An Open Letter to Joss Whedon

Dear Mr. Whedon,

I'm delighted, as is everyone, that you are directing The Avengers. We know it will be fantastic, and we can't wait.

I hope that as you make it, you will play to your real strength - love. The center of your shows is love, as you say yourself at the end of "Serenity". The ship - and the show - can't fly without it.


I don't mean romance, couples finding each other, though that can be part of it. I mean the love that moves us all to do our best to care for and safeguard our friends, our families, and our worlds. I mean the love between friends and neighbours and allies and even enemies, when it exists, and when it matters that it does not. I mean your obvious love for every single one of your characters, even the complete rotters; and the love you makes us feel for them in turn.

Love is the warm, beating heart of everything you do best. It was the heart of your masterpiece, Firefly, and of Buffy. Angel was fascinating because it explored what happens when love really isn't there, though the protagonist - whom you loved - desperately wanted it to be. It was developing in Dollhouse, through the surprising moral growth of Topher and Adelle. It's always there, in your best work. 

Sometimes you seem to think that plot or action scenes are your main strength, and what we watch you for. And don't get me wrong: you're great at those and we wouldn't enjoy your work as much if you weren't. But they aren't the point.

The fight scenes in Serenity were great, but they took up so much of center field that they took the focus away from the characters we loved in Firefly. The end of Dollhouse wrapped up the loose plot points very neatly, but it all happened so fast that again we lost something of the characters.  (Though Topher still broke my heart.)

It's a tricky balancing act. You have to have plot. You have to have action. People will complain if you don't. But I hope that while you're working on the Avengers, you remember that we can get fight scenes anywhere. Lots of people write good ones. Half the films out there today are all about the fight scenes. But those films can't do the thing you can do. They can't make us love their characters or care what happens to them. That's what you do better than anyone else.

Show us how you love the characters, and we will love them too. Eye candy and flashy fight scenes and cool plots only matter if we care about the people. Let your love for your characters be the center of the film. Make us care. And then it will be another Whedon masterpiece, and a truly great movie. 

Yours faithfully,


A devoted fan

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Dollhouse 2.4

Brilliant episode. One thing bothered me: why do I feel pretty damn sure that Priya wasn't given any choice about winding up back in the Dollhouse this time either? If she did remember, if they let her go free, Rossum would surely track her down, find out about Boyd and Topher and Evil Scumbag's death, dismemberment, and flushing down the bathtub. She's safer in the Dollhouse. But does that matter? I don't think she was right to choose the wipe; she didn't deserve to have to kill someone, absolutely, but she did the right thing. I didn't understand why she didn't want to remember. I didn't understand what she was doing in the Dollhouse afterwards.

Topher was brilliant. When she asked him if she was allowed beer in here and he flashed back, clearly, to imprinting her as his 'friend' on his birthday and having a beer with her, and said - "uh, on special occasions", he was clearly about ready to cry. Realising that the fake friend he was enjoying himself with only existed because Priya, a person, with a right to the body that she had never ever signed away, was gone.

He's not a sociopath; sociopaths don't learn, they just don't have the empathy and that's it. But he does have empathy, he just never bothered to use it because other things interested him so much more. That's why he interests us. People with no empathy, like the rapist scumbag one tick shy of a murderer, don't interest us except as horrors.

You'll notice that the people who are willing to hire dolls are clearly ethically compromised, or else regret it, this season? Serial Killer, who didn't hire dolls because he was using horse tranquillizer to make his own, but he's the same kinda guy; Professor Dirtbag, who's aware he shouldn't bone his students but can't get over the desire to, so hey, let's try creating one; rapist scumbag, obviously; Rossum high mucketymuck, serial killer's uncle; all of these are scum. The father who hired Echo to wetnurse his baby and love the little boy too, so someone would love him, but who realises that this was the wrong thing to do and deeply regrets it; you can see he decided to do it while his decision-making powers were deeply compromised by grief, and even then, all he was trying to do was to make sure someone loved his baby. But basically, hiring a doll identifies you as either a bad person or at least doing a bad thing, this year.

Adelle clings by her fingernails to the "meaningful consent" given by the dolls; when that last shred of justification is taken away, she has to face what she is doing, and she balks. But then she gives in; it's not just that she'll lose her job; she'll wind up in the Attic beside Dominic. She can't face that.

It did cross my mind that when scumbag pig demanded she imprint Sierra permanently and Adelle agreed, that, well, SURE she could imprint Sierra. And then later phone her. "There are three flowers in the vase." This problem could be solved in a number of creative ways; why didn't Adelle do that? Though Topher's solution was much better. Priya was robbed. Give Priya herself back; the only ethical solution. I wasn't sure why Boyd thought the result didn't turn out too well. I thought the creep needed to die, and now was dead; the result was perhaps inconvenient, but bad? This was what had to happen.

Of all the people in the series - Victor, Sierra, Boyd, Ballard, Adelle, Topher, Mellie/Madeleine (though didn't Mellie seem like more of a person than Madeleine? She would have had to become less dependent to survive, though), Dr. Saunders - the only one whose story doesn't really interest me is Echo's. But perhaps another Echo-heavy episode would cure that. Not sure. Dushku was quite endearing, and hilarious, as Kiki in 2.3 ("If only!")

Sorry they're not showing it during sweeps; since that surely means they've already made up their minds, and we're not going to get the back half of this season.

Evil in the Whedonverse: Epitaph One

've just seen Epitaph One (unaired episode of Dollhouse, on the DVD, and available by bittorrent). Excellent acting, excellent scripting, brilliant all round, oh man, oh my oh my. And terrifying too; dystopian in the extreme, bleak bleak bleak. One thing that worries me is that I don't see, if this is "the future", how he can get out of this now; how he can give us another ending. The old dream ending? Alternate universe? This is what COULD happen if we all don't make GOOD CHOICES, kids?

Are we watching an Angelverse - all go down fighting, evil triumphs, it's night, it's raining, we're in an alleyway, Wes is dead, Gunn is dying, only the demons can survive in this universe - or a Buffyverse - we destroyed the town in order to save it, but we DID save it, only - and all - the demons are dead, now we can all patch ourselves up and get on with our lives, sun shines, we're on the road away from the Hellmouth and we've even got a bus? ON the basis of Epitaph One, we're definitely in an Angelverse. If that's how it's going to go, though, not sure how much I want to keep watching - except I'm riveted. of course. But one thing that does keep us riveted is hoping that there is a way the characters can escape their almost certain fates; if we knew for sure they were all doomed we wouldn't be so spellbound. So I'll be interested to see how Joss springs us out of Epitaph One, or makes us question it as the Only Possible Future, Because otherwise it's going to be difficult to carry on with the series; we need suspense.

But what I wanted to talk about mostly was Whedon's idea of evil, which is beginning to become steadily clearer and I think it's always the same sort of thing.

In Sunnydale, we have vampires and demons; in Angelverse, we have demons and a few vampires and Wolfram and Hart;

in Serenity we have Reavers, created by the establishment in an effort to make everything better;

in Dollhouse we have an evil establishment with tenttacles everywhere, absolute power producing absolute evil, a slave economy, and - in Epitaph One - vampires, demons, humans, and a new category, blank slates.

The "butchers" of Epitaph One are the Reavers of Serenity or the demons - some demons; the full-blood demons especially - in the Buffy/Angelverse. All the butcher/reaver humanity has been completely destroyed by the actions of an Establishment that used them for its own purposes without much caring about the effect on the individual - or even realising this would be the effect; children, playing with matches, as "Caroline" says in Epitaph One. Their behavioural characteristics - wanton violence, cruelty, vandalism, etc - is like demons in Sunnydale, and many demons in Angel. I think Joss Whedon has never really wanted us to think of demons as good; attractive, possessing many appealing human characteristics, but in the end, they're bad.

The "actuals" in Epitaph One - humans who have not had their souls erased, are still the people they were born as - are human beings.

Then we have the "imprints", who are vampires, kinda (original soul is destroyed, imprinted with someone else's personality)

And finally we have the new category, the "dumbshows", who are the dolls, in Dollhouse; the original personality has been erased, and basic functions still exist, but they're blank slates. They don't exist in Buffy or Angel.

So I think Joss Whedon is meditating on evil, or showing us the faces of evil, but the mechanisms used to produce it are changing. In Buffy/Angel, it was supernatural - demons were demonic, and some demons can take over your body and make you demonic, and you can get away with it because there is a structure of powerful demonic beings in places of power who will use agencies like Wolfram and Hart to protect you if you're useful enough to them.

In Serenity, an evil - control-freak - military industrial government complex tries to pacify an entire world and has unintentional side effects of creating demons by putting stuff in the drinking water (or the air, or whatever it was). The consequences were not intended but the mechanism was entirely human and certainly intentional. They just didn't realise what it would do. And they hid it, lied about it to everyone "for their own good", and were generally secretive; always a bad idea, in the Jossverse; and marks you as a bad guy.

And in Epitaph One, an entirely self-serving for-profit organization comes up with a cool new technology with some highly exploitable ramifications; but like the stuff in the water supply in Serenity, the technology gets out of control with disastrous results. But these results actually were foreseeable. So more and more, the responsibility for evil is becoming human, in the Jossverse; it's becoming our fault. We can't blame the demons or the side effects. We can blame people in positions of power, for sure; but they are people, not demons.

Which makes his new take on evil spectacularly scary because it is so much likelier to happen. It's so much closer to the real world.

I think the Buffy and Angelverse were metaphorical, and cautionary tales. But I'm not so sure the Dollhouse is a metaphor. I think he's saying, this is REAL, folks; this is HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU. Maybe not this specific thing, but somewhere, right now, is the technology that's going to destroy us, and it's not even going to be very long from now.