The positioning of chess pieces on the set of a TV show or movie is a good litmus test for how seriously the producers of an imaginary world take the reality they’re creating. I was very disappointed to see Dollhouse fail this test in last night’s episode, especially since the show is normally so good.
Look at the lower-right square on the board (from Topher’s point of view). It’s dark. That’s wrong. The lower-right square, from each player’s point of view, is always the lighter color. Read the rest of this entry »
Dollhouse’s “anybody could be a doll” motif reached a new level this week with the suggestion that Adelle Dewitt, mistress of the institution that imprints hot young things with alternate personalities, may be a doll herself. What does it all mean? If the show lasts long enough, how far could the solipsism possibly go? Here are some options.
Everyone – or almost everyone – is a doll. The doctor, Topher, the handlers, etc. After all, the house is just one arm of a huge organization. Why wouldn’t the parent organization put dolls in charge of the Dollhouses, to make sure that they run correctly?
The dolls, much like the slayers at the end of Buffy Season Seven, will all suddenly become fully integrated super-beings, remembering all their pasts, retaining all their accumulated skills. In this sense, they’ll be like Duncan Idaho in the novel God Emperor Of Dune. Speaking of the Dune series, Read the rest of this entry »
My confidential source at Fox reveals that there are no longer any plans to film a holiday special in which Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s lovable but rakish anti-villain Spike shows up at the Dollhouse to teach Echo a lesson in taking the reins on one’s destiny.
Apparently, the original plan was for Spike to provide a key piece of insight to Echo, who would have recently escaped the dollhouse, but be unsure what to do next. At that point in the series, the newly self-aware Caroline/Echo will be asking herself a lot of questions, like “Who am I, really?” “Am I good or evil?” and “What is my purpose in life?”
Spike has already had to wrestle with all those questions and come out the other side a healthy being, so he was seen as the perfect catalyst to guide Echo through the changes. His appearance would also have been an experiment in viewer ratings: if he scored well, then Fox was to go ahead and fund the first season of the long-anticipated “Spike: The Hard Way.”
Apparently, though, Joss Whedon, creator of both franchises, decided that the appearance of the beloved platinum-haired vampire would be too much of a deus-ex-machina.
“Echo needs to get where she’s going on her own merits,” Whedon will say in a yet-to-be-released statement. “And Dollhouse, as a show, needs to do the same. “
Fans of both the TV show Dollhouse and the operating system BeOS have excitedly pointed out that the two are connected. The fictional institution where hot young people have their memories replaced according to clients’ wishes apparently has its technical infrastructure controlled by a real OS created by a software company that closed its doors in 2001.
BeOs and Dollhouse have something else in common. They are both known for a cult following that simultaneously sings their praises and predicts their doom. Hardcore fans of BeOS refuse to let the dream die, continuing it as an open-source project even now, just as Whedon’s followers largely refuse to accept that his previous projects, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly, ever came to an end. (In the case of Buffy, which lasted for seven seasons, fans’ refusal to let the franchise die was eventually acknowledged by the release of “Season Eight,” which exists only as a series of comic books.)
The best way to get an appreciation of how BeOS occupies a similar cultural space is to read sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson’s famous essay, In The Beginning Was The Command Line. The essay itself is part computer industry chronicle, part personal history, and part plea for the reader/user to look beyond the shiny appeal of artfully rendered buttons and pull-down menus, and to embrace the raw power of talking to the computer directly.
Stephenson, writing two years before the end of BeOS as an officially supported product, quotes an entry from the BeOS public bug-tracking system, submitted by a user with the best interests of the company at heart:
The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.
Whedon, as one creator of glorious flame-out cult hits to another, has given BeOS what it always needed.
image from a series called “Before The Fall Of Missima” by brownin329
Fans of both the TV show 
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