On Friday night, television’s body-swap-show torch was officially passed from Dollhouse to Caprica. (Supernatural also featured a body-swap episode last week, but as a one-off it doesn’t count.)

Joss Whedon had already broken my heart one time too many for me to watch Dollhouse with any sense of trust. But unlike many of my friends—some of whom found the very premise of the show so offensive they vowed never to watch it—I was willing to give it a shot.

So I watched. But I held myself aloof until last weekend, when I found myself watching “Epitaph Two,” the series finale, a second and then a third time. Damn you, Joss! How is it that even your weakest work can get under my skin?

Joss Whedon, Doomed Auteur
And he did it with almost everything stacked against him—from the beginning, when the pilot was scrapped and Dollhouse was assigned to the Friday-night “death slot,” to its cancellation shortly after the beginning of Season 2, up to the very end, when Fox made the ballsy (if bizarre) decision to air the second half of a two-part finale without ever showing part 1. (For a variety of reasons, “Epitaph One” was released on the Season 1 DVD set, iTunes, and Amazon Unbox, but was never broadcast.)

Then again, cancellation may have been what made the end of the series so good. The final episodes had a real sense of urgency. A show about a high-tech whorehouse in which beautiful people’s personalities were reset each week to fulfill rich folks’ fantasies was always going to be a hard sell. But throw in a mega-corporation with an evil plan to use personality-erasing technology to take over the world, and you start to get people’s attention.

In Defense of Eliza Dushku
One criticism of Dollhouse that I never agreed with was that Eliza Dushku wasn’t a good enough actress to pull off Echo’s many roles. It’s true that Enver Gjokaj and Dichen Lachman (as actives Victor/Tony and Sierra/Priya) made much more complete and startling transformations than Dushku ever did. Echo’s persona (which was awfully similar to Dushku’s) shone through each of her personalities. But that was sort of the point. Echo was always Echo, even when she was being someone else.