Okay, so, this is a serious request: can anybody come up with a great way of selling Dollhouse to average joe (not to be confused with Joe The Plumber) in a few sentences?

I haven't watched it, yet. I saw the first couple of minutes with Eliza's character being coerced into signing up for five years, and I saw her on the motorcycle, and dancing in the white dress shirt. I told her, "Look into pants," and then I had other things to do.

I...if this wasn't Whedon, I would have already deleted it from the TiVo. Instead, it's sitting there, waiting for me, and I'm thinking about it. Too much.

...and dancing in the white dress shirt. I told her, "Look into pants," and then I had other things to do

Yeah, looking at that opening sequence again I immediately flashed back to Absolutely Fabulous with Patsy saying "One snap of my fingers and I can raise hemlines so high the whole world's your gynecologist."

I can't believe I didn't recognize Toa, having been roped into AG last season. Huh. Good catch!

I may have been distracted by Tamoh's hips. Perhaps.

Because they aren't real. They're recordings. And they're not even original recordings; they're mashups.

But aren't we all mashups? Of our parents, our friends, our experiences? What goes into making a person? Whether or not you consider the imprints real, they're Echo's reality at the time of the mindwipe.

But aren't we all mashups? Of our parents, our friends, our experiences?

My mom's -- or anyone's -- personality isn't overlaid on my empty one. I can't say "Because I know P-C, I can therefore be a kickass medical writer and Mikado filker." (I wish.) Knowing someone doesn't make me them.

Yeah, my argument is based on the idea that the Dollhouse brain-tech would actually work, instead of being an effective lobotomy (which is basically is, now that I think about it), so this is sort of a silly argument.

Well, there's some of that, and there's also the chemical soup that makes us who we are. For example, erasing my memory would not erase the seratonin imbalance that makes me depressed, which heavily influences my personality, decision making skills, and hair trigger temper. I'd be imprinted with memories, but add to that the mental illness, and you'd still have a mashup.

This would also follow with someone with autism, or schizophrenia.

There seems a weird confusion on the show between expertise granted by a memory program (like Tank loading up the program to operate a helicopter in The Matrix)and physiological issues (like asthma). You can load me with a hundred memories from the brain of an autistic man with prostrate cancer, but it doesn't change teh fact that I'm not autistic and don't have a prostrate, so neither my brain nor my body will experience the world with a cancerous bum or an autistic mind.

Does anyone have the line the lab tech used to explain the shortsightedness?

Does anyone have the line the lab tech used to explain the shortsightedness?

Handwave, handwave, the brain perceives the world as though she were nearsighted, handwave, handwave, midichlorians.

I was kinda wanting to poke holes in the verbatim.