Vampire Diaries

You guys, why didn’t you tell me how awesome Vampire Diaries is???

Okay, I know that some of you tried. Buy why didn’t you try harder????

This show is hilarious, well-written, and well-acted, and the cast is gorgeous (the 16-year-old in me swoons over Baby Boreanaz, aka Paul Wesley). I’m sure that some people may assume that my like for this show is based on how much I love (the first 5.5 seasons of) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but no. This is just another good show that happens to deal with vampires. And witches. And I’m thinking possibly werewolves, too. And Bianca Lawson also appeared on this show for a couple of episodes. Hmmm. Well, they never claimed to have reinvented the wheel, right?

Perhaps my favorite thing is the lack of ridiculous footwear on these supposed high school students. Yay for realism!

Wow, I’m really glad that, despite being in sincere pain, David Boreanaz is soldiering on through the tough times that he has experienced since it became common knowledge that he cheated on his wife (there have been rumors about his infidelity forever, but he had to come clean in order to head off an extortion attempt). A lot of guys wouldn’t be able to keep going. They might even miss the cut at Quail Hollow. But David, well, he’s a trooper. He’s not going to let the man (or woman) bring him down! This kind of internal fortitude must be why he was able to so convincingly play first a vampire, then an FBI agent, for all these years.

I had the hugest crush on him in high school, but I’m happy it died a natural death before this happened.

Dollhouse is finally worth watching

I’ve been watching Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s new show, since its pilot. I wanted for so many reasons to like it:

• It was created by Joss Whedon, who I will always love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• It stars Eliza Dushku, who played the complicated and interesting Faith on Buffy
• The premise sounded really interesting
• …

Okay, so maybe there were just three reasons that I wanted to like it. But when the show premiered, it became clear to me that maybe these things were actually liabilities. Joss Whedon is a god to a certain subset of television and movie watchers, but Buffy and Angel were a long time ago, and Firefly didn’t even last an entire season. Sure, he did well with Dr. Horrible (although I believe I made my feelings on that one pretty clear), but you’re only as good as your last show, and I’m not sure that Internet sensations count.

Second, Eliza Dushku is not a great actress. She was the perfect person to play the tough, conflicted Faith, but she’s much less convincing on Dollhouse when she’s supposed to be nice and harmless. It’s gotten to the point where casting her conveys the same message as casting Lucy Lawless: watch out for this one, she’ll hurt you bad. I never quite buy it when other characters look at Echo’s Persona of the Week and fail to notice the danger. For example, on tonight’s episode, “Echoes”, they had her running around a college campus in an outfit that screams “late 90s” (complete with a miniscule skirt and almost thigh-high socks!) and wearing high-heeled Mary Janes. Who else but a freakishly tough woman could withstand hours of kinky sex, motorcycle-riding, and sneaking around in those things? I know that I probably would have only had the fortitude to get around to the first two things on that list.

Third, the premise seems more ridiculous each week. The idea is that there is a group of beautiful people who are essentially blank slates and for incredible sums of money (usually), individuals, corporations, the government, etc. can have these blank slates imprinted with any set of memories or skill set they desire. So Echo the Doll can become sex-kitten Alice, and then go back to being Echo when the engagement is over. And aside from the fact that the technology seems to keep finding newer and more spectacular ways of failing (no spoilers, but if you’ve seen next week’s preview, you know what I’m talking about), some of the assignments just don’t make sense. Why would a couple use a Doll as a midwife? Why pay a boatload of money when a real midwife could be had for considerably less? Or as a hostage negotiator? Why shell out a lot of money on a fake negotiator when one would presumably soon also be paying a ransom? The given excuse of the need for privacy seemed pretty flimsy. I can’t imagine many negotiators make it a practice to blab about their assignments once they’re completed. And, anyway, what value did Echo add in that situation? Due to the way she was programmed, she actually kind of arsed it up before damage control and more Dolls helped save the day.

And why is Echo working in LA, when that’s where she became a Doll? Episode 6 revealed that there are 20 Dollhouses around the world (why is the LA house the only one that seems to have reached the status of urban legend?), so what sense does it make to have her stay in the city where she started out? She’s already been recognized while on an engagement, and the more assignments she does, the more likely this is to happen again. This 20 Dollhouse thing feels to me like Joss is already tweaking the established mythology, although I am glad that he did not wait six seasons to reveal that there are a lot of other Dollhouses, so this main Dollhouse is less special. It seems that I may be harboring a little residual bitterness about the Slayerettes that popped up in season 7. My bad.

I’ve said more about this than I thought I would, and this post is already excessively wordy, so I will save my thoughts on the Dollhouse staff and other Dolls for some other time.