobiologist character constantly states the obvious, but prefaces it by saying, "I have made a cunning observation."

6) Realize that you may have, at most, three or four character "voices" and refine those. As regular readers of this blog know, I utterly, unreservedly love Joss Whedon. But he is a perfect example of a writer who has a few voices that he uses over and over. There's always the stilted British person (Giles/Wesley/Adelle), the funny, quippy nerd (Xander/Topher/etc.) and the lost/crazy girl (River/Echo/Fred/etc.) And the amazing thing is — those characters are all wildly individual and have tons of depth. You would never mistake Giles for Adelle, even leaving apart that she's way prettier. (Well, somewhat prettier.) Whedon may have a few basic voices that he reuses over and over again, but he finds other ways to make his characters unique and distinct from each other. He's also worked, over the years, to refine each of those voices and make the most of their strengths.

7) Vary your sentence lengths, and play with punctuation. If all else fails, try this. In real life, some people tend to speak in longer sentences, others in shorter ones. (Actually, we all vary our sentence lengths all the time, but our average sentence lengths vary quite a bit.) There's nothing wrong with just deciding arbitrarily that Captain Starjumper's average sentence will be five words long, while Navigator Angstrom's will be twenty. Also, you can try giving one character lots of emdashes or colons in his/her speech — but do this sparingly, and only for one character. In my new fantasy novel, I have one character who includes lots of parenthetical statements, and I put those in actual parentheses. But I made sure to avoid any funny punctuation games with any other character's speech, so it didn't start annoying the reader too much.

8) Adjust the French/Anglo-Saxon mix. Those of us who write in English are lucky — it's actually two languages in one. (Plus random language detritus from a dozen other languages.) We're speaking a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French, the language of the Normans who conquered England in 1066. And just as the Enterprise's engines are a mix of matter and anti-matter, your speech is a mix of French and Anglo-Saxon. And some people definitely use more words of Latin origin than others — it's often a badge of education and upper-class status to use lots of obviously Latinate words. So if all else fails, try experimenting with having one of your characters use more Anglo-Saxon words than the rest of them, or more fancy French words. Grab a dictionary of etymology and think about which words come from which language — you can give your characters a more Germanic or more French "voice" without actually making them speak a foreign language at all. You could also just try having some characters use more one- or two-syllable words than the rest, but this might be subtler and more fun.