Over the past few weeks, Dollhouse season two has started reminding me of Jericho season two — both shows came back from cancellation, with a limited number of episodes. Both shows' fans cherished hopes that they'd continue past those truncated second seasons, but the people making both Jericho and Dollhouse seemed aware that they shouldn't save any trail mix for the hike back. Both shows abandoned their slow, incremental approaches and started racing forwards... almost too fast. But I'd way rather have too fast than too slow... or a setup that never pays off.

The other comparison, while we're at it, is that both Dollhouse and Jericho have pretty unique spins on the apocalypse — both involving an evil corporation and entitled assclowns who just have to control everything.

So last night, Dollhouse served up one decent episode, and one great one. In the first hour, we learned, yet again, that you never really leave the Dollhouse. Victor's contract expires, and he gets set free, wealthy but adrift, and unsure why he's in love with a woman he can't remember. He's so used to doll life, he sleeps in his bathtub because it reminds him of his coffin. And then he gets kidnapped/recruited to become a soldier in a new Rossum unit, that's basically a linked group mind. And then in the second hour, Echo, Victor and Sierra get sent to the Attic, where they encounter Mr. Dominic, and a serial killer... who turns out to be one of the founders of Rossum Corp.

The first hour was a slight disappointment, but only a slight one. After seeing so many hints about Victor's war-related PTSD, I figured we were in for an exploration of the ways in which trauma comes back even after you think you've defeated it. Even though Topher seemed so confident that they'd "cured" Victor's PTSD, I assumed we were going to learn otherwise. But after waving a bit in that direction, the episode lurched towards the "hive mind" soldiers thing — which was a really neat concept, and yet another fresh spin on the Dollhouse's tech. (The execution was pretty good, but the "chanting soldier voices" thing veered towards being cheesy once or twice.)

Mostly, instead of being an homage to Kimberly Peirce's underrated movie about PTSD and getting re-drafted against your will, the episode "Stop Loss" served to show us just one more way in which Rossum is evil. And at this point, we're pretty much primed to think Rossum is more evil than a dozen standard evil corporations put together. So it's just as well that the show is moving forward beyond showing us how evil Rossum is — towards explaining how Rossum got that way, and how our heroes are going to fight it.

You have admire how quickly the second episode, "The Attic," ran through all the standard science-fiction cliches for this sort of situation. Echo is in a virtual shared world, along the lines of the Matrix, and then she and Laurence Dominic are being chased by a shadowy serial killer through people's worst nightmares. The first half of the episode was fun, and some of the nightmare imagery was pretty jarring — especially the vision of Echo and the other dolls on tables, with wires going into their brains and tubes going down their throats, as liquid slowly flows into their trays.

There's nothing wrong with a "chasing a serial killer through people's nightmares" episode — we all like a good mindscape serial killer. But it's probably just as well that the episode took a sharp lurch halfway through, when the good guys finally catch up to the evil mass-murderer Arcane — and he's revealed to be a British nerd.

The Attic turns out to be more than just the random hell all of the broken dolls and disloyal employees are sent to — it's a giant computer, made out of hundreds of human brains, all supercharged by experiencing trauma over and over again. It's another neat spin on the show's central "brain hacking" conceit, and then it leads to us discovering the origins of Rossum. Arcane, the serial killer, is actually Clyde, the co-founder of Rossum, who developed "encephalic coding and communication," only to be betrayed by his partner after he imprints someone with a more docile version of his own mind.

And ever since Clyde got sent to the Attic — in 1993 — he's been running statistical analysis and scenarios for the future of the ECC technology. And in all but 3 percent of these scenarios, the ability to read and write brains leads to the collapse of civilization. Presumably, Rossum has access to Clyde's data-crunching, and knows about this — but doesn't care.

Conveniently, Clyde's memory of the name of his partner in founding Rossum, as well as the person who was imprinted with the obedient "Clyde 2.0" persona, has been removed. But it turns out Echo's original personality, Caroline Farrell, discovered who they were before she was wiped and turned into a doll. (We know a lot of time passed between Caroline breaking into the Rossum lab on that college campus and her becoming a doll — so presumably she discovered more about Rossum during that time.) So after Echo and the others break out of the Attic, they know enough to start taking the fight to Rossum.

Once again, the star of last night's episode was really Olivia Williams as Adelle — her arc moved awfully quickly, but it was still pretty amazing to watch. In the first hour, she has one last fling with "Roger," her perfect lover who's installed into Victor's body — only to have Roger confess that he's in love with someone else... Sierra. Even a pre-programmed lover won't love Adelle. "Roger" only rubs salt in the wounds by scoffing at the idea that Adelle would be pathetic enough to hire a programmed doll to love her. This rejection, and evidence that Adelle has lost her grip on the Dollhouse by not preventing Victor and Sierra from "grouping," sends her into a tailspin, and she spends pretty much the rest of the episode drunk, while everyone around her schemes. Echo bursts in to tell Adelle that they're not equals, and Boyd tells Adelle that she needs to find the old Adelle quickly, or he'll help take her down.

And then Adelle takes a shower with the Actives, and when she comes out, she's apparently sobered up a bit — and chosen her side in the fight between Rossum and the human race. We think at first that Adelle has finally discarded the last little piece of her soul and become "Darth DeWitt" in full — but then it turns out she sent Echo to the Attic on purpose, to discover Rossum's secrets.

If these episodes had aired on a weekly basis, this progression would have felt a lot slower, probably — Adelle losing control of the Dollhouse to Harding, selling out to get it back, turning into a bitter shell of her former self, and then finally making her choice. But even getting all six of these episodes over a three-week span, it still feels like a pretty intense journey, with Olivia Williams fully investing you in Adelle's downward spiral.

Once again, I also really liked Echo — especially the bit where she went shopping in the Dollhouse's imprints and turned them into an all-you-can-eat skillset buffet. After so long of Echo being helpless and glitchy and confused and headachy, it was just beautiful to see her turning her previous source of weakness into an amazing strength. And yay for Echo taking on an army single-handed and winning, by hacking their brains with her super-brain. If we didn't already know the good guys were going to lose, I'd say maybe Rossum had created the engine of their own destruction.

And I wonder if Victor and Sierra are gone for good — are they just Tony and Priya now? Their love has overcoming brainwashing and programming, and now it's overcome a military hive mind as well. I wonder if we'll get to see what it is that drives them apart in the future?

Speaking of which, it seems like we're leaping over the flashforwards in "Epitaph One" at amazing speed now. I'm having a hard time figuring out where those segments fit into all this. I'm guessing we've already passed by the sequence where Echo is programmed to be a Russian girl and complains to Ballard about her headaches — when did that happen? Right before Alpha's visit? It doesn't seem like the sequence of events allows for that. (Or did that scene purely happen in Echo's nightmares inside The Attic?) And then the scene where the Rossum scumbag Mr. Ambrose takes over Victor's body and announces that the Dollhouse is now renting out its Actives to become spare bodies for rich people — did that happen during the three months Echo was away, but before Mr. Harding took over the Dollhouse? I'm a bit confused at this point.

In general, though, Dollhouse is delivering unforgettable characters and a mind-blowing spin on its basic premise, and it's really fully become the show it's hinted at from the beginning. It's going to be a long three weeks' wait to see our heroes posse up to take on Rossum, and I'm hopeful based on the past few weeks' incredibly strong track record that the revelations about Caroline's past aren't going to be disappointing. (It helps to know that the next episode is written by Tim Minear, the man who can do no wrong.) Even if you were hoping the show would plunge us into the post-apocalyptic Felicia-Day-on-the-run future right at the start of the season, you can't deny that getting to see the building blocks of that future sliding into place has been amazing. This show may be on its way to cancellation, but we're going to be seeing people building on it for years to come.

Also, I hate to be a broken record, but the more we see of season two, the sadder I am that the show didn't put its best foot forward. The season's first two episodes were just so lackluster, compared to everything that's come after, that it's depressing to look back on them. I get very sad when I think of the fact that Fox sent out DVD screeners of "Vows," the I-married-a-boring-arms-dealer episode, to every TV journalist in the country, thus generating bad or no buzz. What if Fox had mailed out the Sierra/Nolan episode instead? Or any of the episodes since then?

Anyway, there are just three episodes of Dollhouse left, including two present-day ones and then a return to the post-apocalyptic future. Now that the show has already proved it's not holding any plot (or character) developments back for a later that'll never come, those last three episodes are going to be the most anticipated television of January, as far as I'm concerned.

It's hard to believe this is still the same show that used to serve up timid "engagement of the week episodes" that only hinted at the questions that lurked in its premise. By my reckoning, this makes six outstanding Dollhouse episodes in a row. And what's more, the show is starting to race forward, at breakneck speed, as if to make up for its slow pace earlier.

Was it just me, or did your heart stop too when you read the words "Three months later"? Sure, BSG and DC Comics, among others, have pulled similar stunts before — but in the middle of a random episode?
It was gutsy. And yet, it turned out to be a brilliant move. As usual with the "jumping ahead in time" stunt, everything had changed, and part of the fun was figuring out how. (For a moment, I thought Echo really had just taken a nurse job using one of her imprints, and was just living quietly.)

But more than that, part of the coolness after the three-month jump was seeing how much closer we were to the glimpses of the future we saw in the post-apocalyptic episode "Epitaph One."

So after the jump, suddenly Echo is playing house with Paul Ballard (which feels logical, considering how much they were already conspiring together) and they're in cahoots with Boyd back at the Dollhouse. Meanwhile, Topher has gotten a promotion, and Adelle has gotten a demotion. Most of all, Echo is now fully in control over her multiple personalities and their talents, instead of having them triggered randomly. She's now much more like a superhero (who's occasionally glitchy) than a puppet who occasionally turns into a superhero, and really, thank goodness. I'm imagining the new Echo is like Chuck with the "Intersect 2.0" installed.

Last night's first episode, "Meet Jane Doe," subverted so many expectations, it's hard to know where to begin. For starters, we expected a story about Echo in her childlike "doll" state wandering around for an hour, while the Dollhouse tried to find her — instead, we got five minutes of that, then something totally different. And then, at the end, you expected Adelle to do something cunning and brilliant to regain her mastery of her Dollhouse — and instead, she kissed up to the evil scumbag, Harding. In the second hour, you think Alpha is just trying to take down the men that Echo has had romantic engagements with — but his real target turns out to be Ballard, because Alpha was spying and realized that Ballard and Echo are in love.

Even with everything else that happened last night, it's hard to avoid fixating on Adelle. Her transformation was incredibly painful to watch — first, from steely-but-sensitive mistress of her domain to subservient, resentful underling to Mr. Harding. And then, from underling back to boss — but this time, she's willing to do whatever it takes to please her masters and save her own skin. Olivia Williams was incredible last night — most of all in the scene where she is willing to give Alpha whatever he wants, because that's what she's become. She's lost her self-respect, and whatever shreds of idealism she may have had left, and become a monster. And it's fascinating to watch.

The other big star last night was... Eliza Dushku. A lot of people have doubted her ability to carry this series — including me, on a few occasions. But now that she's playing a more self-aware version of Echo, she's able to bring a lot more real acting to the table. Her scenes with Paul Ballard, where she's in love with him and he's unable to reciprocate because of his whole "Galahad" complex, were brilliant and rich, and she seemed to snap between different personas pretty easily. Dushku's talent has never been mimickry or creating different mannerisms — she's not an Enver Gjokaj — but she's a lot better at handling nuances of emotion. She's always Eliza Dushku, no matter who she's playing, but she's capable of bringing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety. And last night, we saw more of what she can do when she's in her comfort zone.

Meanwhile, once again Topher was ethical-dilemmas guy — turns out the remote wipe device he's been working on is just one piece of a larger puzzle, one that will lead to everyone in the world becoming mind-controlled slaves. Topher cracks the problem of how to program anyone, anywhere remotely — but it's Adelle who hands it over to the evil corporate overlord. No wonder those two are basket cases after the apocalypse.

As Adelle says towards the end of last night's first episode, with the kind of power Rossum has, you don't want to be on the opposing team. Apparently Rossum doesn't just control a sitting U.S. Senator (who's got an excellent chance of becoming President), they also have 22 Dollhouses, with a 23rd on the way — and that means thousands of current and former clients who will safeguard Rossum's interests. And now, they have the means to reprogram whoever they want. Shiny.

It was interesting to see Harding running the Dollhouse, in contrast to Adelle. Her fancy performance was always aimed at creating the impression of a humane, caring service that was therapeutic and philanthropic — much like Inara's "Companion" poise in Firefly. Inara and Adelle even both use tea to symbolize the fact that they're fancy and full of happy empowerment. Harding keeps the tea, but drops the empowerment schtick — he's happy to be a pimp, and his dolls are property. As Boyd points out, the only real difference is that Harding doesn't lie to himself.

So the first episode was, once again, all about how the wealthy get what they want, and the rest of us are just their soon-to-be-broken toys, what with the evil boys' club of rich assholes congratulating themselves in Adelle's office. And then in the second half, we discovered that the wealthy don't always fare that well with the Dollhouse — we meet a guy who blew his entire fortune on engagements with Echo, and get to see a bunch of her other clients killed horribly as well.

Patton Oswalt returns as the tech whiz who needs Echo to impersonate his dead wife, and he's somewhat unsettled to learn that even though he's never planning on hiring the Dollhouse to recreate Rebecca again, she still exists. You can't really delete a program — once a program's created, it has a life of its own.

Did anybody else think Alan Tudyk was channeling Heath Ledger's Joker, just a bit, in his performance as Alpha last night? Maybe I'm on crack. In any case, Alpha was nattily dressed, and was (thank god) doing less of the "crazy talking to myself and snapping between personas" thing, and more of the "super-genius psycopath" thing. I was "meh" about Alpha last season, but he went a lot further towards winning me over last night. Especially after having just gotten such a powerful glimpse of the real evil of the Rossum Corp., Alpha is looking more and more like the lesser of two evils.

I don't have much else to say about the second hour — Alpha's still obsessed with Echo, and wants her to love him. It's a bit underwhelming as a villain motivation, but I think it's partly supposed to be that Alpha is obsessed with Echo because he sees himself in her, and he wants to be able to understand the difference between programmed and "real" emotions. And he knows that Echo's feelings for Paul Ballard are "real," so he wants to be able to see where they come from. Maybe now that Alpha has imprinted himself with Ballard's personality, we'll get something new and different out of it, like an Alpha who struggles with doing the right thing occasionally. We know, from "Epitaph One," that Alpha does turn out to be something of a force for good.

I liked the Actives being turned into killer zombies, which was a nice twist. And the Monty Python references. And Boyd, Echo and Ballard choosing to trust Topher with Echo's secret — wonder how badly that'll backfire? And co-writer Maurissa Tancharoen doing her sassy "I ain't got time for no neurocondensing" act. And Ballard's "My ass does feel very pampered."

Bottom line: This show is now much more clearly about an evil corporation that wants to own your brain. This has been true from the beginning, but it was harder to tell in those early episodes. Now it's pretty clear and straightforward, and the storytelling that can come as a result (with alll of those broken, complicated people, squirming under Rossum's thumb) is going to be magnificent. For as long as it lasts.

So I totally did not see the revelation concerning Senator Daniel Perrin coming — that he's the doll and his wife is his handler. It was one of the coolest plot twists I'd seen in ages, and yet it totally made sense once the show explained it.

It goes like this: the evil Rossum Corporation has tons of power and influence, but the bastards in charge wanted more. They wanted their own puppet as a U.S. Senator (and maybe, eventually, as president.) So they kidnapped Daniel Perrin, the scion of a powerful political dynasty (think of him as Fred Kennedy or something.) And they took the dissolute party boy and reprogrammed him to be a fiery crusader for justice, with tons of political ambition. Daniel Perrin 2.0 quickly became a senator. And then they decided their lucrative, illegal Dollhouse operation was getting too much attention, so they decided to have their puppet Senator investigate these rumors — only to disprove them and exonerate Rossum completely.

Of course, poor old Madeline aka November would have to be the sacrificial lamb, stepping forward as a former doll only to be revealed as a crazy woman and then destroyed. But you can't achieve total political power without crushing a few people along the way.

Alexis Denisof did a fantastic job of bringing Senator Perrin to life, and the Dollhouse writers managed to find yet another fascinating twist on the idea of people's identities being erased and rebuilt: Here was someone the Dollhouse had made better. They'd taken a worthless shell of a human being and turned him into a good guy — except, of course, for the part where he danced to their tune. An extra layer of weirdness comes from the fact that they didn't just build a fictitious persona for him — they layered on a new personality on top of his old one, so that when he realizes he's been reprogrammed, he has a hard time separating his real life from his fake one. His fake marriage to a woman who loathes him is a new level of creepy from a show that seemed to have emptied its creepy-bag already.

The other big twist, of course, is at the end, when Perrin has killed his wife under the control of Bennett Halverson (Glau). And he starts to think that maybe it wouldn't be quite so bad to let the Dollhouse erase his memory of what happened, so he can go back to thinking of himself as a fine, upstanding senator. Who cares if it's a lie, or if the real murderers will get away with it? It's the easy way. And then Echo points out that Perrin didn't kill his wife, Rossum did. But if Perrin lets Rossum erase his brain again, then Perrin really did kill his wife. When you put it like that, there's no choice, right? Perrin has to do the right thing and hang on to his real memories.

Except he doesn't. The next time we see him, we think he's about to step up and expose Rossum, but then we realize that he's taken the devil's bargain. He's chosen to let Rossum wipe his mind one more time, rather than deal with the reality of his life. (Not unlike Sierra last episode, choosing to remain a doll rather than remember that she killed her tormentor.)

This was such a smart, challenging two hours of television, it's a crime that it's not the new 24 or House. Just rewatch the scene where Perrin is trying to explain to Echo that she's a doll, before he discovers he's a doll himself — his horror and disgust are so palpable, and then it turns out that he's the thing he's been describing all along.

If only this show wasn't airing on a Friday night. Or if only it actually appealed to the kinds of brain-damaged idiots that this Microsoft ad seems to think are watching:

It's Dollhouse for dummies! I will refrain from making any snarky comments about Microsoft's opinion of its own users' intelligence.

Meanwhile, November is all fired up to do the right thing — and you know it's not going to turn out well, even before you understand how she's being set up. She's still a puppet, even though she's no longer a doll. And just standing up and telling the truth about the Dollhouse is never going to work, because they can discredit her so easily. Weirdly, it's the best argument I've seen so far in favor of Ballard's decision to go work for the Dollhouse instead of continuing to work against it — there's no way to destroy it except from the inside. The scene where Ballard finally gets to talk to November and explains to her his version of events is pretty heartbreaking, but you can easily see why she's not won over. All she sees is another person trying to control her, and not being nearly as subtle about it as the Senator's people.

Ballard can't protect her from her own bad decisions, and when he realizes that, it's a crucial step towards him being less of a meathead. I actually love Ballard, but it's about time he got over his "knight in shining armor" fixation — and it's especially cool to see him starting to cast that off in an episode where the "you're my knight in shining armor" thing turns out to be a conditioning trigger for a mindwiped slave.

Adelle and Topher continue to be the best double act on television — the limo scene was great — and both of them had some great moments this week. After seeing Adelle acting a bit like a whipped puppy with Mr. Harding lately, it was great to see her regain her backbone and move to protect November. And the ball-grabbing scene with Ray Wise, cartoonish though it was, still totally ruled. Meanwhile, what's a better double act than Adelle and Topher? Two Tophers! Yet again, Enver Gjokaj proves that he can do pretty much anything, as he creates a spot-on impression of Fran Krantz.

So why did I say that the Summer Glau parts didn't work for me? Well, the stuff between Bennett and Topher was great — the nerd bonding, the rivalry, the scheming against each other, the flirting. I could have watched it for hours. The bit where Topher decides she's too pretty to be as smart as she is was a tad annoying, but also utterly believable. And I loved it when she's flattered that he tried to tase her. That was twisted and sweet and totally awesome.

But the rest of Glau's performance, for whatever reason, just did not work. I think it was the writing more than Glau's acting — they were trying to do something arty, and it fell flat. There were too many scenes of Glau soliloquizing and repeating weird phrases over and over, to show that she's tightly wound and psychotic. And the whole business where she has a vendetta against Echo because Echo's original personality, Caroline, left her crushed under some rubble just felt a bit contrived. It felt like way too much of a coincidence. And I just could not buy that Bennett would let the Senator and Echo escape, just so she could keep pursuing her vendetta against Echo a bit further. The whole thing felt, frankly, flimsy. And Glau struggled mighty to sell it, but the whole "psycho geek" routine felt a bit too close to a glitchy Cameron from Sarah Connor Chronicles. "Will you please make sure? Will you please make sure? WILL YOU PLEASE MAKE SURE?"

I think it was the fact that this is supposed to be such a huge operation for Rossum, and yet Bennett bungled it so hugely — first by torturing Echo when she was supposed to be mindwiping the Senator, then by letting the Senator escape, and finally by turning the Senator into a psycho-killer — seemed just a tad much. And I just couldn't buy into the "I got hurt in an accident and you ran away, so I'm obsessed with destroying your mindless shell even though you don't remember me" thing. It felt a bit forced.

Glau was a joy to watch whenever she had scenes opposite Fran Kranz. But the rest of the time, her scenes dragged the story to a halt. But I'm sure your mileage may well vary, and feel free to let me know in the comments!

But generally this was another fantastic outing — bringing the show up to four brilliant episodes in a row. There are so many ideas embedded in this story about what makes us who we are, and how much we're slaves to our programming — even the Bennett storyline, which fell flat for me, had an interesting spin on how she's a slave to her compulsion for revenge. It was depressing to see so many ads for Human Target, a show based on a comic book that explored similar ideas of identity and selfhood during its most recent Vertigo Comics incarnation but which is tossing all of those ideas away in favor of a dumb bodyguard storyline. Dollhouse is the show that fans of Peter Milligan's Human Target comics actually deserve.

Wee tidbits: We've had several hints lately that there was another Sierra before the current one, and that Adelle got a bit too attached to her, and it ended badly. I wonder what are the chances we'll find out what that's about before the show runs out of episodes?

Also, yet again we get another person telling us how special Echo is — this time, it's Bennett, saying that Echo has this magical ability to make people love her (or something.) I'm beginning to think she's turning into RTD's version of the Doctor, and we're going to have people saying that Echo is fire and ice and dragons and a lonely god and the reason the Earth doesn't turn backwards. Still, I'm willing to let it pass, since Echo being special turns out to be important in the post-apocalyptic world we're heading towards.

Also, more hints that Caroline wasn't a particularly nice person... and suddenly, Echo doesn't want to go back to being Caroline. After insisting in "Omega" and this year's season opener that she's just waiting for Caroline to come home, she's now gone over to Whiskey's point of view — if Caroline returns to Echo's body, then Echo is killed. So she'd rather remain Echo, and let Caroline rot in a wedge? It'll be interesting to see if that becomes an issue soon.

I love that the DC Dollhouse's Actives are named after Greek gods, like Hades and Aphrodite.

Great lines:

"This is the same tech that turned Echo into a serial killer." "We said we wouldn't dwell on that. He's dwelling."

"You just woke up a lot of people — and they all think you're a bitch!"

"How about the Senator beats his wife?" "The Senator doesn't beat his wife. The Senator loves his wife." "Lucky wife."

"No, no, you're very pale. White. Pinkish white. I mean, your skin. Your skin is like a pig. Because it's pink. People assume that pigs are bad, but I like them. I love them."

"Wasabi peas." "I'm excited and scared."

"Imagine John Cassavetes in The Fury as a hot chick." "Which you know I often have!"

"Oh, it's very nice." "She was kind of a hooker." "Mmm Hmm. How about while I build the magic bullets, you work on adapting your gun?"

"The Senator is filibustering."

You don't know Dollhouse!

You think you know what Joss Whedon's show is about: Dushku plays Echo, a girl whose mind has been erased so that rich people (and occasional pro bono clients) can have her customized to be whatever, and whoever, they want. But the second season, which started last Friday, is totally different.

This time around, Echo will be dealing with all the lingering effects of having all her personalities downloaded into her. And as you saw last Friday, Echo will be experiencing a lot more "flash backs" to her other imprints. Sometimes these will be by accident, sometimes Echo will be in control of it. But Echo will be figuring out how to use this for her own advantage, as she tries to gather a new family of people she can trust around her.

Dushku says that Echo will be becoming self-aware, but as Echo, not as her "original" personality, Caroline. And in fact, as she learns more "unsavory" stuff about Caroline, or just things that are "not Echo," she'll question whether she really wants to be Caroline after all. "She is getting farther and farther away from Caroline," Dushku says of Echo. "You'll absolutely see a new Echo this season."

And that was more fun for Dushku to play, since she doesn't just alternate between the "dumbed down doll" state and whichever personality she's taking on this week. Instead, we always know there's more going on with Echo than we see on the surface, and that makes her more grounded — and more fun to play. Echo is constantly pulling from her past imprints and processing and making sense of stuff, and evolving her own ethics and morals.

Adds Dushku:

When the pieces start to fall apart, and she starts to be taken over by a memory that she can't control, I think it's difficult. and there's that processing going on, and there's that authentic self that's holding on, and that's keeping her from completely losing it and completely being controlled by the personalities [she's pulling from. And that kind of] deeper work for me is sort of more interesting and more challenging to play.

We'll also learn more of the Dollhouse's backstory, discover more of the other Dollhouses around the world, and find out how some of the other Dolls came to this point.

Upcoming imprints:

According to Dushku, this Friday's episode is the "mommy" episode, and it was one of the hardest personalities for her to take on, since she's never been a mom. "Trying to tap into that maternal instinct was difficult, but a thrill," she says. And she hinted there will be breastfeeding involved, which sounds like it might be beyond even Topher's proven ability to create physiological as well as mental traits. "Mommy was definitely harder than serial-killer sorority girl." How does Echo wind up being imprinted as a serial killer? Dushku explains: "Episode 3, I start out as a college girl, but when the imprint goes haywire, it's more serial killer than soriority girl."

Summer Glau joins the cast:

The invincible Summer Glau has already filmed two episodes, and Dushku says they're just about to start working on episode seven. As we've mentioned, Glau plays a programmer, and Dushku mentioned she works at the Washington, DC Dollhouse. We'll learn a bit more about how things work differently at the other Dollhouses. And Glau's character has some backstory with Echo, which means Glau and Dushku have to fight. (Physically, it sounds like.) Glau "came in with her 'A' game" and they've had a great time filming together, says Dushku.

Echo Is Ophelia

We were curious to hear if Dushku felt like Dollhouse was a metaphor for the experience of being an actor in L.A., where people want you to fulfill their fantasies, and don't mind erasing you as a person in the process. She felt like the show is more like a parable of women's experiences in general:

[It] also translates to young women all over the world. And I remember my mother... I was the only girl in a family of three boys, [so] she did extensive reading. She read a book called Reviving Ophelia, about adolsecent girls, and the way young women were broken down in their early teens, [when] they're starting to get hit from all sides, from the media, and images, and the men in their life, and their peers, and everything starts to change and the spirit of young women is so fragile, and can be toyed with and broken. And my mother was really aware of that and tried to fight against that, and tried to teach me to sort of stand in my authentic self, and be comfortable in my skin, and with all of that research that she did, and applying it, it's still haunting me. And it's still, at times in my life, [people] have wounded me [and] have come close to breaking me. And so when I sat talking about that stuff to Joss... it's so extraordinary that he accented that in such a profound and intelligent way, that I can't think of anybody else that gets that, and can create an entire fantasy show that encompasses such a universal and serious thing in our society. And so yes, it's absolutely parallel to me, and I also feel, to women all over the world.

Dollhouse airs this Friday, Oct. 2, and the following Friday, Oct. 9. (And then Oct. 16, it gets preempted for a baseball game.)

E! Online spoke to several members of the Dollhouse cast and crew about what we can expect for the new season. Now that former FBI Agent Paul Ballard and increasingly self-aware Doll Echo will be in the same room each week, Tamoh Penikett says we'll be seeing a relationship form between the pair:

They have a connection. It's not a physical attraction, but I hope it's something that we explore a lot more this season. You're not quite sure what it is. There's a past, there's a history, there's an understanding between them that's very different. I think the audience is really going to like it and be really curious about where we're going in the first few episodes.

The romance is reserved for fellow Dolls Victor and Sierra, whose first season connection will continue to be a major plot point. Enver Gjokaj teases the Victor-Sierra subplot:

Sierra and Victor are definitely still involved. They're going to explore that relationship more. They explore the Sierra-and-Victor love as dolls, but then also they're going to go into the backstory of both of them.

But it's frequently sex and crime that make the Dollhouse itself tick, and Fran Kranz, who plays Topher Brink, promises there will be plenty of that:

Sexually dark stuff…murder…sex and murder.

Eliza Dushku also mentions that we should expect a somewhat different look to the series this season. She says that the show's "science fiction haze" has been lifted, so that the show may look more like it's set in the present day and give audiences the impression that there might be a Dollhouse right outside their back door.

Dollhouse Season Two Is All About "Murder and Sex" [E! Online]

The DVD set, which came out on Tuesday, offers a few new ways to wrap your mind around the mysteries of the Dollhouse, that secret underground spa facility where beautiful people are programmed to become whatever rich clients need them to be for a day or so:

1) Watch the unaired pilot and finale back to back. The two episodes of the show that Fox didn't want you to see fit together pretty neatly, surprisingly enough. The unaired pilot contains as much story development for Echo (Eliza Dushku) as the first six episodes of the regular series put together, and it also raises all the questions you wish someone would ask, about the morality of turning people into your personal robot slaves. Watch Topher laugh as he justifies his life as the chief mind-blotter — and then watch "Epitaph One," the unaired finale, right afterwards. All of the questions raised in the original pilot find their answers here. You learn that, yes, this all does end very badly. Topher's bravado has been replaced with weeping inside one of the Dolls' coffins, and bosslady Adelle's sang froid has developed some serious cracks. Meanwhile, the pilot shows us Echo beginning to rediscover her selfhood and experiencing her first glimmers of memory. Watching those two episodes back to back makes for a kind of Dollhouse movie, with a beginning and an end — yet it leaves you wanting the next batch.

2) Watch a bunch of the episodes in a row, so they feel less episodic. One of the biggest complaints about the first half-dozen episodes of the season is how aimless and "stand-alone" they feel, with the "client of the week" and the "this week, she's a scuba instructor with a dark secret" feeling. But when you watch a bunch of them in one go, it feels a lot better — you do see something of a progression from episode to episode, with Echo showing her first signs of going beyond her programming in the "hostage negotiator" episode, followed by the mysterious ex-doll Alpha making his first move to push her to go further out of her parameters in the "bow-hunting" episode. And then Alpha goes further in the bank-robbery episode, giving Echo a remote mindwipe to try and push her further. It all leads up to the midpoint of the season, when everyone's pretty much aware that Echo is no longer just the usual empty vessel for people to pour their own desires into — she's becoming something more versatile, and maybe more dangerous. You see a bit more of a progression.

3) Listen to Joss Whedon complain about studio interference. The other great pleasure of the DVDs is the commentary track, where creator Joss Whedon talks about the creative process, and exactly how much Fox messed with his business. At one point during the first episode, "Ghost," Whedon talks about the network sending him tons of "notes" demanding more explanations for everything. After the episode was already stuffed to bursting with characters standing around talking about rewriting brains and creating real personalities to put into people's heads, the network came back and wanted just a bit more spelling out of the show's premise. He also admits that he knows nothing about how to do hostage negotiations, and if you followed Ellie Penn's techniques for dealing with hostage-takers, you would probably get everyone killed. But sounds good, and that's the main thing. His commentary track for the sixth episode, "Man On The Street" is even more revelatory, where he talks through the problems he had with the show, and the ways in which "Man On The Street" represents a turning point for the show, and how he wrote the whole thing in something like three days, all of his ideas pouring out of him. And the "Man On The Street" commentary is the deepest Joss has gone into discussing the wish-fulfillment and horror of the Dollhouse and what it represents to people. "We all have something that we would like Topher to slice out of us, so much so that it paralyzes us in some cases."

Mostly, the DVDs are a chance to flop on your couch and delve back into the Dollhouse universe in a big way, now that it's miraculously coming back. And maybe, to realize quite what a unique, rich story this actually is, and how much it takes the themes of wish-fulfillment and fantasy, and shows how they can lead down a dark path of wanting to erase other people — and eventually the entire world. They're in stores now, and well worth renting or buying so you can rewrite your memories of this vastly underrated show.

When Echo, Sierra and Victor awaken in the Dollhouse with most of their original personalities and memories intact, Echo leads the charge to free the Actives from their apparent captivity and escape the Dollhouse forever. Meanwhile, Ballard discovers the Dollhouse is closer than he thinks.

[SpoilerTV]

Carter recently told the World Entertainment News Network that she knows exactly what should be done with any potential Wonder Woman movie:

I've always liked Joss, and Eliza would make a great Wonder Woman.

This came, apparently, in response to "rumors" about a Whedon/Dushku team working on the Wonder movie, which is news to us. After all, wasn't Whedon politely shown the door by Warners over creative differences, and aren't he and Dushku busy enough with Dollhouse? We're cautiously optimistic about the idea of Eliza taking on the role of Diana, but somehow think that poor Lynda's gotten her wires crossed somewhere along the way.

Carter Approves Of Dushku As Wonder Woman [IMDB]

Dushku's announcement came on the Howard Stern show, where she was appearing to promote her new Fox show. She explained:

I'm so perfect for the Black Widow character, that they just need to get into it... They need to understand… I just learned Russian because I had to play a Russian girl in ‘Dollhouse.' Maybe we could all tell them. Lets get on a Black Widow Iron Man 2 campaign.

As much as I love Eliza, this seems a little too much like Sean Young's ill-fated public campaigns to be Catwoman in Tim Burton's Batman movies for my liking. Eliza, you've just launched a new TV show! Concentrate on that, not on trying to get a movie role that's already been cast!

This can only end in tears.

‘Iron Man 2' Casting Campaign: Eliza Dushku Wants To Be The Black Widow [MTV Splash Page]

In Dollhouse, which starts Friday at 9 on Fox, Dushku plays a woman named Echo whose brain has been erased to make way for whatever personality and skills a paying client wants her to have. But Echo is starting to keep some of her memories and recognize her fellow mindwiped puppets, which is considered a "glitch in the system."

Dushku said the show is a metaphor for her own life, where people are constantly expecting her to be different people in different situations. It's also a metaphor for objectification.

I asked Dushku where she sees her character in four or five years. Does Dushku still think she'll have new places to go with the character in Dollhouse season five? She said absolutely. After all, most people evolve so much in just a single day. People are constantly evolving, so there are plenty of places to with a character like Echo who's able to become different characters and is evolving on her own as well.

She added:

Apparently from day one, Joss has had a five year plan for the show... what's so exciting about this show is, it's so open for endless possibilities, because you're dealing with so much, it's mankind. [Our] thoughts and wishes and desires are there by the millions and the trillions.

In Dollhouse, Dushku's character has an active named Boyd Langton, who's supposed to keep her safe during her "engagements" with paying clients. But Dushku says "it's obviously not a perfect system," and things do tend to go wrong during her gigs.

Playing Echo has allowed Dushku to "play and jump around in between these characters, every week and sometimes multiple times in one show." She says she has an "appetite" to experience different emotions, and Josh has given her "the ability to show different colors." Her favorite characters, so far, have included a blind cult member (who's sent inside a cult with cameras in her retinas.) And a "prissy" 50-year-old woman who's put into Dushku's body.

She's also enjoyed getting to play some scenes opposite Tahmoh Penikett, who plays FBI agent Paul Ballard, who's investigating the Dollhouse.

The show only gets better as it goes along, says Dushku, because Joss Whedon and his writers are like a novelist, building the story as they go along. In future installments, you'll learn more about the history of the Dollhouse, including how long it's been around and what happened to past "Dolls."

Dollhouse is Dushku's first time as an executive producer of a show, in addition to starring. It sounds like she's pretty active in the writers' room, helping to break stories. And she says she's also involved in day-to-day stuff like morale on the set and making sure the crew's voices are heard. She's been way more hands-on than with anything else she's worked on, but luckily everybody involved with it wants it to succeed as badly as she and Joss do.

In some episodes, you'll find that clients who hire Dushku's character, Echo, customize her in ways that they may end up regretting. Sometimes what people think they desire isn't what they really desire, but they don't find out until it's too late, says Dushku.

Dushku says she's aware she has a big lesbian fan following from her days on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, with its subtext-rich Buffy-Faith frenemy relationship. Dollhouse almost had a gay-themed episode, but that script didn't make it into the first 13 episodes. "I'm already thinking up ideas for the next 13 episodes," she added. "I'm dying to get back to the writers' room and tell more stories."

Images from Los Angeles Times (more at the link.)

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 clip above shows Sierra (Dichen Lachman) being programmed for the first time to become an empty vessel for the Dollhouse's rich clients.

And here's a clip of Echo waking up after having her latest memories erased. I think this one was floating around a while back, but we never featured it before:


And here's a couple more clips edited together. Echo gets recruited into the Dollhouse, plus FBI agent Paul Ballard interrogates someone he thinks knows about the mysterious operation:

Dollhouse erases your brains starting Feb. 13, 2009.
[SpoilerTV]

I'm not sure if these new promo pics are NSFW, but you might get some funny looks from your coworkers for looking at a couple of them, especially the "gun-toting wet-T-shirt contest" one. The poster definitely looks real, and the cast pic seems like a real pic, but not sure about the other ones. They're all from SpoilerTV.

Meanwhile, reader Diane33 points us to a newly leaked Dollhouse script, with a title page missing the writer, episode title and name of the show. It's either a very very good fake, a decent spec script, or an actual script for the show in desperate need of polishing up. It's clearly not the work of Joss Whedon or Jane Espenson, but could be the work of one of the show's other staff writers.

Update: Turns out it's actually a spec script written by fan writer Jackal.

The script includes some clever moments and some nice bits of characterization, but a lot of the dialogue is just a bit clunky and the characters are drawn more crudely than in other Dollhouse scripts I've read. In particular, Topher, the guy who programs the "Actives" with their personalities and instructions, is much more of a buffoon than he's been in other scripts. He keeps hitting on his female coworkers in a way that would probably get him mind-wiped and programmed to become a male stripper.

In spite of all that, I'm leaning towards thinking this script is "real," in the sense that it was actually written by a Dollhouse staff writer. The only other possibility is that its author spent hours and hours studying the show and attempting to emulate its little quirks and incorporating minor details from other scripts. And yes, fans are obsessive, but it seems unlikely.

In any case, if the script is real, it highlights just how trippy and swervy the show is going to get. And just how quickly Dollhouse will be giving us answers to key questions — some of the information in this script is stuff I would have expected the show to hold back until season two or three, but we keep hearing Fox asked Joss to ramp up the pace, so maybe he's obliged.

In a nutshell, the episode gives us the origin story of Echo, Eliza Dushku's "Active" character. Before she was Echo, her name was Caroline, and she ran away from home and then ended up signing the five-year contract at the Dollhouse.

In the unnamed episode, Caroline's mother Janice shows up and wants to hire Echo for a day — so Echo can be reprogrammed with Caroline's original memories. Janice and Caroline can spend a day rebuilding bridges, and then Caroline can go back to being Echo.

After much debate, the Dollhouse crew agrees to allow this to happen, but it quickly goes wrong. Caroline wakes up, disoriented, in her old house, and then freaks out and runs away. Somehow her "handler," Boyd, loses track of her. So the Dollhouse programs another "Active," Sierra, with Caroline's memories, so Sierra can help track Caroline down.

Meanwhile, we learn why Caroline was estranged from her mom, and why she decided to go become an empty vessel for hire. It turns out Caroline and her boyfriend broke into the headquarters of Rossum, an evil pharmaceutical company (which I think is linked to the Dollhouse.) Caroline's mom called the cops, and when Caroline's boyfriend tried to explain, the cops shot him.

Eventually, both Caroline's mom and the Dollhouse crew track Caroline down. But when Caroline hears that her mom is dying with stage four breast cancer, she doesn't want to go back to being Echo. She resists her programming, and even when the Dollhouse crew tries to erase her mind remotely, it just gives her a brief migraine. So they call in a SWAT team on her.

The SWAT team almost catches Caroline, but then FBI agent Paul Ballard miraculously swoops in and rescues her. Ballard is still trying to dig up dirt on the mysterious "Dollhouse," and in the episode's teaser he watched Echo and her friends serve as prostitutes to sting a drug dealer. Ballard's decided he's Echo/Caroline's "knight in shining armor," sort of.

So Echo/Caroline almost gets away, but the Dollhouse programs a third "Active," Victor, to be a bounty hunter. The newly skilled-up Victor pwns Paul and Boyd, and grabs Echo. She's taken back to the Dollhouse, where she screams and thrashes around as they slowly erase the day's events from her mind. But even after her mind is erased and she's returned to being Echo, she still remembers in some part of her. And when she's put in her coffin-like "bed," her eyes are silently pleading to be set free from her fancy prison.

(And meanwhile Boyd, her "handler," decides to quit the Dollhouse at the end of the episode, because all of this human trafficking is making him squicky.)

As I said, the script definitely moves the story forward at light speed, and increases the sense that Echo is inevitably going to break free of her conditioning altogether. There are also hints early on in the episode that she's thinking for herself a bit too much when she's supposed to be in her "blank" mode. It also massively ramps up the horror quotient of having Echo be a mental and physical prisoner in this compound that keeps her docile and mindless most of the time, because we see her struggling against it.

I suspect that, with some polishing by Joss and company, this script — if it is real — will turn out to be a pretty great episode, possibly even reminiscent of the Firefly episode "Ariel." And even if it's fake, it proves that Dollhouse can work as a twisty, suspensful thriller. I guess we'll find out sometime this spring.

Fox released a few new hot shots of our main lady Dushku looking tan, and ready to be programmed to be whoever or whatever you need. If you had a day with Dushku to be whatever you so desired, what would you want her programmed as. Me, I'd get a rough-and-tumble bully to go set my drum-playing upstairs neighbors straight. Get 'em butt kicking Echo on their loud asses.

Joss Whedon's world of programmable women and men in Dollhouse comes to Fox on January 13.

The clip, which first appeared on Michael Ausiello's Entertainment Weekly blog yesterday, shows Eliza Dushku's Echo waking up from a mindwipe, and her handlers - Topher (Fran Kranz) and Boyd (Harry Lennix) - discussing the (lack of) morality behind what they're up to. As much as I'm convinced that the series is in trouble, these two minutes are enough to make me hope that I'm wrong.

Watch Eliza Dushku's memories vanish! [EW.com]

Poniewozik's review is cautiously optimistic about the show's potential -

It was both better and worse than I expected, in different ways... Yes, this is certainly Joss Whedon trying to do What People Think Works on Broadcast TV Today—the legendary serial-procedural hybrid. But the first episode—in which Echo is imprinted with a kidnapping-negotiator's personality to secure the return of a rich man's abducted daughter—is well enough written to be absorbing. Writing a crime hour doesn't seem like Whedon's thing, but the episode is tight, suspenseful, with intriguing psychological twists and flashes of Whedonesque humor.

- but also entirely aware of the possible drawbacks of the series:

Dollhouse as conceived (a heroine plays a different "person" every week) is less a series concept than an actress' showcase, a sort of extreme version of an Alias undercover premise. (In fact, the reports of how the show was conceived have said that Dushku essentially broached the idea as a showcase.) And the actress being showcased is Eliza Dushku. Now, I have nothing against Dushku. I thought she was fine on Buffy. But she's not exactly Toni Collette (who's playing a multiple-personality case on Showtime's The United States of Tara, which I have not seen). Watching her inhabit her imprinted "personality"—a tough negotiator with secret vulnerabilities—I did not see her becoming another person. I thought: Oh, look! There's Eliza Dushku with glasses and her hair in a bun!

As someone who suffered through as much Tru Calling as I could handle (That'd be about ten minutes, if you're curious), I have to concede Poniewozik's point. After all the back-and-forth about shooting delays because of scripts not being good enough, will its star ultimately be its undoing?

Image from Entertainment Weekly.

I Have Seen Dollhouse [Tuned In]

Sure, the Doctor (version II, anyway) eventually got to tell Rose Tyler he loved her, and they shared a nice smooch in Doctor Who's season 4 finale. But if you watched the Confidential, you know that actors David Tennant and Billie Piper provided much sweatier minutes of mackage than the two-second bit that was deemed appropriate for the kiddies. (I suggest watching it in slow motion for maximum shortness of breath.)

If you're not yet excited to see Eliza Dushku stretch her thespian legs in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse — or turned on by Dexter's Desmond Harrington — you certainly will be after this little firebomb of a clip. Wrong Turn may be from a dumb horror movie that pits college students against cannibalistic mountain men, but it's certainly got one scorching moment in it, and here's the proof.

Julianne Moore is something like the duchess of psychological sci-fi horror, with impressive stints in movies like Children of Men and Blindness (we won't talk about Evolution). In this deleted scene from The Forgotten, she and Dominic West can barely keep their hands off each other — and so they don't.

The Iron Man trailer seemed to promise us an onscreen meeting of the lips between Robert Downey, Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, but it never quite happened. They did, however, film it, and this montage of set pictures gives us a glimpse of what could have been ... in Tony Stark's mouth.

All right, this last one isn't a kiss, but finding a cut kiss for this show would have been impossible: No kiss is too naughty for Torchwood. BBC Two did, however, draw the line at a Jack/Ianto crotch grab — so I guess it's a good thing we have the internet to show us the things that television won't dare to. John Barrowman and Gareth David-Lloyd are in top (and bottom) form in this thrilling deleted scene.

The fact that Whedon is now being so open about admitting that Dollhouse was in terrible trouble recently may, perversely, be a sign that the worst is over. Writes Whedon:

Yes, it's been hard and I've been depressing to be around for awhile. Basically, the Network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be. They bought something somewhat different than what I was selling them, which is not that uncommon in this business. Their desires were not surprising: up the stakes, make the episodes more stand-alone, stop talking about relationships and cut to the chase. Oh, and add a chase. That you can cut to. Nothing I hadn't heard before on my other shows (apparently my learning curve has no bendy part) but frustrating as hell given our circumstances - a pilot shot, scripts written, everybody marching together/gainfully employed... and then a shutdown. Glad I was for the breathing room, but it's hardly auspicious.

The most startling part of Whedon's update: it turns out that everything we were told about the original pilot was wrong. We've been told, over and over, that Dollhouse's original pilot would still air, as its second episode. The new pilot would be more of a standalone episode, introducing the show's premise in a fairly easy-to-digest way. And then the original pilot, which introduces a lot of long-running subplots and mysteries, would air the second week, to pull people in.

But now, it sounds as though the original pilot is just gone. Whedon says he even reshot most of that episode to try and salvage it, but it couldn't be saved:

The original pilot was in fact thrown out. Again, at my behest. Once it became clear what paradigm the Network was shooting for, it just didn't fit at all, even after I'd reshot more than half of it (see above re: despair). To get a sense of how completely turned around I was during this process, you should know there was a scene with Eliza and the astonishing Ashley Johnson that I wrote and shot completely differently three different times, with different characters in different places (actually I wrote it closer to eight times), and none of it will ever see air. Which is as it should be (though I'm determined to get Ms. Johnson back in the future). The scene just didn't belong anymore. Similarly, the character of November has fallen out of the mix, because the show simply moves too fast now for me to do what I wanted with her.

November (played by Miracle Laurie) was one of the "Actives," or programmable mind-wiped puppets, in the Dollhouse. She was described as "the Tracy Turnblad of the Dolls." Her character may pop up in Dollhouse season three, Joss jokes, but meanwhile, Laurie has a new role, as an FBI worker who pines after Tahmoh Penikett's agent Paul Ballard.

Other changes: plot developments that Joss had originally intended to hold back for a while are now coming out early. And some plot elements that he had wanted to introduce right away are being held back. Steven DeKnight, who wrote and directed an episode that helped redefine and save the show, isn't staying on. But Jane Espenson (Battlestar Galactica, Firefly) is joining the staff.

In any case, fear not — Joss says that he and the rest of the staff are re-energized by the new direction, and after feeling despondent and lost a month ago, they're now full of excitement again. Joss was so thrilled, he was able to write a new episode in record time — partly because he had to, but also because the words poured out of him. He says the network wasn't wrong to want the show to be "exciting and accessible," and the retooled version sounds like it'll be more upbeat. (And therefore, possibly, less likely to die quickly.) Joss adds:

Nothing essential has changed about the universe. The ideas and relationships that intrigued me from the start are all there (though some have shifted, more on that), and the progression of the first thirteen eps has me massively excited. The episode we're shooting now I wrote as fast as anything I have before, not because I had to (although, funny side-note: I had to) but because I couldn't stop the words from coming. Because I can feel the show talking to me; delighting, scaring and occasionally even offending me. It's alive. Alive! Which is a far cry from how I felt a month ago. It's been hilarious trying to keep up with what's in, what's out, who's met whom and when - we've shot all of the first seven episodes out of airing order - but it's come together in a pretty thrilling way.

There's much more, including Joss praising Eliza Dushku and riffing a lot, at the link. [Whedonesque] (Dollhouse Trailer Screencaps from All About Tahmoh)