Dollhouse Some More

"Dollhouse"

Okay.

Last week's episode was so earth-shatteringly entertaining, shocking, awesome, hideous, perfect, stupendous, and overwrought, I have felt a need for DAYS to holler and scream and howl about it. There is simply nobody nobody I can do this with ... and it is killing me all to death.

Worse is the fact that nothing I can say can properly convey the spectacularity of events without spoilage, and with something as fine and gasp-inducing (and that was only HALFway through the episode - what happened at the end was shout-worthy) as this, I would Never Dream of doing such a thing. This is the whole reason I've been unable to post about it.

I think of TEO, my best friend, and know that there's much about this show I can't recommend to her, Whedon lover as she is. Yet I wish ...

I think of E, and know he'd actually dig it quite a bit probably, but that the flaws would likely matter more to his consumption than they do to me - and, though I tell myself the *highs* more than make up for the flaws - that the audacity here, the things DH is doing, are so stunningly worthwhile (and the entertaiment, when it's "on", so wildly entertaining) that it's almost necessary viewing. But I know too that my recommendations, perhaps even more particularly when I'm as fully invested in this as I am, are only my own "thing" and they don't necessarily have oxygen nor the right to live, outside my own head; and so I know that he needn't listen either.

Nobody else I can think of would even bother. Nor would I even try to ask them to, really.

Oh, but "Dollhouse" ... Oh, you show you.

I need to crow, to sputter, to gobsmack. I need to share the intensity of the energy this show injects into my brain with someone, even if it's an invisible computer screen I know speaks to nobody and a page which lives, hiding in plain sight, in a backwater of Teh Intarwebs.

Oh, you show you. What you did.

It's all the more deeply awesome because of that one DVD I own, which E and I consumed with unseemly relish, years ago (and which I need-need-need-need now to go back and watch again, for that one performance).

It's awesome because the performances here are so good even without past knowledge.
It's awesome because they did it, and NOBODY appears to have known what they would do. My stars. My gracious. They didn't even try, and they surprised everybody. Go show!
The final forty-five seconds of Friday January 8th's episode made everything everyone else complains about so much more than "worthwhile" it is a gift to television it ever came to air. Possibly the most entertaining and stunning piece of work I've ever seen broadcast.
And it begs one non-spoilertastic question.

Would "Dollhouse" have gone this route (would it have been able to?), if the show had not been canceled.


I suspect it would be painfully easy for me to find articles explicating development, and the effects the show's short life have had upon it. I suspect it would be possible to learn, yes, the Big Bad here, the level of what they are up to now, is in fact partially owing to a truncated shelf life. Or that, no, maybe the show actually WAS heading to such a huge dustup, was always going to be of such enormity.

I realize I don't want to know.

There are times, Intarwebs or no, when it's more fun to consider life, than have its every question answered.

(When it's more fun to have a blog in one's own real name, but still thrive in pretty complete anonymity due to *other* people's failure to ask, "Where is Diane L. Major?")

But Friday's episode intrigues with certain performances, with the life of the series as a whole, with the subtleties of careers and casting, with the cult of Whedon's personality, with so many things.

That it gets me thinking these things - and philosophy - even beyond those things it's clearly *aiming* to get me thinking, is one of the reasons I have become so intimate with this show. I don't identify with the characters (heaven forbid; even as a writer, I bridle from that possibility). I don't participate in in the JossCult, though I like the guy. I am far too old for most of the actors to hold much real estate in my mind; my affections for them are definitely maternal ones. I don't fit anywhere in this show's world, nor does its view have any place within me even.

But I love its questions, I *love* its adventure, I love its awkwardness and its cruel honesty - I love that it says what everyone else is thinking, but would never breathe. I love that it's not obvious.

I love wondring what is coming next.

I may not breathe again before *this* Friday.

But I'll be awake, and eager, all the way along.