Welcome back to TV, Joss Whedon. ‘Dollhouse,’ your latest show, doesn’t look half bad.

The series premiered Friday with its pilot, ‘Ghost.’ The episode got the plot moving well, left enough dangling for next time, and offered good performances from its star. However, it also showed where ‘Dollhouse’ could run into fatal problems.

The Doll House is a secret organization that recruits people and then erases their memories. New personalities can be downloaded into these new employees at the command of the Doll House and its clients, called ‘actives.’ When there isn’t anything fitted in them, these actives are childlike and simply exist. Each active also has a handler, someone who accompanies them in the field to keep an eye on things.

Eliza Dushku (Whedon’s ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel’) stars as Echo, an active. At the beginning of ‘Ghost,’ she partied and raced motorcycles with a patron of the Doll House. But her memories of the night were deleted when she returned to headquarters.

Later in the episode, the Doll House is contracted to get a child back from kidnappers. Echo was fitted with the personality of ‘Miss Penn,’ a hostage negotiator. Echo performed well in the role, despite experiencing a slight glitch with her implanted personality (apparently the Doll House downloads aren’t perfect). She retrieved the kid, returned to base and again had her mind wiped.

While Echo was saving little children, government agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) received a harsh rebuke from his superiors. Ballard was told to stop searching for the Doll House and to get back to other cases. However, the agent doesn’t seem to take orders well and followed up on several leads on the Doll House.

There are several reasons why ‘Dollhouse’ could succeed, one being Dushku. She’s quite good as Echo and does well transitioning from the different personas. In her normal state, her facial expressions are soft and her voice very mellow.

But as soon as the Miss Penn persona was installed in her, Dushku’s performance changed. Her stance and body language become stronger. Her tone picked up an air of authority and she had no trouble telling the kidnappers what to do (‘They have to get used to doing my way, and right now they’re getting very used to it.’) Besides, Miss Penn is not good with people, she’s got at people.

It’s important that Dushku keep this up. Viewers will get confused very quickly if they can’t tell what character is on the screen in front of them.

Whedon leaves just enough questions for next time, too. He never fully explains what the Doll House is, how it was started nor who runs it. Also, Echo’s handler, Boyd Langdon (Harry Lennix), seems bothered by the Doll House’s operations and what might happen to Echo. An ex-cop, Langdon is told to get the job done and forget heroics. It seems clear conflict will arise between Langdon and the chiefs of the Doll House.

There’s also Ballard, a Fox Mulder type, and his quest to find the Doll House. He isn’t above threatening Russian gangsters at gunpoint and killing people to find what he needs. Or sitting naked on coffee tables next to the men he’s just murdered. Someone should really explain the concept of DNA evidence to him.

But Whedon faces problems with ‘Dollhouse,’ each accompanied by precedents. Firstly, Whedon likes to create twisting, mythology-intense stories, see ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’. He’ll need to balance taking it slow with ‘Dollhouse’ to build the base of its plot without going at a snail’s pace.

Lastly, but most important, viewers will get tired if they have to see a brand-new adventure each time and a totally different personality put into Echo. ‘Quantum Leap’ is a punch line for a reason. Viewers will need a bit of substance and familiarity to want to keep tuning in. Maybe Echo slowly starts to remember glimpses of her old life and wants it back. That seems pretty Whedon-esque.

‘Dollhouse’ could be good. It also wouldn’t be too surprising to see it canned after its scheduled seven episodes.

adbrow03@syr.edu

Published on February 15, 2009 at 12:00 pm