Dollhouse is about a company that hires out people who can be programmed to have any personality or skillset, and these "Actives" are blank slates when they're not being used by a well-heeled client or pro-bono case. One of these "Actives" is Echo, played by Eliza Dushku. The show launches on Friday, Feb. 13, along with the midseason premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The show has been releasing a never-ending stream of sexy photos of star Eliza Dushku in various states of undress for weeks now, and a new flood of Eliza porn came out yesterday. (See below, but some gallery images are borderline NSFW.) One caller asked Joss how he feels about the live nude Dushku marketing, and he said he was okay with it. Mostly because Eliza was okay with it, and Eliza is very comfortable with her body. Joss was there for the photoshoot.

And the marketing reflects the fact that sexuality is woven into the fabric of the show — and it goes to some very creepy places on purpose. The show is about men and women being brainwashed and hired out, and some of their assigments have to do with sex, says Whedon. The show goes into some situations that make Whedon himself intensely uncomfortable, even if they don't bother any of the show's other writers.

Dushku was adamant that whatever TV show she made next should address sexuality, "not just by virtue of being all hot, but by talking about sexuality: why it drives us and how it works." One of the show's goals is to "get the audience to ask what of their desire is acceptable, and what is creepy. In order to ask that we had to go to kind of a creepy place," says Whedon. "We may have crossed the line."

The show definitely does the standard cute-babe-in-a-hot-outfit come-on, but then it also subverts and examines that idea. But Whedon was quick to add that it's not so ironic that it lets him off the hook. His only real huge disagreement with Fox over the development of the show was how much to deal with issues of sexuality in the show's human-trafficking context. The network, as always, would have preferred to have tease the audience with sexy images and perhaps pay lip-service to deeper questions, but didn't actually want to go any deeper. But Whedon insists that the show shouldn't, "by virtue of playing it safe, become offensive."

Where's the army of super-ninjas?

I had to ask exactly how far this show's technology stretches. If anybody can be imprinted with any personality and skillset, are there tons of people wandering around L.A. who are living a lie? Also, could I kidnap a hundred people, plug them into the machine, and have an army of loyal super-ninjas an hour later?

Whedon said the show won't be addressing those issues in the first season, but will hopefully get to them later. "What you can accomplish, and what you can destroy, with this technology is something wer'e going to be asking increasingly toward th end of the season," Whedon said. "But for this first season, we did keep this premise fairly simple, and the Dollhouse is fairly strict about what they'll allow this technology to be used for. No ninja armies just yet."

The philosophy of Dollhouse

It's almost a foregone conclusion that someone will be doing a book on The Philosophy of Dollhouse — I think similar books already exist for Whedon's earlier shows Buffy and Firefly, and when they do, they may want to look at a transcript of today's conference call. Whedon geeked out a lot about the philosophical underpinnings of his show. (We already asked him about nature versus nurture at Comic Con.)

Today, Whedon talked more about the idea that people's identities are already becoming more customizeable, thanks to the Internet and "extraordinarily specific medications." This is something that wasn't really true even a decade ago, and it gives you new ways to talk about very old questions. "Who am I? What am I as I get older, and what's really sticking? What's the part I can point to and say, 'This is me,' and wha'ts just coming and going? And what has been imposed on me? Who the hell am i? Why aren't I prettier?" But also, what do people expect from each other, and how do we use each other?

Joss sort of gave a mini-seminar about "identity and objectification" in response to a few different journalists' questions. If you weren't already pumped for Dollhouse, you'd at least have realized this is very much a show about ideas.

Oh and speaking of exploitation, this Grindhouse-style promo annoyed me at first, but now it's growing on me:

What changed in the battle with the network?

Whedon also talked about his process of developing the show with the network, including some of the stuff he'd said before about adding more high-stakes suspense and action stuff — which he feels add to the show. And he reiterated that it's still basically the show he wanted to make. But he also added more details about the compromise he reached with the network.

For example, the first several episodes of the show will be entirely stand-alone episodes with no long-term plot developments. He referred to the first seven episodes as "the seven pilots," meaning you could watch any one of them without needing to have seen the show before. The first five episodes, in particular, take great care to reintroduce the characters and the storyline, with some progressions from episode to episode. Pretty much every episode will have the same structure: Echo gets programmed to be a new person and goes off on an assignment, with complications that ultimately get resolved at the end of the episode. It was tough for the show's writers to get that jazzed about a show that resets every week, with no longer story arcs at first, but then they got better at it.

Also, the Most Dangerous Game episode (co-starring Matt Keeslar) was originally going to be episode five or six, but the network heard "bow-hunting" and wanted it to be the show's second episode. And some people have asked why it wasn't the show's pilot, because it's so great.

He pointed out that all of his shows have had a difficult gestation process: Buffy was held until midseason, and was reshooting parts of its first episode during the filming of its season-one finale. Angel was originally much too dark for the WB, and the producers had to rethink their original vision completely. (David Fury's original unfilmed Angel script, "Corrupt," is well worth reading, and a link to download it is here.)

The Friday night timeslot:

Of course, people asked Joss how he felt about having his show stuck on Fridays, and he sounded genuinely upbeat. The placement gives Dollhouse a chance to build an audience over time, insteadiof having the tremendous opening-night pressure that would have come on other nights. Whedon seems to have decided that his shows always win over viewers over time, and that they often take a while to find their audience and become addictive viewing. He wants it to get plenty of attention right away, but not so much that it burns out under the spotlight. "

Some minor spoilers:

Whedon also mentioned a few minor spoilers for the first season. In particular, episode six is told from the point of view of a random bystander on the street who gets drawn into the Dollhouse's world. Other episodes tell the story of one of Echo's assignments from Echo's point of view, or the client's, or the point of view of another "Active."

One of the big threads, even in the early standalone episodes, will be Echo's nascent sense of identity, and her developing friendship with her fellow "Active," Sierra.

Meanwhile, Agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) will mostly be five steps behind in his quest to find answers about the Dollhouse, but will run into it in unexpected ways from time to time. And he's not going to be "the reporter in The Incredible Hulk," always too late to learn anything. He'll be picking up more clues over time.

There's a "creepy naked guy" at the end of the first episode, and we'll get answers about how he fits in fairly early on.

The show "becomes a bit complicated" after the first seven episodes. By then, we'll have a clear picture of how helpless the Actives are, with very little ability to deal with the outside world. Starting around the midpoint of the season, everybody gets put through the wringer.

Other random stuff:

The show isn't inherently as silly as Buffy or Angel, because it's not subverting an established genre, and with this concept it would be easy to go too campy, says Whedon. "This has to be more grounded."

The show had a couple of really interesting scripts that didn't make it into the first season. One was about the boy soldiers of Rwanda, contrasting real-life programming of people with the Dollhouse's fictional version. And another was a weird and powerful story about sexual perversion and shame, and people's inability to deal with other people, which didn't quite make the cut this time around.

There are some new challenges to doing a show nowadays: there are six commercial breaks instead of four, and the "remote-free viewing" feature means each episode is 15-20 percent longer with the same amount of time for filming.

Someone asked who would win in a fight: Faith or Echo? Whedon said Faith would win, unless Echo had been programmed with Faith's personality and skills. In that case, it would be a draw.

There will be more Dr. Horrible webisodes at some point, but everybody's terribly busy. Likewise, Whedon's thinking about doing more Serenity comics, and is already thinking about a "season nine" of the Buffy comics. There might even be some comics tie-ins with his horror movie Cabin In The Woods. But he reiterated that there will be no Dollhouse comics, because the show doesn't lend itself to the comics form.

Dollhouse promo pics from Fused Film.

The rumor came directly from Miller herself last year, when she spoke about the movie's director, The Mummy's Stephen Sommers, and his alleged prediliction for large breasts:

(I wear a) tight black leather outfit. And much bigger boobs. They gave me these things that looked like chicken fillets. The director said, 'I'm gonna be honest, I like girls with big boobs,' and I don't have them so we made them bigger. At least he's honest. But I was mildly offended.

Now Sommers has addressed the non-controversy himself, telling Entertainment Weekly:

Everybody here laughed because they know I would NEVER say that to an actress... I guess the costume department gave her a tight fitting bra, but no one gave her rubber breasts or whatever. It is 100 percent Sienna Miller.

So now we know... Not that we were really wondering that much in the first place. Given that Miller's comments were six months' old and mostly forgotten, you'll hopefully forgive us for suspecting that Sommers' rebuttal is a somewhat unusual way of trying to inject some interest into the mostly-ignored summer movie by making it seem a little more interesting (and sexy) than it actually is.

GI Joe: Rise Of Cobra is released August 7th in the US.

'G.I. Joe' director denies making Sienna Miller wear rubber breasts [EW.com]

It’s pretty open-and-shut, to my mind; and frankly, I’m surprised to have seen any support at all for tweaking your kids’ genetic makeup to taste on a forum like this one, where the taste of the mainstream public is routinely derided. How much of science fiction teaches us that people, and especially large crowds of people, tend to make terrible decisions? Cripes, look at how much of history teaches us this:

Salem Witch Trials

Nazism

The Macarena

And why would we expect it to be any different when it comes to passing on our DNA?

And therein lies the problem. It can be entertaining and illuminating to delve into the philosophical points of whether we should choose a baby’s sex or eye color or give them a chocolate-flavored penis, and whether we even have the right to do so in the first place—but ultimately, we have to look at the practical aspects of the question, too. And one of those relevant realities, sad or not, is that people love fads.

On a small scale, that might not seem like such a big deal. Like, OK, so violet eyes become popular—and you know they would; we’d have preschools teeming with little purple-eyed monsters named Carson and Sequoia—but what’s the damage? And perhaps there wouldn’t be any, although there are many people still alive who remember when differences in color determined, say, which water fountain you got to drink out of.

Sex selection is more worrisome. Again, maybe it would just all pan out that about half of parents would choose boys and half would choose girls—although, as was pointed out in last week’s post, even without science that allows them to choose, there are people who clearly lean one way. Yes, you could argue that this is actually a point in favor of sex-selection technology (as commenter icelight did)—that if a culture is going to kill its daughters, for example, then letting them opt for sons from the outset at least keeps babies from being murdered. That’s a fair point, but there’s an inherent danger in it, beyond the fact that it could be seen as implicitly condoning the culture in question’s inherent sexism (which, for the record, is not what I think icelight was doing).

The danger, which figures into all questions of designer offspring, is simply that we might skew our genetic portfolio the “wrong” way—and I put wrong in scare quotes because, short of being able to predict the future, there’s no way to tell which attributes may or may not be valuable two or three generations down the line. Is it good to be tall? Sure, unless something bad happens to your planet and you have to move underground, in which case a population whose average height is six-foot-two is a gross inconvenience. Is it good to have a super-efficient metabolism that keeps you from getting obese? Absolutely, unless food for some reason abruptly becomes much less plentiful.

Even in the case of predetermining and preventing a child’s predisposition for disease or disability, I’m wary. When it comes to cancer, it’s pretty cut and dry, but what about autism or dyslexia? The case has been made that these aren’t inherently crippling conditions so much as different modes of perception that aren’t aligned with the traditional or mainstream way of experiencing the world. By eliminating them from the gene pool just because we’re sure they’re “bad,” we may risk cutting ourselves off from a valuable kind of knowledge.

The thing about nature is that it makes our genetic choices for us randomly, impersonally, and incontestably. We can assume with some certainty that by leaving our biological makeup in its hands, we’re not going to end up with too many tall people, too many women, too many redheads, or too many or too few of anything else. I’m all for scientific progress, but I’m even more in favor of caution, particularly when it comes to something as irreplaceable and still well beyond our understanding as humanity’s genetic constitution. We have not, in my opinion, demonstrated sufficient wisdom to convince me that we can be trusted to ensure our future as a healthy species once we start futzing around with the biology that determines it. Once we do, hey—give your kids all the chocolate-flavored penises you want.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

Now I know why so many people said they remembered this show the other day. It's hard to believe this scene was televised on NBC in 1988, given how many times D'Abo comes within a hair's breadth of showing her lunar modules. I love the part where she says, "We've already seen each other's hands. What else is there to see?"

(Earlier in the show, she has awesome hand-sex with one of her fellow aliens... who then goes insane and lets out all the bald monster inmates on their prison ship. Her hand-sex technique is actually pretty great.)

Anyway, "pajamas" are a total Earth cultural imperialism, and I commend D'Abo for resisting. [IMDB]

I've been mesmerized and alarmed, looking through a giant Flickr set of fembot art, mostly created in Photoshop. It's a weird mixture of the titillating and the disturbing. The only way you know these woman are fembots is if they're flawed somehow, so the images divide into two categories: fembots suffering damage (usually with sparks flying out) and fembots who are seductively removing their faces or synthetic skins. It's like torn clothing or a striptease, only way more personal. And yet impersonal, because of their blank emotionless faces.

Way more pics at the link. [Meifembot on Flickr, thanks to Olga]

Crack the bubbly! Demand will continue to increase, and markets will become more and more sophisticated. Globalization will roar forwards. Says the executive summary:

Based on responses from over 150 manufacturing companies in eight countries, the study identifies a number of key findings about possible changes in the coming years:

— Manufacturing will become increasingly global by 2020, with around 80 % of manufacturers expected to have multi-country operations, compared with just over half today.

— Supply chains will also increase in complexity and consolidate. Half the companies surveyed said they will be using fewer suppliers by 2020, but 40 % said they will be using more distributors as increased competition drives them to reach new markets.

— Manufacturers appear uncertain what actions to take about green issues, but as political and social pressure increases around emissions reduction, urgent action will be required to reach 2020 targets.

— Differences between the manufacturing industries in developed and emerging markets will also continue to evolve.

I actually feel a bit sorry for these consultants, who probably did most of their survey before large chunks of the global economy started to hit the fan a few months ago. The lead time on a big doorstopper of a report like this is probably months and months. But it does show the ever-present danger of attempting to extrapolate from last year's trends into the future. (And, just maybe, why I was wise not to go into management consulting after all.)

Another thing occurs to me: Did none of the 150 companies surveyed for this report think transportation costs might have gone up by 2020? I mean, I know peak oil is still just a theory, but it doesn't seem entirely far-fetched to think that the cheap transportation that allows us to make a widget in Asia and ship it for assembly to South America, after which it gets sold in the U.S., will be a lot harder to manage by 2020.

Note: The image up top is from a different report, "The Future Of Manufacturing," from last February. [Consultant News]

The show returns just over a month from now, but the Felix Gaeta-centric webisodes start tomorrow at 11 AM CST. As we've reported, they'll reveal that Gaeta is having a hot same-sex relationship with Lt. Hoshi, formerly from the Battlestar Pegasus. But we won't learn that Gaeta is gay, says Grace Park. That's because flashbacks will reveal that Gaeta was sleeping with one of the Number Eight "Sharon" Cylons during the occupation on New Caprica. Gaeta thought he and the Eight were in love... until he found out otherwise. Gaeta "swings both ways," Park tells TV Guide.

In the webisode series, "The Face Of The Enemy," Gaeta is trapped on a Raptor that's running out of oxygen, and someone/something is murdering the crew one by one.

Meanwhile, writer Mark Verheiden promised the very next BSG episode, "Sometimes A Great Notion," will leave you gasping for air:

Much is revealed and there are some story turns that will leave viewers in shock. I'm talking big-time, gut-punch, "oh my God, did I just see that?" stuff. And it just rolls from there...

[Chicago Tribune and SpoilerTV and Famous Verheidens Of Filmland]