Was DS 9 dark enoght to have an episode like the Bester one?B 5

[Lindley]

I bailed after a few episodes (and then watched some later ones) but my impression was that the dolls were far more victims than anything else. Which is the main reason I bailed - who wants to watch some weepy show about poor widdle victims? I like characters who are powerful and drive the story, not get kicked around and expect us to feel sorry for them.

In a sense Dollhouse was more like "hard" SF than typical TV fare. It wasn't about good vs bad, really, or even about a particular protagonist. It was simply saying, "If this technology existed, how would it affect the world?"

The answer: first for sex, then for violence, and finally as a weapon of mass destruction.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I think it's the tone that put me off, the way Whedon played out some kind of icky private fantasy by making female characters helpless victims so we could all feel sorry for them. Not sure I want to know that much about Joss Whedon's fantasy life, thank you very much!

I would have liked the premise better if the "dolls" had never been victims but rather depicted straightforwardly as people we don't need to feel sorry for, who made their own bed and they can damn well lie in it. It would have been better for the main character to be male, to short-circuit any "poor widdle victim" tone. If some secondary characters seemed like victims, so be it. As long as the central character isn't, the icky tone would be neutralized.

I did jump back in for the last episode and I saw where the story had gone, so the whole victim tone of the early episodes was counterproductive. At any rate, I found the early tone of the series too nausea-inducing to bother slogging through.

 

[Lindley]

It's true that Enver Gjokaj (Victor) could have easily carried the show. Of all the Dolls, he was the one who seemed able to instantly snap from one character to another most fluidly.