Oh wait, wait, it’s almost midnight and I’m blogging about a canceled show on Fox?
Watching “Epitaph One,” I couldn’t help but be irritated at the proposed degeneration of the Dollhouse into an apocalyptic future. It seemed like the same old zombie plot all over again, and instead of a virus there’s just the Dollhouse mind magic.
And that’s why I want to gripe about the whole “tech” concept of the show. To me, the most far of fantastic science could produce the possibility of “imprinting” someone. It would require the complete knowledge of a brain’s material structure, and the ability to alter it on the mechanical level. This would require some very complex machines, ones that if they could alter the material structure of the brain, could also theoretically be capable to blueprinting just about anything. So, someone builds one and uses it to make a fancy brothel, and the machine uses “waves”, maybe ionizing radiation, the imprint people. Maybe years into the future this could be feasible. But no, all of a sudden all this high tech machinery gets transmitted into “phones and boom boxes”, and the powers that be somehow let it all slip into an apocalyptic nightmare. This is the shift from science fiction to zombie plot devices, and I think it reflects confusion into show message, which seemed to shift from a question of morality and ethics to a paranoid mind control delusion. And that’s why I think the show didn’t succeed. I don’t think it was too cerebral or too high on questioning society, as the fox-style cameras (everythings so new and shiny), the ripped male actors and the satin and high heels girl kicking asses suggests otherwise. It seems to me to be a hybrid of T.V. cliches to produce a marginal show, one that I considered watching extra but then decided it was too damn boring. Somehow Hugh Laurie makes me happier when I watch House.
Dollhouse is all about “society as a spectacle”. Is it just me or did the Romans have men fighting tigers in a giant coliseum? Man those T.V. shows are so poisonous. Turning all those people into mindless zombies that somehow live in a world remarkably less violent then the middle ages. Yeah, its all about spectacle…. But the innocent Dollhouse is just another one, and apparently a rather marginal one. So yeah lets all go buy the DVD to watch the zombieocalypse double secret season un-finale. Or I could do something that might make me happy, like taking a nap or eating a sandwich.
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April 26th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Yeah, its all about spectacle…. But the innocent Dollhouse is just another one, and apparently a rather marginal one. So yeah lets all go buy the DVD to watch the zombieocalypse double secret season un-finale.
This was a point I wish we’d have time to talk more about in class today. What’s the status of a television show whose theme is how bad television is for us? Can we really take such a show seriously?