Brief spoilers for the premiere of "Dollhouse" coming up just as soon as I put my hair in a bun...I expressed most of my reservations about "Dollhouse" in my column on Wednesday, so I want to expand on a couple of points and then get out of the way and hear what you have to say on the subject. Again, my concerns about the show:
The plausibility factor: Eliza Dushku as the world's highest-priced, programmable hooker? Absolutely. Eliza Dushku as the person you want when your daughter has been kidnapped? Not buying it, no matter how much the FBI agent or Topher the programmer tried to argue differently. The fact that the imprinted personality coincidentally featured memories of a woman who was once abducted by this specific kidnapper both caused its own set of problems and helped save the day, but it made the whole thing even tougher to swallow. A weird choice as the opening case for the series.
The Dushku factor: Hey, look! It's Eliza Dushku in a micro-mini! Hey, look, it's Eliza Dushku with her hair in a bun and a skirt-suit! How versatile! I don't want to be too dismissive of her. I think there are certain things she does very, very well, most of which (sass alternated with vulnerability) Joss Whedon showcased nicely in "Buffy" season three. But she's not the chameleon actress that this role requires, and when she puts on the glasses and the skirt-suit, she doesn't seem like a different person, but like Faith trying to bluff her way through a crisis. The other two episodes I've seen have the imprinted roles falling very much in Dushku's wheelhouse, which is better for plausibility's sake but not so helpful for the larger idea that she starts over from scratch as a new person each week.
Beyond that, I don't want to say more until we get to later episodes. Joss said in our interview and lots of others he's done that he feels like the back half of this season is where the show really finds itself and starts to work. I hope he's right, and that the show is around long enough for us to see those episodes without waiting for the DVD. But in the early going, "Dollhouse" feels less like a show that's been a victim of network goonery than a show that had some basic problems in conception that still need to be addressed.
What did everybody else think?
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