Five by Five! Again!

Very happy to see another Joss Whedon show on the air, and even happier to have it star not one but two of my favorite Buffyverse feministas, Faith aka Eliza Dushku AND Fred aka Amy Acker:


(And trust me, if you're thinking this is just an excuse to post pics of Buffy babes on the blog, know that these are two of the more modest entries in Internet-wide image searches for Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker. Plus, if the point were just to post pics of Buffy babes, then I'd HAVE to post Cordelia somewhere, too, right?)

The show seems pretty solid - my first impression was just gratitude at the actual effort put forth in the show to create character arcs off the bat and generate an interesting universe within which to operate. If you haven't heard or seen, the general premise is that there is a weird corporation (that looks suspiciously as though it purchased the building vacated by Wolfram & Hart) that has a slew of attractive though vaguely zombie-ish people walking around in yoga clothes. They are agents who have next to no personality, allowing them to be "programmed" with various personality traits in order to achieve missions - some of the missions are your run of the mill "rescue the kidnapped child" type thing, while others seem to be "give a guy a nice weekend." When the missions are completed, the agents go to get a "treatment" that zaps their memory clean. So clearly, there's a lot of moral ambiguity - how did this corporation get these models volunteers? - though the individual workers in the firm claim to be in the business of making the world a better place. Eliza plays Echo, a character who after a single epsiode is already exhibiting signs that the system doesn't work entirely - she has flashes of memoryies that weren't quite erased - and who also has some sort of checkered past that has yet to be revealed.

To don the philosopher hat for a while, interesting that a Joss Whedon show - normally such a locus of talks of souls and love and good and evil and the like - is operating on a materialist model of mind where personality, ability, memories, etc. are all reprogrammable by computer circuitry. Seemingly reducing the human condition to neural circuitry and electric potentials? Maybe? Unless, natch, that machine has some mystic soul component - or, better, if the fact that it is failing is a pointer toward the immaterial. We shall see.

I have read some criticism here and there that the premise - women who can be used for dates, whose memories can be conveniently erased so the next day they remember nothing - has a sort of nasty roofies-referencing undertone to it. Whedon has such a history of pro-feminist motifs that this seems to be a little bit of a paranoid charge, but the idea, once planted, is pretty sketchy seeming. Still, the initial mission in the pilot - where Echo certainly seemed to be serving as a tailor-made escort - gave the entire episode a weird vibe.

And beyond that, the pilot - which was reportedly reshot to provide more exposition - handed the goings on to the viewer on a platter in a much more overt manner than the typical Whedon vehicle. Lots of scenes where characters stopped and explained in speech exactly what they do and exactly the moral dilemmas involved - it wasn't quite an expository voice over, but it did have a little bit of LCD. AH, well - the second episode is supposed to be the original pilot and much better than the first. We'll see next week.

So I'm down with the show - it's got that energetic vibe and big setup that's given Joss his cult-god status - but I understand some of the complaints thus far. Interesting if they'll be able to flesh out the "erased memories" ideas without resorting to sci-fi silliness. And interesting to see if there will be anything approaching the interlocking chacter arcs of the other Mutant Enemy efforts, since so far Echo seems even more of an overwhelming center to the show than Buffy of Angel ever were. Give it time, I suppose.

Was there anything else I was supposed to include?