Follow Up – Dollhouse

Dollhouse – FOX – 2 Seasons – USA

I wasn’t around back in 2002 when Firefly got cancelled. I mean, I was around, I just wasn’t watching Firefly. I didn’t catch it until it finally arrived in Australia and got a run really late at night. So I don’t know what the feeling was right after FOX completely messed that show up and buried it. I know I was pissed off to find that this show I really enjoyed didn’t have an ending and I’m guessing that the few Firefly loyalists who were there at the time felt the same way.

I don’t feel pissed off about Dollhouse getting cancelled. You really can’t get pissed off. After Firefly I’m sure Joss Whedon vowed never to work for evil hate mongers like the FOX network ever again, but somebody over there convinced him to give them another shot. I don’t know what they said but the agreement seemed to be ‘we won’t mess with your episode order, and we promise you we’ll give the show a chance to grow’.

And they did. Hats off to the FOX network for giving Dollhouse a chance to grow. You could argue that it’s hard to grow when you’re assigned the Friday Night Death Slot but let’s be thankful they let a full season play out despite awful ratings, and then allowed a full second season to play out despite even worse ratings. This isn’t the FOX network from eight years ago that was cancelling everything good it could get its hands on. This is a FOX network that pretty much said “Look, we’re sorry about how we acted last time. How about we let you scare aware our advertisers with your show’s appalling ratings for a while?”

I’m not pissed off that Dollhouse is gone but boy am I disappointed. The start of the series was shaky but it got better. When it came back for a second series and reverted back to the ‘case of the week’ format that worried so many people early on those waves of doubt came flooding back, but by golly was the second half of season two some of the most kick ass television you’ve ever seen.

Yes, there was a lot of exposition that had to be thrown around but who better than to deliver lots of dialogue than Joss Whedon. We got plot twists that were genuine plot twists. We got to see one of the best ensembles on television at work. We got to see Viktor as Topher, or rather the absolutely fantastic Enver Gjokaj play Viktor play Fran Kranz playing Topher. It was one the best moments in television from the past year.

After so many great episodes and after a satisfying finale the disappointment only seeps in when you think about what could have been. You just know that Joss had a five year plan for the show. You just know that they would have left the Dollhouse behind in season three anyway; and not just because they felt the need to ‘rush to the end’ because of an imminent cancellation. You just know that we would have spent time in this post apocalyptic world that we only got glimpses of in both season finales; we’d have known more about Viktor and his Beyond Thunderdome pals, we would have seen Topher’s sad and slow descent into madness, and most importantly we would have gotten a lot more Dollhouse.

Yes the show had a few wrinkles that have been talked about extensively elsewhere, most notably Eliza Dushku’s performance but she was surrounded by such a fantastic cast that her shortcomings as an actress can be overlooked. Also it was kind of obvious that FOX pulled the purse strings tight as we kept visiting the same office buildings, and the same Southern California landscapes. Bravo to Joss Whedon for getting completely stripped of a budget and still being able to make a fantastic sci-fi series; you know it had to be hard for him having a big explosion at the end of the second last episode that seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the outside of the building that supposedly blew up.

All we can really do now is sit here and imagine a world where the third, fourth and possibly fifth seasons of Dollhouse exist. Of course we’re more than thankful for what we had, but naturally you have to feel disappointed when a show that became as good as Dollhouse was has to go home. Here’s hoping Joss Whedon gets another TV series in the near future because remember: The world still needs heroes, kid.