Torchwood: The Dollhouse

 


The Dollhouse by Juno Dawson

At first glance, and indeed, for the first thirty to forty minutes, it looks like the Dollhouse will be fun. Not good fun. Enjoyably bad fun. And somehow at a certain point it loses even that angle. The Dollhouse is quite infamous for being shit, yes, but I was surprised to the actual degree it was shit. Because there is next to no redeemable aspects in this production - it opens with a montage that is beyond the most incoherent audio thing I have ever experienced. Montages do not work on audio. I never knew this until I actually experienced one, and dear god was it a damn trip. Dear god is this whole story a trip. It's obviously a Charley's Angels ripoff, and I don't have any experience with that franchise to color my opinion on that angle, but it is rather stupid that our three american Torchwood operatives boil down to The Smart One, The Dumb One, and The actually probably Racist one. The Smart one isn't even that smart, she just occasionally gets common sense lines, the dumb one is just like, "Oh really, marlow? DAMN, MOTHERFUCKER," and the actually probably racist one just feels actually probably racist and is in fact just the worst thing ever, I'm not sure whether the actress is Mexican, but look, it just does not sound like that. It really does not sound like that. And that is a critique I have to all three actresses, who really, are just ? Abysmal? At sounding remotely american? Or even human? They cannot speak, and it is really an issue because the script? as I said, is mostly fine? But no one in the production can do a decent American accent, and the best attempt is Eve Webster as Valerie, who just pulls a Nicola Bryant and is actually kind of decent at it, but everyone else? They cannot even say "Hold tight," the audio literally just says "Ho' Tie!" Constantly. Literally every other line because Car Chases. Are a must. Evidently. 

Also NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NOOO NOOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NO NO GOD GOD PLEASE NO NO MORE OF THIS OH MY GOD

And perhaps I should dicuss the script, as I did say the script is mostly fine, but I did also say that it loses even that angle at a certain point, because the story stops doing the whole semi-normal light-hearted investigation of things with laughably terrible actors and loses even that level of enjoyment when the plot becomes about Sex Trafficking and turning people into Dolls or something and oh my god it is gross it is vile and it is not tastefully done vile like some of the other Torchwood stories I've heard, it's just incredibly shit. Perhaps that is the best way to describe the Dollhouse. It starts off enjoyable from an ironic level and then loses even that. The ironic enjoyment is initially quite high, at a certain point I was considering giving it an ironic ten, but then it just plummets, and I cannot. I literally cannot. It's just disgusting. A Two. And that's generous. 2/10

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