Dollhouse season 2 (2009-2010)

Much to everyone’s surprise Joss Whedon's Dollhouse was renewed for a second season. You do need to watch season 1 first. I reviewed it here.

There were some changes in season two, some of which were forced upon Whedon but some reflected a slight change in his approach to the series. Whedon also wanted a different visual style - more shadows and a more atmospheric film noir-tinged look.

Whedon and his writers are as convinced as ever that women are physically much stronger than men. Apart from being silly this leads to some poor writing. Instead of finding ways in which Echo can use her brains and her female strengths to get out of trouble the writers are content to just have her effortlessly beat up big burly guys. The nonsensical GirlPower! stuff gets totally out of hand in the second season.

The character of Echo undergoes some changes but they make sense. Whedon always liked very long characters arcs. The Buffy of Buffy season 5 is a totally different person to the Buffy of season 1 but the changes are plausible and organic. She has grown up. She has also begun to understand the full implications of being a Slayer. Cordelia has a complex character arc in both Buffy and Angel, and again it makes sense. She has also gone from being a high school girl to being an adult woman.

Echo’s evolution has more to do with her attempts to become a real person rather than just a Doll but it’s presented in a plausible way. Echo starts to remember things that she’s not supposed to be able to remember. She starts to develop intellectually. She’s no longer a child-like zombie. She starts to have emotions. Sierra and Victor start to evolve as well. They develop emotions, and they develop sexual feelings towards each other and Dolls are not supposed to be capable of such things.

The imprinting process starts to develop glitches. At the end of each Engagement the imprinted personality is supposed to be wiped completely but that’s no longer happening reliably. The Dolls start to retain traces of imprinted personalities. Echo ends up with lots of different personalities imprinted simultaneously and it’s no longer possible to wipe these imprints.

By 2009 of course every TV series had to have character development and had to have extended story arcs. As a result Dollhouse has several story arcs and it has a long story arc extending over both seasons. This is why we get the Dolls starting to behave like real people.

Unfortunately this undermines the original concept and that original concept was the series’ biggest strength. The idea was that a person could start out as a young woman named Caroline, have that personality erased, have a new personality (Echo) that is child-like and innocent, then be given other totally different personalities and then have them wiped and Echo would then have no memory at all of anything these other personalities had done. It raised provocative moral questions. If she (in the guise of one of these imprinted personalities) kills someone in the course of an Engagement does Echo bear any responsibility for this? She has no idea that it happened.

Most of the Engagements are in effect high-class prostitution jobs. In the course of a year she might have a hundred different sexual partners, but since Echo has no memory of any of this and has no sexual urges and no knowledge of sex you could argue that Echo is in fact a virgin. And is Adelle DeWitt actually running a high-price call-girl operation if the girls have no knowledge of having had sex with clients? Are you a prostitute if you don’t know that you’ve done it? And if one of the Actives commits a crime on an Engagement is she guilty of a crime?

These fascinating moral dimensions are less evident in season two, which is a pity.

There are however plenty of good things about season two. As Echo develops self-awareness other questions are raised. Her body was originally inhabited by a young woman named Caroline. Does Caroline still exist? And is Echo a real person? Was she a real person when she was little more than a cheerful zombie? And now that she has self-awareness and emotions, has she become a real person? The series gets interesting when Echo learns about Caroline. Caroline was a psycho bitch terrorist who got people killed. She was a nasty fanatic. Echo isn’t keen on one day giving up her own existence so that that bitch Caroline can have her body back.

The downside to season two is that Echo ends up with forty simultaneous implanted personalities, all of them experts in some field such as firearms and unarmed combat. As a result she becomes more of a generic comic-book kickass action heroine with super-powers. The series becomes more of a routine sci-fi action story rather than the provocative slightly cerebral serious science fiction series of the first season. There’s too much blowing stuff up and endless endless fight scenes.

From comments made by Whedon in an interview it seems that he was under immense pressure from the network to dumb the show down as much as possible. He was also forced to reduce the amount of sexual subject matter - he had hoped to explore the emotional and sexual ramifications of the technology much more fully.

And then there’s the major story arc and I found it disappointingly obvious, too much like countless science fiction movies of the past half century. To be fair the series was made with the threat of cancellation always hanging over it so some of the ideas may have developed more satisfactorily had Whedon not been forced to hurry things along.

Both seasons of Dollhouse are visually impressive with a much more coherent aesthetic than Whedon’s earlier Firefly.

One of Whedon’s great strengths was his ability to create interesting female characters and then develop them in complex ways and Adelle DeWitt in Dollhouse is one of the best examples of this.

The first season of Dollhouse is excellent and while this second season doesn’t work quite as well it’s still superior science fiction television and it’s highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray release includes both seasons and looks lovely.