oh, joss. you got me again.

[stalwartkumquat]

I should have known better than to watch a Joss Whedon-produced finale late at night. Who among y'all has watched all three of the Dr. Horrible epis, and is ready to talk about it? After you complete your first round of therapy, I mean?

Here is some more specific fodder for our conversation: One online reviewer astutely observed that, at the

Comments

Re: A third, even deeper layer

[stalwartkumquat]

it is a fascinating window into your soul that you equate being "romantic at heart" with "stalk[ing] people at the laundromat." if they'd had laundromats back in romeo and juliet's day, i bet things would've turned out much different for those crazy kids

Spoilerrific

[xequalsfun]

My experience was probably different than a lot of people's, in that I watched the 3 back to back to back. So it was kind of breathless and I didn't have much build up of tension.

I found it a bit shocking that apparently nobody there noticed Mr. Hammer was the one holding the gun before the explosion (incidentally, I did not get from it that it malfunctioned before the trigger was pulled - I thought Hammer did pull the trigger but then it malfunctioned, the point being that Hammer was willing to do what Dr. Horrible was not). I also thought the obvious solution there was to fire up the freeze ray to buy some time, but maybe that's because of the House season finale.

After the fact, I did reflect on Jossy's willingness to kill off characters from the last few seasons of Buffy. I think if I had taken more time to watch, I would have had more time to mull on where I thought it was going.

Incidentally, did you see who the Evil League of Evil are, according to the credits? Fake Thomas Jefferson is probably my favorite.

Re: Spoilerrific

[stalwartkumquat]

yeah, there is much irony -- or, no, probably something other than irony, but which i'm too lazy and uneducated to call anything other than irony -- in penny's death scene. i wonder a bit about the lack of eyewitnesses, but then again, i think everyone had either run out of the room or was hiding, huddled, behind chairs, so i could see the possibility of nobody actually witnessing the climactic event. or, even if they saw it, quickly discounting it as something that couldn't possibly be the hero's fault; i mean, keep in mind that throughout his insulting (but melodic) monologue leading up to that scene, everybody in the room save penny was completely smitten. there's something Whedonly dark in the fact that only the villain and the damsel in distress understood the truth of the hero's flaws -- and that, the moment those flaws were revealed, one of them turned into a complete sociopath (leaving him unlikely to gain any traction if he tried to break that story) and the other died (ditto

Re: Spoilerrific

[xequalsfun]

I hate to rain on your parade, but I'm pretty sure this was a one-off made possible by the writer's strike. I read Joss Whedon's post about it on the website and he is not talking about making it into a series.

I do agree that, while it is a Roman building story as Mr. Softee points out, the ending makes it quite clear that Dr. Horrible is still somewhat nebulous. That's part of what makes the final beat so good: we flash to the "human" Dr. Horrible, definitely in way over his head, and are left to wonder whether his pain and desire to lash out are going to be enough to push him to walk the walk as much as he is talking the talk. But I don't think we'll ever get the answer to that question.