Search - Dollhouse: The Complete Second Season on DVD

K. K. (GAMER)
Reviewed on 8/7/2023...

Alot of people liked this but not our cup of tea. Along the lines of Alias if you enjoyed that show.

FABULOUS

Geary A., Jones | 08/25/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"True, the first season floundered a bit, but the second season of DOLLHOUSE had some of the best writing ( and acting, for that matter ) to hit the 'idiot-screen' of all but a few series ( THE DRESDEN FILES, TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNORS CHRONICLES, FIREFLY, and several other cancelled shows ) in recent memory. I personally find it disheartening that the general television audience member seems to prefer Barbie-and-Ken vampires in thinly disguised slop-operas, horny, insipid housewives, and the same boring, detectives solving the same sonorous, crimes that other equally, tired, detectives were solving ten, or twenty years ago.

Perhaps Whedon's great failing was in designing a show that actually required a brain, and an appreciation of that seldom-seen-and-often-penalized quality referred to as ( Shudder! Gasp! ) 'originality.'

Bottom line: this was another great series, and a welcome addition to any serious sci-fi collection. Long live Echo!"

Could have been dolled up a little....

toronto | 08/08/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Like all Joss Whedon work, Dollhouse is well written and beautifully orchestrated, but there was something about this series that didn't ever really connect with me. Perhaps it was because Eliza Dushku -- who was unbelievably good as Faith in Buffy and Angel -- is (in spite of Josslove) not really cut out to play the whole variety of characters she was supposed to play. She has an opacity about her and an offhand style that never really goes away. She is always Eliza Dushku, and never really transforms. I suspect however there's something about the whole concept for the show that interferes with the audience identifying with the main characters. I never really care about Caroline/Echo's past or future. In the end, her original story is kind of half-baked anyway. But funnily enough, it is the innocents, Sierra and Victor, who steal the show, as well as Topher the geek. As usual in the Whedonverse there are good things here and there: Miracle the big woman (nice to see one as a romantic figure); Olivia Williams (Cruella de Ville), and the welcome return of Summer Glau and Alexis Denisof; not to mention the change in Alan Tudyk! Still, somewhere towards the end of season one, one loses one's sense of the whole thing, as the characters and their going back and forth multiply. There's also a flatness in the filming early on that reminds one of 70s TV (the genre problem). Compared to Buffy and Angel and Firefly, there is just a lack of overall emotional connection. The second season is more action filled, but by then we have seen a lot over and over again: variations on the chair, endless halls in empty buildings filled with sudden fighting, etc. Another problem is that we have seen a whole lot of this story before in other places: Terminator apocalypses and the rest. This is just such a familiar groove. The MadMax truck at the very end struck me as something that could be the start of a great idea -- pity it arrives so late. It may be that the goofy segments in the series are just too short -- Whedon is at his best riffing away. He works best with a dysfunctional group with a single purpose (e.g. the writers' room as archetype). Dollhouse is designed so no one can be in a group, everyone is so impaired or conspiring. They cannot gather around Echo or anyone else, which is where Whedonics works its best magic. There is more energy in Season 2, but there is still this lack of groupness -- bits of it start happening, and then die because of the overall concept. You can see fragments of groupness (meetings in Adele's office, meetings around Topher, Victor and his soldier exploit with Sierra and Echo, and so on, bits, but, to repeat, the Actives have such a struggle to come together because of their constant return to distancing that only partly ebbs). So, for me, there isn't enough group playtime throughout. Joss W. needs to go back to group playtime. One hopes that the Avengers will be this kind of playtime.

The reason I give it 3 stars and not less is the last episode of all. This seems to me to redeem a whole lot. Considering that they had to work with an already out there Epitaph One, the thing is a marvel. Maybe Epitaph One and Two should have been the series. For Whedon fans they have all kinds of familiar tropes from all of his series (I particularly like the fact that he finally got to shoot the post apocalyptic LA from Angel), but they nevertheless work so effortlessly. Everything about the editing and cast connecting and reconnecting just flows. The scene around the kitchen table (the essential Joss Whedon archetype, the group around the table is his touchstone utopia) is a kind of summary statement of every group around a table in Whedonverse, and is more or less what we have been waiting for (sure it is Southern California/American apocalypse ecotopia, but we still go for it). The foibles and bonding and exposition and sarcasm -- we've seen this a hundred times in Whedonverse, but it is always a beautiful thing. I watched the whole series in a row on DVD, which was both fun and a chore, but it was worth the work, towards earning the last episode."

Short lived but not short sighted

M. Brasfield | Detroit | 07/13/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Dollhouse was a show that left you thinking, "Huh?", but filled in it's blanks with episodes that brought you into this exotic world that left you wanting to see more but in the end, being on a network like Fox, the less the better. It was a show that tried to make you believe that technology, while a wonderful tool, can become quite lethal in the wrong hands and our future could evolve to look like one where technology is no more a solution to our problems than a bigger problem where people begin to lose faith (faith, hah!) in themselves.Give thanks to Eliza Dushku and Joss Wheldon for bringing these concepts to your living room now on DVD. It is an experience you will not so easily dismiss."