Eliza Dushku marathon: "Tru Calling" & "Dollhouse"

On the back of getting acquainted with Eliza Dushku through her stint in the Buffy-verse as Faith, it wasn't exactly difficult for me to go on to the other shows she's had leading roles in.

"Tru Calling"

With a decent premise, Tru Calling had potential to do something bigger. But, mostly thanks to sloppy writing, it never took. Simple solutions to supporting characters, simplistic arch-story and a repeated recipe doomed this show. Jon Harmon Feldman is sadly an amateur creator.

A.J. Cock went on to get her breakthrough in "Criminal Minds", proving her talent, but here she didn't get anything at all to work with. Eric Christian Olsen is one of those actors I hate, and he was as bad here as he now is in "NCIS L.A." week in and week out. Jason Priestly's character is shallow and anything but intriguing, and the same goes for Cotter Smith's.

Zach Galifianakis and Shawn Reaves have both boring support roles without much to develop, and all I'm left with is Eliza. I like my Eliza fine, but she suffers from the same as the rest of the cast... With writing like this, who needs studios to secure axing? Anyway. Been there, saved that.

★★☆☆☆ Season 1
★★☆☆☆ Season 2


★★☆☆☆ Overall Quality

"Dollhouse"

With Joss Whedon as creative mind and a show designed for Eliza, this is another ballgame all together. A creative idea, room to play around with differences and nuances, wit and adorable fun, a well though through arch story, great guest actors and actresses (many well known to Whedon-fans from his prior shows) and a dozen other good qualities.

Dollhouse doesn't take it self too seriously all the time, and it offers especially Eliza a lot of different shades of her character, Echo, to play around with. She get to be everything sexual like dominatrix, sexy seducer or just plain and cute. She also get to re-live some Buffy-like action in more than one way. Still they also remembers to evolve its characters, and Echo even grows into one of those heroines I tend to admire.

From the supporting cast I could hope for more, but especially Fran Kranz as Topher Brink is a typically Whedon-esque character with a lot to offer. There's a lot of Wash ("Firefly") going on there, and it's not hard to enjoy here either. Speaking of Wash; Alan Tudyk is one of those guests helping this along, and that's a lot of fun on several levels.

So I didn't really take off on all of the other supporting characters, but this was always mostly interesting to me as Echo's journey. She's got an intriguing past we never get to fully delve into, but despite Fox we still get a somewhat satisfying end to it all. That's not nothing in this game, and with a couple of seasons of good entertainment Whedon delivered again. Hopefully someone will lure him back into another show as soon as possible. It wouldn't exactly bother me if Eliza also went back to TV rather than these movies she tends to end up in... I for one enjoyed Echo a lot, and Eliza proved her Faith wasn't a one hit wonder.

★★★★★ Season 1
★★★★☆ Season 2




★★★★☆ Overall Quality