Dollhouse - Season 2

When Dollhouse was facing possible cancellation after season one, I was hopeful it would continue, but the prospect of it ending wasn't a particularly depressing one. The show found its stride in the second half of the season (and the more disconnected first five episodes actually hold up better than expected when watched again), but an early death didn't seem like the tragedy that Firefly was. And the first two episodes of season two continued to underwhelm and shut down any possible chance of the show gaining an audience before Fox finally pulled the plug. But the last two episodes that aired before the cancellation was announced were pretty strong, more or less just stand alone stories, but they signaled that the writers still knew what they were doing and prepared fans for the sad truth. Once we knew Dollhouse was dead, it became the best show on television in what may be an unprecedented run of quality science fiction programming. The show didn't make us really miss it until we already knew it was gone.

The question of course, is whether the show would have still been as good if the writers thought they were safe, and the answer is probably not. At the very least, the plot would have developed much more slowly. They could see that the end was coming, and instead of just playing out the string, they dropped the normal formula of Echo going on various engagements that go wrong and decided to give us as much of the planned story as they could in the time they had. I thought after "Epitaph One", there was no way we could reach that point in the story naturally, but in season two they told us pretty much everything we needed to know. The last two episodes suffer the most for the rushed plotting, wrapping up everything that had to be a bit too quickly and conveniently for the series' normal reasonable intelligence, but they got the job done for the most part. "The Hollow Men" is the heroes' last ditch effort to prevent the Dollhouse technology from destroying the world, which is a bit too much standard action movie, and "Epitaph Two: Return", which makes resolving a horrible dystopia seem too easy. They didn't have to be perfect though, the first sort of working because we know their plan ultimately fails anyway, and wrapping up of all the character arcs being the second's more important goal. In between the first two and last two episodes, the show really was completely brilliant, with smart, believable character development, twists that hit the right balance of throwing you completely off while making sense in retrospect, brilliant uses and abuses of the central premise, and plenty of those tragic Whedon moments. Dollhouse wasn't perfect, but it succeeded in making me care that it's gone, which is an accomplishment for it lasting less than 30 episodes.

Television Update 4: Straight-to-DVD Finales

A few shows that have recently ended or been in danger of ending have seen episodes or even feature length movies be put out on home video instead of the airwaves, at least in the USA. Here's what I think of them.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan


Edward James Olmos, who directed this movie, claims it won't be the end of the Galactica saga, and he's not talking about Caprica. In any case, it felt less like a real film and more like a very long, somewhat informative filler episode, giving a lot of background on what was happening with the Cylons in secret in the beginning of the war, within the context of what we know from the end of the series. Cavill and Simon have the biggest roles, with the former orchestrating nearly every move made within the walls of Galactica in the first couple seasons, and the latter having a genuinely intriguing character arc, adding some purpose to a model which was hardly used at all during the regular run of the show. The new footage is heavily interspersed with clips from earlier episodes, although the new perspective was enough to prevent it from feeling like a recap show to me. Not great really, but had some interesting nuggets.

Dollhouse - "Epitaph One"


Because of filming two pilots, the season order got a little screwy for Dollhouse's first season. Only the first twelve regular episodes ending up airing in America, with an extra thirteenth filmed cheaply and shoved onto the DVD. Epitaph One could have been the last episode of the series until it was somehow picked up for a second season, and it jumps into the show's future, showing an apocalyptic world torn apart by the organization's apparent poor business practices. It's pretty fascinating, though it will probably end up becoming frustrating when the show eventually does get canned before the plot can really get this far along. Despite some real clunker episodes, it's brilliant, original science fiction like this that makes the show worth watching every week, although unfortunately there won't be another new episode until December.

Prison Break: The Final Break


I believe this was originally intended to be the show's final two episodes, but they ended up packaging them together into a separate movie, which honestly feels like the right decision. It just doesn't really jive with a series ending, feeling more like a little bonus adventure that's not really relevant to the story arc. I guess it really is the ending anyway, but oh well. It features one last jail break, this time from a women's penitentiary. It fills in some details missing from the ending montage in the series' final episode, and provides an adequately tense and interesting story, although it seems weird that they are able to get in so quickly after the series' other two breaks both took at least a dozen hours of television to pull off. Prison Break was always a second tier series to me, and this does little to change that, but has a nice send-off for the characters.

Dollhouse - Season 1

Thanks to a weird production quirk, there was another episode filmed that didn't relate directly to the season's plot and won't air on TV just yet, but will appear on DVD. That leaves this week's twelfth (that's a weird looking word, isn't it?) episode as the finale, although hopefully not for the whole series. The show's in big trouble thanks to poor ratings, though I'm not sure what FOX was expecting sticking it on Friday night. After hating the original pilot so much that they made Whedon do another one, causing the aforementioned confusion with the last episode, they seemingly made him do several episodes in a style he didn't want, causing the show to sputter out of the gate quality-wise, and then stuck it in a viewership black hole. It's like they were trying to kill it before it even started. I was definitely not sold on Dollhouse through the first five weeks. A couple episodes were pretty good, but there was no thrust to the overall plot when the series seemed to be crying for it, as we saw Eliza Dushku go through several disconnected assignments with only hints of what was to come.

Thankfully, by the sixth episode things get more or less on track as the central story develops into something worth following and the show simply becomes more enjoyable to watch. In many ways it's not very typical Whedon, as there's still some humor but it's not as prevalent in the tone, and they often seem more focused on delivering a message than just keeping the viewer entertained. The very idea of the Dollhouse is a scary one, as for various reasons, some more justified than others, these people are removed from their bodies for years as they are forced to do whatever their employers are paid to do. Even if they agree to it beforehand, there's something very wrong about what they're doing, despite the fact that they are very often used as forces for good, protecting helpless people and bringing criminals to justice. Still, just as often or even moreso, they're merely pimped out for some rich guy's personal amusement. But even with that it's hard to dislike any of the people responsible too much, because they seem to believe that they're not in the wrong and are very well-written as likable, complex characters. They really packed a lot of great revelations and twists in the second half of the season, culminating in a great climax to a lot of things I thought would have taken longer to cover. I hope it survives to see another season, because I really wonder what they could do with the continued opportunity.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Season 3

The third season is an important one, as it's end marks the split where some of the cast continues on in Sunnydale, and some move to Los Angeles for the Angel spin-off. It's pivotal for most of the characters too, as it's the last year of high school before everyone can move on, and they have to make decisions about their future. Buffy's desires are at odds with her destiny and blah blah blah she keeps fighting monsters. Willow is transforming from genius bookworm into genius bookworm that can do some magic, Xander's still occassionally funny but irritating whenever stuff's actually happening, and Giles cements himself as possibly my favorite character, although I suspect his role will be diminishing soon if not immediately.

The story this time is about the town's mayor, who has been hinted in the past as being more aware of the town's supernatural troubles than he led on, but to this point has been unseen. He's fairly friendly and non-serious for a major villain, and although that isn't exactly a unique idea, it's executed well enough. There's also Faith, a new slayer in town who appeared after the death of the other slayer at the end of the second season, who was summoned because of a glitch in the logic at the end of the first season. She has some problems. Besides the main story, there are a few other pretty entertaining tangents like an alternate universe where the sidekicks are bad guys. There's also an especially good one surprisingly focusing on Xander, where a pretty dramatic event requiring all the other main characters' attentions happens mostly offscreen while he gets into some trouble before anonymously saving the day. I've decided to watch Angel's first season next, so I can alternate between the shows until I finally finish.

Yakuza

Yakuza isn't an amazing, huge game. It's a solid, somewhat quirky one. But we need those too. It's a strange mix of beat-em-up and RPGs. What I might like most about it is its charm, not from a content sense, since it's a crime story filled with violence and sometimes gratuitous swearing, but just a gameplay sense. The button-mashing combat, the leveling up, the text boxes, the loading between fighting and normal play, the little shops full of items; they're all almost nostalgic in this modern world of minimalist interfaces and streamlined menus. It's a throwback to the old days.

It's a pretty enjoyable throwback too, most of the time. Besides the storyline, there are dozens of sidequests and other activities everywhere in the little area of Tokyo they lit you run around in, and you can ignore the main game for long stretched if you don't feel like dealing with it. The combat has some interesting wrinkles to it, especially if you seek out training to learn some new moves. It's usually pretty straightforward, but there are lots of items sprinkled about and techniques that are useful in various situations. It starts getting pretty frustrating near the end, when you start getting attacked by a certain type of enemy that tends to dodge everything and hit you with ridiculous spinning kicks and you get ganged up on, all culminating with an annoying boss who actually has bodyguards that revive themselves shortly after being beaten. But as long as you don't do what I did once and accidentally get into an unwinnable (almost no health against 4 guys with knives, one of whom can't be forced to drop his) fight that forced me to quit and lose an hour's progress, it shouldn't be too bad.

The story itself is pretty interesting. I wish they included the original voice track, because as fun as it is to hear Michael Madsen and Mark Hamill try to play Japanese characters, I was annoyed by the common overacting and inconsistent pronunciation. But it's still a good mob story, with plenty of twists, mysteries, and likable characters. The gameplay throughout is a constant repeat of running to the next fight besides a diversion or too, but wanting to know what was up kept me going. It got a little silly at the end, with some clichés, pointless extending of the climax, and a nearly interminable ending, but overall it encapsulated a pretty fun game well.