The Failed Pilot Project Case File #4: Dollhouse

Finding the best way to roll out a story

This article discusses the unaired first episode for Dollhouse, which is only available on the Season 1 DVD; while you can effectively read this article without having seen the episode, it might help to go and watch it. Given both that there is no easy video access for the episode, as well as it’s relation to the series proper, there are some mild spoilers that apply to both the pilot and/or the first season.  Also, this post deals with some ideas that were originally discussed in the Failed Pilot Project posts for Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, so it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with those articles first.

“This isn’t about what you want; this is about what you need.”

-Adele DeWitt

Even if it was preceded by the cancellations of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, I often see the cancellation of Firefly as the real watershed moment in the backlash against network cancellation, that crucial turning point where the act of cancellation began to be seen as an affront to the artistic medium of television. Sure the cancellation of the other two series – and many others as well both before and after – seems equally egregious in retrospect, but somewhere between the series’ short time on the air, the rabid Whedon fan base, and the key role the internet could now finally play, the cancellation seemed to make a much larger impact than any cancellation before it. This cancellation was so large in fact, that for many Gen Y-ers who were perhaps too young to catch Buffy and Angel when those shows first aired, the cancellation of Firefly is the defining event  of Whedon’s career.

So ingrained in pop culture is the association of Whedon with Firefly  and it’s cancellation that in the months leading up to the premiere of Dollhouse, expectations were both ridiculously high and unfairly low for the show. Sure people believed in Whedon’s talents and wanted the show to succeed as a kind of schadenfreude against FOX, but you couldn’t click on any article about the show without running into some sort of quip about how the show would be cancelled in less than a month; that’s just the kind of reputation FOX had acquired since December 2002. But when Dollhouse actually did get around to premiering (after a significant delay due to the writer’s strike the previous season), the biggest talk around the show wasn’t about the numbers (though they were never that good, even factoring in the show’s Friday night timeslot), but the fact that the show wasn’t up to the expected quality.

But then a few things started happening. Episode six, “Man on the Street”, aired, and it was good, as were the episodes after that. This finally started to feel like a Whedon show on par with Firefly, a show that people would remember fondly. Concurrently with this, news begin leaking that FOX wouldn’t air the thirteenth episode and final of the season (“Epitaph One”), and that it was in some way due to the scrapping of the show’s original first episode. Suspecting Firefly-levels of network chicanery, fans became incensed, convinced that those first five subpar episodes must have been the result of network meddling. The urge to see this original episode (and the unaired “Epitaph One”) fueled DVD sales, and soon the interwebs was all a-chatter about how this original episode, “Echo”, was much better than what the series started off with, that it should have been aired, and from there the show could have jumped right on into the good stuff. But here’s the dirty little secret about “Echo”: it’s not very good. Sure, it certainly was better than the first few episodes that aired, and so what Internet commentators were saying was technically true, but the hype effectively blew the episode’s quality out of proportion.

While “Echo” technically isn’t a pilot – all of the “pilot money” went into making the show’s expensive main set – it certainly acts more or less like a pilot, as it goes about setting up all of the characters and stories that would come into play over the series. Yet even though it has non-pilot status, FOX still treated it like one, putting it under test screenings and the like, and then asking Whedon to shoot a new first episode when “Echo” tested to be too dark and confusing. Whedon concurred, and shot a new episode (“Ghost”) to serve as the introductory episode, hoping to do reshoots on “Echo” and have it serve as the second episode, a plan that eventually failed when “Echo” was shelved permanently. But for all its faults, “Echo” is neither too dark (at least by any traditional Whedon standards), nor is it too confusing (by anyone’s standards). It lies out, quite simply and plainly, all that the series intends to do, and it’s the fact that it does this too simply and too plainly that causes the real problems.

The best way for me to describe this original episode is that if you’ve seen the first season of the show, especially those first five episodes, then you’ve effectively seen “Echo”, especially considering that many of the scenes in this episode would later be reused within those first five episodes. (Some were reshot, while others were simply dropped in as is.) It introduces Eliza Dushku’s Echo, showing her undergoing three engagements in quick succession. It introduces Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) and his fight to shutdown the Dollhouse, having him deceived by not one, but two, dolls, the latter of which takes up the bulk of the episode’s back half. The others characters – Adele, Topher, Dr. Saunders, Boyd, Victor, Dominick, and (very briefly) Sierra – are also rolled out here, though they are only really distinguished by their roles in the Dollhouse, and not much else, even is Adele (Olivia Williams) gets to use her sultry British accent to do a lot of smooth sounding exposition. Even when these characters have discussions about the moral implications of the Dollhouse – as happens here between Boyd and Topher and then between Topher and Dr. Saunders – it doesn’t sound as if these discussions are character specific, so much as if Whedon is trying to work out, in the most obvious of ways, all of the themes the show will deal with. If it sounds like a busy episode, that’s because it is, and yet at the end of it all it doesn’t feel like all that much was accomplished.

Last week, when discussing the Firefly pilot, I sung it’s praises as the best pilot Whedon has ever done. But what’s left out of that discussion – and something that couldn’t be discussed fully until this week – is that Firefly isn’t just the best pilot that Whedon has ever done, but it’s also the most original. Buffy was an adaptation of a former screenplay, and Whedon had to reorient the tone from outright camp to serious coming-of-age drama. Angel was a spinoff, and had to undergo its own shifts in tone. (Several times, actually.) Yet Dollhouse might just be the most unoriginal show Whedon has ever produced. The idea for the series first came up when Eliza Dushku, who was all ready contracted with FOX to star and produce in a series, took Whedon out for lunch in hopes of germinating an idea that they could work on together. It was while discussing idea for a show that Dushku could be on, one that would allow her to play many different beats while remaining action oriented, that Whedon eventually stumbled onto the idea for Dollhouse, a show on which he wanted to work. And so it quickly went through network television grinder, and after the erection of the main set, it was time for Whedon to shoot that first unsuccessful episode.

I relay this story because I believe that it’s important in understanding what’s wrong with “Echo” as a pilot/introductory episode. In his attempt to put all the elements that the series would cover into play, the episode not only feels overly busy, it just feels too overt. I suspect that unlike with Firefly, Whedon didn’t have nearly the same amount of time to let the idea for Dollhouse to be worked over in his mind. As such, “Echo” feels like the most literal of infodumps, as if Whedon just plugged the ideas that he wanted to discuss, as well as the basic premise, into some sort of story formula, and filmed it just so that he could have something to work off of for future episodes. There may be a lot of ideas in “Echo”, but they don’t necessarily point to anywhere.

This is best exemplified in the way that this pilot rolls out two plot developments, with Paul’s investigation into the Dollhouse and the beginnings of Echo’s self-realization. In both instances, there is just so much that is covered in the episode that it leaves very little room for growth in these two areas. Paul gets tricked by two separate dolls, thus revealing the width of the Dollhouse’s reach just a bit too quickly. Echo begins to remember things (like her actually name) and we see the beginnings of grouping, effectively covering all of the early forms of personal growth that Echo would go through (albeit not to the heights that such growth would go) in the span of 45 minutes. This problem is compounded by the too-brief introduction of Alpha (which was in name only here) and the complete lack of mentions of The Attic. The same could be said for the character, none of whom get any sort of back story here (as Echo, Sierra, and Boyd would in “Ghost”), and it’s not really clear how Whedon would have dealt with this issue going forward. The beginnings of most shows tend to focus on world-building, usually over the span of at least a few episodes. “Echo” as a starting point leaves very little room for natural growth, and I could see how Whedon would have struggled to work his way out of a corner if it had been the first episode.

But there are some good things about the pilot, and these are the reasons that it receives the legitimate, earned praise that it does from the show’s fanbase. Most important is that unlike the first five episodes of season one, “Echo” isn’t in the standalone, mission-of-the-week format. Much like Firefly before it, Dollhouse’s first episode feel like Whedon trying to break away from the traditional format that brought him so much success, if only for the artistic joy of doing something different. It seeks out to tell more complicated, nuanced, morally ambiguous stories, so that the jump to the mission-of-week format, again as with Firefly, feels like a downshift in creative output, an inferior product of some superior television genes. Even despite the flaws in story that “Echo” had, its structure was sound, and it could have led the way to a more serialized, more dramatic, better series than Dollhouse was in the early episodes.

This shift to mission-of-the-week brought along another problem, a disease that the internet dubbed “The Eliza Dushku Show.” Now, I’m not generally one to go on and on about how a certain actor isn’t good at their job – I find I’m not the best judge of that sort of thing – but I do agree that Dushku’s range is limited, and putting her in a role that would require so many different beats from week-to-week never seemed like the best of ideas. (But hey, I guess I don’t know Dushku like Whedon does.) But my main concern in the placing Dushku at the center of the series – even if that was one of the stipulations of her contract with FOX – was the way that she was so central that most of the other characters got too short a shrift. Firefly proved that Whedon was at his best when he was making an ensemble show, something that would become true once again once Dollhouse reoriented itself midseason. And “Echo” was far more of an ensemble piece, far more egalitarian in its role sizes that it seems impossible to ignore the fact that that’s the kind of show that Whedon had wanted to do all along with Dollhouse, and that by kowtowing to network pressure and (briefly) reorienting the show as a procedural, he just delayed the inevitable.

The other positive thing we get from “Echo” is much better idea of what the Dollhouse is and why it exists, thanks in no small part to the opening monologue by Adele, in a scene that later would be recycled into “Epitaph One”.

One of the major complaints against Dollhouse in its early run was that it was never made clear why some of Echo’s early engagements – hostage negotiator, outdoorsy date, bodyguard, safecracker – couldn’t have been done by somebody other than a doll. I’m not saying that the jobs present in “Echo” – a charity case to help a woman get clean, the perfect wedding date, a more badass hostage negotiator – are any better at this, but at least Adele’s monologue gets at the heart of why the dolls are so successful better than any of the first five episodes did. Most of those episodes would try to show the dolls using whatever skills/muscle memory was transferred into their brain as an example of why they were so exemplary, but this is one of the few case where telling becomes better than showing.

All in all, “Echo” is/could have been a much better way to start the series, as it would have let the audience know just what the show was about, and it most likely would have saved the show from those damaging first five mission-of-the-week episodes. But as a story it’s still weak, and it probably would have robbed the show’s early run of the few dramatic moments it was able to achieve. While I think that both FOX and Whedon were right in wanting to create a new first episode for the show, “Ghost” and the episodes that followed weren’t the answer. Instead, Whedon should have kept the same format as “Echo” and just extended a bit, giving us more time to know the characters and holding onto some of those dramatic reveals for later episodes.

Next Week: We move from one show creator to another as we discuss the casting changes of Bryan Fuller’s Wonderfalls.