Word: echoing
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...exactly. Echo's "engagements"--ranging from deadly capers to prostitution--are real. That spa treatment is a sometimes painful process in which her personality and all memory of her missions are erased. And her luxury digs, called the Dollhouse, are the headquarters of a secret illegal business where she and other blank-canvas "actives" are programmed with new personalities to do hush-hush jobs for the superrich. (See the top 10 TV series...
Writer-producer Joss Whedon has played with the conventions of monster stories (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel), space sagas (Firefly) and comic books (Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). Now, with Dollhouse (Fox, Fridays, 9 p.m. E.T.), he tries dystopian sci-fi. Echo is not a slave, technically; she goes to the Dollhouse after having run into unspecified trouble as an idealistic college grad named Caroline. The deal: if she becomes an active, the company makes her problem go away--along with all her memories. The threads running through this ambitious serial: Who was she? And what...
...perfect at the Dollhouse. Echo has begun to recover memories, and the actives show a tendency to occasionally go haywire. It turns out that human memory is like an analog cassette tape: overwrite it too many times, and you start to hear the ghosts of old voices. Actives are meant to be clean slates, with no messy human baggage. But as preamnesia Echo notes, "You ever try cleaning an actual slate? You can always see what was on it before...
...affectless tabulae rasae--like children or especially pretty, dumb actors.) Some of those people, like the voices on an old laugh track, are now dead. Which raises questions: What does it mean to be alive? What is the Dollhouse's obligation to the people whose memories it "resurrects"? Is Echo herself, Caroline or the sum of her borrowed parts...
...Echo has a different assignment each episode--the three sent for review are a hostage case, a wilderness adventure and a heist caper--which makes Dollhouse a kind of drama-school exercise for Whedon and Dushku. The genre-hopping Whedon is up to the task; his hostage-negotiation story would make a crisp pilot for a CBS procedural. And he unsettlingly conveys the actives' experience of living a constantly interrupted dream. ("Did I fall asleep?" they ask after each treatment.) But Dushku, memorable as the bad-girl Faith in Buffy, isn't much of a chameleon. She's passably callow...