The series features a character who’s normally childlike and trusting, but who is placed in a machine and comes out with a whole new personality, exactly the right one for the mission in hand, a personality built up from experts in the field. It means that the character ends up doing all sorts of things that would look impressive if anyone did them, but even more so when it’s someone so small and apparently vulnerable taking down the thugs or riding into danger. At the end of the mission, our hero reverts back to their normal self.
That’s the premise of the Gerry Anderson series ‘Joe-90′.
There are a number of differences between it and the new Fox series which shares an identical premise, ‘Dollhouse’, none of which favour ‘Dollhouse’: ‘Joe-90′ knew who its audience was, and how to balance action with exposition. It had an appealing central character, played by someone who could alter the intonation of their voice.
‘Dollhouse’ is clearly aiming to be creepy by having an ‘empowered victim’ as the main character. It’s the contrast between innocence and experience, the trusting agent and her knowing handlers. The thing is, ‘Joe-90′ had all that but was much creepier – Joe’s handler was his stepdad. Just that one fact makes a forty-one year old puppet show a great deal more effed up and interesting than the vague objections and ‘we must protect our business interests’ of the supporting cast of ‘Dollhouse’. There’s no family connection or emotional attachment in ‘Dollhouse’, no real-life analogue at all. The points the show is trying to make about identity and abuse and women playing roles in a man’s world are all so abstracted that you can’t actually apply them to anything you know.
The whole show feels low powered and ill-thought through. It starts with a motorcycle chase through a city street with only about three other vehicles on it (and using a really obvious stunt double), the central plot involves perhaps the least convincing hostage negotiation in the long history of shows about hostage negotations – the hostage-takers demand five million dollars and the negotiator offers them eight million instead. ‘I want them to know I’m in control’, she explains. Presumably, on the way home, she buys two books in the 3-for-2 offer from Borders, and insists on paying for four to demonstrate her dominance in that transaction, too. The Dollhouse itself is paranoid about keeping its existence secret – but seems to tell all its rich, powerful, connected clients exactly what the deal is.
Worst of all, there’s just no tension. Not action-suspense tension – there’s none of that, either – but there’s no demonstration of the tension that there has to be in a running show. There’s a fantastic amount of potential, and it just tumbles out as you think about the premise of the show. But it’s not there on screen. Elisha Dushku fails to get across the weirdness of her character – her ’spaced out, blank’ Echo is exactly the same as her ‘aggressive negotiator’ one and her ’sexy, thrillseeker’ one. You can see exactly what she’s meant to be doing, but it’s not happening. The body language and voice stay the same, you can only tell the difference in character by looking at her hemline – she must be smart and confident, she’s wearing glasses. Compare and contrast, say, Toni Collette in ‘The United States of Tara’.
Ultimately, unlike, say, Jennifer Garner in ‘Alias’, Dushku doesn’t sell the weird world she lives in as a real place or make you care what happens to her. If the plan really is to make the audience impose a good show on the blank slate of the one that’s there, that’s really quite amusing and meta, and fits with the themes of the show as expressed in the press releases and interviews – but I don’t get the sense it’s deliberate, or that it’s much of a survival strategy.
The first episode is only a first episode, and it’s not a stinker, but there are very few interesting seeds planted in it – the missions were boring, the supporting cast are character types (the sympathetic handler, the nerdy tech guy, the cold businesswoman), with no sense they’ll be actual people. The design of the Dollhouse itself is bland, but not artfully or surreally so. There are no jokes, there are no jaw-dropping reveals or striking visual moments, ‘jeopardy’ is a character needing their asthma inhaler and so they take it out of their pocket.
No-one actually quite says “don’t get too attached, Echo won’t be around for too long” in the episode. But it might be good advice anyway. ‘Joe-90′ was popular enough that it got renewed and lasted thirty episodes. That, I think, will prove to be another difference between the two shows.
