Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Jul. 22nd, 2008 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI have no idea how to punctuate Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Is it long enough for italics? Or short enough that I should use quotation marks?
Punctuation aside, I really am uncertain what to say about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. On the one hand, some parts I quite liked—the communicagrams from Bad Horse, for instance. The songs generally seemed pretty good.
On the other hand, the whole thing seriously went off when Penny died.
The treatment of Penny’s character marred the entire show, really, it just wasn’t as obvious until she died. It’s not the actress’s fault; she was playing a plot device, not a character, and even Katherine Hepburn couldn’t have done much with that. She exists to propel Dr. Horrible into Evil, and she has to die because that’s the only way to get him there with his status as our beloved anti-hero intact.
She can’t end up with Dr. Horrible, because that would be happy.
She can’t end up with Captain Hammer, because that would just be unbearably cruel—crueler than her death, because Dr. Horrible really only cares about her as girlfriend material, not a person. Death is tragic. Captain Hammer/Penny is just tawdry.
She can’t reject them both and devote her life to the homeless, because if Dr. Horrible turned to darkest evil because Penny ditched him to help the homeless it’s just too obvious that the plot is driven by his unbearable pettiness. Somehow, the fact that he was planning to kill Captain Hammer for being, basically, a schoolyard bully who got that girl Dr. Horrible wanted, is not enough to drive this fact home.
Instead of achieving Captain Hammer’s murder, Dr. Horrible gets Penny killed in a way that is kind of sort of totally his fault, and yet not, so it makes total sense for him to be eaten up by guilt and a sense of tragedy and descend into emo Evilness.
Evil in the Whedonverse is a topic for a whole other post.
Emo Evilness appears to have been the point of the whole exercise. It’s like Anakin’s descent into the Dark Side, which evidently occurred because “He was corrupted by Twu Wuv!” It seems like an odd message to warp your story around.
So, yeah, not really sure about that. Nice try, but no cigar.
I think Joss Whedon gets more credit as a feminist than he deserves. Not that he’s secretly harboring anti-feminist fulminations in his heart, but I get the impression that he’s not thinking about issues that perhaps deserve some of his attention—in this case, giving his heroine a personality beyond saint, and treating her death as tragic because it’s her death and not because it’s going to crack Dr. Horrible’s twisted little heart.
Punctuation aside, I really am uncertain what to say about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. On the one hand, some parts I quite liked—the communicagrams from Bad Horse, for instance. The songs generally seemed pretty good.
On the other hand, the whole thing seriously went off when Penny died.
The treatment of Penny’s character marred the entire show, really, it just wasn’t as obvious until she died. It’s not the actress’s fault; she was playing a plot device, not a character, and even Katherine Hepburn couldn’t have done much with that. She exists to propel Dr. Horrible into Evil, and she has to die because that’s the only way to get him there with his status as our beloved anti-hero intact.
She can’t end up with Dr. Horrible, because that would be happy.
She can’t end up with Captain Hammer, because that would just be unbearably cruel—crueler than her death, because Dr. Horrible really only cares about her as girlfriend material, not a person. Death is tragic. Captain Hammer/Penny is just tawdry.
She can’t reject them both and devote her life to the homeless, because if Dr. Horrible turned to darkest evil because Penny ditched him to help the homeless it’s just too obvious that the plot is driven by his unbearable pettiness. Somehow, the fact that he was planning to kill Captain Hammer for being, basically, a schoolyard bully who got that girl Dr. Horrible wanted, is not enough to drive this fact home.
Instead of achieving Captain Hammer’s murder, Dr. Horrible gets Penny killed in a way that is kind of sort of totally his fault, and yet not, so it makes total sense for him to be eaten up by guilt and a sense of tragedy and descend into emo Evilness.
Evil in the Whedonverse is a topic for a whole other post.
Emo Evilness appears to have been the point of the whole exercise. It’s like Anakin’s descent into the Dark Side, which evidently occurred because “He was corrupted by Twu Wuv!” It seems like an odd message to warp your story around.
So, yeah, not really sure about that. Nice try, but no cigar.
I think Joss Whedon gets more credit as a feminist than he deserves. Not that he’s secretly harboring anti-feminist fulminations in his heart, but I get the impression that he’s not thinking about issues that perhaps deserve some of his attention—in this case, giving his heroine a personality beyond saint, and treating her death as tragic because it’s her death and not because it’s going to crack Dr. Horrible’s twisted little heart.
