Dollhouse

I love the high concept of Dollhouse (SciFi), Joss Whedon’s latest small-screen project. A secret facility full of people who have their brains and personalities periodically wiped so they can be imprinted with new ones and hired out as bespoke assassins/midwives/escorts for wealthy clients? And one of them, Echo (played by Eliza Dushku), finds her "real" self straining to rise through the multiple mindscrapes she has endured since entering the Dollhouse? And from the man who brought us the wit and wisdom of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Bring it on! Let us caper with concepts of reality, individuality and self! Let us ask if every mindwipe is a kind of murder! Are we more than the sum of our memories? Is anonymity true freedom?

All these questions, however, have so far gone unanswered because one other dwarfs the rest. Namely, can Eliza Dushku act? As the alternative vampire slayer Faith, she was always the weakest link (if we ignore the mercifully brief emergence of Kendra) in Buffy - an ass-kicking sexbomb, yes, but in scenes that required her to do more than scissor-kick, toss her hair or undulate suggestively, she was agonising to watch. And in Tru Calling, which removed the asskicking from her repertoire and forced her to tone down the animalistic seductions to mere mortal levels, her screen presence became disconcertingly bovine.

She may have had the production deal at Fox that enabled the series to get made, but asking her to essay a different character every week while trying to evoke some lingering essence of the woman she was on entering the Dollhouse is an exercise in futility. All it does is make you miss Sarah Michelle Gellar’s quicksilver actorly intelligence so badly that it starts to hurt. Perhaps if someone could erase the memory of her and imprint us all with Dushku as the new quality benchmark, we could sit back and enjoy. Until then, we can only hope that Whedon finds a way to realise the subject’s potential without his leading lady’s help. It’s a matter of keeping the (lower-case) faith.