* Via Merrick at THR.

New Line has picked up a pitch from Darren Lemke, the writer behind the studio’s Bryan Singer project “Jack the Giant Killer,” that reimagines the classic tale of “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” as an action-adventure movie.

I’m thinking Steven Seagall for the lead, with Jet Li as Kato, though I’m not sure how either of them are at dancing to the music of Tchaikovsky. Okay, actually, this version won’t be a ballet  (obviously) and they’re going for more of a “Chronicles of Narnia” vibe.

* Brad Pitt will be producing, but not playing the lead, in an action-oriented flick about the young Vlad Dracul (his buddies call him “the Impaler”). I’d prefer if they would be honest and call this “Dracula Begins,” but the actual title is “Vlad.” The studio will be the “Twilight” driven Summit. How much you wanna bet this vampire-to-be has a tortured love-life?

* Hand drawn animation appears to be coming back to Disney in a big way. Yay. Film-maker Brendon Connolly has some interesting hints.

* And one more item from THR/Heat Vision that I can’t really ignore. Cowriter-producer Peter Jackson has announced that auditions for “The Hobbit” have begun and the only role that’s precast is Ian McKellan as Gandalf. So, actors, if you’ve got a snub nose, a pasty complexion, are never chosen first for basketball, and have hairy feet, I suggest you get into gear. They are denying rumors that James McAvoy could be in the running for Bilbo, though he does have an overall Baggins thing going on, I think. Another actor who screams “hobbit!” to me is writer Peter Morgan’s favorite star, Michael Sheen of “Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen,” and “The Damned United.” Of course, whoever it is, I guess it will have to believable that he’ll look like Ian Holm when he gets on in years.

* In my box-office wrap-up yesterday, I wrote the following:

“2012” cost $200 million to make, a rather obscene sum that was unthinkable not so long ago, and in four weeks in wide release has earned a mere $148,787,000. I haven’t seen “The Blind Side,” but it just makes me happy that a modest movie about people is proving, I think, to be significantly more profitable than at least one pretty obviously bloated spectacle.

I really hope that readers understood I was talking about the domestic gross. Internationally, the Roland Emmerich feature has earned upwards of $650 million. However, as Sharon Waxman reports, Emmerich will be taking home a good percentage of that  — a cool $100 million (half the film’s outlandish budget, in fact) — for himself to share with whomever he’s going to share it with. From a studio’s point of view, at least, I still can’t help but wonder if “The Blind Side” will turn out to be the better deal.

* The lovely and extremely talented Amy Adams is pregnant and bowing out of the newest film from director John Hillcoat (“The Road“) and his collaborator on “The Proposition,” screenwriter and Aussie alternative music legend Nick Cave, writes the Playlist. The film is currently set the star the powerful twosome of Ryan Gosling and Shia LaBouef, who will be playing brothers and prohibition-era bootleggers.

* Overture has picked up the rights to “Stone,” an all-star thriller to be headlined by Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, and Milla Jovovich. Not mentioned in the Variety piece, however, is that, as per If Magazine, actor Enver Gjokaj will be playing De Niro as a young man  in what I gather are some fairly significant flashback sequences. Very coincidentally, I praised Gjokaj’s work on Joss Whedon’s TV show, “Dollhouse” to the skies yesterday in this epic-length “best of” feature. The hard-to-pronounce Gjokaj doesn’t particularly look like De Niro, but regular viewers of the show know what a gifted chameleon the all but unknown young theater-bred actor really is. I’m guessing the audience will assume he’s De Niro’s son. Let’s just hope he has some good show-biz luck to match his obvious abilities. (H/t Whedonesque.)

* A.J. Schnack smacks down a really stupid idea, and specifically the L.A. Times coverage of it, way better than I did. He also has a to-the-point comment by documentarian Chuck Braverman.

* Considering the press-release-cum-advertorial tone of this piece, Screenrant appears to be involved in some way with with Movie Clips, a new service providing thousands of visually very high quality movie excerpts which has made licensing deals with the studios. It’s still very much in beta, but, poking around a bit, I found some nice scenes, but it’s a far, far cry from YouTube in terms of depth and variety, though the consistent quality of the visuals are very nice.

As an example, I tried a search for “Citizen Kane” and found nothing. So, I tried Orson Welles, and I got two scenes from the far from the disastrous 1967 production of “Casino Royale” — not exactly a key Welles (or Peter Sellers) moment in anyone’s view. Still, it looks pretty…or it would, if I could get it to embed properly. Oh well, you can see the clip here.

More recently, I thought my fandom was under relative control. But now, I’ve been asked my opinion on the ten best examples of small-screen work in this decade from the creator and guiding force of “Angel,” “Firefly,” the already canceled “Dollhouse,” and, of course, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” I only have to be thankful for the fact that first four seasons of “Buffy,” which contain most of that show’s greatest episodes, are disqualified because they appeared on TV sets before 2000. We take our mercies where we find them. (And, yes, if you’re about to catch up with these on DVD, there are a fair number of spoilers below for the various series, though I’ve tried to keep a few secrets.) One word of warning: my relative ranking of these shows is a matter of mood and borders on the random. In other words — don’t hold me to these choices!

Out of competition:

The Body” (“Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”) – This episode usually ranks extremely high when people make these kind of lists. Entertainment Weekly named it as pretty much the best thing Joss Whedon has ever done and maybe the best TV thing ever. The truth of the matter is that, yes, the episode where Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Geller) discovers the already cold body of her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland, a wonderful asset to the show for the five previous years), dead from an entirely natural brain tumor, was probably one of the most remarkable episodes of television ever shown, and probably the only thing I’ve seen that comes close to capturing the essence of what it feels like when someone dies unexpectedly. The problem was, I didn’t find it depressing; I found it real. I didn’t feel any more like repeating the experience than I would the death of an actual loved one.

Whedon – who wrote and directed the episode himself – deserves all the credit in the world for the brave choices he made, including shooting the episode in close to “real time” and not using any music. If I have one complaint with , it’s his tendency to close emotional episodes with, dare I say it, somewhat drippy montages. His choice to eliminate music from the kind of “very special” show where other creators would lay in with three or four montages of Joyce frolicking in the woods or what have you, shows Whedon is, at heart, an outstanding filmmaker. I’ve never had a problem with his much-noted tendency to kill off sympathetic and/or popular characters. It might anger some fans, but especially if you’re dealing with inherently violent material, there’s something morally wrong about not dealing with the fact that good people are just as mortal as bad people. Still, I don’t enjoy watching this episode. If this were a movie, maybe I’d be more in awe or eager for profundity. However, if I’m going to be honest, I can’t call “The Body” a favorite and I can’t be sure it’s one of the “best.”

#10, Shiny Happy People (“Angel”) – Fans of the spin-off about Buffy’s ex, the vampire-with-a-soul detective (David Boreanaz), and various assembled demon-hunters and occasionally friendly demons, will be scratching their heads at this choice. It’s an unpopular episode from a widely and justly derided storyline involving a very weird affair between Angel’s unbalanced super-powered teenage son from another dimension, Connor (Vincent Kartheiser, now of “Mad Men“), and a suddenly evil Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), a former high school mean girl turned lovably complex grown-up foil for her vampire boss. And, yeah, it was a little freaky for Cordy to give birth to a fully grown creature called Jasmine.

However, as played by the wondrous Gina Torres of the then recently-canceled “Firefly,” Jasmine was freaky in a good way. A being whose god-like ability to create an instant sense of peace, happiness, and complete obedience, is somewhat set off by the fact that she’s actually a deformed and decaying, if not entirely evil, monster who must consume people to live, she was every charismatic leader and every great screen beauty rolled into one monstrous ball. More than anything else, “Shiny Happy People” reminded me of Don Siegel’s 1956 film verson of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It was another believable demonstration of how we humans are only too willing to surrender our our humanity to the first apparently completely beauteous and 100% wise being who comes along. You know, like Oprah, only less powerful.

#9. “Epitaph One”/“The Left Hand” (“Dollhouse”) — A tie for the two best episodes so far of Whedon’s most recent, most highly problematic, and most freshly canceled, series. Without going into what I think went awry with the show, about an immoral corporation providing semi-slave designer human beings for a very high price, these two very different episodes take creative risks that pay off in big ways. The DVD-only, lower-budget, “Epitaph One” is set ten years after the events of the series and makes use of its somewhat low-fi  aesthetic to create an exciting post-apocalyptic science-fiction drama that plays like a more thoughtful version of certain aspects of “The Terminator” (which Whedon is famously trying to buy). The episode features some especially good acting, both from guest stars like Felicia Day and series regulars like the always superb Olivia Williams and Harry Lennix.

The more glossy “The Left Hand,” which aired just before I started writing this, benefits from a breakneck pace, lots of prime Whedon tragicomic humor, as well as a scene-stealing guest appearance by “Firefly” and “Terminator”-alum Summer Glau as a truly messed-up techie on a soul-crushing vendetta against Eliza Dushku‘s self-aware “doll,” Echo, but with a definite crush on her enemy’s  programmer. Most of that humor I was talking comes from strong work by Fran Kranz, whose really grown into his role as seemingly 100% amoral nerdy brain-designer-genius Topher Brink, and the amazing Enver Gkojaj as, yes, seemingly 100% amoral nerdy brain-designer-genius Topher Brink. (He’s duplicated himself so he can literally be in two places at once.) The previously unknown Gjokaj may be one reason why – canceled or not, mixed reviews and controversy or not – “Dollhouse” may go down in TV history. Over the years, Whedon has shown an increasing flair for picking out shockingly good actors to populate his work in supporting roles, and Gjokaj may be one of the very best. His chameleon-like ability to inhabit a number of highly disparate characters with complete believability and – as seen on this episode – his Alec Baldwin-like gift of mimicry, pretty much guarantees that we’ll be hearing from this extremely accomplished young actor again very soon.

#. “Serenity” (“Firefly”) — High on the list of reasons why Whedon’s combination of horse opera and space opera never really had a chance to hit with audiences, the choice to air its original pilot — not to be confused with the later movie of the same name — as the final episode, and only after the show had already been canceled, is certainly among them. Just a hair darker in its outlook than the rest of the show, this “Serenity” is very much in the tradition of classic movie westerns and does a marvelous job of introducing a rich cast of characters. In particular, Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) is a combination of the swaggering Han Solo and the tragic, embittered Ethan Edwards of “The Searchers” but with a far sharper sense of humor than either and one of the best lead characters on any show, ever. Deemed too slow and not funny enough by the network and even some fans, the episode that introduced the mostly well-intentioned thieves-for-hire of the Firefly class ship named Serenity, is perfectly calibrated, comedy-laced, action film-making of the very best kind.

#7. “War Stories”  (“Firefly”) — A brutally funny combination of violence and character-driven comedy, this episode focuses on a kind of triangle we don’t often see in movies and TV. Space-freighter pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk, “Dodgeball,” “3:10 to Yuma“) is happily married to beautiful, ex-military, bad-ass Zoe (Gina Torres), but he finds himself jealous of her old combat buddy and current companion in danger, Captain Mal. Even if he can be convinced that there was never anything romantic between the two of them, he is desperate to somehow become a part of their unique relationship when it comes to dealing with life or death matters. Maneuvering himself into a situation where a real danger ensues, he not surprisingly gets more than he asked for.

This episode is notable for easily the funniest believably painful torture sequence ever filmed – a bit of inspired ultra-black comedy that Whedon might not dare to have tried in the post-Dick Cheney/post “24” world. The brilliance of the scene is accounted for not only by a great script credited to Cheryl Cain, but the top grade chemistry between Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion. To this day, they are darn funny appearing together as themselves in public, but they’ve never been better than when they were allowed to work out their issues while being electrocuted by an interplanetary criminal mastermind.

#6. “Chosen”  (“Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”) – Longtime fans know that Joss Whedon has a spotty record when it comes to season openers and pilots. However, he always seems to pull things out at the other end and delivers solid finales that leave you both satisfied and wanting more. Happily, so far, this seems to go double for series finales. The conclusion to Whedon’s most popular and long-lived show is pretty much everything fans could have wanted, providing a certain amount of closure to long-standing conflicts in thrilling and kind of beautiful ways.

As Buffy and her long-time friends, who are getting a bit old to be called “Scoobies,” face one more battle against the original evil and witness the destruction of their hometown, not everything goes so well. In typical Whedon fashion, a couple of beloved characters die (though one recovered from his nasty case of being burned to a crisp quickly enough to return as a regular on the next season of “Angel”), but the overall tone is wistfully hopeful, and fully in line with the show’s emphasis on friendship, female empowerment, and the need to tough out this thing we call human life.

#5 – “Not Fade Away” (“Angel”) — “Angel” was always the darker, meaner cousin of “Buffy.” So, naturally its conclusion is suitably more down-and-dirty and, remarkably, even better than the acclaimed wrap-up of its sister show the year prior. Largely a fantasy-noir variation on one of Whedon’s favorite movies, “The Wild Bunch,” this episode is about what happens when battle-hardened folks face an unbeatable enemy. Sure, the staff of Angel Investigations are more morally upright than Sam Peckinpah’s mangy hardcases, but this is still a tale about settling old scores in blood and a final battle that may be as ultimately pointless as it is noble. Again, not everyone survives…I think. The show’s ending is, rather brilliantly, far from completely resolved, though the tone is much more “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” than “The Sopranos” finale. In any case, Whedon’s theme of life as perpetual struggle couldn’t be more strongly underlined than by this exchange from that vampire Hope and Crosby, Angel and Spike (James Marsters), as they ponder how to take on a (mostly unseen) horde comprised of all manner of demonic beast and humanoid.

Spike: And in terms of a plan?
Angel: We fight.
Spike: Bit more specific?
Angel: Well, personally, I kinda wanna slay the dragon. Let’s go to work.

#4 “Once More With Feeling”  (“Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”) — I really love good musicals, but I really kind of hate bad ones and I can’t stand bad music. So, when I heard that Whedon was using his vacation time to write songs for a musical episode of “Buffy,” I could see that it would be easy enough to make logical in the Buffyverse, where there’s a demon available for any and all plotting needs. I nevertheless had visions of “Cop Rock” dancing very badly in my head. Directing and writing a musical is hard enough, I theorized, without the additional burden of composing all the songs yourself. Little did I know that, while Joss Whedon may not quite be Stephen Sondheim and Elvis Costello rolled into one, he’s a solid tunesmith whose music ranges from the silly but tuneful to the downright enchanting and delightful, with the occasional bit of modern-day schmaltz thrown in.

Still, it’s the stunning level of humorous and dramatic invention that makes this episode such a massively enjoyable piece of work. The plot involves a song-and-dance demon (the great theatrical tap-dancer Hinton Battle) infecting Sunnydale with a dangerously incendiary plague of musical-comedy. Unusually among musical episodes, the show is very much a part of the regular series continuity. That might have limited its appeal to curious newcomers, but the integrity it shows in respecting the internal logic of the show’s fantasy universe while commenting good-humoredly on the musical comedy tradition, makes the show all that much weightier for regular viewers. Whedon knows what all creators of great musicals know: all the singing and dancing in the world should never get in the way of a good story.

#3 “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog.” Sometime before the 2005 release of “Serenity,” I found myself at an early screening for fans, signing a birthday card to Joss Whedon. Just above the compulsory, “Happy Birthday” I wrote “Another musical?” Well, it took a writer’s strike and the burgeoning power of Web 2.0, but my timid request was answered in high style last year with the blissfully silly and often hilarious, yet ultimately rather tragic and haunting, web-movie musical about an earnest aspiring supervillain with anti-corporate leanings (the multi-talented Neil Patrick Harris). As he strives to enter the Evil League of Evil by pleasing its rarely seen leader, Bad Horse (“the Thoroughbred of Sin”), defeat his obnoxious superhero nemesis, Captain Hammer (a never-funnier Nathan Fillion), and win the heart of an adorable activist do-gooder he chats with at the laundromat (‘net star/creator Felicia Day of “The Guild“), we learn how becoming a full-fledged supervillain may create serious problems if you also want people to love you.

A true family project co-created with brothers Zack and Jed (a musician as well as a TV writer), and Jed’s then fiancee/now wife, Maurissa Tancharoen, “Dr. Horrible” has a low-budget comic book aesthetic that actually underlines its tale of aspiring artists of crime. Crisply directed by Whedon, it’s songs are some of the funniest and most haunting from a new musical you’re likely to hear these days, if a bit less tuneful than the slicker, more Broadway-inspired music of “Once More With Feeling.”

A third act plot point, however, takes a chance by daring us to take the premises of the plot to their logical, poignant conclusion that some may not appreciate. While it could be argued that the whimsical conceit might have allowed this to be one instance where Whedon didn’t actually need to keep things fictionally real by giving a cruel fate to a sympathetic character, the choice provides this brilliant mini-musical with a stronger ending and a far better set-up for the upcoming sequel than a more straightforwardly comic conclusion would have. All in all, “Dr. Horrible” proves that, even if driven off the airwaves entirely, the Whedon brand at this point has a far better prognosis for a long life than most of his characters.

#2. “Our Mrs. Reynolds” (“Firefly”) — By now, you may be noticing a bit of a trend. Yes, I love “Firefly” and I definitely would marry it, if only the courts would legalize man-on-TV show-marriage. It’s easily my favorite Whedon show and one of my favorite television shows of all time. Sure, some of that has to do with the fact that I just love a good western, but the show truly is special even among Whedon shows. It features the most consistently strong cast of any of any of his shows, and this episode introduces a very special, if then completely unknown, guest star with the appearance of Christina Hendricks (“Mad Men”). We first meet the future Joan Holloway as Saffron, an apparently shy, possibly completely submissive, member of a colony whom Mal, unaware of local customs, accidentally marries. Written by Whedon, this fan-favorite starts out as a feminist-friendly variation on a somewhat disturbing plot thread from “The Searchers,” but eventually becomes something like the perfect TV-length screwball farce, only with more violence. What more could you want?

#1. “Objects in Space” (“Firefly”) — Unlike every single other season finale he’s written, the de facto conclusion to “Firefly” resolves very little in the way of ongoing plot elements. Indeed, it appears that fact so frustrated Whedon that it probably largely led to his determination to wrap up the story arc in more suitable fashion with the movie, “Serenity.” Nevertheless, viewed on its own, this episode is my personal selection for Whedon’s all time best work ever. It features guest-star Richard Brooks (“Law & Order”), who is letter perfect as Jubal Early, a coolly brutal and mentally unbalanced bounty hunter — Whedon’s off-kilter homage to Boba Fett, in fact — sent to recover River Tam (Summer Glau), a psychotic young fugitive who has taken refuge on board Serenity. The episode gradually boils down to a highly charged and very strange battle of wits between Early and the schizophrenic-like-a-fox Tam. It’s a blend of suspense, psychology, action, and odd pathos that, if you care to look, has some existential undercurrents. (Whedon discusses those in some detail in the somewhat unusual DVD commentary he recorded for the episode.) Still, this tale of outer space cat-and-mouse between two individuals whose life experiences has rendered them both less than whole, but more than merely human, is simply great science fiction entertainment for people who enjoy thinking a little. If there’s one thing I’m bummed about from the cancellation of the show and the box office disappointment of the ensuing movie is that we may never get to see Jubal Early face off again against the Serenity crew, though a guy can always hope. (Note to dubious viewers in light of the ending: yes, Early lives!)

“Hi, I’m Joss Whedon. You may remember me from such shows as ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ ‘Angel,’ and ‘Firefly.’ Or perhaps my internet sensation, ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.’ Or, of course, my role as Douglas the car rental clerk in the famous ‘Rat Saw God’ episode of ‘Veronica Mars.’ And let’s not forget that I also wrote the screenplay for ‘Toy Story.’ Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I’m awesome, and you should watch my new show, ‘Dollhouse,’ because I created it, and everything I create is genius. And also because Eliza Dushku is hot.”

The above is, in fact, not an actual quote from Joss Whedon. It is, however, a nice summation of the things that Fox is hoping you’ll remember and keep in mind when tuning into “Dollhouse.” There are a lot of rumblings about how the show is only “meh,” and how if it was by anyone else, it wouldn’t inspire anyone to watch beyond the pilot episode. I’m here to tell you that this isn’t…well, okay, I can’t say it’s completely untrue. In fact, there’s some stuff that goes down during the first 15 minutes of the episode that will make you feel like you’re being hit over the head with a hammer, so obvious is it attempting to set up the show. Survive beyond that, however, and you’ll probably find yourself intrigued enough to come back next week.

“Dollhouse” begins with Echo (Dushku) and Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) sitting in an office, with the latter trying to pitch an opportunity of sorts to the former. DeWitt is having limited success with her attempts to sell Echo on her offer of “a clean slate,” with Echo arguing, “Have you ever tried to clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before.” (Foreshadowing, ahoy!) We quickly determine, however, that DeWitt’s suggestion that Echo might want to volunteer for this mysterious project – which comes with a bonus plan of providing Echo with her freedom after a mere five years – is really just an example of the British being incapable of impoliteness. In truth, Echo has no real choice in the matter…and, frankly, she’s a little pissed off by that.

“I don’t deserve this,” Echo snaps. “I was just trying to make a difference, trying to take my place in the world, y’know, like she always said.”

The question, obviously, is…who is this “she“?

Well, presumably, Echo knows, but as we soon learn, just because Echo knows something doesn’t mean the memories are there for the long haul. And thus begins the lengthy stage-setting sequence, where Echo rides a motorbike, burns up the dancefloor in an incredibly short skirt, and then heads back to the Dollhouse – as her new home is colloquially called – for a quick memory wipe. Yes, it certainly gets the job done as far as introducing the viewer to the show’s concept. The only problem: it’s really, really heavy-handed. C’mon, wasn’t there some less leaden way of tackling how short-term Echo’s relationships are without forcing us to endure this exchange…?

Dude: Listen, I know at the beginning of the weekend, we said no strings…
Echo: We also said no ropes, and look how long that lasted.
Dude: Yeah, I remember. I remember it all. I always will.
Echo: What, like I’d forget?

Oh, God, that’s bad. It’s so bad that I feel like I have to blame its inclusion on someone at the network, because I just can’t believe Joss is responsible for such a God-awful chunk of dialogue as that. Thankfully, nothing else in the pilot ever plummets to the depths of this scene, but it’s still a memory that you won’t soon forget…which, come to think of it, is kinda ironic.

As soon as Echo leaves her boy-toy behind, we begin to be introduced to the team at the Dollhouse; first, there’s Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix), who serves as Echo’s “handler,” and then there’s Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), the scientist responsible for the imprinting and removal of the personalities of the Actives, as they’re called. Boyd is a man with a heavy heart, who clearly isn’t thrilled about this whole memory-wiping thing, especially on occasions like this one, where Echo feels like she’s found the perfect guy. Topher, meanwhile, is a smart-ass with the potential to become a complete jack-ass, but at least he’s given dialogue that can truly be called Whedon-esque. Laurence Dominic (Reed Diamond), meanwhile, is the Dollhouse’s head of security, and he apparently answers directly to Ms. DeWitt. This, we soon learn, is not necessarily the best position for one to be in; although Ms. DeWitt might have been polite to Echo, she clearly has no problem being rather bitchy to just about everyone else who works beneath her.

When we first meet Dr. Claire Saunders (Amy Acker), there’s a brief moment where it seems quite clear that Joss is teasing the fanboys out there, by having the woman who once played Winifred “Fred” Burkle ask the woman formerly known as Faith, “Would you like a massage?” But before the fantasy can be fulled, Doc Saunders ruins everything by adding, “I’ll set that up.” Dammit! Also in the mix: the exotic-looking Sierra (Dichen Lachman), who’s the most recent addition to the team of Actives and the one who’s getting her indoctrination, such as it is, when Echo follows the screams of agony to their source. She successfully fights through the pain, though, as she turns up later in the episode as part of Echo’s mission, essentially playing the bad cop to Echo’s good cop.

The last series regular is Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), an FBI agent who’s assigned to investigate the Dollhouse. He’s been on the case for 14 months and describes his progress to his superiors as “slow,” but in that time, he’s physically threatened a senator, disrupted a seven-year human trafficking investigation, and been arrested for trespassing on a prince’s yacht…so, you know, at least he’s keeping busy. His supervisor doesn’t even believe that the Dollhouse exists, referring to it as “a joke,” but for his lack of accomplishment, Ballard is still dedicated to the case, and he knows full well that it must exist…or, at least, that someone higher up the food chain thinks it exists…or else he would’ve been given a new assignment a long time ago.

Once we get past that awful introductory segment, things do begin to get interesting. We see Echo in her “blank slate” state, but we see that, despite the fact that she should be clean as a whistle, she has more curiosity than the average Active. We also get a good idea of how this whole implanted-memories thing works…both for good (how perfectly she takes on the traits and abilities of her new identity because, well, as far as she knows, that’s who she is) and for bad (each identity is apparently based on a real person, which means that she has their flaws as well). It does strike me as a bit odd that people with enough money to hire an Active wouldn’t just get a professional, i.e. someone who really does do this stuff for a living, to get the job done better. But I understand: if I don’t buy into the concept, then I’m never going to enjoy the show. So for the time being, I’m trying to buy into it.

I just hope Joss doesn’t let me down…and, for that matter, I hope Eliza doesn’t, either. The show is really going to live or die by her ability to pull off a credible performance of a different personality each week. We really haven’t seen all that much range from Ms. Dushku over the years, and there are a lot of folks out there who are skeptical that she can carry a role which requires as much diversity as Echo does.

But, hey, Joss is awesome and Eliza is hot, so I’m in. For now.