Echo

I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan. He's responsible for giving us Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. If you're not aware of this guy or any of the above-mentioned tv shows, please take a peek from under that rock you live and Wiki it. You will not regret it :-).

Dollhouse is the latest television show from Whedon and ran from Feb 2009 until Jan 2010. It's about a fictitious (hopefully ;-) organization which runs an underground operation of actives. Actives are people who have signed their life away to this organization for five years. Their minds are scrubbed clean of any personality or memories which are stored away on a hard drive. The actives are then used by the Dollhouse as clients require it. Need a negotiator? Not a problem. The Dollhouse can create an entire personality and put it inside any of it's actives to create exactly what you need. These actives are not pretending - they are who they've been programmed to be.

The show focuses on one active in particular - Echo. She and some of the other actives slowly become self-aware even in their scrubbed doll-state. This begs quite a few questions - does the soul exist? Can you be you without any memories or personality? What's your essence? Nature versus nurture and so on. The show touches on this without becoming too much of a philosophy lecture :-).

The technology that was created to program minds is also quite scary. I immediately thought of splitting the atom - amazing science, but used for war. And that's what usually happens with any new scientific breakthrough. We use it selfishly to gain the most power. Something similar happens in Dollhouse as well.

Awesome show - hot women kicking ass as different people each week - what more do you want :-D?