Despite a couple of flaws — which I'll get to in a bit — "Belle Chose" was Exhibit A for how great Dollhouse can be when the concept is handled right. So it's not surprising that it was written by Tim Minear, the man who gave us Firefly's "Out Of Gas" and many of Angel's best episodes.

So what's the secret these two men share? They're both in positions of great power — the college professor is tenured and at the zenith of his career, the serial killer is wealthy and connected. But neither of them can have what they want, and their fantasies about women remain tantalizingly out of reach. That's frequently the larger thread of Dollhouse: The wealthy may already own your bodies and souls, but they want to own your hearts and minds as well. They always have some unfinished business, something that people (usually women) are unable to give them freely for whatever reason.

The professor wants a young, impressionable, none-too-smart student (named Kiki!) whom he can teach and condescend to, in a sort of Educating Rita pastiche that turns pornographic. It's not just that he wants a student to sleep with him to get an "A" — watch those scenes where he tells her about Chaucer. (Or "Chauncey," as she insists on calling him, in a lovely reference to Being There.) And even though the professor really does have all the power in this situation — even disregarding the meta-point that Kiki only exists because he had the Dollhouse create her — he wants to teach Kiki that she really has all the power. He trots out the standard second-wave feminist analysis of Chaucer's Wife Of Bath as empowered woman, who uses sexuality to get what she wants. Traditionally, people viewed the Wife Of Bath as a harlot, a cautionary tale for women, but it became fashionable to view her as a feminist heroine instead.

Here's the Wife Of Bath giving the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, a hand job — from Pasolini's Canterbury Tales movie:

As that montage up top makes clear, the professor and the serial killer, Terry, both have the same fantasy about women: that the women are in control, that they're constantly using their sexuality to gain advantage, and that the men are helpless. (The only difference is, the professor enjoys this fantasy, and insists the women aren't whores — Terry thinks they are.)

So Terry, the serial killer, collects "Dolls" of his own — but instead of the mindwiped, programmed puppets the Dollhouse supplies, he creates his own, injecting people with paralytic drugs and then turning them into human mannequins — they each represent one of the women in Terry's family, who ignore him and leave him out of their games. If you really had any doubt that Dollhouse is a metaphor for how powerful people objectify and mistreat everyone, especially women, then the opening scenes of this episode ought to have set you straight.

The underlying metaphors in "Belle Chose" are by no means subtle — and that's a big part of what I love them for. They come right out and say it: the professor, a model Dollhouse client whose fantasy is incredibly harmless and almost sweet, is directly compared, again and again, to the serial killer who kidnaps women, injects them with crap, and turns them into his fully poseable figures. Both men are in denial, both men are blinded by fantasies about female power that excuse their abuse of women. And when the two finally meet — it doesn't really go well for either of them.

Because, of course, the episode takes a weird left turn about two-thirds of the way through — the serial killer's been downloaded into Victor's body, and thanks to the foolishness of Saul Tigh (helping out his fellow artifiicial person) the VictorOfTheLambs character gets out and about. So Topher tries to shut down Victor/Terry — only to swap Victor's and Echo's imprints. So now Echo is imprinted with the misogynistic serial kiler, while Victor thinks he's a hot teenage girl. Cue weird woman-hating stuff from Echo, while Victor flirts with a bunch of boys and nearly gets gay-bashed. it's almost too over the top, but it works — partly because it's great to see one more weird use of the Dollhouse's brain-switching tech.

But yeah, there were a couple of major flaws in the episode that did lose it a bit of its sheen of awesomeness:

Flaw #1: The incompetence of the Dollhouse is staggering. I mean, really. This is starting to damage my suspension of disbelief. The moment where Adelle actually turns to Topher and says something along the lines of, "We've imprinted our active with the mind of a serial killer and turned him loose — and he has no GPS locator!" made me giggle. When the characters themselves comment on how incompetent they're being, it's a bad sign. I also think Professor Skankypants should get a refund.

Flaw #2: The last act was a little bit of a let down. I'm not sure where you could go with this episode, after Echo was imprinted with Terry's sick mind, but having Echo turn into the episode's monster (which sort of happened last week as well) was a bit disappointing. And then Echo gives a long speech in which she tries to convince the three captive women to kill her — why not just have them tie Echo up? The longer Echo's speech dragged on, the less concerned I was that Terry's persona was going to reassert control, and the more I felt like the episode was just spinning its wheels.

But meanwhile, the episode also packed a ton of other awesomeness:

Adelle is amazing. Her double act with Boyd was one of the major highlights of the show, especially "There is no need to continue to translate me." And then she switches, seamlessly, into an equally great double act with Ballard, where she handles the uncle and he handles the evil nephew. So great.

All of the stuff with Paul learning to be Echo's handler was terrific — this is the first time we've seen what happens to the Actives after they're programmed, and the scenes of Echo getting a makeover were a much-needed bright spot. Echo/Kiki being all bouncy and giggly while the campy costuming guy tells her she's won a free makeover were great.

And of course, Paul is totally in love with Echo — this episode pretty much broadcast it. The whole Fast Times At Ridgemont sequence where Paul watches Echo in the shower and then watches her act flirty later on, in extreme slow-mo. That's not your standard concerned handler look — that's a seriously schmoopy/lustful look. I kind of want them to have Anthony Stewart Head guest star, so he can raise one eyebrow and say, "A Handler in love with an Active? Fascinating."

Oh, and it's official: Dr. Claire Saunders is missing, both in the sense that nobody knows where she is, and in the sense that we miss her. A lot. And it's sounding like despite Boyd's amazing tallness, Adelle really will go over his head and have Claire dragged, kicking and acting her heart out, back to the Dollhouse.

Fox announced the move via press release (which also revealed that Joss Whedon would be writing and directing the season premiere, although I'm not sure many people didn't expect that), leading to some speculation that the move was due to more production problems or Fox interference. The Hollywood Reporter's Live Feed blog, however, suggests a much more benign reason:

With production starting in late July, the network pushed back the start date to ensure that episodes would run consecutively.

Equally likely to influence Fox's decision is the fact that the move also allows them the chance to give the much-buzzed Glee an encore performance in Dollhouse's place in the original timeslot.

Even if many people may be secretly hoping for more Dollhouse disaster (Hey, it makes for good headlines!), we may be in for a surprisingly stable year for the show — especially with Tim Minear coming on board as an Executive Producer and the network getting a clear demonstration of the audience goodwill it's engendered. Could this be the chance the show needed to truly shine?

Syfy Creative Director of Original Programming Mark Stern sat with us and talked about the new reboot we're all eagerly awaiting, which is the Tim Minear (Angel, Dollhouse, Firefly) reboot of Alien Nation. And as it turns out, they're still trying to get Quantum Leap back on the air as well.

You just announced Syfy's plans to reboot Alien Nation, was it your idea to go after that series?

Alien Nation has been [one of] three or four shows that I want to do. I want to do those shows, at least one of them. And yet again, if you're going to go and do Alien Nation, you'd better do it the right way, same as with Battlestar. We've been talking to a number of writers, since I got here, about Alien Nation. What's the right approach, how do you do it so it feels relevant? And Tim Minear came in with a great approach to it, that really felt like it didn't just tell the same story again, and it was still really true to what Alien Nation was about.

So that worked. I would love to find our time travel show — whether it's literally Quantum Leap — and we've been talking to Don Bellisario [show creator] about [doing] that as a possibility, because what is the next really great time travel series.

Where are you with that what are you pitching at Bellisario a darker take or a Eureka-esque whimsical time travel series, it really could go either way?

I honestly don't know. Every three or four months, we take Don out to lunch and see how he's doing and where his head's at. Whether he's ready to kind of go into that world again. It's a process, and the same is true with Alien Nation. You need to gestate and take time. What you don't want to do is rush into them and just say "okay, it's out version of this," and it's not good. We definitely always have our eye on the great shows from the past. But really our focus is on what the new stuff is.

When it was mentioned that Tim Minear was going to dabble with the Starsky and Hutch feel to Alien Nation, people were a bit surprised. They thought the show would be going darker. Can you give our readers an idea what you and Tim have in mind for Alien Nation?

You know it's very early, but I do think what Tim wants to do, which is very much what Ron Moore and David Eick did with Battlestar, is take what was great about that franchise, which was obviously the relationship between these two different people and these two different cultures, and find a way to make it relevant to the things we care about today. Is it going to be darker? I don't know what the tone is going to be yet, honestly. Tim is not a dark writer, he comes from a very different place. He wants it to be more than just frivolous and silly. It's going to have to attack a lot of the same themes that the original series and the movie did. But it really has to feel like there's something new there, like this isn't the same old. I wish I could give you more specifics, but we really just had that first pitch meeting with him where he said, "This is what we want to do," and we said, "That sounds fantastic. Let's do it." Now it's really about him pulling it together.

And I have to ask, will aliens still have the spotted skulls?

Man, I have no idea. I really don't. I'm sure, you know there's no Battlestar without cylons. They'll definitely be our version of cylons, I don't know what that will be yet. The thing is that's the challenge of all of those. Hold on to what's really great, what's cool about it, what makes you want to watch it, what you remember about it, and update it. It's a very fine line you're treading.

The original 80s feature gave birth to a Fox series that focused on the lives of a bunch of newly landed, spotty headed aliens and their integration into human society. Specifically, it was a buddy cop show between alien detective George Francisco and his human partner Matthew Sikes.

Minear explained to Variety how he's going to bring back this buddy-cop classic:

It's genre mixed with procedural mixed with funny and mixed with big, giant scary. I love serialized stuff, but this is also a cop franchise. That 'Starsky and Hutch'/'Lethal Weapon' buddy cop comedy is absent from TV right now.

The reboot will most likely take place in the Pacific Northwest, 20 years after the UFO crashes onto our planet. So the aliens have had some time to assimilate to Earthling life. The trades claim that the alien population will have grown to about 3.5 million and most of the others will have their own segregated habitat in something similar to the "North African ghettos in France."

So now you can all stop clamoring about District 9 simply being a copy of Alien Nation, because we're actually going to have an updated copy of Alien Nation. Will alien intolerance replace the post 9/11 themes that were created from shows like Battlestar Galactica? But more importantly will audiences care about the plight of an alien?

[Variety]

Joss Whedon famously said that a movie is an answer, but a television show is a question. His first TV show, Buffy, asked pretty much the same question in every episode of its first season: can a young woman who's called upon to save the world also have a normal life? But Dollhouse has managed to ask a new (and weird) question with each episode. You may not have liked all the questions it's asked so far, but at least it's stayed lively.

Last night's episode, of course, had a classic A/B plot structure - with a dash of Tahmoh Penikett's FBI Agent Ballard digging for dirt on the Dollhouse.

In the "A" plot, there's a crazay religious cult in Arizona, and an overzealous ATF agent needs an excuse to bust the ex-con cult-leader. So a U.S. Senator gets the Dollhouse to turn Echo (Eliza Dushku) into a blind religious zealot... whose eyes are turned into actual cameras, in one of the series' more science fictional premises so far. This means that Echo does not wear halter tops, tube tops, miniskirts, thigh-high boots or babydoll dresses - so it's a big change for the series right there. (Based on the previous episodes, I was sure the scary religious cult was going to have an all-miniskirt uniform for female members.)

And then in the "B" plot, as showcased above, Victor (Enver Gjokaj) has been getting inappropriate erections during his mindwiped "doll" state. He's supposed to be a loverboy when he's programmed to be one, but when he's in neutral, he's supposed to be perfectly childlike and asexual, hence those coed showers. The show has stressed how dehumanizing and wrong the Dollhouse's methods are in previous episodes, but I suspect that this visceral example probably hit home a lot harder, especially with the male viewers. And it definitely adds a new dimension to the whole "prostitution" aspect of the show's premise - unlike, say, Firefly's empowered Inara, the "Actives" only have sexuality when it's convenient for their owners. Oh, and it's officially true now that Echo is not the only Active experiencing glitches. The whole storyline is played for laughs, but it's super disturbing once you stop and contemplate it - especially the idea that Victor is being "scrubbed."

As for the "A" plot, I liked it a lot better than I expected to. At first, I thought, "Oh, it's ripped from the headlines - of the early 1990s." But then I found myself liking its Big Love-esque crazy compound people more than I expected. For one thing, it took the obvious observation - hey, these cult people are brainwashed, and so is Echo! - and got it out of the way in the first five minutes. And then never referred to it again. (A lesser writer would have built up to that observation over the whole course of the episode, and then unveiled it with a big "Ta-da" at the end.) For another, the cult members had just enough personality not to feel like total sheep, especially the one woman who kept saying things like, "This is just like Zion Ranch!" and actually challenging Jonas the crazy cult leader from time to time. Also, the plot moved fast enough that I didn't feel too bogged down in the "are these cult people really bad or not" question, with the ATF agents moving in by the episode's midpoint.

Oh, and the scene where the drill is descending towards Echo's eye, while her handler Boyd talks about her skill at "getting in" to places, was really fucked up and awesome.

And then you had the "miracle" where Echo's sight gets restored, which is a nice twist to throw in. It has all sorts of theological resonances, including the whole Saul of Tarsus thing the episode mentions early on. And it leads to a fun debate about the "meaning" of Echo's miracle - does it mean they should all light themselves on fire and expect another miracle to save them? Or does it mean, as Echo says, that she got her sight back so she could lead them out of there. Any episode which leads up to someone saying, "God brought me here. He has a message for you. And that message is, 'Move your ass!'" I so totally want that embroidered and framed on my wall.

It didn't hurt that last night's episode, "True Believer," was written by Tim Minear, author of many of the best Angel and Firefly episodes. (Including the Firefly episode "Out Of Gas.") A man who could write an hour of television about two old men playing Scrabble, and it would rock.

People accuse Dollhouse of getting off to a slow start because the first half-dozen episodes are meant to be newbie friendly. But actually, it feels to me as if the plot is rocketing along at top speed. Not only is Echo showing tons of signs of awareness and selfhood, but her owners at the Dollhouse are noticing. They're even having conflicts over how to handle it. The nominal boss, Adelle DeWitt, wants to make use of Echo's somewhat greater resourcefulness, but her underling Mr. Dominic (aka Journeyman's brother) sees Echo as a liability. And Dominic has a point - Echo is showing signs similar to the ones the rogue Active, Alpha, showed before his "Composite Event." (And it seems like Alpha is trying to make that happen.)

So, to sum up... I loved the "B" plot, about Victor's erections, and what they mean, and what to do about them. The livestock are getting out of control! And I sorta liked the "A" plot, a lot more than I thought I would. As for the stuff about Agent Ballard, I would happily watch Tahmoh Penikett play Scrabble for an hour, even if it wasn't written by Tim Minear, and he definitely had a few cute moments. And he's making progress, even if it's only because Alpha is spoon-feeding him. And soon, Ballard and Echo meet!

What did you think?

The idea is those with the money or connections can access this secret highly illegal facility where they can basically fulfill their greatest fantasies. Most people assume that means sex—and on an occasion it does, because that is a lot of people's fantasies—but it's basically scenarios. They can basically reenact scenarios of romance, adventure or anything perfectly, because they become the person that you want them to be—they become that person.

Fox has already committed to seven episodes of this show, and Angel/Firefly producer Tim Minear will be involved too. Joss has already pitched all seven storylines, in advance of the looming writers' strike. It's a vehicle for Dushku, who already had the deal at Fox. Here's hoping the network gives it the same chance that Tru Calling got. Image by Andrew H. Walker, Getty Images.

Best News Ever! [E! Online]