Dollhouse

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I watched the first episode of Dollhouse last night.  It was very, very good – it’s a testament to Joss’ power as a TV god that he can have a show that hits the ground running like Dollhouse did.   The first entire season of Buffy had a sort of stilted quality to it; Angel had the leg-up of being a spinoff (I think Angel actually declined in quality after all of the Connor shenanigans until Season 5); Firefly hit all the marks but still was wobbly until Our Mrs. Reynolds.  

Dollhouse is solid, through and through.  But it still has issues, the first of which is that Eliza Dushku, while very easy on the eyes and apparently passionate enough to help bankroll the show (she has producer credit), is really … not … that .. good … of an actress.  The first few minutes of the show I just kept thinking ‘what is Faith doing here?’ – her presentation of the in-over-her-head Echo was the same performance as her in-over-her-head evil Faith, and her negotiator persona was completely unbelieveable.  She played it like someone acting like they’re acting like they’re acting.  Which is either brilliant, or bad acting with too much analysis on my part.

The premise is intriguing (and Alias with a sci-fi twist, but never mind that), and of course I’ll follow Joss to the grave.  It was fun to see Commander Lock, Faith the Rogue Slayer, Helo from BSG and Mirage from The Incredibles (the resemblance of Dichan Lachman is UNCANNY) all in the same show.

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And now to the inevitable (at least for me) game idea:

The players are all Actors (are they not?) who work together as a team.  No one has a character sheet to start with – they all get the stock characters for their assigned roles: negotiator from Quantico (I mean, come on …), bad-ass commando, &c., which are in themselves amalgams of other personalities (think of the Personas as LEGOs that get put together instead of single entities).  As they rotate through these personas, they leave a trace behind – those traces start to add up into the true personality of the Actor who’s been wiped.  All of the echos start to become the true voice of the character.  Think of the entire campaign as a character creation.  The echoes (when triggered by another character in the role with the echo), causes first an echo for that character, but also causes a stronger echo in the first character – a sort of positive-feedback loop.

So Character A has the negotiator persona (Persona A) and has a small echo of the wiping process caused by a stressful situation.  That echo (and its cause) stay with the persona.  Character B gets a persona that includes the echo’d bit.  Player B activates the echo (for some positive benefit), and gets their own echo that attaches to Persona A, and meanwhile Player A gets a stronger echo in Persona B; a chain reaction.