The problem with "Dollhouse", years later.

So, I’m a pretty big “Buffy” fan, in the sense that I’ve seen every episode of the show at least four times, several more than ten. I liked “Angel” pretty well, too. I enjoy “Firefly” as well, though I do think it gets fetishized because it was cancelled — the show was enjoyable but the concept, even compared to “Buffy”, was pretty hokey, and sometimes I find the stylized dialogue a little embarrassing.

ANYHOOZY. Suffice it to say that I was mad stoked when it turned out there was another Joss Whedon show coming down the pike. Not only that, it starred Eliza Duckshoot, who played Faith on “Buffy”. I watched the first episode, and didn’t think much of it. But I was willing to give it time: the pilots of “Buffy” and “Firefly” were kinda sucky, too. Shows take time to grow into themselves.

So it was with an unfolding sense of disbelief that I followed “Dollhouse” and came to realize that it was just going to be like this. The whole show was going to be weirdly chilly and hard to get invested in. I couldn’t really figure out what I didn’t like about it, other than that Eliza Duckshoot has pretty much two speeds: Faith, and plastic; e.g., when she was inhabiting the body of someone bitchy and badass, she was a lot of fun, but when she was inhabiting the body of anybody else, it was totally impossible to buy into her character’s reality.

Anyway, I’ve finally got around to watching the whole thing, and I think I’ve figured out what the biggest problem with the show really is: the central character, by design, has no personality. I realize that this is sort of the plot arc of the first two seasons, but the upshot is that the viewer is relieved when the alleged protagonist is offscreen: everything she does is dead air. It’s impossible to care about her, because she doesn’t exist.

One of the standard things one teaches to beginning creative writing students is that their characters have to want something: that’s how you make them active, keep them interesting, move the plot along. But Echo is pretty much not capable of wanting anything, which ultimately neuters the character and renders the show kind of boring. I realize Joss Whedon’s not a beginning creative writing student, but I think that basically he missed this native flaw when thinking about how much fun it would be to write a show that could be a spy show one week and a cop show the next week and a doctor show the week after that. And because he’s Joss Whedon, he got it on the air.

The show eventually sort of solves this problem by pushing Echo ever more to the periphery: by the end of the first season, Tamoh Pinikett’s FBI agent is as much the protagonist as Echo is, and in fact, at least one whole episode takes place without the character onscreen at all. ALL of the supporting characters are more interesting than the protagonist, so the show feels like it wants to be about them.

It puts me in mind of a scene from “Real Genius”: When we meet Val Kilmer, he fires off some kind of helicopter that careens around the room and ultimately crashes. He pops up and asks, “Would you classify that as a design flaw or a launch problem?” Well, “Dollhouse” kind of has both.