Whedon is once again directing the scene in Dollhouse, in what he has called “the biggest surprise of my career” – a second season for his genre-bending, mind-altering science-fiction allegory about stolen identities.
The cautionary conspiracy tale about empaths, so-called “dolls” whose identities have been wiped clean and imprinted with new personalities, debuted earlier this year to mixed reviews. Critics were torn between those who found the concept engaging and provocative, and those who found it off-putting and pretentious.
That was then, this is now. Whedon, the auteur-writer-filmmaker who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Emmy Award-winning musical tragicomedy Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, no longer cares what the critics say about his latest TV creation.
All he cares about now is that he has a second chance to tell the story he wanted to tell all along.
“Before, it was just an idea,” Whedon admitted on Dollhouse’s sprawling interior stage set on 20th Century Fox’s back lot. “It was an idea we had a lot of trouble defining – and people got to see that.
“Now, we feel the idea is defined. We understand what it is. We know now what our cast is capable of. Our mandate now is, how far can we take this? How much can we twist the knife?”
The new season will find Eliza Dushku’s character, Echo, experiencing recurring blackouts and flashbacks. She is beginning to suspect who she really is. And she has a mission.
“This year, we’re going to see the results of everything she went through last year,” Whedon said. “And we’re going to see what effect that has on her. She’s going to be a lot less passive, and more certain about what she wants. And that’s going to make her life a lot harder. The more she finds out about what’s going around her, the creepier it’s going to get. Because creepy is what makes this fun.”
Last spring, thinking that Dollhouse was about to be retired for good, Whedon wrote a final episode, a flash-forward to the future, where everything is revealed.
That episode, “Epitaph One,” never aired, but is included in the Dollhouse DVD box set.
Whedon says he was torn between pretending that future never happened – after all, relatively few viewers saw the episode – and addressing it immediately in Friday’s (Sept. 25) season premiere. He chose the latter route.
“We will see the future again,” Whedon promised. “We will use time as a bookend structure for this first episode.
“If you haven’t seen it, this episode will explain what happened. We will be visiting that future every now and then, throughout the new season. It will not be something where we can change it, or where we send people back in time and everybody has metal under their flesh.
“I love that stuff,” Whedon added, alluding to the late Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. “But apparently that gets you cancelled.”
Whedon says he knew he would be serving two masters – “people who have seen it and people who haven’t” – the moment Dollhouse was unexpectedly renewed for a second season.
“It does create the problem of new viewers versus the old, but any season does.
“There is no way you can definitively map out a television show in the first season because, by the fourth year, you find out that God works so much better. And to be wed to something right from the beginning would be a disservice to the viewers. So we did allow ourselves some wiggle room.
“What we are doing is basically moving forward from where we’ve already been, but being very cagey about the context. I do not think of it as cheating, because these are my rules. It’s my football. And if you don’t like my show, I’m going home.”
Whedon is quick to dispel notions that the Fox network wanted him “to sex things up” in the new season.
“They were not putting pressure on us to make the show sexier or edgier,” Whedon said. “They were putting pressure on us to make the show safer and easier to take. Which is completely understandable, and a perfectly reasonable position to take. It’s just that I’m not very good at that. So, last year, if there was something in the show that seemed a little bit off or racy, know that that was me. That was totally me. The other writers are all Mormons.”
Whedon is determined to break away from the present network mindset that insists serialized stories no longer draw a big audience, and that what viewers really want to see is self-contained, weekly stories.
“Ultimately, the reason people were coming back to the show, the reason people became fascinated – and the reason we’re here to talk about it now – wasn’t necessarily the engagement-of-the-week, though we work very hard to make those as interesting as possible,” Whedon said. “Ultimately, it was the ensemble, the characters on the show, the people up there on the screen. As soon as we had licence to tell an ongoing story, as soon as the inner workings of the Dollhouse became as important as the weekly (stories), that’s when we feel the show started to work.”
Whedon likens his Dollhouse experience of the past four months to being in a cartoon.
“This has been like one of those skiing cartoons, where you go up the mountain and down the mountain, up and down, up and down. Right now, we’re pretty high up because we’ve realized we’re actually going to have to work for a living.”
This time, though, there’s no pressure.
“I do not think I have a worry left in me,” Whedon said. “I think I have reached a Zen place.”
