Dollhouse

What if you could be anyone?

What if you could do anything?

If your memories were erased, again and again, would there be anything left of you?

These are the questions to be examined in Joss Whedon’s new TV show "Dollhouse," starring Eliza Dushku, premiering Friday, Feb. 13 on FOX. Other, equally important questions to be answered are: Can Eliza Dushku convincingly play several different people every episode? Will viewers tune in and follow a storyline guaranteed to be as psychological as it is action-packed? Will viewers tune in at all on a Friday night, in enough numbers to satisfy FOX?

My quick review, for those "don’t tell me anything, la la la I can’t hear you" people who are avoiding even the slightest hint of plot: It’s good. It’s going to get even better. Watch it.

For everyone else, the concept is a simple one. There’s a super-super-secret place called the Dollhouse. For the right price you can get anyone you want, for (presumably) any task. Want the perfect girlfriend, the perfect assassin, the perfect musician, the perfect hostage negotiator, the perfect spy, the perfect, I don’t know, backgammon player? The happily amoral folks at the Dollhouse will take your money and your specs, create that personality and download it, including skills, experiences, and muscle memory, into an "Active," a person whose own memory has been completely removed. The Active utterly becomes that newly created person, thinking and acting as such, until the assignment is over, whereupon the Active will feel a compulsion to return to the Dollhouse for a "treatment." The new memories get wiped and the Active is returned to a blank, gently puzzled state to await the next job.

dollhouse2.jpgSimple, easy to follow, straight-forward, only this is a Joss Whedon show so you know that can’t last.

The Active we’re following is Echo, played by Eliza Dushku. As the becoming-legendary story goes, she had a development deal with FOX and took Whedon to lunch to pump his brain for ideas. After they observed that everyone still sees her as "Faith" from "Buffy" without getting an idea of her range, Whedon went to the bathroom and came back with the name of the show, the storyline for the pilot, and several of the episodes already mapped out. This is the sort of thing that makes writers hate Whedon just a little bit.

And while there are many excellent actors in "Dollhouse" — Olivia Williams plays Adelle DeWitt, the person running the place; Harry Lennix is Boyd Langdon, the Actives’ handler and DeWitt’s unrequested moral compass; Tahmoh Penikett is the relentlessly persistent FBI Agent Paul Ballar; Fran Kranz as neurotech wizard Topher Brink; Reed Diamond is Laurence Domini, DeWitt’s hard-edged security man; Whedon-alum Amy Acker as the scarred and silent Dr. Claire Saunders, medical doctor for the Actives, and the Actives themselves (Victor, played by Enver Gjokaj, and Sierra, played by Dichen Lachman) — the show’s success lies squarely on Dushku’s shoulders. Can she play the part, or parts, and make us believe it?

In the first episode, "Ghost," she makes a good start. We get a few glimpses of her past before we see her in several guises: party girl, harsh professional, and blank slate Active. Dushku still has some mannerisms she’ll need to lose before we believe she’s really become a new person — and I can’t help seeing some Faith in there, still — but she does a good job and I think she’ll get better. We get a hint that maybe her personality is a little stronger than the Dollhouse people are used to, and a startling peek at what may be waiting for her in her future.

We also get a feel for the rest of the cast, as every one of them gets some screen time that shows off their place in the story. And surprise! Almost all of them have conflicting desires and hidden agendas. Besides Echo, the two we learn the most about are Langdon, the handler and ex-cop, who is getting a little more involved in the Active’s cases than he should be, and Topher Brink, who apparently has no problem at all mucking with people’s brains and will tell you why, at length.

This is a show that grabs your attention slowly, and works its way into your brain more with re-watchings. The initial 10 or 15 minutes of the first episode started off gradually for me, and the rest isn’t exactly nonstop raging, exploding violence. It’s as close to a procedural show as Whedon’s ever gotten, with more real-world interaction. There’s also not as much humor as his fans have come to expect, although Topher Brink is clearly the one getting the best quotes (from a promo clip: "This is cutting-edge science in a house full of hot chicks!"). But it got my attention, it held my interest, and even after watching it again I found more new details and new questions every time.

There are warring personalities inside the company itself. There’s a somewhat obsessive cop devoted to hunting the place down. There are jobs that won’t go quite right. There are the hidden histories of the Actives’ pasts. There are the hidden mysteries of the pasts of the implanted personalities, one of which surfaces in the first episode. There are other threats to the Dollhouse looming. There’s the ongoing ethical issues of playing with someone’s memories. And despite those memory wipes, Echo seems to be remembering things...

This isn’t "Buffy," with pop culture references, teen slang and makeup monsters, or "Firefly," with space travel and an invented society. This is something new, something different.

This is "Dollhouse," a psychological thriller that will bring you back the next week, and the next.

"Dollhouse" premieres Friday night, Feb. 13, at 9 p.m. (right after the newly scheduled "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," which isn’t a bad pairing at all).