Kalshane,

and honestly, I am not trying to belabor this point because while I'm disappointed, I'm still likely to buy the DVD, etc.

But my response is: why should whether she likes Hammer have anything to do with Billy? She's an adult woman. Yes, I think she was hoping to see him at the laundromat, but Hammer is still a dick.

I think by the time the dedication ceremony was going down she knew it wouldn't work out between her and Hammer but she felt she had to pretend for the sake of appearances.

You know what? - yes, without Penny Hammer wouldn't help to save the building, but given Penny's sheer assertiveness, can you see her doing so on her own? I can understand why Hammer's allure was lost on Penny once the building was secured to her cause.

Le Nubian,

In the final laundromat scene, based on what she's singing, she's obviously having doubts about her relationship with Hammer.

I don't know if having a conversation with Billy would actually change how things worked out with her and Hammer, as Laga suggests she may have already made her decision and was staying with him for the press conference for the sake of appearances but I do think that it might have further softened Dr. Horrible's resolve to kill Hammer. He plainly has doubts right before his freeze ray wears off and if he had talked to Penny and realized she wasn't as blindly smitten with Hammer as he believed, things may have gone down much differently.

but what about the Evil Gang?

they wanted Hammer neutralized (killed, preferably) and since his aim was to get into the gang, I'm not sure that an attempt on Hammer's life would have been avoidable.

I am fine with the point of the three acts to show Horrible becoming well, Horrible. I just wish Penny's role and agency were a bit stronger.

D woke me when he came home at 2 and kept me up until after 4 watching Dr Horrible and I'm only a teensy bit mad at him. I'll get through the day with the help of coca-cola and the snippets of song that keep wafting through my head. so romantic!

I apologize if this sounds snippy. It's not intended to, but I've got years of discussional frustragion here, so.

yes, it's also structured like X, Y, or Z. Hell, I can read it as an allegory for various and sundry things, often quite cleverly done. The fact that one can see Dr. Horrible and totally see the morality play aspects doesn't negate the part where, especially given its roots in the common tropes of comics, it falls prey to a narrative device (common in comics) that I find disturbing. Penny's treatment is practically text book. I understand that other people may not have that as a button, but the fact that it's not a button doesn't mean it isn't THERE.

Honestly, Plie, I don't see it. Nor do I have the same disappointments that Typo has.

But ,my expectations for something that is less than an hour long where I knew nothing about the world and how it worked were not exceptionally high. But then , I'm not a short story reader either.

Dr. Horrible is the only character with any sense of humaness/completeness. If this was a series -- or had been the length of a feature film, I suspect I would find myself agreeing with you. As it stands, I see it as parody and now,greek drama. Both of those forms have always seemed a bit heavy handed to me,so I am guessing the things that are pinging people, but not me are because I see them as that is the way the forms work.

I think Plei is reading it correctly, and I also think that Joss has no intentions of doing something anti-feminist, and probably has no idea he is/has/was doing things. He seems to read himself as a crusader FOR feminism, which frankly makes it slightly more annoying, but it isn't a big button for me personally-- don't know why. But I can't engage in a conversation about Wall-E because it is so lovely, and then we learned that human's gluttonous and obese ways ruined the earth and even though they didn't mean to say that all fat people are sitting sround eating their weight in babies each day until the end of humanity as we know it-- they did. And you can tell me to calm down or that there are so many other things right, and I can enjoy the love story, but I can't get past it because If they had say, some extremely fat overcomsumers, and some extremely skinny overconsumers of plastic surgery/Hollywood idealswhatever, than I could have lived with it. I also have RAGING class issues. I think I can only have so many buttons if I don't want to completely explode.

So Plei, I feel your pain, and even though it is only an annopyance to me and does not fill me with rage, I still understand, and I still see it there

Also, that was a crosspost with beth- I didn't mean to sound like I was disagreeing with you so vehemently.