Even though Dollhouse was cancelled by TV execs after just two seasons, creator/director Joss Whedon believes he was still able to “accomplish” some of the goals he set out for himself but he also acknowledges that he lost focus on the direction he wanted the show to take. In an interview with Sci-Fi Now, the writer/director revealed…

“The situation with Dollhouse was that Fox was trying to get it, but we had come at two different shows, we had done that accidentally, and it got to a point where I didn’t know what I was trying to accomplish, and you can’t go into a story room with that feeling, because it’s already really hard. I remember thinking this is the difference between this and Firefly, because with Firefly, I knew, and here, now I’m not even sure. [Dollhouse] accomplished some of the things I wanted to accomplish. The questions of identity and humanity I thought were out there front and centre, and I’ve heard people respond really well to that, and I’ve heard people say the show even helped them.

I never conceived of a more pure journey from helplessness to power, which is what I always write about, and in that sense I feel we accomplished a lot of it. I do feel that part of what we tried to get at kind of got taken out at the beginning – and it really was more important to how the show would work than I even realised when they took it out – which was sex. The show was supposed to be, on some level, a celebration of perversion, as something that makes us unique. Sort of our hidden selves. You can talk about your hidden selves and identity, but when you have to shoot each other every week, you get a little bit limited. The show was supposed to flip genres every episode, and the moment we did that, they shut us down and said, ‘Quickly, have someone shoot at someone.

I feel when we had to take sex out of the equation, it became kind of a joke or almost unsettling. Because we couldn’t hit it head-on – and so much of our identity is wrapped up in our sexuality, and this is something Eliza [Dushku] was talking to me about, as something she wanted to examine before I even came up with the idea,

To have that sort of excised and marginalised and sanitised, and not to be able to hit on the head what they were doing, made the show a little bit limited and a little bit creepy at times. I think we still did some fairly out-there stuff, and I’m proud of what we did, given the circumstances, but with those circumstances, it was never really going to happen the way it should have.

<<<THOUGHTS>>>

I’ll always be of the opinion that Dollhouse should have focused on the future storyline and used the past as the occasional flashback to set it up. Doing it the other way around was just confusing.

Photo courtesy of geeksix.com

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