Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it seems, sometimes, as if downbeat sci-fi has somehow become accepted as more... highbrow may seem the wrong word - "realistic" definitely is - but intellectually acceptable, if that makes sense; people dismiss more positive sci-fi as fluff and popcorn viewing best done with your brain turned off, while happily gathering around for the latest SF that eagerly demonstrates just how fucked we all are, whether by our own doing or by outside forces. Early sci-fi efforts included their share of cautionary tales of things that could, and will, go wrong, of course, but there was still a sense of wonder and positivity about this whole "technology!" thing that is almost entirely missing from today's science fiction (Even the aforementioned BSG finale had an essentially "everything's great, and we've been given another chance - but watch out for those robots!" coda attached). But how did that happen? When did we become so resigned to our dystopias and our demise that it became what we embraced? Some theories:

Happy Is Boring
Who wants to follow happy people doing happy things? We watch/read/listen/play characters who have grand adventures and terrible experiences, because those are the ones that have interesting things happen in them, and because escapism is always more exciting when there's an element of "I'm glad that's not me" in there, as well. Conflict is key to drama, after all; when you're just paying attention to contented people feeling content, you're left watching one of the more boring episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and nobody wants that.

We're In Our Teenage Angst Period
Along similar lines, culturally, we've reached a point where optimism doesn't seem mature enough anymore - Happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales and we've grown past those a long time ago, thank you very much. It's not just science fiction; stories of all media and genres - well, okay, maybe not musicals - have found that, to be critically acclaimed, it's better to focus on the more serious, downer things in life. Of course, sci-fi has that problem more than most, considering the general cultural apathy towards it in general (See "Why Aren't Critics Insanely Excited About Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles And Other Related Questions").

Optimistic Sci-Fi Doesn't Try Hard Enough
This isn't entirely true, of course; I think there's an argument to be made for Flex Mentallo to be the equal in almost all ways to Watchmen, for example... But for the most part, even the good "happy" SF (Doctor Who, Fringe, Transformers) seems to content to "merely" be good entertainment instead of trying to make the grand statement about something larger, like a Battlestar Galactica. Mind you, this may be because...

It's Impossible To Be So Optimistic About Science Anymore
Is the bloom off the rose? We've seen how technology can be abused and used for evil ends too often to be too eager to celebrate it fully anymore. Even in the high tech utopia of Star Trek, the positivity comes more from the human spirit - even in the alien races surrounding us - than the science (Remove the humanity, after all, and you're left with the Borg). It's much easier for us to worry about technology than it is for us to believe in it, perhaps; we're more and more convinced that we'll create Skynet before Data (and even Data comes with evil prototypes).

In the end, perhaps it's just a trend; maybe one day we'll collectively wake up and realize that our creations haven't managed to overpower us and cause nuclear annihilation after all, and that science has slowly continued to improve our lives even if it doesn't look like the glittering prize that it may have done fifty years or so ago. There's always been as much to be in awe of as in fear of, in terms of scientific discovery; it'd be nice if our fiction remembered that more often, and delivered stories that compel, tell us about ourselves and also remind us that, sometimes, things can work out after all.

Think about it; even the runaway successes don't make it past a seventh season. With the exception of the original and most recent series, all of the Star Trek series lasted seven seasons. Buffy lasted seven, as well, and BSG lasted four and a bit (The miniseries always feels a little like a season zero to me). The only three shows to break this rule that I can think of are Doctor Who (which ran for 26 years originally, then went on hiatus for 16 years before returning), Stargate SG1 (10 seasons) and Smallville (About to head into its ninth).

The practical answer, I'm sure, would involve actors wanted to stop playing starship captains and go off and do something else for the Hallmark Channel or guestspots on Leverage or whatever; seven years seems the limit on contracts for most actors aside from Tom Welling and Allison Mack. But what keeps SF shows from just swapping out actors and leads like Law & Order and continuing on regardless? Part of me wonders what the fan raction would've been had Star Trek: The Next Generation had introduced the cast of Deep Space Nine into the show around its sixth season and just continued with them as a new Enterprise crew for an eighth, and beyond, with the cast and crew of Voyager joining in at a later date. Could we have had fifteen years of Star Trek, or would fans have jumped ship because their favorite characters were gone?

You could make the argument that no show deserves to run 15 years no matter what the genre; certainly I'd admit to dropping out of er way before the ten year mark, never mind making it all the way to the end. It wasn't that I was bored of the cycling in and out of numerous characters who shared similar traits and ever-increasingly dramatic personal demons, but also that the stories themselves became repetitive and predictable. The same could be said of the final years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager and Stargate SG1 (and of recent seasons of Smallville and Doctor Who, for that matter). Even the last couple of years of Buffy and Deep Space Nine began to feel stale, as if the writers had told all the stories that they'd wanted to. Is there something about sci-fi drama that exhausts itself in its need to constantly up the scale and scope of its stories each and every year? Perhaps actors seeking greener pastures isn't the only reason why even successful SF ends around the seven year mark; maybe the creators run out of new ideas that they're able to create on a weekly television budget, as well (After all, Star Trek: First Contact was one of the best Next Generation stories despite coming years after the seventh season of the series).

Part of me wonders why we haven't really seen a successful sci-fi procedural set up so as to allow for characters to come and go more freely than a Star Trek, but also to take advantage of a syndication-friendly done-in-one format without the constant demands of an ever-growing internal mythology and backstory... A CSI: Mars, or whatever. The closest things I can think of to that would probably be The X-Files, which tried to replace its stars in its eight season (Hey, another show to add to my list of 7+ seasons! X-Files ran nine, of course) without much success... probably because of the crushing weight of the show's mythos being tied directly to the original leads, and SciFi's Eureka, although that seems to be creeping towards a "bigger picture" backstory ever so slowly. It seems like an obvious idea, considering the success of police and medical procedurals, but science fiction shows always seem to gravitate towards intricate backstories and centering the shows around the characters, instead of the plots, as some kind of cliched way of giving "regular" audiences something to hold onto amongst the technobabble. But, as Lost and Battlestar Galactica push SF TV towards a model of shorter, more novel-like approaches, it'd be nice to see Eureka or even SciFi's new Warehouse 13 demonstrate that SF TV can do something else, and have the longevity of more "mainstream" shows.

The core problem with Dollhouse, I decided, isn't that it's not a good idea, or even a good take on a good idea (although I'll leave you all to discuss that latter one); it's that it's not an idea that can sustain itself as an ongoing television show. Either we're supposed to swallow that Echo (a) tends to break down a lot on missions, (b) tends to be given missions that are especially exciting and/or violent and (c) this is all apparently standard-operating procedure, considering the fact that, for all the weekly back-at-the-office in-fighting scenes, Echo still gets sent out on missions that will go wrong and involve her breaking down in some way week after week... or we're supposed to believe that all of this is going somewhere. The problem is, the only somewhere it can go that could be satisfying for the audience involves Echo remembering/realizing who and what she is and doing something about it, and in the most important sense - no matter what the outcome of that may be - that finishes the story. Yes, the series can continue, obviously, whether Echo suddenly has self-awareness and can access all these different personalities, or whether she gets reset, or the series shifts onto other characters... but the story we're all watching now will be finished. Same thing with the Ballard subplot - either he finds out that the Dollhouse exists, finishing the story, or he doesn't, and he's an idiot.

Dollhouse, ironically enough considering the ratings, may be too finite a story for its own good as a Friday night Fox show. For it to have the depth and weight that Whedon (and the show's fans, for that matter) think it has, it's not enough to continually show the sexism and everyday abuse that surrounds us, week after week - Surely, at some point of doing only that, the show stops being an ironic commenter on that and simply complicit in it? - but, instead, come to some kind of conclusion about it... but can it really do so in the format it's in?

Watching the show, I'm reminded of comic writer and editor Mark Waid's commentary about DC Comics' Final Crisis series:

I know that sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I promise I'm not. I felt the same way about FC that a lot of people seemed to—I tried to follow it from issue to issue and my head hurt. A lot. And I was confused and baffled by the series. BUT—when I read it all in one sitting, I got it. Its ideas were clear to me (though they required some mental work from me, which is fine—so do stories spanning the scale of "literature" from James Joyce to J.G. Ballard to last Friday's episode of Battlestar), and I thought they were stunningly innovative and clever and, most importantly, were fresh and unlike anything else I'm gonna get from a random superhero comic... I maintain that the story itself is pretty comprehensible. Should it not have taken the form of a seven-issue series, then? In retrospect, probably not. In an entire lifetime of reading comics, I've never experienced a disconnect so astounding as what I got out of reading it as it came out versus what I got out of reading it straight through. That alone fascinates me and is something worth studying.

So is Dollhouse the Final Crisis of television; something that can't fully be appreciated until it's over? And if so, shouldn't it really be a movie...?

I'm only semi-joking with that last question. With Watchmen coming out next week, I'm getting worryingly obsessed with the idea of stories being told in the most suitable format and medium; after all, Watchmen the movie can never be Watchmen the book for too many reasons - not least of which is the fact that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created the book in part to explore the differences between comics and movies - but does that mean that there's no reason for the movie to exist? I'm still in two minds; while I tend to lean towards the "No" side of the argument, and wish that Zack Snyder and David Hayter had come up with something original, instead, I still harbor this vague hope that the Watchmen movie can be something as wonderful and poignant as its source in its own right. A few exceptions aside, cross-media adaptations tend to prove how well-suited stories were to their original homes, after all; even something like, say, Serenity just makes you want to watch more Firefly, if that makes sense, because of the potential for new stories that those characters and that world had.

We like to think that the creators of our favorite stories know what they're doing, or at least what they're writing for, and that after-the-fact continuations are fun, but not really the same thing because they're... well, off somehow; Buffy's comic continuation may have all the same writers, but it's lacking the performances that elevated the material, or Star Trek's 1970s cartoon dumbing down material for the kids. But, occasionally, even the greats can slip up; Morrison on the Final Crisis serialization that confused even the pros, or Whedon on Dollhouse's off-putting, repetitive format.

I keep coming back to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy, each iteration of which - well, apart from the comic, perhaps - worked in and of itself, and added to the overall strange tapestry of the story, with Adams writing the radio shows, novels and television episodes and continually refining and reshifting the ideas to fit into the different forms. Perhaps that's what Whedon needs to do to Dollhouse; step back, rethink what he's trying to say with it, and then reapproach it from scratch with a definitive ending - or, at least, coherent point - in mind.