NOTE: This review is chock full a’ spoilers. So if you are adverse to them, now would be the time to stop reading.

The superhero movie has gone through a lot of reinventions over the past few years, but none of them are as strange, as immediately delightful, or as ultimately frustrating as Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The series of three 15-minute shorts, written and shot during the recent writers’ strike, stars Neil Patrick Harris as Billy, a young malcontent who spends most of his free time as Dr. Horrible, an aspiring villain (and video blogger) who yearns to join The Evil League of Evil. The League, it seems, will help him not only take over the world but finally get up the guts to ask out the girl of his dreams - a do-gooder named Penny (played by Felicia Day). In between Billy and his twin goals stands Nathan Fillion’s Captain Hammer, the city’s friendly neighborhood superhero, who is always there to thwart Dr. Horrible’s plans with a well-timed punch and a corny one-liner.

There’s a lot to really love about Dr. Horrible. For one thing, it’s a musical. That’s right, true believer, it’s a bona-fide musical. Each of the three episodes is filled to the brim with parody pop-musical songs Whedon co-wrote with his brother Jed. Watching these sequences, it’s hard not to notice how much Whedon’s skill with a camera has developed over the years. Like a great comic book artist, Whedon knows when to pack large amounts of detail into a frame and when to let simplicity rule the day. He takes us, in a few short moves, from a tightly composed video blog shot to a musical number set in a Laundromat, complete with tightly choreographed dolly shots and a brief fantasy dance between Billy and Penny.

Joss Whedon has once again subverted two genres by mashing them together and watching them play off each other, and he embraces the ridiculousness of both musicals and superhero movies simultaneously. The jokes come fast and furious, and are both totally bizarre and completely hilarious. One particularly delicious running gag concerns Dr. Horrible’s correspondence with the Evil League of Evil’s chief villain, Bad Horse. When Billy reads Bad Horse’s missives, four men in western garb (complete with chaps and mustaches) appear framing the scene and sing Bad Horse’s letters in a faux-Bonanza song style. Dr. Horrible’s wannabe sidekick is named Moist and has the rather minor (and gross) power to dampen things.

The performances are also spot-on. This is the first Whedon project where the ensemble feels both evenly matched and stylistically consistent. The latter quality is especially important. One of the challenges with performing Whedon’s work is the way his writing vacillates both in style (by switching from genre to genre) and in tone, from knowing wink to utter, devastating sincerity. In past projects, this inconsistency was always a weak point that one had to get around (or ignore) in order to enjoy Whedon’s work. Not so in Dr. Horrible. All three leads are dexterous in their handling of the material, particularly Harris, who renders Billy both ridiculous and utterly human. Harris’s switching on a dime from ironic commentary on his character to sincere inhabitation of him is remarkable. Nathan Fillion, who apparently is capable of anything, plays Captain Hammer’s douchebaggery to the hilt, making him both charming to the other characters on screen and repugnant to us viewers watching him at home.

Felicia Day does her best with a weak role, and it is here that the frustration with Dr. Horrible starts. Joss Whedon is one of the few genre writers out there with a real love for female characters and, in all of his previous projects, women frequently take center stage as fully formed, complex human beings. This is the guy who centered his run of Astonishing X-Men on Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost instead of Wolverine and Cyclops, and created a show called Buffy The Vampire Slayer. In Dr. Horrible, however, he seems to have left this project behind, and Penny is basically a non-entity. She’s there to be blandly sentimental, just formed enough to fuel Dr. Horrible’s plot arc. In part one, she plays an object of desire; in part two, an object of competition; and in the final part, the victim of that competition, as Hammer and Horrible accidentally kill her in the midst of a skirmish.

It is at this point that Dr. Horrible takes a plunge that it is incapable of recovering from. Whedon has now killed off at least one major character in almost every project he’s been in charge of. Originally, it seemed like a bold way of subverting audience expectation and making his work count, but now it is starting to feel as formulaic as Stephen Spielberg’s forced happy endings. In Whedon’s past projects, those deaths have also served some overarching purpose. In Serenity, Wash’s rather abrupt death creates a real sense of danger and urgency for the final action sequence; we as viewers become totally unsure as to whether or not any of the other characters will live through the confrontation. Buffy’s death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is so thematically integrated into the series that it is both inevitable and excruciating.

Unlike these other projects, however, Dr. Horrible is (until its ending) a lark: a beautiful, shockingly well-crafted lark with no real significance beyond fun and games. It broadcasts its larkiness loud and clear with lyrics like “With my freeze-ray I will stop / The pain.” We never, for one moment, take the violence or the threat of violence seriously. The possibility of real death is first introduced as an idea by Bad Horse’s henchmen in song. Whenever Hammer and Horrible confront each other, the result is slapstick and silliness, until all of a sudden (and to no visible end) it isn’t.

In the age of the twist ending, it might seem peculiar to complain about this. There is a difference, however, between a twist that changes and deepens one’s experience of a work and one that feels arbitrary; Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is definitely in the latter group. There are plenty of less-extreme ways of grounding Dr. Horrible in a more real world at the end, if that was Whedon’s goal. Billy could end up in jail, for example, or his aspirational villainy could drive Penny away for good. The show becomes a tragedy in the end, but this tragedy serves no purpose other than showing that Whedon is capable of making it happen. The world that Whedon so skillfully crafted in the earlier parts of Dr. Horrible is incapable of sustaining or supporting the extremity of the ending. As the concluding montage moves towards its meant-to-be-haunting final shot, the frame is filled with joke after joke: the wild west henchmen mime-galloping at a loft party, Nathan Fillion cartoonishly crying on a therapist’s couch, and a final reveal of the Evil League of Evil which shows you that Bad Horse is, in fact, a quite mundane looking horse.

Ultimately, it’s hard to know what to make of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; it starts out as a refreshingly idiosyncratic and devilishly funny take on both comic books and musicals, and at the very last possible moment, devolves into a forced, maudlin spectacle that sucks all of the fun out of everything for no reason. For roughly 42 of its 45 minutes, it’s an exciting, innovative romp anchored by top-notch performances and cinematography. As novelist George Saunders put it, however, “ending is stopping without sucking.” We look to endings to lift the proceedings up to the next level - to give them meaning, to make a story more than what it is. The ending of Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog makes it much, much less.

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog is available on iTunes. Isaac Butler’s writing is available at his blog.

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