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Fox! Friday! Whedon! Umm… something looks frighteningly familiar there…

Rarely in television history has there been a more rabid following of a creative force than there has been for Joss Whedon. With Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, he has created programs that will do much more than stand the test of time, and endure in many of Whedonite hearts as some of the best television programs of all time. And I’m one of them. Many consider Buffy to be the crown jewel of his works, and while I do love me some Scoobies, my personal preference goes toward Angel, which I do believe is the best TV show of all time. I thought it was a much more mature and riskier work. Firefly is awesome and I love it, but it’s hardly comparable to shows that lasted seven and five seasons respectively (although it is the only one of his shows that has a feature film added to its name). And now, after years of waiting that has produced enough salivating amongst Whedonites to flood the driest deserts, we have his new show, Dollhouse, which features Eliza Dushku, who previously performed for Joss on both Buffy and Angel as Faith, the sorta-good/sorta-bad ridiculously sexy rogue slayer, as a young woman who can be programmed to become any personality type that the clandestine company she works for want her to have for their clients. Clear on all that so far? Well, welcome to the Dollhouse, where even the most rabid of Whedonites will feel a little let-down.

The episode opens with Dushku and Dr. Adele DeWitt (played with icy-cold verve by Olivia Williams of Kevin Costner’s “The Postman” fame… ouch for her) having a conversation in which Dushku’s character seems to be filled with regret about something and DeWitt offers her a world where her actions don’t have consequences (I’m assuming morally). Next time we see Dushku, she’s racing motorcycles and partying with a really nice guy that apparently she had quite a weekend with. She likes him, but she knows that it’s time to go. She’s accompanied back for her ‘treatment’ by her handler, Boyd Langton (the paternal Harry Lennix (24, The Matrix Reloaded)), where the super-science geek Topher (played with uber-nerdieness by Fran Kranz) wipes her memory of this last weekend. When we see her again, she is now referred to as Echo (other members of the Dollhouse have Military-style alphabetical names, like Sierra and November), and she essentially has the mental capacity of a child. She meets with the mysteriously-scarred Dr. Claire Saunders (Amy Acker of Angel, still looking lovely as ever) who seems to be a physical therapist of some kind, whose body language screams “moral qualms”, but if you blink, you might miss this character. Also thrown into the mix is FBI Agent Paul Ballard (played with slow-burn intensity by Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar Galactica, another of my favorites of all time)), who is being told to lay off more overt investigative methods in finding out more about Dollhouse, because someone still wants to know what’s going on, but not in a way that’s going to affect another, more high-profile investigation into the kidnapping and trading of young women. Do you think he listens? Would it be much of a show if the risky, edgy cop obeyed his superiors?

But there is a very rich and powerful man and father of an adorable eight-year old girl who has need of this company’s resources after the adorable daughter is kidnapped. So Echo is given the personality and certain physical attributes of a professional profiler/negotiator so that the child can be exchanged for the ransom safely and without any further incident. But because of the Shake-n-Bake mixture of personalities that Echo is given, it causes problems at the exchange, and Echo and Langton have to go further into the abyss to find the girl.

This pretty much sets up what we expect to be a “personality of the week” concept mixed within a conspiracy/morality/identity mythology. As you can tell, this is by far the highest-concept project that Joss has done. Buffy? Vampire and Demon slaying with girl power. Angel? Eternal curses and romantic creatures of the night with some moral ambiguity thrown in. Firefly? A Western in Space. Not much new territory, but it’s in the way that Whedon and Co. explore those themes. And a lot of familiar names of that Company are here. Mutant Enemy vets like Tim Minear (who was totally screwed by Fox with two really promising series, Drive and The Inside), Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain (both of whom went from Angel to do a lot of great work with The Shield, another brilliant series), and of course cast members Dushku and Acker. And Whedon likes to go for broke as far as his characters are concerned. He made it pretty clear in all three previous projects that he’s willing to kill any character at any time. And that gives Whedon’s stuff that much more of a sense of urgency.

But with Dollhouse, much like the personality traits that Topher mixes up for Echo, Whedon throws in a mix of different genres and comes out of the blender with a pretty cool but somewhat lackluster pilot. There are some really cool moments; the acting, particularly from Dushku, is solid (maybe with the exception of Williams, who just seems a little too one-dimensional as the seeming head of this corporation); the dialogue and direction stay tight and keep us engaged, but the show seems to end far too soon for everything that needs to come from a pilot and it suffers most from lacking the signature nudge-nudge humor of Whedon as he seems to be going for a departure from his previous forays into genre-bending entertainment. And that’s where Whedonites are going to be the most disappointed.

Now, this is also not new for Whedon and television. Pretty much all of his pilots have been a little on the “Hmm, I don’t know” side. It took me until Season Two of Buffy to get into that show, but after that I was hooked. Angel was pretty much a given hook for me and many others since it was birthed from Buffy, and Firefly... well, quite honestly, I had to buy the DVD set before I began worshipping that show too. I will give Whedon an infinite amount of chances, but as determined by Fox’s pooch-screw of the airdates of eps of Firefly, and Fox already having retooled this pilot (Apparently, Whedon’s initial 2-hour pilot will remain unaired), the PTB (Powers That Be, for the uninitiated) already seem to be setting this show up not to be another Buffy or Angel, but another Firefly. And with it being on TV’s Night of Death, or as we call it, Friday, scheduled just after the dropping-like-a-rock ratings of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, chances are that, unless TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly do a huge cover story on this show, it’s going to stay a Whedonite show for the seven filmed episodes and then just… disappear.

Like an Echo.

But while it’s not the most enviable start, Dollhouse does make a certain impression, and it’s something that, if Fox gives it the chance that it didn’t give Firefly, could become something much more than it seems.

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