viranimus said:
Dollhouse was more coherent and well paced (but the latter was in part thanks to fox cancelling it instead of letting Whedon ramble on aimlessly and endlessly) and had a single underlying focal point.
While I do like Dollhouse and think it's underappreciated (largely because it already lost most of its audience in the first few episodes before it actually got good), I only partly agree with this. It was very well paced and developed its characters and ideas rather well in an interesting way...but only during the second half of the first season and the first half of the second season.
It struggled a lot through the first five episodes to figure out what it was trying to do with itself, and it was somewhat generic and didn't get most people's attention as a result. It didn't start living up to its potential until after that, but once it got going, it was great. That carried over to the second season, but when it got canceled in the middle of it and they had to abruptly wrap up the plot somehow in the space of a few episodes, it all fell apart again and was ridiculously rushed and unsatisfying at the end (with the exception of Epitaph One/Two, which is great).
When it was good, it was very good, and it was a really interesting idea that they only got to scratch the surface of. I just wish the beginning and end had been as good as the middle. Seeing Enver Gjokaj as Victor as Fran Kranz as Topher was almost enough by itself to justify the entire series, though. I think that's the point where I realized how awesome he is and how many different characters he'd played without them feeling out of place and wished the show had focused more on him.
