Dollhouse, Episode 2

I don't know how rabid a fan of this show is, so I'd like to warn the reader that I may leak some spoilers below, so read at own risk.  It's my speculation however.

I admit it - I am a fan of Joss Whedon.  Not forever, not of everything he does, but definitely since Firefly.  Just finished watching Episode 2 of Dollhouse, which revealed more back story, particularly about Alpha.  They are still setting up the parameters of the show, so it is hardly time to make judgements about how good it will be overall.  The surface stuff is all good - action, character interactions, the layering.  However it struck me what the central idea of the series is, and it seems to me that it comes from the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

Not to be petulant, but only from the Frank Herbert stretch - particularly the volumes after God Emperor of Dune.  What has been revealed about Alpha is that he was somehow able to access multiple imprints and escaped the Dollhouse.  A central theme in the later Dune novels was that it was possible to awaken a clone's memory to give it access to every copy of itself that existed in the past.  Don't worry about time travel and so on, but the suggestion was that there is something that binds the mind to something that persists longer than the living body.  One could use the label "soul" for this - the soul is eternal and persists beyond one lifetime and represents everything that a particular body/mind set learned.  In Dune it was an important step to be able to access these old mind/body pairings, suddenly acquiring memories and skills that the current mind/body pair haven't directly experienced.

Sounds vaguely like the Dollhouse premise of "imprinting".  On one side, there is the operators of the Dollhouse that are using science and technology to wipe clean the dolls.  On the other side is Alpha who was able, eventually, to access the wiped information.  This ability seems to be rare, so Alpha has achieved it and it also appears that Echo is close to achieving this. 

The other thing is that Echo appears to be able to learn across imprints and almost instantaneously.  Watch episode two carefully to pick up on this evidence.

So far, excellent TV.  At least for me.