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.

The Matrix Revolutions

Structurally, the finale of the Matrix series seems very odd. The action sequences are bigger than they've ever been, but it seems like the main characters don't actually do a whole hell of a lot. It's not that easy to even come up with a point for the first half hour - they could have easily skipped the whole Trainman part and just had the stuff with the Oracle without much changing. It's like the Wachowski Brothers looked at the script and said, "This needs to be two hours. Let's add a few more scenes in the Matrix, even though this is supposed to be a dichotomy with the second movie or something." That whole part is basically a retread - one last gunfight, one last Trinity jump kick, one more scene with the Merovingian. And that's basically all the main supporting cast gets to do for the rest of the movie.

The main conflict takes place in the real world, as Keanu goes to confront the machines while their army launches an assault on the humans' last city. The big battle largely features people we don't care about - a bunch of nameless goons in poorly-thought-out walking tanks and mildly developed bit characters running around here and there, while Will Smith's wife and a snarky crew race there hoping to help. The whole thing goes on for about twenty minutes, after which this has happened: the robots are still coming. One of the most enjoyable sequences in the movie happens before all this though, on the other ship with Neo and Trinity; where Bane, a human whose mind has been taken over by Smith, attempts to kill his nemesis. It's the only fight in the series that doesn't feature stylish martial arts or science fiction vehicles, just a couple of guys knocking each other around and using anything in arm's reach to gain an advantage. The guy playing Bane has a spot on Smith impression, and while he could have taken business a little smarter than he did, it's an important sequence for showing how Neo's powers have extended beyond the computer simulation they started in.

Unfortunately, the other scenes with Smith aren't so great. He transforms from the cold, brutal, efficient machine he was before into a typical maniacal bad guy, complete with silly menacing laughter. He seems to become more human as he struggles harder to eradicate them as a species. That's probably intentional, but that doesn't make it enjoyable characterization. The final battle between him and Neo is pretty mixed. It has some good moments, and it's interesting to see an over the top anime-style fight put to actual film, but it gets silly pretty often and, again, ends up feeling a bit pointless. The story's resolution is satisfactory for what they built up, although I could have done without the very obvious Christian imagery. The series went a while with Neo being a non-specific savior, it seemed weird for them to suddenly tie him directly to one Religion. In the end, Revolutions wasn't the redemption most were hoping for after Reloaded. They're both pretty watchable sci-fi action, but they don't come close to the simple quality of the original.

The Matrix Reloaded

I forgot to mention in the last post that the movie has good music too. Solid mix of original orchestral stuff and licensed techno and rock. Anyway, the first sequel had insane expectations that it failed to live up to. I still think it's an entertaining action movie, but it's sadly devoid of a lot of the elements that made the original good. A big problem is that most of the action seems pointless. The sense of fear and tension is missing. The first time around, Agents were scary and powerful, and the good guys were very vulnerable, just doing enough damage to give themselves time to escape. Now, Neo's practically omnipotent, and he treats them like playthings. It's not just him either; Morpheus holds his own against an upgraded model much better than he did against Smith. The danger's just gone. Neo can resurrect people and fly away from any fight, but he sticks around anyway to show off his moves. The ghost twin things chase after our heroes with an SUV and assault rifle; the gunner can fire a burst into any vehicle and cause it to flip over, but he empties hundreds of round at the good guys and nary a scratch. Every time a car crashes and spins through the air, we get treated to a slow motion glory shot from the best angle. The movie spends twelve minutes on the freeway chase, in which the following happens: they get away.

What's funny is that the advanced visual effects have aged worse than the first movie's tricks. The "burly brawl" starts out decently enough, with some interesting choreography as long as you ignore a few obvious stand-ins and the fact that the only thing they seem to be doing is grabbing Neo's shoulder, but as soon as the Smiths really start coming in the fight becomes a slow motion computer-fest as an extremely fake looking Keanu Reeves smacks around a bunch of extremely fake looking Hugo Weavings, accompanied by domino and bowling sound effects. Any time Reeves is replaced by a digital model to do something fantastic, it looks incredibly dated, and they bring the camera way too close to their sad creation. The movie is simply less believable than its predecessor. And outside the fighting, the movie's not that great either. Lots of people like to complain about the rave/sex scene, and for good reason. From when the drums begin to the final shot of Keanu's butt covered strategically by Trinity's leg, about five minutes pass. That's not a terrible amount of time to waste, but in those five minutes, we learn nothing, and the bits of dialogue only reinforces plot details we already knew.

When the movie came out, it was part of a multimedia attack featuring a video game and collection of anime short films. It was cool at the time, but now you see how it weakens The Matrix Reloaded as a film on its own. Why should we care about this dumb kid Neo rescued since the last time we saw him? Why are we just glazing over this apparently important stuff that Will Smith's wife is doing? All the other humans we meet don't really add much to the story. There's a whole fleet of hovercrafts with crews that jack into the Matrix, so how come we met none of them last time around? It kind of seems like the Wachowskis took their tight little science fiction story and wanted to make it more epic. The story works on some level, it just doesn't seem like the logical extension of the first film. I personally didn't mind the philosophizing and blunt exposition that cropped up, but it probably could have been presented more naturally. Also, the cliffhanger was fairly poorly executed. Bane is set up as a villain for the third movie, but at the time Reloaded ended he certainly wasn't memorable enough to get away with revealing him for a split second upside down. There are twists right before the break that really shake up what we believe in an interesting way, but it certainly wasn't a middle on par with some other famous trilogies.