Now unlike many geeks I’ve never been that into comics, and those comics I have been into haven’t been the Marvel/DC variety. However Joss Whedon directing and no doubt being involved in the script of a superhero movie had to be a good thing, right?

Unfortunately though, during a conversation with a friend, doubt started to creep in. Joss was going to make the most amazing Wonder Woman movie ever as well… but due to “creative differences” with the studio it got shelved.

And as we all know he often has ‘creative differences’ with the studio, and there are only so many times this can happen before you really have to ask. Is it Joss or the studio that’s being difficult?

I think anyone who has read this blog will know I’m a huge fan of what Joss creates. Buffy, (most of) Angel, Firefly, Serenity and Dollhouse are all fantastic. Hell I even liked Alien: Resurrection. But I can’t help but feel that there is a measure of diva in what drives him and that diva means that he has a habit of throwing his toys.

I hope I’m wrong and that The Avengers is a fantastic movie that hits our screens in 2012. But I’m keeping a certain level of healthy cynicism till then.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh on The Whedon? Or is there merit in what I say?

I travelled with a friend down the highway to Geelong to watch Serenity in a pre-release screening. I had a good time, liked the film, saw it once again in the cinema on general release with another friend and bought it when it came out on DVD in order to help boost sales and convince them to make more. We now know that that’s never going to happen but what the hell. At least I have it on DVD right?

But here’s the problem:  I’ve never watched the DVD. Beyond that, I’ve never revisited the original Firefly series (which I also own on DVD). I’m currently watching (extremely slowly) Buffy with my highly horror adverse wife and I’m enjoying it – we’re only two episodes in and it’s still astonishingly amateurish but it’s fun. When I think of Firefly now I think of it being (a) slightly forced and (b) unfinished. Now I know that (b) is not Whedon’s fault but (a) certainty is. Firefly, I suspect, is not going to go down in history as one of the great shows. If Fox hadn’t canned it in  mid-stream, the reasons it is so missed would have been removed. Hopefully it would have provided new reasons to be missed, but I don’t think we’d seen them yet.

I haven’t blogged much about Dollhouse’s cancellation, mostly due to a lot of other people already what I had to say. As a series it was deeply flawed and didn’t always get it right, but the thing it always had underpinning it was that it was just so different. That difference in approach to a theme is classic Whedon, as much as the layered characters and pithy dialogue. It wasn’t Buffy or Angel and it certainly wasn’t Firefly. It was it’s own beast, with it’s own issues.

Did the US network, Fox, step in and mess it up? Maybe. Did the show tiptoe around it’s loaded subject matter? Of course it did. It was about human slavery, prostitution and a person’s hunt for self when they’re stuck in that world. It’s heavy stuff, too heavy no doubt than a lot of everyday TV watchers.

The fans watched though. Us rapid fan boys and girls who lap up anything “The Whedon” does and then sit around for months and years afterwards talking about how good it was. How it was canned too soon. Despite the fact that we fans meant the almost guaranteed success of the internet musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog we are not enough to keep a major US TV network happy.

So what next? There is that episode of Glee that is coming up, but that won’t be a Whedon show. It will be an episode of Glee directed by Joss Whedon, not written. Then of course there is the much rumored follow up to Dr. Horrible. They’d be mad not to really. Will Joss Whedon go back to TV? I’ve heard it said that he’s not interested, at least not in it’s traditional format.

I’ve talked about this with a few people and I reckon there are two formats that would suit a Whedon style story down to the ground:

• Mini-series format – Torchwood did it for their Season 3 and it was amazing. I reckon Joss Whedon could really blast this format. 5 x 1.5 hour episodes, back to back and really concentrating on the story. Though he’s have to work on that slow build up thing of his that seems to happen in every series , bar Firefly.

• Online streaming – This is the other format that has been mentioned a lot. A regular show, with proper production values which is shown only on the internet. Anyone who wants to watch it pays a subscription, and then at the end of the season the DVDs are released as normal. No networks exerting control or pulling the strings. The technology is there and the fan base as well, pretty much all of whom are very internet savvy.

So those are my vague thoughts on the matter. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next, whether it be ‘net based, TV or another movie.

Sorry for last week’s lack of links and apologies in advance for the lack of links next week!

• Mark Charan Newton thinks sci-fi books are dying. I tend to agree.
• Why fandom owes even more to H.P. Lovecraft than we realised.
• A man has ‘beaten’ WoW. Sort of (via Boing Boing)
• Dollhouse battles were about sex. So says Whedon – Fox will never tell.
• Real life vampire killing kits!
• Using Microsoft’s Surface to play D&D – more footage.

I haven’t watched any of season 2 yet, but still this is a shame. It was an interesting show.

• The Onion AV Club have done another ‘Gateway to Geekery’, this time focusing on H.P. Lovecraft.
• Critical Hits have written a pretty good piece on how to get most (and longest) bang for your buck with Game Workshop minis games.
• Apparently dreaming about games makes you better at them. Does that mean that if you dream about sex you get better at that too? (via Felicia Day‘s twitter.)
• Joss Whedon is bidding for the Terminator rights. Sort of. Background is here. (Via the A.V. Club)
• EuroGamer has a big, informative and pretty balanced article on the campaigns in Germany to ban violent video games.

Chris Pramas has done a Dragon Age PnP RPG interview here. It sounds like a simple, introductory system which gels with what Pramas has said before and could be interesting. Also surprising was that Bioware approached them, not the other way around.

Our first release is a boxed set and it presumes no previous experience with tabletop RPGs. It’s designed to teach people how to play, so it has lots of advice and examples.

In less promising news, the Kuzui’s (producers of Buffy) are planning another Buffy movie, without Whedon. Fran Kuzui was the director of the original movie and there’s obviously some terrible, complex rights issues here. Needless to say, I can’t imagine the new movie would be any better than the first without Whedon’s input.

The show didn’t really start with too much of a bang. Joss Whedon shows always have a season wide arc, a theme that gives continuity while allowing the freedom to duck off that path from time to time. The first half of Dollhouse was extremely episodic. Which when you’re talking about an organisation that programs people means that you have a lot of potential episodes. They were mostly pretty fun, and certainly entertaining but where was the punch? Where were the big questions about personhood?

Those questions arrived in grand style with the “game changing” 6th episode, Man on the Street. Suddenly were weren’t just talking about the adventures of one plucky active, we were looking at the Dollhouse as a whole. It’s really a shame that the show had to wait till the half way point to really start telling the stories that the creators had obviously been wanting to tell. I’m not going to wade into the conversation around whether Fox did or did not hijack Dollhouse in the first half of it’s season, but those more formulaic first episodes really didn’t do the concept justice.

There is so much discussion about the concept, a highly illicit and underground organisation who programs people at the whim of the extremely wealthy which uses the proceeds of this high end slavery ring to finance scientific research for an even shadier parent company, that I don’t have a whole lot more to add. To get caught up though check out io9.com who have some very insightful commentary.

However what I will say is that Dolhouse showed through it’s first (and maybe only) season that TV can be a medium to ask some tough questions on the nature of a person and whether the ends truly justify the means. While technology was at the heart of the Dollhouse I don’t really see the show as saying that use of technology will make us less human, but more that technology is an amazing tool that has no sense of morals or ethics. That is up to the people who use it.

The cast of people in the Dollhouse are an impressive array of conflicted, complicated characters. They are aware of the morally grey area they inhabit and yet constantly convince themselves that what they’re doing is a good thing. It’s rather strange to root for a character who you find so morally reprehensible. Topher (the programmer) is the character that embody this the best I think. He’s a loveable, quirky character in best Whedon form who also rips peoples personalities from their brains and then plugs a new one in. Not quite so loveable any more. By the end of the season we are starting to glimpse a little of the self-loathing that he must struggle with. After all, as one Doll asks, why did he programme her to hate him so much?

At the end of the day Dollhouse turned into a complex show that actually required you to think about things, rather than always getting the answer handed to you. There are more stories to tell and hopefully a second season will be signed off so that everyone involved gets that chance. If not, well I’ll always have the DVDs.

He’s got a huge fan base, a track record that includes both the popular and the critically acclaimed, and is hailed by many as a god of all things pop-cultural. And yet every time he comes up with some- thing new, people (particularly TV critics) can’t wait to call it a failure.

Read the rest of the article if you’re interested.

I for one am enjoying the show as I like that it is shiny and over produced while being creepy and morally hard to get a handle on. I honestly don’t think the acting is that bad and after only 3 episodes (I seem to remember it took Buffy more than 3 episodes to get into it’s groove) I think it’s got a lot of life in it. But then if you were going to like this show, you’ll like it. It isn’t for everyone, nothing is. But it would be sad to see it pulled off air before it had a chance to really do it’s thing, aka Firefly.

Bring on Friday for episode 4!