Dushku's Echo Takes The Apple In 'Dollhouse'

The big question looming is, what is the show really about?

Whedon has said in a number of interviews that he came up with the show's concept during a lunch meeting with star Eliza Dushku, best remembered as bad-girl slayer Faith in Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"It came from my conversation with Eliza about her, about her life, her career, about what everybody wanted from her, what they wanted her to become and what she was trying to become," Whedon said in an interview the recent upfront presentation for Fox. "That's really what the show is about. It's about plumbing the depths of our identity."

Dushku plays the show's protagonist Echo, a member of an underground, illegal group of people called "Actives," who've had their personalities wiped clean, enabling them to be imprinted with any number of new personalities to carry out missions arranged by their handlers. The Actives live in a facility called the Dollhouse, where they don't recall any of their programming or their missions. Then, Echo begins to remember things she isn't supposed to remember. She starts to experience self-awareness and is compelled to find the truth about her identity.

"The exciting thing -- and part of the other reason I created the show -- is that Eliza is very versatile, and this will be a chance for her to play 100 different people," Whedon said. "They'll all be her -- she's not going to wear old-person makeup or anything like that -- but they'll all be from very different social strata, with very different agendas and very different motivations and very different things. Every week [Echo] will have an agenda that's evil or decent or sexual or romantic or altruistic. It can be anything.

"It's sort of taking the role of a Frankenstein monster and saying, 'Who am I? Who created me? Why am I like this? What's good about me? What's bad about me? What's eternal about me? And what's just evanescent?' And everyone in the show is dealing with that same issue, but for a different reason. That, to me, is the heart of the thing: 'Well, who are we?'"

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