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hideyseek · 4 years

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50 Questions You’ve Never Been Asked

tagged by @usersoup <3

What is the colour of your hairbrush? it is .. black and turquoise, though i must admit that since i’ve cut my hair i rarely use it.

Name a food you never eat? huh. caviar? i tend to forget about the existence of foods i don’t eat until i’m on the instacard website. chocolate ice cream, i guess. that’s like, a normal-person food i never consume.

Are you typically too warm or too cold? i am constantly too cold. as i type this i am in my apartment in sweatpants under a blanket and my roommate is in shorts and a tshirt.

What were you doing 45 minutes ago? mm i was reading a room of one’s own, at risk of sounding like the pretentious humanities major i am. i’m reading it out of desperation (we are in possession of the writer’s block and we would like to give it up as soon as possible), after having had it in my head to read since i came across a lin-manuel miranda tween in like 2015 telling all young writers to read it

What is your favourite candy bar? i don’t really like.. candy. twix or butterfingers, if i had to pick one at gunpoint.

Have you ever been to a professional sports event? yEAH u fucking bet i went to winterguard international championships twice in high school and bands of america championships once (both as part of my school’s winter/colorguard). i’ve never gone to a pro sportsball match though.

What is the last thing you said out loud? oh, are you really out there alone? (at my roommate, who is on the balcony with a desk lamp rigged up for optimal dirtball making).

What is your favourite ice cream? vanilla. or hazelnut. i fucking love hazelnut.

What was the last thing you had to drink? not to associate myself with brands, but i am drinking sprite as i type this.

Do you like your wallet? yes! i had my wallet nicked on a bus in the middle of the semester and my replacement is a lovely narrow black folding wallet that i am infinitely fond of.

What was the last thing you ate? the dregs of my cheezits, pepper jack flavor

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend? mm no, though during my phone call with my grandma earlier this week she told me i should buy more clothes no less than four times. she thinks i should own and wear more “pretty girl clothes” and i haven’t the heart to tell her that i think gender is fake.

The last sporting event you watched? i participated in a harry potter pub quiz over zoom the other week, if that counts. otherwise, probably something televised and american football related, several months ago.

What is your favourite flavour of popcorn? KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN

Who is the last person you sent a text message to? oH thank god i have an interesting answer to this one -- my stage manager/playwright friend, whose recent play i am dying to get a copy of.

Ever go camping? yeah. my family used to go every august with some family friends.

Do you take vitamins? mm just vitamin d. (fuck off this was not meant to be a dick joke).

Do you go to church every Sunday? nah.

Do you have a tan? not anymore... even during the semester i spend most of my time underground in a basement rehearsal space or in the on-campus computer labs. (hence the vitamin d)

Do you prefer Chinese food or pizza? these are?? not equivalent at all in terms of scope? chinese food, of course.

Do you drink your soda with a straw? nah. can-to-mouth for me.

What colour socks do you usually wear? depends on how cold i am: i have some very lovely warm purple socks and some red and black socks that my dear friend gifted me for christmas last? year? but otherwise i have just sports shoes height white socks and black socks.

Do you ever drive above the speed limit? i am gay, i do not drive.

What terrifies you? failure, mostly. i hate that that’s my answer, but there you go. failure, or being putting myself in a situation where i don’t really have a choice in what happens to me.

Look to your left, what do you see? mm, i just moved from the study to bed so: the empty space in the loft bed railing where the ladder is, a blank wall, the edge and hinges of the bedroom wall.

What chore do you hate? none, really? i’ll get really passive-aggressive about some of the small apartment tidying things in my head, but not often enough that anything comes to mind now.

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? how my linguistics prof last semester had folks self-identify if they spoke non-american english in the middle of lecture

What’s your favourite soda? hm, hm. oH. there’s a vietnamese sandwich place in my hometown that has the best lychee soda. (a handful of google image searches informs me this is elisha aerated brand)

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive-thru? hm, most of the time when i’m going to fast food i’m going to in-n-out with either a pile of theater people or my high school friend group, so sitting. er, going in.

Who’s the last person you talked to? roommates, in person.

Favourite cut of beef? i could not name cuts of beef if u asked me to really nicely. actually jk i know uh, ox... oxtail? i like oxtail soup.

Last song you listened to? am in the middle of listening to trenchh by cavetown but i’ve been alternating fob and cavetown and bastille on shuffle on spotify.

Last book you read? ella enchanted by gail carson levine, because it is my #1 comfort book.

Favourite day of the week? i like thursdays. they just sound nice.

Can you say the alphabet backwards? if i had like, several minutes, i probably could do it. but everything after w would involve me counting (counting? reciting?) from the beginning.

How do you like you coffee? i’ll drink it any way but black. i have discovered i do not like dalgona coffee. but i like the dark chocolate mocha that peet’s does in the winter a ridiculous amount.

Favourite pair of shoes? i have this pair of converse that’s grey stripes that always makes me feel like a Cool Arts Student, even though it’s actively terrible for my arches.

The time you normally go to bed? to bed? midnightish. to being asleep? usually 1-2ish.

The time you normally get up? eleven in the morning, apparently, since that’s what’s been happening now that i’m not setting alarms. during the school year, usually 7:30 or 8 because i work in the scene shop half the mornings of the week.

What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets? conceptually? sunsets. aesthetically? also sunsets. metaphorically, though, i prefer sunrises.

How many blankets on your bed? i’ve got a blanket (duvet, maybe? comforter? i have never really vibed with these western concepts of bedding) and another knitted blanket.

Describe your kitchen plates: black and square and slightly chipped because roommates and i get a bit aggressive with cramming them onto the drying rack.

Do you have a favourite alcoholic beverage? i like hard cider. (i like soft cider better than hard cider, but the apple taste drowns out the alcohol taste enough for me to have a pretty good time.)

Do you play cards? haha yeah. whenever i’m home i play 24 with my little brother and lose a lot. or my family’ll play 21. or BS, which i fucking hate because i cannot lie for shit.

What colour is your car? still gay, still don’t drive.

Can you change a tire? mmmmmmmmmmm no. i have a shocking lack of car-related life skills for someone holding down a job that mostly involves wrenches.

Your favourite province? oh boy. hubei province, bc there’s no country specification and this feels less impersonal than if i were to just point somewhere in australia.

Favourite job you’ve ever had? hm, let’s limit this to work i’ve done for money, just to narrow the field down. (i tend to like the work i do a lot.) i really really enjoy working as a sound technician, especially as a mic assistant (it checks my “meeting people” box and my “helping people with their emotions” box and my “storytelling for an audience” box because at the theater i work at, pre-show mic check is me talking about my day and has resulted in a handful of people telling me i should try standup). the hours and pay are kind of crap, though. you don’t get friday nights when your friday nights are spent backstage of the same show you’ve heard twenty million times at this point. i also enjoy teaching computer science, because i just fucking like computer science. christ, i just,, miss being at work :c the production of newsies i was gonna do this summer got canceled.

How did you get your biggest scar? mm, pass.

What did you do today that made someone else happy? i, hm. everything that comes to mind feels vaguely manipulative, since i can’t really tell if people were made happy? oh! i had an extended slack conversation with one of the academic interns for the cs class i help teach that was basically just us bonding over word humor. he seems like the kind of person who would have gotten a kick out of it.

I tag: @kittog @wali21 @capt-ann @lemon-yellow @iamanonniemouse @raccoon-sex-dungeon @snakesonacartesianplane @eternalflarg @swimmingseafish (do it if u want! don’t let me bully u into anything)

#tag game #SOUP I LIKED THIS A LOT! THANK U #no pressure friends #!#but also i enjoy holding knowledge about the people i like

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journeytothecenterofmyminduk · 4 years

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Navigating The Art World

by Gala Knörr

When I finished reading ‘Navigating The Art World: Professional Practice for the Early Career Artist’ by Delphian, I started formulating ideas for this short essay and sensed the impending ominous feeling of having jumped the fence of that age where you are considered a grown human being and supposed to have all your life together, an artist in their mid-thirties. All aboard to real adulthood! Yet you also realize that the career that you embarked yourself in, is a lifelong pledge to your work, boiling it down slowly to its core, and its most flavourful fruits show up along a road where your permanently tested patience is tied to your growth, an acceptance of seasons of chaos, a mastery of rejection, and a community of like minded individuals within a world that is mudded by the often precarious nature of being a young(ish) artist.

Truth is I graduated in 2007 from a BFA program at Parsons Paris, unaware that some of my classmates were the offspring of powerful well known figures of the cultural industry, armed with the mentorship and know-how to navigate the following stages of one’s career. We were in the midst of the peak years of the Myspace era, the beginnings of a post-collegiate Facebook being introduced into a global audience, shaping what social media is today, and unleashing the incessant forms of marketing and e-commerce strategies of the current multiple social networks of the Internet. I left with a BFA diploma in my pocket, a hand full of insane life changing experiences that up until today have proven to be valuable, but when I opened the door to my family’s home in Spain the 2008 market crash happened, and realized I had no clue what I was supposed to do next, but keep making work. I didn’t live in the city I studied in anymore, I returned to my home country and I was so far removed from the young emerging art scene there, the natural progression for me was to invest in my education and moved to London to earn my MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. I was in London one of the most culturally effervescent cities of the EU (Brexit meh), but even though I was in a context of artistic osmosis and formed a strong group of heterogenous artist friends, I was in a very demanding city. I did not have an instruction manual, and the friends I knew whose career seemed to be blooming I erroneously compared myself to, while I worked odd jobs such making PSAs with celebrities, DJing gigs, appearing as an extra in films, sold clothing, served drinks at openings, taught children’s workshops, gave guided tours and gallery assisted at Saatchi Gallery. After a while, a few pints, conversations and twisted changes of fate, I seemed to have stopped caring about the outside and decided to focus on the inside.

My emotional stability, bank account and studio were waiting for me to believe in myself, I quit my day job (that was a bit dramatic), turned thirty, and those years I seemed to have blindly stroll through my career aimlessly, had actually been extremely formative. Social media became part of the pivotal change in my practice, and I don’t mean how well my work and studio practice were portrayed on the gram, I mean the actual act of it, the performance behind it, particularly how it has shaped us all. But it was the Hedley Roberts’ text towards the end of Delphian’s book that resonated so much with my personal experience. I never really had a mentor in university, in fact a tutor I worked with refused to write me a letter of recommendation to further my studies, a big slap in the face that only fed my drive to pursue my career. Recently, I invited my friend Paco Marcial to chat with the artists participating in the Adhesivo Magazine Digital Residency during lockdown. Marcial worked alongside Jason Rhoades as his studio manager for many years, and he said something that stuck with me and echoes Roberts’ sage advice in the book, ‘one must find people from their own generation to work and build oneself, those who know how to understand you’. After studying the work of many artists I admired, one random London day I met an artist who like me was hispanic, born in the eighties and making work I deemed meaningful, I asked this stranger to get a coffee at the Royal Academy one day, and for an hour and a half I had a conversation that helped me focus not only on my work but how I made it, gaining me a pal I still call a friend to this day. As Hedley says ‘If you know what kind of artist you want to be and you’ve documented and written about your work…and you’ve got nothing in the pipeline for next year. What are you missing? The answer is community.’

‘Navigating The Art World - Professional Practice For The Early Career Artist’ by Delphian is available online at the Delphian Gallery’s online shop.

#articles #delphiangallery #emerging artist #text #community #contemporary art #art school #art student

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Dollhouse full series review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

96.15% (twenty-five of twenty-six).

What is the average percentage of female characters with names and lines for the full series?

45.89%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Twenty.

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 50% female?

Twelve.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

Positive Content Status:

Very poor - this is exactly why we don’t just rely on passing the Bechdel and having a large number of female characters in the cast as ‘guarantees’ that we’re watching feminist content. If all those female characters exist to be punished, objectified, and abused by the story’s creator as an expression of his misogynistic rage, that is not a good thing (average rating of 2.76).

Which season had the best representation statistics overall?

They’re about the same, really. The one Bechdel fail was in the first season, but season two had less female character presence overall, but it was also more balanced insofar as it scored more episodes with 40% or more on the cast. Both scored equally badly on content quality, though my feeling is that perhaps season one’s sins were the worse of the two. On the other hand, season one had more guest female characters AND it used its supporting female cast more prominently, whereas season two was more male-heavy not just in numbers but in screen time and narrative attention. At the end of the day, I’m not sure it matters which you consider to be worse.

Which season had the worst representation statistics overall?

See above. I cannot recommend this show for feminist content.

Overall Series Quality:

For a first-time viewer, there’s probably still solid potential for enjoyment, and at least some of the twists should be genuinely enjoyable. The majority of the cast is very excellent, and the idea of the show is compelling. However, the quality of the series as it turned out is negligible, full of flash and little substance, the bad apples in the cast spoil the batch while the good grapple with bad writing and the woeful underuse of their skills, and the whole thing remains far better as a thought than it is in execution. And then there’s the misogynistic rage thing. That’s a problem that really messes with the overall product, to put it lightly.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

For the record: I believe, sincerely and completely, that Joss Whedon hates women. Not that he doesn’t know how to relate to them or he misses ‘the old days’ or any other such placid disdain; I think he deeply and violently hates women, and I think the evidence is written all up and down his work - all of his work, but perhaps never more clearly than in this show. He can claim to be a feminist all he wants, he can put women at the forefront of his shows and talk big game about what he believes they’re capable of, but so long as the women in his stories continue to be mistreated at every turn, beaten, raped, and constantly belittled and devalued within the text, I will not be convinced that the man doesn’t resent the Hell out of women for existing - and particularly, for existing with potential for sexuality. The misogyny of the Whedonverse is rampant, unchecked, often participated in by his ‘heroes’ as much as his villains, and treated as largely incidental, rarely acknowledged and even then, gleefully delivered as ‘just the way things are’. Characters might shake their heads about how that’s unfortunate (and Whedon pats himself on the back for making such an insightful feminist statement), but the verbal denouncement doesn’t detract from the indulgent inclusion of that misogyny, the platform provided for it to roam uninhibited, and be showcased and vicariously enjoyed. For someone who claims to be a feminist, Whedon sure does seem to be fetishistically obsessed with making women suffer, and when I compare the content of his work to that of the other creators whose shows have appeared on this blog, the result is most unflattering.

As easy as it would be to while away this post explicating the details of Whedon’s reprehensible worldview, however, I shall refrain; for one, it would be boring as Hell, it’s not a complicated reality and the truth really is in the pudding for all to see, you don’t need me for that, and for two: I already promised to at last talk about the characters and their arcs (such as they are), since that is one subject I often neglected in the posts on this show, and arguably the only subject upon which the show could hang any virtues. Naturally, we will begin at the beginning, with the much-maligned lead character: Echo.

Eliza Dushku is not a terrible actor. But her range is pretty limited, she plays variations on the same archetype almost exclusively, and that’s a terrible fit for a show where the central caveat is supposed to be that she can take on any personality and be a complete and whole different person week by week. No one should ever expect to be able to float that idea with a lead who is so very obviously not up to the task, and while I don’t think she’s responsible for the failure of the show (all of its other flaws would have soundly sunk it even if Dushku was a crown jewel of talent), it certainly does not help that she’s easily the blandest and least compelling player in the whole sorry mess. It’s a cringe every time she utters some silly line about how powerful and badass she is, because there’s nothing convincing about it, and if the creative team really believed (and believed their audience would believe) that Echo is THAT great, they wouldn’t feel the need to have her showily declare it. When season two hits and Echo’s ‘character development’ fast-tracks to full sentience, she becomes even less dynamic: all of the things which could have provided legitimate engagement with the character’s struggle are skipped over, her process of self-actualisation (anyone who read my Farscape reviews knows my love for hard self-actualisation narratives), her navigation of her role as a developing entity in a world hostile to such things (touched on occasionally in season one, thrown to the wind in season two), anything to do with her cognitive evolution is scrapped in favour of ‘she just remembers it all now’, and there’s no arc to it. I invoked the concept of the Mary Sue in one episode post, and that is exactly the problem we end up with: a ‘perfect’ character who can do everything and anything and be ~the best~ at it, who is beloved and desired by all who meet her, except for her (mustache-twirling cliche villain) enemies, who fear her awesome powers. There is no personality in Echo, no conflict, no meaning. Wild as it may sound, you could actually remove her from the show completely and easily adapt the other characters (the ones who have personality, conflict, and meaning) to fill the space, and not only would it work, but the show would be infinitely the better for it. That’s the absolute opposite of what you want from a lead character.

The other BIG mistake in the casting for this show is Tahmoh Penikett as Paul Ballard, who plays his part with all the verve and charisma of a piece of wood with eyes drawn on (ever watch Ed, Edd, and Eddy? Plank has more dynamic personality than our boy Ballard). I’m not sure how much of it is Penikett’s fault - it has been many years since I watched Battlestar Galactica, and while I don’t remember being particular impressed by him, I don’t remember being frustrated by his inability to walk in a straight line without making it look weird, either - but whether he’s handicapped by his own acting non-prowess or not, he’s certainly fighting a losing battle with an unfocused mess of a character, and if the writing couldn’t decide what Ballard’s deal was to start with, I’m not shocked that Penikett had a hard time conveying it. Is Ballard a morally righteous hero (on a show with no moral centre for him to relate to)? Is he flawed and secretly-dark, and if he is, who recognises that, is it deliberate? Is he losing control, or is that just supposed to be ‘normal person’ behaviour? Again, who notices, does he know? How much of his interiority is a white-knight cliche, and how much is supposed to be genuine, and is any of it supposed to be subversive? I honestly can’t tell, one episode from the next. In season one, he’s garbage at his job, and some characters mention it, but then Ballard himself appears to be under the impression that he’s fighting the good fight and the tone of the show seems to agree with him rather than acknowledging his self-delusion. In season two, he joins the Dollhouse at the same time as openly declaring himself to be still against it, the plot conveniently pretends he never raped Mellie so that we can uphold the idea that he IS righteous, after all, and has no dark impulses, other characters at the Dollhouse put up with him being an obvious liability for no discernible reason, and then eventually he gets rendered brain-dead, reconstructed as a doll version of himself, and then dies a few episodes later anyway. Big whoop. It feels an awful lot like they had no long-term plan for what to do with the character, so they just focused on giving him a romance with Echo and then threw some contrived death stuff on top of that for flavour. Speaking of the romance thing: eek. Again, in season one it seemed they couldn’t decide whether or not his mounting obsession with his damsel-in-distress vision of Caroline was creepy as Hell (pro tip: it absolutely was), but then in season two it all became very simple: Ballard wants Echo, but doesn’t really believe she’s a real person (for some reason this is not a deal-breaker to her), and they dance around each other for a bit but never get together and somehow we’re supposed to interpret this as the development of a wonderful love story with a bittersweet tragic end when he dies, twice but also not really because then she downloads him into her brain anyway so they live happily ever after, sort of. It’s a fucking mess, y’all, and they don’t earn it, and the utter soup that is Ballard’s personality and motivation goes un-examined. The fact that season two tips heavily in favour of Echo/Ballard scenes is something very significantly to its detriment, because it’s the worst and most shakily-developed non-relationship of the series. Ok, that, and whatever the fuck Topher/Bennett was supposed to be.

Speaking of Topher...actually, I don’t have much to say about him. Breaking pattern with the rest of the characters, Topher shows no real sign of a personal story in season one, so it’s season two which attempts to give him some function as an individual outside of being the comic-relief tech guy. It’s not particularly successful, since the attempted character development revolves around 1) moral compunctions (which, as noted ad nauseum, this show left itself incapable of engaging with in any meaningful way back when it pretended sexual slavery was a morally grey issue), and 2) throwing a love interest at him: zero actual relationship-building ensues and it’s awkward and chemistry free and then she dies (so glad Bennett could exist to tick off a bunch of Whedon’s favourite suffering-woman tropes and then die for shock value, yay). At the end of the day, Topher was just a handful of affectations, fun to watch, but hardly amounting to more of a ‘whole person’ than the paper-thin personalities of the sex-fantasy cliches he imprinted into the dolls.

If Topher is the character who suffers most from a lack of development in season one, Boyd is the hardest hit in season two, easily. As Echo’s handler in season one, Boyd was pleasant, mild-mannered, protective, and he had an ethos which governed his choices (imagine such a thing!). His former career as a cop was referenced variously, and it seemed clear that we should expect one day to learn how he came to leave the force and wind up as a bodyguard working for a secret organisation. Season two? Forget about it. Forget about it because of the idiotic ‘twist’ that turned Boyd into Rossum’s cuckoo founder and thereby unraveled his entire personality as a sham in one fell swoop, obviously, but forget about his character having even the appearance of development in the meantime, also. Removing Boyd from his position as Echo’s handler was a grave error, as it downgraded his importance and effectively stifled the natural bond he had developed with his charge which represented a nice, uncomplicated character dynamic (one far more welcome than that clusterfuck replacement which was Ballard as Echo’s handler, euch). Additionally, this led to Boyd being largely backgrounded for the entirety of season two, given no meaningful stories to engage with, and certainly not expanded upon or explored as a character. As noted, any such expansion would have been irrelevant anyway once the dumbass ‘big reveal’ happened, but that’s all the more reason to bemoan the loss of Boyd’s character, which essentially occurred a full season before he actually donned his suicide vest and exploded in the Rossum building. If you have to dump a character just to service your twist, don’t. Dump the twist instead. Like pretty much every other actor on this show, Harry Lennix deserved better.

And then there’s DeWitt...I largely covered the DeWitt issue back in the episode posts, really; she starts out an intriguing character (and I credit Olivia Williams with much of this, she created dynamism out of an oft-lacking script, in every case), but season two really did a number on her when it came to leaping wildly about different plot ideas that jerked DeWitt’s characterisation from one extreme to another with very little connective tissue to sell the change. If Ballard was the character whom the narrative couldn’t decide how to handle in season one, DeWitt takes up that odious mantle in season two; is she losing her grasp? Is she playing the game? Is she an evil, pragmatic genius? Is she foolish and deluded by an idealism that plainly has no basis in reality? Is she an alcoholic who spontaneously gets her shit together after a couple of other characters tell her off? Damn, that was easy. As with Ballard, the problem is not just that the story seems to change tone and purpose for DeWitt’s character from one episode to the next; it also robs her of the opportunity to be defined through consistent interaction with others - she has no one to bounce off in a manner which would create a baseline for her behaviour and how it is outwardly perceived (and thus, how the audience is intended to interpret it).

I’m gonna talk about Sierra and Victor together, because frankly, that’s both the way the show packages them, and there’s not much to say outside of it. For the millionth time ever on this blog, I will complain that all shows ever would be improved by being ensembles; in this case, Sierra and Victor both would have benefited from a framework which allowed either one of them to take greater precedence more often, instead of having their own narratives distilled down to a single Personal Episode each in season two. I do enjoy both, and their relationship has legitimate chemistry and charm while also following a sensible plot concept through - the idea that strong emotional connections and bonds can transcend the mind wipe. Unfortunately, the show has little functional purpose for either character outside of their relationship, to the extent that it even sidelines them almost entirely in the climax of the series (pre-flashforward). Victor/Anthony is given the least plot purpose in the show proper, which is just a criminal misuse of Enver Gjokaj - Anthony is a soldier and that’s essentially his entire personality right there, and the only thing that gives them an excuse to make him do Manly Fighter Stuff in the latter stages of season two. Sierra/Priya gets more to do, but the bad news is, it’s all about being raped, and that’s her whole story - horrible possessive misogynists abusing her so that she can embody Whedon’s favourite Broken Bird trope, with the added misfortune of changing the nature of her relationship with Victor to make it a little bit about him ‘rescuing’ her with the love of a good man. Both of these actors are so good, and their characters had such potential, I can’t believe the show fucked around and wasted them like it did.

Ok, one more before I go. I know he was never a member of the central cast, but we gotta talk about Laurence Dominic, because he was deceptively essential to the show, important to what made it work for the brief time when it could be said to work, and he was altogether the best character on the show insofar as he was the most cohesive, consistent, and logical player in the piece. I said as much when he made his welcome return in ‘The Attic’ (the best episode of season two...coincidence?), and as I noted then, it may be that Dominic’s early exit from the show was to his benefit in that he avoided being jostled across season two having all semblance of coherence torn to pieces along the way. I’m fairly certain the writer’s had no idea how valuable Dominic was to the story when they axed him (not least because they clearly had no idea how important it is to create some kind of moral framework to support a story that is inherently morally dubious), but consider the most obvious changes to the show format and the other character’s stories once Dominic was out of the picture: Boyd takes over as Head of Security, to his detriment as a character, and to the detriment of his relationship with Echo, leaving her wasting time with that dolt Ballard instead and putting audiences everywhere to sleep. And DeWitt? DeWitt loses her sounding board, the right-hand man who - for most of the first season - anchored her character by giving her someone to talk and plot and, at times, disagree with, creating that behavioural baseline that she lacked when she was being dragged all over season two. Dominic’s role was a structural pillar on the show, he held the roof up so that the rest of the characters could interact and interrelate - with each other, and with him - he had distinct relationship dynamics with pretty much all of them - and he was exactly the kind of character that you want around being a stable, unobtrusive presence. They could even have kept the idea of him being an NSA spy, just keep him working undercover, the audience knows the truth but the other characters don’t, it creates tension! Sure, it’d probably mean letting Ivy be sent to the attic under false charges, and that wouldn’t help this show’s abysmal abuse-of-women record, but considering the show did nothing of consequence with Ivy in the end anyway and she just existed to be belittled by Topher while he sent her to fetch him snacks...yeah, anyway. I could talk a lot about why Dominic was the best character on this stinking show, but it’s ultimately beside the point: the point is that nothing in this show really worked, and that had a lot to do with major conceptual issues (moral grounding is not optional! Misogyny is not tasty plot flavouring! Joss Whedon is an abomination!), and keeping Dominic around long-term would no more save the show than if Eliza Dushku possessed a modicum of acting range. It’s frustrating because there are so many good pieces there, excellent actors, intriguing character set-ups, fantastic plot possibilities, and heady existential implications. It’s just that some moron decided the best thing to do with that would be to play nasty sexual wish-fulfillment games and leave the rest to rot. I’m pretty sure the version of this show I enjoyed once was largely the version I made in my head, because the reality is a wasteful disaster. And misogynistic as Hell, too. We, the viewers, deserved better.

#Dollhouse #full series review #Bechdel Test #female representation

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