The Dollhouse review/recaps I’ve been writing thus far have varied wildly. This is because I have two conflicting desires when it comes to reviewing a specific episode of television. Most blogs out there give brief glib reviews of any given episode. They will on occasion focus on the little details that make an episode especially good, but overall they gloss over these details and what they do focus on, they interpret incorrectly. Outside of this world, there’s Television Without Pity. Television Without Pity focuses on detailed recaps of episodes with nearly shot by shot descriptions written with humour in mind. These recaps tend to focus more on the facts of an episode with mythology and character development often being left unexplored.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.