Complete Your Whedonverse: Dollhouse & Firefly

During the last few weekends, I finally completed my viewing of the Whedonverse, which to the uninitiated, would be the jewels of pop culture created by Joss Whedon. Until recently, I was only a member of the Buffyverse, a late-coming aficionado of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I completed that knowledge with the viewing of the complete Angel, the spinoff starring sexy vampire, David Boreanaz. This was vampire chic before it was cool.

I'd skipped most of Firefly and Serenity, Whedon's foray into sci-fi (via pseudo-western). I got in on the ground floor with Dollhouse, Whedon's latest offering. But this summer, I decided it was time I became a completist. I got all of the missing pieces and watched them over several weeks. Here are my findings.

I started with the DVD set of Firefly, the brilliant-but-cancelled fan favorite. The cast, lead by Nathan Fillion as Capt. Mal Reynolds does not disappoint. They are uniformly good looking, and also very good actors. The show melds shoot-'em-up westerns with star-spanning sci-fi, and manages the feat quite well. Unfortunately, the concept is quite complex and convoluted, and required that I do some on-line research to fully grasp it. In the future, so the storyline goes, the Earth became overpopulated and run down, and so mankind spread its wings and terraformed several planets, moons and planetoids in a new star system.

This created conflict between government and "frontiersman" factions, culminating in a war. The government was controlled by an American-Chinese alliance, and the rebels lost the battle. Capt. Reynolds and his ragtag team were on the losing side, and after the war become minor league outlaws. The morality of the crew is quite gray, and the rightness or wrongness of their missions is difficult to nail down. The Whedonesque dialog crackles, and the swashbuckling melds nicely with the humor, the pathos and the sexiness. . .much like on Buffy and Angel.

But it was all a little too highbrow to catch on quickly, and it was summarily executed by FOX long before it should have been. Still, fan support was strong enough to commission a theatrical film, and thus Serenity was born. The movie plays like a kick-ass extended episode that fits very well with the series. It was surprising that Whedon killed off two major characters, something that actually kind of pissed me off. And watching Summer Glau as River Tam was a little weird after having first seen her as the Terminator, Cameron, in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There are a lot of similarities between her two characters, chief among them her mastery of waif fu.

Small wonder that Glau will be appearing in the second season of Dollhouse. Bigger wonder that Dollhouse is getting another crack at bat at all. The show was positioned as the lead in to Sarah Connor last year, and neither show did well in the ratings. Connor was by far the leader in name recognition, but Dollhouse won renewal. And I'm so glad it did. I just wish it wasn't at the cost of the other show.

Dollhouse concerns a super-secret "house" of beautiful people who can be downloaded with any personality with any mission that the super-rich can pay for. They can be lovers, fighters, anything a client might want them to be. As with all of Whedon's other shows, motivations are colored with many shades of grey, morally. And, as with the other shows, things are very complex, and require more of your brain to follow than ordinary TV shows do. Again, the actors are well chosen, and very good. The star, Eliza Dushku (Faith, from Buffy) has been unfairly derided as a "limited" actress, in my opinion, performing very well in her difficult role as an "active." She plays Echo, the blank slate personality, as well as Caroline, her "core" identity, and then as a different personality in every mission.

The show didn't really take off until about the sixth episode, after all of FOX's notes had been absorbed, and the real story started being told. So if you get the DVD set, hang in there. It gets terrific. But upon second viewing, even the early episodes have nuggets I didn't notice before. The set goes very fast, and I was surprised how quickly I got to the end of the network run. But it is in the final episode, Epitaph One, that things get really interesting. The unaired episode (which as far as I know, will remain so) is a ten years in the future flash forward. In a dystopian future, the logical conclusion of the abilities of the Dollhouse are played out to spectacular dysfunction.

Epitaph One serves a similar function to Dollhouse as Serenity does to Firefly. It puts a neat coda onto the series. At the time of filming, they didn't know if the show would continue. So it could have been a finale episode. As it stands now, Season 2 will be filling in the gaps between the regular episodes and the final one. It could also sort of paint them into a corner, and confuse people who have not seen the DVD-only episode. It remains to be seen how they will deal with that.

All-in-all, I'm glad to have plugged the gaps in my Whedonverse knowledge. And I feel a little glum not having any new installments to view. I guess I'll have to wait patiently (only a couple of weeks!) until Dollhouse's second season begins. And I'll be crossing my fingers mightily that somehow--somehow--the show gets a full-season order beyond the promised 13.

My review: Firefly, Serenity, Dollhouse Season 1: Highly recommended