Dollhouse redux

Preparing for this Friday's second season premiere of Dollhouse, we started re-watching season one. We haven't gotten to seeing either of the unaired episodes on the Blu-ray disc set, but we got five episodes in so far. Not too far, that's when it was just "getting good" when we first watched it.

I'm finding a lot of little things coming out the second time through that I missed the first time. Partially it's because I still wasn't sold on the show yet, so I wasn't always paying 100% attention. But partially it's because a lot of hints were floating around about things that would be revealed later, hints that no one pegged, not even in the TiVo forum where people analyze these things to death.

Generally speaking, those first episodes that felt flat when we first watched them feel stronger in retrospect. And I don't mean just the effect any show gets that when you rewatch weaker earlier episodes after you've come to know and love the characters, the flaws are less evident and the familiarity is a comfort. (That's true in the case of early episodes of Firefly: they're easier the second time, but it's only because of those factors, the stories themselves didn't improve.) In this case, we can see reasons why things happened the way they did, that the first time through just rubbed us wrong, but in hindsight, some of it was actually significant, and appropriate.

I'm not sure if we'll have watched it all in time for Friday; probably not. And with a lot of shows premiering their new seasons this week, we're about to be way behind on TV in general, and struggling to keep up again. Once more I find myself half-hoping a few of the promising new shows of this season will turn out to suck because I can't spare the time to keep up with too many good shows!