Dollhouse: Echoes; Needs
Apr. 6th, 2009 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckMy opinion on Man on the Street can be found elsewhere, but let me just say again that it was the first episode of Dollhouse that had me completely enthralled.
After that, Echoes was a bit of a letdown, for several reasons. On first viewing it felt disjointed and chaotic, something which reflects the actual story, so it makes sense. On second viewing, it improved and I enjoyed it more. I don't find it particularly funny to watch stoned people act silly - at which point did it become the acceptable substitute for showing drunk people on screen? - and while I get that it showed us the person underneath the role they play in their job, it's just not my sense of humour. I had the same problem with the Angel episode Life of the Party. But that's my personal little hangup about the episode and I can overlook it.
Echo's past as Caroline showed us a somehow earnest, but naive person, who is enthusiastic about helping people and animals without fully thinking through what she's doing, but at least she is willing to act instead of just sitting around with her friends and talking about the plight of the poor animals. It again becomes clear that Echo is Adele deWitt's personal pet project, her favourite guinea-pig and that she has some respect for Caroline. I'm not sure how I feel about Caroline - she's likeable, but she's flawed in my opinion. Would I have preferred a more perfect heroine? Again, this show doesn't it make it easy for the viewer to fall in love with the characters. On the other hand, Caroline/Echo was Alice in Wonderland in this episode and I can remember I found her annoying and silly, when I first encountered her as a child. Which might have been the point - as a reader you feel superior and more clever...
And here we come to Needs and my problems with the episode and the series as a whole. I like my television to be character-driven, but of course that doesn't work without a decent plot and a solid concept. With Dollhouse we've got the concept, both for the series and the individual episodes, but this doesn't always translate well plot- and characterwise. It worked perfectly with Man on the Street in which concept, plot and character development went hand in hand. Needs was strong on concept and it works on an intellectual level for me, but once we knew it was all an experiment, it was pretty clear that it wouldn't get out of hand completely. Unlike other viewers, I don't have a problem with the difficult subject matter and the constant moral grey, but there's a but there and I can't fully put it in words. K can: he loved Man on the Street, was lightly disappointed with Echoes and hated Needs and he says it's because he doesn't care about the characters and concept just isn't a substitute for him.
Needs gives the dolls what they need and then we get a complete reset: They forget about it again and they're back to being dolls. That's frustrating when you care about the characters. As a viewer, you want them to wake up and become full persons again. Just like Echo/Caroline you want to save them, but that's not so easy, is it? How do you get them out of their caves, free them from their ignorance? Are you actually doing them a favour? Certainly not, when they're set free in the doll state - they wouldn't be able to function. In Needs we see Caroline without the traumatic memory of her boyfriend's death - would she really want to have that back? I think this is where concept and character development could intersect, where I hope Dollhouse will get more interesting again. Oh, and whatever happened to Alpha, of course....
After that, Echoes was a bit of a letdown, for several reasons. On first viewing it felt disjointed and chaotic, something which reflects the actual story, so it makes sense. On second viewing, it improved and I enjoyed it more. I don't find it particularly funny to watch stoned people act silly - at which point did it become the acceptable substitute for showing drunk people on screen? - and while I get that it showed us the person underneath the role they play in their job, it's just not my sense of humour. I had the same problem with the Angel episode Life of the Party. But that's my personal little hangup about the episode and I can overlook it.
Echo's past as Caroline showed us a somehow earnest, but naive person, who is enthusiastic about helping people and animals without fully thinking through what she's doing, but at least she is willing to act instead of just sitting around with her friends and talking about the plight of the poor animals. It again becomes clear that Echo is Adele deWitt's personal pet project, her favourite guinea-pig and that she has some respect for Caroline. I'm not sure how I feel about Caroline - she's likeable, but she's flawed in my opinion. Would I have preferred a more perfect heroine? Again, this show doesn't it make it easy for the viewer to fall in love with the characters. On the other hand, Caroline/Echo was Alice in Wonderland in this episode and I can remember I found her annoying and silly, when I first encountered her as a child. Which might have been the point - as a reader you feel superior and more clever...
And here we come to Needs and my problems with the episode and the series as a whole. I like my television to be character-driven, but of course that doesn't work without a decent plot and a solid concept. With Dollhouse we've got the concept, both for the series and the individual episodes, but this doesn't always translate well plot- and characterwise. It worked perfectly with Man on the Street in which concept, plot and character development went hand in hand. Needs was strong on concept and it works on an intellectual level for me, but once we knew it was all an experiment, it was pretty clear that it wouldn't get out of hand completely. Unlike other viewers, I don't have a problem with the difficult subject matter and the constant moral grey, but there's a but there and I can't fully put it in words. K can: he loved Man on the Street, was lightly disappointed with Echoes and hated Needs and he says it's because he doesn't care about the characters and concept just isn't a substitute for him.
Needs gives the dolls what they need and then we get a complete reset: They forget about it again and they're back to being dolls. That's frustrating when you care about the characters. As a viewer, you want them to wake up and become full persons again. Just like Echo/Caroline you want to save them, but that's not so easy, is it? How do you get them out of their caves, free them from their ignorance? Are you actually doing them a favour? Certainly not, when they're set free in the doll state - they wouldn't be able to function. In Needs we see Caroline without the traumatic memory of her boyfriend's death - would she really want to have that back? I think this is where concept and character development could intersect, where I hope Dollhouse will get more interesting again. Oh, and whatever happened to Alpha, of course....
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-06 05:49 pm (UTC)Hehe until the last minute I kinda hoped that Victor would wait for Sierra to go to bed, to be sure she was okay, but of course I knew he wouldn't, that that Victor was gone. The frustration wasn't about Echo failing in her attempt to save the dolls, the viewers had to know that they couldn't go outside in their blank state, but about the Four dropping and then regressing.
We wanted those four to be free, to be human again, to be the persons they were once upon a time in order to relate to them. I think that while DeWitt and Sanders "played" with the four dysfunctional Actives' need for a sort of closure Joss Whedon also played with our desire to see them as characters instead of dolls, and I guess that he would say that this episode's ending what probably not what we wanted but it was what we needed.
We are his pet project.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-06 06:00 pm (UTC)Yes, you're right, of course, and again, it works on the conceptual level (the writer giving us what we need, but not what we want), but as a viewer, we're still not quite satisfied emotionally.
If we take a step back, we never can be, of course, all television is like the Dollhouse, the actors go back to who they were once before and no matter how much fanfiction we write or read, the characters won't ever come alive. Sometimes, the viewer gets frustrated with the script - the client doesn't get what they expected - and sometimes the writer, the person behind the curtain, is surprised by their creations, by how the dolls or actors react.