One show that didn’t get cancelled was Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, and Fox was roundly criticized for allowing such an underperformer to limp into another season. Perhaps Fox wants to atone for its bungled handling of Whedon’s previous series Firefly, which was badly promoted, then prematurely dropped by the network, only to become a hit on DVD. But a more likely explanation is that Fox doesn’t have a show set to replace it.

To my mind, Firefly was a near-perfect TV series. By contrast Dollhouse is intriguing, but deeply flawed. The series concerns a secret compound called (you guessed it) the Dollhouse, where people – usually women, always good-looking – sign contracts to vacate their minds for a few years. Their memories are wiped clean and they are reprogrammed again and again with new personalities and skill sets to satisfy the whims of the Dollhouses’ upscale clientele. The main character is a woman named Caroline, who is signing five years of her life away – not because she wants to, but because she has no choice. Or more precisely, because she believes she has no choice. For all the gloss and glamour of the Dollhouse, we understand immediately that human trafficking is what’s happening here: Caroline is a desperate woman and she has a “choice” to be a Doll in the same way that people “choose” to become prostitutes or sell their spare kidneys. The idea of choice as a dramatic device is rarely used as deftly as Whedon uses it here.

In the pilot we meet Caroline and her handler / protector ( a noble ex-cop named Boyd who finds the whole idea of the Dollhouse distasteful), the CEO (Adele, the sort of venomous but high-class baddie who’d be right at home in a Hitchcock film) and the techno geek (Topher, providing comic relief along with the technobabble). We’re also introduced to dogged FBI agent Paul Ballard, who is obsessed with proving the existence of the Dollhouse. Ballard’s colleagues think he’s crazy – the Dollhouse is regarded as an urban legend. Each episode tracks Caroline (renamed Echo) as she becomes a different person – a hostage negotiator, a dominatrix, an outdoorswoman, etc, and follows Paul Ballard as he works his way closer to center of the mysterious organization that runs the place.

Again, this is interesting stuff, but it doesn’t completely work.

An obvious flaw in the premise – one that’s been pointed out elsewhere – is that there is little a Doll can do that a regular human being can't. Wealthy clients can find high-priced call girls who will do anything and everything the Dolls can do on the show; and even the less obvious uses for the Dolls – as made-to-order forensic specialists and assassins and spies – are skills that can be procured through conventional means too, for what I imagine would be a competitive price.

The concept of the Dollhouse, therefore, keeps banging its shins on a peculiar problem: what does the Dollhouse offer that you can’t get anywhere else? In the pilot episode, special agent Ballard argues that it’s the authenticity of experience: the Dolls really believe they are the people they are programmed to be and therefore provide a more satisfying fantasy for the client. But this seems like a pretty small hook upon which to hang an extremely expensive, difficult, secretive, labor-intensive and morally dubious enterprise – especially when you take into account the Dollhouse’s spectacular potential for failures, such as the maniacal Doll-gone-wrong named Alpha.

Now, it’s pretty clear that the real agenda of the Dollhouse has yet to be revealed, and I suspect there will be a sinister revelation that the Dollhouse is reprogramming people in the highest levels of government and industry. But such a revelation seems trivial compared to the real potential of the Dollhouse technology, which has been introduced rather off-handedly by Whedon, and which actually suggests that the Dollhouse itself is a rather tawdry sideline to what should be the main business.

About halfway through the first season one of Adele’s close friends dies, a friend who’d had her memories recorded at the Dollhouse months earlier. Because of this, Adele imprints the body of a Doll with the memories of the dead woman, essentially resurrecting her.

Up until this point, the Dolls were not necessarily seen as real, complete people, but rather composite sketches of people – a narrow band of memories and experiences that would allow them to complete a task over a few days or so. If more than one skill was needed (fishing + horsemanship + engine rebuilding) they could be so programmed. Not entirely convincing, but okay.

But suddenly we’re supposed to believe not only that complete human minds can be accurately downloaded onto a computer hard drive – as accurately as a copy of Microsoft Vista – and then transferred into any human body, but that Rossum, the company that runs the Dollhouse, didn’t immediately run out and patent this process. Because what you’re talking about is, effectively, immortality.

Something tells me you wouldn’t have trouble finding a market for that.

In the 1970s John Varley wrote quite a lot about a future in which you go to a special shop that periodically does backups to your mind and your memories, to be downloaded into a new cloned body if you should step in front of a bus (or get murdered, as happens in his short story The Phantom of Kansas). That's the world that Dollhouse implies, but oddly, it isn't the one we're being shown.