What follows is me discussing things my mind lingers over as I watched the season premiere of Dollhouse. Plot will be discussed but not described, arcs will be examined but not articulated. This ain’t my old-style Dollhouse review, and I’ll likely continue to experiment with form and focus as the season continues. I got tired of the relentless crutch of the recap template so the style will drift dramatically from week to week I’d imagine.

Being human is not an easy thing. It seems easy because we’re born ready. But to teach something to be a human, to construct a mind that offers even a simulacrum of the complexity of the human experience, for a true “blank slate” to grow to be a person is riddled with trials we can’t imagine.

The Dollhouse doesn’t create from a blank slate, they cobble together minds from a vast and growing collection, and still they suffer the consequences of ignoring the risks involved in such a construction. Creating an inviolate mind from an aggregation of violations tends to result in some failures.

Dr Saunders is a creation of ‘sociopath in a sweater vest’ but she stumbles to a sense of identity, after suffering through a noted numbness during the first season. She sees her flaws — some with which she was imbued, others she generated as a consequence of being alive — as a curse inflicted on her by her ‘creator,’ she fails to understand that in many ways we are all broken, that we are little more than a collection of flaws.

All the Dolls we care about are broken in important ways. In some ways it’s a commentary on the conceit of drama itself. We rarely watch stories with truly normal people living their lives. Conflict, drama, and extraordinary events are all essential to compelling storytelling, so we end up seeing troubled people more often than not. But that conceit comes from the essential truth that we each react to the world in a wholly unique manner. The integration of external stimuli and internal processes is what people see when they look at you, so exposing people to the unexpected, bringing out their internal strengths and weaknesses, is a method of examination.

So Dollhouse continues to watch the Dolls fall (or get picked) apart, breaking down their identities only to have them self-coalesce. The mind, whether innate or implanted, is more robust than we know. But at the same time, the veneer of the Dollhouse staff also cracks, though with more subtlety. Victor’s scars are a painful reminder of the damages the Dollhouse can inflict, one that DeWitt can’t stand to see on someone she’s come to love.

We’re seeing the continuation of themes about what it is to be a person. And the show seems to be settling in on the idea that the Dolls can be people too — Saunders is the best current example of this, though the other Dolls are all exhibiting symptoms of personality. And the idea that Dolls can be people is to me very comforting but also striking and perhaps terrifying.

The ideas brought up in the unaired episode Epitaph One of mindless slaves to violence are more akin to tech-savvy zombies than to questions of identity, and so less interesting to me. That we could be supplanted by entirely different people is much grander in scope; it’s a subtler debasement, in fact it can even be argued that it is not a debasement because the replacement is equal to you. The personalities Dolls get imprinted with may be constructed but that doesn’t imply they are somehow lesser than natural minds. And that’s a terrifying non-implication.

This premiere did such an excellent job of giving me everything I want from a show, along with a few things I didn’t know I wanted, all without leaving the Dollhouse. The real world events were nice, but mostly unneeded. I like the direction the show is taking — I sort of hope they quietly ignore Epitaph One for a good long while — though I still hold out hope that the real world stories will improve at the same rate the in-house ones are.