First let me say that I know that this has probably been done to death. Many commentators have critiqued Dr. Horrible, and there are some very good review of it. I should also say that I have no formal training in cinema. I don't know the first thing about lighting or camera work or screen writing. I'm going to make an attempt though to analyze the characters because I think that's something I can do. I'm a huge fan of Dr. Horrible and I really wish that Joss Wedon would do more with the character, even if it was just in comic book form.
First lets look at the world.
Obviously superheroes and superpowers exist in the world of Dr. Horrible. Even underwhelming powers like Moist's. People know about supers and seem to just accept them as part of everyday life, though they don't seem to be as innocuous as they are in the Tick's The City. There are supervillains as well as evidenced by Dr. Horrible himself and the Evil League of Evil..So we establish early on that these things are known and accepted by virtue of the fact that Billy aka Dr. Horrible has a video blog where he talks about wanting to be a supervillain, but I'll get into that later.
Next I want to talk about the one character I hated. Captain Hammer, played expertly by Nathan Fillion. We see Captain Hammer through Billy's eyes. He's arrogant, a womanizer, selfish, cruel, and seems to only really care about himself and his image. There is literally nothing to like about his character and I don't understand how he's been able to con the people of Los Angeles for so long. He seems to be a very good liar off screen, and somehow seems to have not garnered a reputation for womanizing. From clues given in the short Captain Hammer seems to have been born with his powers. He's tough, strong enough to throw a car at someone and able to leap high and far enough to get onto a moving van. This has made him into a bully. He only fights crime because people admire him for it. They give him what he wants when he wants it and the people and media of LA seem to practically worship him. I'm not sure if Joss ever gives a reason for this because even at the end they don't seem to blame Captain Hammer for abandoning them. Either way at the end he shows his true colors when he tries to kill Dr. Horrible and ends up killing Penny instead, and causing himself pain for the first time in his life. That's another interesting thing. Its not even clear if he's actually injured, he's just experiencing pain and he runs. He shows himself to be a coward. He might have been a crime fighter, but he was no hero.
Then we have Penny. Penny is love interest and represents the optimism that Billy is lacking in his life. She genuinely believes that there is good in everyone, so much so that she blinds herself to their glaring character flaws until its too late; and even then she still has faith in the good in people. Felicia Day plays Penny with a sweetness that could easily have been annoying and I think she was the best choice to play this character. She tries to be proactive, trying to get signatures to open a homeless shelter, only to have people walk past her like she wasn't there. She believes that good will win out and that people are starting to come around, not realizing that Captain Hammer is only using her to hurt Billy. She even blinds herself to Billy's nihilism and seems to believe him when he says oops I meant Ghandi when he slips for a moment and says that he wants to be an achiever like Bad Horse. If Penny has a flaw its that she doesn't see the world around her until its too late. She dies because she's in the wrong place at the wrong time and she dies believing that Captain Hammer, a man who we've seen isn't good, will save her and Billy. A tragic end for a tragic character.
Then we come to the Doctor himself. Billy starts out as not entirely unlikeable character. Yes he steals; but he seems to be, at the start, a relatively unsuccessful supervillain with dreams of joining the Evil League of Evil. Billy wants to be Evil and his journey is progressively darker as it goes along. He starts out not wanting to fight a poser named Johnny Snow in a park because kids play there, and ends up willing to murder Captain Hammer because he's tired of being pushed around. He says throughout the movie that he wants to be evil and that he wants Penny, but we know that he can't have both. I wasn't that shocked by the ending of Dr. Horrible and here's why. If it had had a happy ending where Captain Hammer was outed as a jerk, Billy got the girl and gave up being a villain it wouldn't have made sense. Billy wanted to be evil, I'm not sure he understood what that meant at the beginning but by the end he's embraced being Dr. Horrible fully and claims to not feel a thing. It remains to be seen if this is true, because it ends with Neil Patrick Harris as Billy and not as Dr. Horrible. Billy loses the thing he loves to get the thing he wants and he doesn't seem to look back. He's a questionable character at the beginning but he's on the path of evil. He has several chances to turn back but stays on the course, even saying in one of the songs that he has no remorse.
You can't look at Dr. Horrible the same way you would a superhero story because its not. It is a superVILLAIN story. There's no happy ending to be had, because that's not the nature of the beast. It is a great story and I love it; but you have to look at it from the right perspective and understand it for what it is. An origin story of a supervillain. We just happen to like the villain at the outset.
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