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Welcome to the Dollhouse Premier

The time has finally come. Welcome to the Dollhouse starts tomorrow evening.

I first posted about this last June (New Show for Faith) and I've been waiting anxiously ever since. Eliza Dushku is a great little actress. Her Faith character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was played to perfection, in my opinion, and she's gorgeous to boot.

Joss Whedon is directing, of course, and will be adding his unique vision to story and set. I loved the way he did Buffy, but for some reason Firefly didn't grab me at all. Just a personal thing, somehow.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from the Calgary Herald that lay out the basic premise of this series:

Dollhouse is part TV adventure/mystery, part social commentary about the illusions people often trap themselves in.

Eliza
Dushku plays Echo, one of a handful of unknowing subjects whose
personas are wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of
new identities and personalities, depending on the assignment at hand.
Language facility, social skills, past memories and required physical
abilities are programmed, erased and then reprogrammed for each
assignment. Handlers accompany the reprogrammed subject women, called
"Actives" or "Dolls," into the field, where hardly anything ever goes
wrong.

That whole concept of downloadable personality is a favorite in SciFi. William Gibson's people had sockets behind their ears where they could insert modules to give them skills they didn't otherwise have. The Matrix did the same thing, except of course that the whole thing took place in VirtualReality, so a physical socket wasn't necessary. (Did that last even make sense? Can a manifestation in VR have a physical socket behind the ear? Arrrrgggh!). Finally, there was a very black SciFi novel about a future where soldiers' personalities and skills were downloaded into available bodies so they could fight battles. When they were killed they were inserted into another. Their entire existence was to be killed, resurrected and fight again in battle after battle.

In the real world, the premise of Dollhouse may be closer than you think. We already have computer augmention for blind people and Parkinsons patients. In Britain, a research team is sure they can capture a person's personality and memories on a chip. If they succeed, implantation in a clone will probably not be far behind. Who knows what sort of world will exist a century from now?

Don't forget, too, that many lawmakers of the old school see education as the process of doing exactly the same thing, ie producing perfect little plug-in clones to be used as necessary by business and industry. Thank goodness this is no longer mainstream.

So there you have it folks. Check out Eliza's new show and let me know what you think. Me, I'm going home to program my VCR because I'll be at work when it airs.

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