Featured: Joss Whedon's Dollhouse

[foolish_m0rtal]

The Dollhouse doesn't exist. Or does it?  Merely an urban legend in Los Angeles, there are some who say it can't happen and others swear it is real. An organization full of mind wiped people (dolls) who have new personalities (including memory, muscle memory, skills, and language) downloaded into them like organic flashdrives. Any personality, anything you want.

 

 

The show follows one doll Echo as she is imprinted with new personas and sent out on assignments(referred to as engagements). The new persona is an amalgam of several real people, and the end result necessarily incorporates both strengths and flaws from the template personalities.
The Actives that are hired out for particular jobs to clients(who pay large sums of money for engagements) are monitored internally (and remotely) by their individual Handlers, who keep watch on them from a safe location in the field in case the assignment FUBARs.

Past Assignments:
1) Bank robbers need a safe cracker to get into an art dealer's personal collection
2) Man wants to spend the weekend in the outdoors with his perfect woman
3) A man needs a hostage negotiator to get his daughter back from kidnappers
4) Woman resurrects herself to solve her own murder

Coolest Assignment for Sierra: Stealing from the NSA

In between engagements dolls are mind-wiped into a child-like state and live in a futuristic dormitory/laboratory, a hidden facility nicknamed "The Dollhouse". The Dollhouse is located somewhere in Los Angeles and is a subsidiary of a mysterious research group known as the Rossum Corporation.

 

As we follow Echo, we also learn about what drove her to voluneer to be a doll, stories of other dolls (mainly Victor and Sierra, though Tango is mentioned briefly and Alpha and November are present throughout the story), and the darkness in the past of the Dollhouse itself.

Although the Actives are ostensibly volunteers who work for a period of five years, the operation is highly illegal and under constant threat on one end from Paul Ballard (Helo Agathon from Battlestar Galactica!), a determined federal agent who is obsessed with finding the Dollhouse, and a rogue Active, "Alpha", on the other.

The show incorporates Joss Whedon's classic humour and his trademark family units. (not so much this season, but the beginnings of one) Hopefull if the series is renewed for another season, we will see more of this awesome series by the incomparable Joss.
Season finale is next week.