Recapping the premiere of Whedon’s Dollhouse while I watch, or live-blogging, or whatever you want to call it in these heady internet days….

Opening line: “Nothing is what it appears to be.” Classic ritual abuse crap – it’s true for the viewers, and representative of how they messes with the characters’ minds. I like them starting in media res though. Which is also nice stylistically – it’s confusing like ritual abuse, and we get to share some of her experience of never knowing what the hell is going on.

I’m kind of taking everything that I learn here with a grain of salt, because I assume that this show will be riddled with plot twists and Whedon pulling the rug out from under us and everything we think we know being wrong. Or at least I hope that is what it will be like. It only seems appropriate.

Blah blah, motorcycle race scene. “Are we flashing back?” asks my fiancee Annie. I just assumed that thiwa s the kind of show where we’d go from tea in an office to riding motorcycles into someone’s birthday party.

I am excited that Eliza Dushku is the lead in this show, because I loved her in Buffy. And I have to say, both she and Sarah Michelle Gellar were SO good and nuanced under Whedon’s direction, and so underperformed in every other thing I’ve seen them in. I formed this theory that he is really the only one who can make them act, so I’m glad Dushku is here!

Hm, so maybe they are painting her boyfriend as the normal-person eyes through which we find out how weird her life actually is and how little she knows? He has that scruffy-but-weirdly-cute thing that Matt had in Seventh Heaven. And she gets in the van and portrays him as a guy she just met. What’s weird to me is that then he has a bunch of really fucking vague and weird lines about how she has to disappear before midnight so her coach doesn’t turn into a pumpkin.

Yeah. I just admitted to watching Seventh Heaven.

So then she is in a machine and we get all the portentious lines about how she thinks she found something real with him, and of course her whole life isn’t real, and we rewind through a bunch of it which shows a lot of memories they gave her. And then she gets up all blank with badly-written perfect robot dialogue like “Shall I go now?” Why do people always have to go to the badly-written robot place?

“You’re so jaded! It’s so… middle age!” That sentence really seems unfinished to me. It comes from this little blond geek who is in charge of erasing and rewriting her memories, and who is apparently convinced that they are great humanitarians for what they do. He exposits that they just did

Limo guy’s kid: “I hate you.” Limo guy, unoffended: “You have that right.” (as in, you have the right to do that.) That is an awesome exchange. Less thrilling: he tells her that if she watches the reality show he’ll see it all over her face even when she is sleeping. But hey, then she gets chloroformed and kidnapped, which kind of overshadows the creepy parenting.

It’s kind of hard to read the credits, because so many of these folks’ names seem to be scrambled. But then we get to Olivia Williams, so I guess those were actual names. I can say that, no one knows how to spell my name. Hey! I should be on this show!

“Would you like a massage?”
“(smiles) They’re relaxing.”
So we learn that she doesn’t know what she likes – classic dissociation – and through some more dialogue, that she isn’t bothered by not remembering what hurt her knee, and is a little creepy. Which is partly dialogue – she says things like “She hurts” (found someone who was being imprinted, which obviously hurt her) and generally talks in kind of a vacant-eyed-child way. I guess that’s fair, actually. She should probably be exactly that creepy and regressed.

Now we meet some g-men who are investigating it all. Investigating Guy exposits about how the corporation works: that these people may as well have been murdered, that they are programmed for whatever people want them to do. Government Boss Guy goes off about how girls are being smuggled into the country and he’s jeopardizing that investigation by pissing government officials off with his craaazy ideas. Oh, X-Files, why do you haunt this genre so.

I like the blond programming weirdo’s character (not as a person, but as entertainment); he reminds me of the three baddies

Now Guy In Charge Of Dollhouse is being ordered to have Echo (Eliza Dushku) go in and help them investigate the kidnapping. Dushku is hot in little glasses and a power suit. Which in itself is a reflection of the show: Dushku is always hot, but this particular look, for whatever boring psychological reasons, is one that I enjoy. And that’s a big part of what Echo does, right – put on different little roles and looks for people.

“Who are you?”
“You asked for me; I’m here to help.”
I do enjoy the motif of her spouting lines that give different takes on how she sees herself and her experience.

Limits of acting: they can show they programmed her to know Spanish, but they can’t program her to speak it very well because Dushku doesn’t.

Fascinating exposition time. Blond nerd guy is expositing to Guy In Charge – who you’d think would know this stuff already – about how he made her shortsighted by messing up the neural connections to her eyes because he bases these personalities on real people.

And here is the smart part: it’s not all about how Dollhouse works or who Echo is; there’s a whole subplot to get involved with (superplot?) where she, as Eliza Penn, is a hostage negotiator for the little kidnapped girl. Gives us a chance to get on her side and become invested in her.

Best lines ever:
“You told me you were good with people.”
“I misspoke; I’m good AT people.”

That’s EXACTLY what she is, albeit not of her own volition. Good at people.

Oooooh. The guy knows exactly what she is and tells her flat-out that she is the best and that the people who sent her could have made her a nurse or a clown in the circus. She has no idea what he means. The guy tries to get her to tell him about her motivations and childhood, and she says she was kidnapped for three months when she was nine. He interrupts her: “All these terrible memories they put in your head. Why would they do that?” She makes up some stuff about what motivates kidnappers, and then is almost felled by a flash of memory of the woman she saw being imprinted. Commercial break.

Oscar, here, jumps in to comment on the reality here, that in reality these kidnappings happen a lot in Mexico and a lot of rich people move up here to escape them, and this is the fear always, that it will happen here. And apparently they referenced that at the beginning – that the character moved up here for that very reason.

G-Man Investigator holds a gun to some guy’s head at a urinal and makes him say “Dollhouse” over and over, and starts expositing and interrogating him. Ha ha, the guy peed on his shoes. That’ll happen. That storyline could be more entertaining, shoe pee notwithstanding. Maybe not so much more entertaining as less choppy – it’s like a light garnish of a few chopped herbs on the rest of the dish.

On a dock in the daytime now, they are trying to make the exchange with the kidnapper while Guy In Charge stands far off with a sniper gun. We see Echo having an asthma attack as a particular man walks toward her. She tells him not to let them on the boat, because they’re not going to give her back. The dad charges toward the kidnapper, ordering him to give the girl back, and gets shot; Guy In Charge shoots the kidnapper, and the boat races off.

Guy In Charge runs over to her, where she is babbling about how you can’t fight a ghost. He says “Are you ready for your treatment now?” in a way that I think makes it clear that it’s supposed to be a trigger phrase. But she just repeats the thing about the ghosts.

She’s super-triggered now about this, says he’s old now and she’s the same age, that he said he was a ghost and you can’t fight a ghost, but he was heavy, ghosts aren’t heavy, that he was the one who took her, that “she’s proportionally similar to a girl,” and back into professional mode: they have 6 hours to save her. She realizes: the kid said only one man wore a mask, which means she knows him.

“We need to do my treatment NOW,” she says; they must imprint them with some idea that they have to have this treatment.

So, they exposit: In Charge is arguing with his boss (so let’s call him Ex-Cop now, since really she is in charge and he is just in charge of Echo offsite); they are in danger because this is becoming news, because the guy who got shot might not live, but on the other hand, it wasn’t that Echo messed up, it was their falt for imprinting her with an abused woman and putting her face to face with her abuser, and she’s the only one who can find him, and aren’t they deluding themselves that they do this to help people? Finally he gets to race off to try to stop her being wiped (why wouldn’t they just be able to re-imprint her?!) and they do a cute Whedonesque psych-out before revealing that she is still “in character.” Commercial.

Echoliza is busting through the halls and plunges us into much discussion over her assertion that if this guy is in her school and at the head of the organization, he must not be Latino. We figure that it’s because “oh, Latinos are stupid,” and that’s why they exaggerate the bad guy’s accent so he sounds like Scarface (Oscar says). Liz says that Whedon really isn’t particularly racially or culturally sensitive and rarely deals with this stuff; Annie asks about the rare vampires of color on Buffy and states her awesome belief that that is especially important “in the vampire community.” Semi-hilarious soundtrack mimicking a heartbeat under all this in an obvious attempt to make us more tense; as Annie points out, the asthma-inhaler breaks in her professional facade are much more stress-inducing.

We find out that the person who was kidnapped, who is a big part of this persona, killed herself last year. “Research, research, research,” Oscar observes. Ohh, and now she’s in their busted-up shack taking to her abuser who doesn’t recognize her. Since she’s not actually the dead abused woman.

“You talk, or I’ll find something to stuff that mouth up,” her abuser leers, grabbing her face.
“I think I’m a little OLD for you,” she finally glowers, pushing away. Awesomes!

She is turning them all on the bad guy, or rather the ESPECIALLY bad guy, by telling them all about what he really wants and how many girls she knows about. The ones he broke down, “the one he dumped in the river – before he was sure she was dead.”

“It’s over – you can’t hurt me anymore.” And he punches her. And she gets up and says, with absolute confidence, “You can’t fight a ghost.”

Goosebumps! That is fucking insane. She IS a ghost. And she’s getting vindicated. That is insane.

The bad guy is dead now, and she is carrying the girl out in triumph – and then this other chick, who looks kind of like Cheetara in Thundercats, busts in and shoots every bad guy. “There were shots,” she justifies. She’s another doll.

Gratuitous group showering scene. Why would they have them all shower in the middle of the office area? And why is it only chicks, or did I miss some of the guy dolls in there? Apparently I did – but still what purpose does that serve? Oscar: “I think the whole point is they’re completely brainwashed and they don’t even perceive themselves as sexual beings.” Well, so they put the soft porn to some expository use!

Then they all get into what are kind of coffins to go to sleep. Coffin fixation, Joss?

Cut to insane freaking scene where someone is watching a video of her in college, and a slow pan behind him to two dead bodies. She wraps up, “What can I say? I want to do everything.” Awesome, and also a tiny bit heavy-handed. But I guess it’s okay to combine a little bit of the hammer-like dialogue with the INSANE PLOT TWISTS.

And the little mutant enemy guy zombies across the screen all “Grr! Argh!” And we squee.

So much awesomes. I did enjoy that, and it wasn’t anywhere near as creepy and traumatizing as I thought. Untraumatizing for me, but I don’t have the government ritual abuse background that for some people might make this difficult.

Plus, I have had an undeveloped theory for a while about Buffy the Vampire Slayer helping people process ritual abuse issues in particular, and abuse in general, without ever openly going into the ritual abuse place. And this totally backs me up, right, in the idea that Joss is making art that processes ritual abuse for us. Why, or whether it’s conscious, I don’t know. But it’s obviously there!