But does that mean that Dollhouse isn’t Whedon? Or does that make it instead all the more Whedonesque? Reading through our lengthy Whedon roundtable, what’s most striking is how utterly generic, in every sense, Whedon’s output seems to be. Whedon famously had only sporadic control over Dollhouse the network messed with and compromised his vision.
This provokes dramatic visible terror on the one hand, and the usual genre comforts on the other, as the main plot focuses on a group of entirely forgettable actors being picked off one by one in the usual manner of the post-apocalypse, complete with predictable tricky unpredictable betrayal and surprise reversal at the end. The first season ends with a future vision of a world in which individual brains are erasable, plunging the world into dystopic chaos. Through the first season (all I could bare to watch) Caroline is mostly gone we only see flashback glimpses of her as Echo is filled with various other personalities - a dominatrix, an outdoorswoman, a perfect girlfriend, another perfect girlfriend. In Dollhouse, Echo (the impressively unresponsive Eliza Dushku) is a shell, robbed of its original self, Caroline.
Dollhouse could perhaps be seen as Joss Whedon’s most personal statement in that it’s about the absence of personality-or more precisely, about personality as almost-absent, but never fully destroyed, trace.