Dollhouse

I could weep with relief, couldn’t you? Just as those who persevered with the first season of The Wire found their faith rewarded after the first few episodes, so Joss Whedon’s latest venture – Dollhouse – has finally kicked into gear.

Whedon had promised in an interview that it would. He described the first five episodes as "baby steps" but after that, he assured us, his "vision" would emerge. For the fans that had followed the troubled genesis of the show, this was largely decoded as "I couldn’t stop Fox fiddling with the opening episodes like a barrelload of commercially panicked monkeys until I fobbed them off with plentiful shots of a half-naked Eliza Dushku and Tamoh Peniket. Now they’re keeping their horrible, darting hands to themselves, thank the freaking Lord."

Episodes one through five were indeed tentative. The central premise (people, known as Dolls or Actives, are kept in a secret facility, having their own personalities erased and new ones imprinted at the whim of those rich enough to pay for the privilege of having a bespoke hooker, assassin, midwife, hooker, bodyguard, hooker) took too long to become clear. Thereafter, it staggered among so many illogicalities that it became increasingly difficult to believe that there could be any overarching explanation for it all.

As well as lacking a narrative heart, it lacked an emotional one too. Whedon’s most celebrated creation, Buffy, gathered the Scooby gang about her from the beginning, and the centre held while the supernatural horrors multiplied around them. But in Dollhouse, although you might feel sympathy for the inmates’ plight, it was virtually impossible, to care about characters who, by definition, don’t have any.

After these baby steps, however, the show did indeed suddenly find its feet. A Dollhouse infiltrator uses Dushku’s character Echo to tell the ex-cop trying to prove its existence that the facility has branches everywhere, plugged into government and industry complexes and serving a deeper purpose than hi-tech prostitution. An X-Files type myth arc beckons irresistibly.

Backstories are provided for some of the main Dolls, which at last humanises them and makes them more than vehicles for woolly questions about the nature of men’s souls. It’s still in no danger of being mistaken for Buffy, not least because Dushku – a two-note actor at best – remains an odd choice for such a demanding, 20-personalities-a-season role, but at least now there is the sense that Whedon has his steady hand on the tiller and is steering now in a purposeful direction. Roll on season two.

Dollhouse is on the Sci Fi channel on Tuesdays at 9pm.