Having missed the launch whilst on vacation, I finally sat down last night and watched all three episodes of Joss Whedon’s musical web miniseries Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog back-to-back-to-back. I had two major notes:
1. When did Joss Whedon and Michael Mann become the same guy? Dr. Horrible is a lone wolf anti-hero whose single-minded devotion to his professional obligation to save a small corner of the world (in this case, by way of organized evil) makes the very concept of romance inconvenient. Sound familiar?
“Why did she talk to me now?” Billy/Dr. Horrible laments, after prospective love interest Penny makes contact right as he’s about to jump start an evil mission. This segues directly into a song with the refrain, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” What Whedon does is the self-mocking, defeatist, loveable loser version of what Mann does, in terms of love as a blight on the record of men who should be above it.
This leads me to my second though, regarding Dr. Horrible’s controversial ending:
2. Is the end really the end?
“Barring some kind of goofy, character-defying twist like making Penny turn out to be Bad Horse, Dr. Horrible was going to end one of two ways: Dr. Horrible gets the girl, or Dr. Horrible becomes the supervillain of his dreams,” Alan Sepinwall wrote. “Joss Whedon chose the latter, and chose to have it play out in the worst way possible for poor Billy.” But by closing on the suggestion that professional success is equivalent to feeling nothing, Whedon, again, is being very Mannian. Diminish entanglements, keep yourself to yourself, wear your sunglasses at night, etc. When a Mann film ends on that note, we are to understand that this is just the way men are supposed to move about the planet. But that final note of Dr. Horrible has a characteristic Whedon angst to it, cleverly engineered to make his superfans insist that this is not the natural end of the story.
And it probably isn’t. Sepinwall talked to Neil Patrick Harris at the TCA’s, and the Dr. Horrible star said Whedon definitely plans to extend the franchise. “Joss has some strange giant master plan that includes much more than a sequel…I think we’re all giggling like little schoolgirls for a week or so and then he’ll figure out what he wants to do next.” More from Sepinwall here; also, on the Dr. Horrible site, Whedon promises he’ll have more details at Comic-Con, so we’ll pass those along from San Diego as soon as we can.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth