IGN was among a group of journalists who visited the set of Dollhouse on Friday, and Joss Whedon’s greeting to us said it all: “Welcome to the biggest surprise of my career – our Season 2.”
Few expected the low-rated series to be renewed, and Whedon made it clear he had also been extremely pessimistic, noting, “I really didn’t expect to be sitting here again for a while. This has been like skiing in a cartoon where you go up the mountain and down the mountain and up and down. Right now we are pretty high up on it because we realized that we were actually going to have to work for a living this summer.” Whedon noted that when he heard FOX was not going to air the episode “Epitaph One”, he was sure that meant they were cancelled.
However, once they found out a Season 2 was actually happening, “The first thing I did was get together with my writers and start talking about what possibilities there were. Particularly after we had made an incredibly strange sort of book end to the show with ‘Epitaph One.’ And what we discovered was that the possibilities were entirely limitless and that we had more excitement and enthusiasm about the show than we did by a country mile last year because we are in it now. Before it was an idea and it was an idea that we had a lot of trouble defining and America got to watch that. And now we feel like it is defined, the network understands what it is we understand what it is we know what our cast is capable of which is wonders. And so we came in just with the most excitement and we been having a great deal of fun ever since.”
Whedon said that in Season 2, their mandate is, “How far can we take this?”, noting their plan is to “build Echo up from nothing, which is basically where she started last year and really give her a sense of momentum and purpose that will ground the show in a way that it couldn’t be last year. And that has been sort of our mission statement, was to make things harder for everybody, find ways to bring back all the extraordinary reoccurring actors we had and most importantly let things begin to cohere. And the good news about that is once they do, once Echo starts really realizing that as a person she not only exists and but that she has a mission. That she has something she wants. This year we are going to see the results of everything she went through last year. Particularly the event with Alpha where she was downloaded with all of her personalities. We are going to see what effect that’s had on her and we are going to find her to be a great deal less passive and a great deal more sort of directed in what she wants and that is of course going to make her life a lot harder. And the more she finds out about what is going on around her and the more we find out the creepier it is going to get. Because creepy is what it makes it fun.”
A common complaint about Dollhouse was that Echo, by her very nature and how she was constantly “re-set” was very hard to invest in as a main character. But Whedon noted that thanks to what she’s gone through, “We are going to see her as we know her and then we are going to see something very different. And that is pretty much all I can say.”
Whedon said the events of the future-set “Epitaph One” — which took place in 2019, and saw the technology of the Dollhouse having taken the planet to an apocalyptic place – are not going to be discarded, noting the characters from that episode (including one played by Felicia Day) will be seen in segments in the season premiere. While Whedon acknowledged it was a challenge to make the material for “Epitaph One” resonate both for those who have seen it on DVD and those watching Season 2 who won’t have, he joked he was used to a problem of that sort, reminding us that, with Serenity, “I made an entire movie that had that problem and only that problem.”
In Season 2, Whedon said, “We will be visiting that future every now and then. It will not be something where we can change it or where we send people back in time or anybody has metal under their flesh. I love that stuff but apparently that gets you canceled.”
The troubles behind-the-scenes on Dollhouse in the first season were well-documented, including a couple of different times when production was shut down. Asked if some aspects of the show like the many shower scenes were ones requested by the network, Whedon replied, “The network did not pressure us to have shower scenes in every episode. That just sort of happened naturally! But actually we haven’t broken a story with a shower scene yet. We are a little disappointed in ourselves and we know we have let American down too.” Olivia Williams than chimed in with, “I want to know when Adelle gets into the shower. That is the main thing.”
Whedon added that FOX, “Were not pressuring us to make the show sexier or edgier. They were pressuring us to make the show safer basically. And easier to take and which is completely understandable on a perfectly reasonable agenda, it is just I’m not very good at that. So if there is something in the show that seems a little bit off or maybe a little bit racy, know that that was me.”
A lot was said about the struggle to define Dollhouse, and Whedon remarked, “Defining the show meant getting out of the idea that it was a sort of engagement of the week adventure show only and that ultimately the reason that people were coming back to the show, the reason the show became fascinating are [the cast and characters]. That’s what people tuned in to see, it wasn’t necessarily the engagement of the week, though we work very hard to make those as interesting as possible and useful as possible to reflect back on everybody but ultimately it was the ensemble it was the people, the characters we wanted to talk about. As soon as we has license to do that as soon as the inner workings of the Dollhouse became as important as the engagements then we feel that the show started to work and the network felt the same thing.”
Whedon was typically candid about a lot of the issues the show was facing last season, and while promoting Season 1 did not shy away from saying he felt the show took several episodes to find itself. This led to a reporter asking him an interesting question – was he too candid, turning off potential viewers by telling them the show wasn’t as strong early on? Said Whedon, ” I may in fact be too candid. I’m wearing women’s underwear. That would, for example there. But the fact is we were under a microscope. Every time we got shut down, people wanted answers, they wanted some explanation and if an episode was nothing more than diverting and we hadn’t quite got in the experience as much as I wanted people to know. I wanted people to know that I knew that. That we were trying to get something out and the struggle we had was causing it to stumble a little bit. I can’t put something out there that is less than what it could be without some sort of explanation. And again it was just a question of you know what stories can we tell? How can we please the network? All of those things that we were going through. People were talking about them anyway and if I didn’t say anything they tended to panic. But I also can’t help myself.”
I asked Whedon about Amy Acker, whose character Whiskey / Claire Saunders was definitely elevated in importance at the end of the season, including a major role in “Epitaph One.” However, Acker was a recurring performer on Dollhouse and now has a lead role on an ABC series, Happy Town. So would Whedon be able to use her in Season 2? Whedon told me, “Yes and it is not nearly as much as we would like but we are going to make the most of her in those few [episodes].”
The day we were visiting the set, production was wrapping up on the season premiere. Speaking about what it’s been like so far shooting Season 2, Eliza Dushku noted, “I am already sort of astonished by the emotions and actions and reactions just in the last eight days, just this episode. Yesterday, full on I burst into tears in the middle of the take. It was a giant scene with [Jamie] Bamber and there was something that happened and I haven’t had that kind of… I was just surprised at my emotion and hadn’t really had that. I was like, all right this is kind of a nice kick off for the season. Everything out on the table and we’ve already had the first season to sort of have our insecurities and have our guard and little bit of that and now we just get to open it up and search into humanity with you.”
Tahmoh Penikett’s character Paul joined the dollhouse at the end of Season 1, and the actor said that the Season 2 premiere, “is a kick ass episode. In a selfish way I
just wanted to make one more point – I was trying to get to the dollhouse all last season so this season I actually have the opportunity to work with this amazing cast.”
Whedon has made no secret what a fan he is of Battlestar Galactica and that is obvious looking at the casting on Dollhouse. Penikett is of course an alum of BSG, and as referenced above, Jamie Bamber is guest starring in the season premiere. Now, Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan is also reporting that in the second episode of the season none other than Michael Hogan, Colonel Tigh himself, will also be guest starring.
