So... last week's Dollhouse pilot? Nope, not so great. But hit the jump to find out why you should still tune in tonight to check out Joss Whedon's latest show.

On the surface, Dollhouse is more or less Total Recall meets Alias: Eliza Dushku plays Echo, a young woman who's a blank slate. Called an "active," she lives at an institution known only as the "Dollhouse"—where, thanks to some fancy-pants machinery and a distinct lack of moral inhibitions, her handlers can regularly plop her down in a chair, erase her brain, and reprogram her with whatever personalities and life experiences they choose.

In last week's pilot, "Ghost," we were introduced to Echo—at the start of the episode, she'd been programmed to wear a super-hot, super-short dress in order to give some lucky bastard the best weekend of his life; by the end of the episode, she'd graduated to wearing some super-hot glasses and a super-hot powersuit that helped her negotiate the freedom of a kidnapped little girl. (Apparently, the Dollhouse's clients need all sorts of different services, but super-hotness is always one of them.) Helo from Battlestar Galactica showed up, too, playing a cop investigating rumors about the (totally illegal) Dollhouse. Befitting a pilot, there was a lot of clunky exposition; befitting a Whedon show, there was a witty nerd who talked just like Buffy's Xander and/or Firefly's Wash; befitting a sci-fi show that has aspirations of mass acceptance, there were allusions to both The Matrix (in the actives' instant acquisition of knowledge) and those sordid-but-depressingly popular shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (in the pilot's second half, we find out that, apparently out of pure and whopping coincidence, one of the people whose past experiences was programmed into Echo was sexually abused by one of the bad-guy kidnappers).

I got kind a sidetracked by that synopsis business, but back to to the "On the surface, Dollhouse is more or less..." part: I say that because it's an important thing to note with anything Whedon does. Rarely can you sum up in a pat sentence what his shows are actually about. Sure, you can say Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about... well, Buffy (a vampire slayer), and you can say that Firefly is about a bunch of space bandits flying around and being all space bandit-y. But Buffy's about all sorts of other things in addition to that—friendship, social acceptance, destiny—just as Firefly's about other stuff too—the Civil War, the West, family, The Man and why he's always keepin' us down. Honestly, it's too early to tell what Dollhouse is "really" going to be about, though if I had to guess, I'd say it'll share some of the same themes as Whedon's previous works—feminism and self-determination—while also throwing in some jazz about the meaning of self and self-perception.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking—we'll see, I guess, because last week's Dollhouse felt more like a hodgepodge of accumulated influences rather than something with its own identity. (Considering the show's concept, maybe that was intentional... but I think that's a pretty big stretch.) There was some silly police procedural here, some generic sci-fi there, some quick back-and-forth banter somewhere in the middle, and—why not?—some vague, Lost-style allusions to a greater story/mystery to be solved in the following week's episode. (Or surely the episode after that, or the one after that—right?) Did the pieces work together? Not at all. The pilot bore some pretty obvious fingerprints of network meddling, sometimes over explaining the concept and plot and sometimes sneakily hinting at all the better, weirder directions the show could go in. "Ghost" felt like it had been crafted to grab a wide audience, not to appeal to the genre-lovin' fans Whedon's projects usually attract. The way "Ghost" awkwardly clunked and jumbled along, it made me want Whedon to hurry up and ditch TV already, as he's been saying he might, so that he'll be able to create his own stuff without having to acquiesce to the demands of all-powerful network execs.

But "Ghost"—and indeed, the very concept of Dollhouse as a whole—also felt half-baked and not-quite finished, which is unusual for Whedon's stuff. Buffy and Firefly (and even, to a lesser extent, Angel) established themselves pretty strongly in their initial episodes. (Hell, in Firefly's case, the damn thing sprung out of the proverbial womb fully grown, a pretty dead-on representation of what it'd continue to be for its too-brief lifespan.) Admittedly, Buffy and Angel took a lot more time to really mature, but still—all three of those shows introduced themselves in a way that felt unique and memorable, and I can't say that about Dollhouse. At this point, the only thing I can remember strongly about the pilot was how lazy/manipulative the whole "Echo has to save the kidnapped girl before she gets abused!" plotline was, and also that business about Echo's dress and glasses*. I remember thinking the main set was pretty, but they didn't show very much of it. I remember thinking Helo from Battlestar was surprisingly bland. Speaking of Battlestar, I also remember a really distracting Edward James Olmos reference. And... yeah. That's about it. I think maybe there was an asthma inhaler involved at one point?

I swear to god I'm not trying to bait Whedonphiles; if there's one group I don't want coming after me in the comments section, it's the oft-rabid Disciples of Joss. Mostly because I'm usually one of 'em—Buffy and Firefly are two of my very favorite TV shows, I get excited every damn month for the dude's Buffy comic, his run on Astonishing X-Men was just that, and there's Dr. Horrible, and goddamn, even that bootleg script of one of his early drafts of Alien Resurrection I've got somewhere on my hard drive is pretty great. But it's this knowing—this knowledge of what the guy is actually capable of—that makes me wish Dollhouse's pilot had been much, much better than it actually was.

It's also why I'll be hitting iTunes and giving Dollhouse another shot this weekend, and probably for at least a few more weeks after that. If Dollhouse starts to improve immediately, then awesome. If it takes a little while, I'll give it that time. And if I give it that time and it still doesn't get significantly better... well, then, so it goes, I guess. (And considering the show's ratings and timeslot, maybe it's a good idea not to get too attached, anyway.)

What I'm (finally) getting to is this: Considering the dude's track record, I'm willing to give Whedon the benefit of the doubt on this one. Despite my distaste for the pilot, it did feel tonally and visually different from anything Whedon's done before, and story-wise—while it might swipe more than a few things from other TV shows or movies—it's new territory for Whedon, at least, and Whedon looks at things differently than just about anybody else. There are, in other words, reasons to be optimistic about Dollhouse's potential. Would I have liked to watch "Ghost" and have been blown away by something that, like Whedon's other works, felt unique and strong and sexy and powerful and smart and weird? Of course, and of course I was disappointed when Dollhouse's pilot ended, and I didn't feel comfortable using a single one of those adjectives to describe it. But knowing what Whedon has accomplished in the past gives me no small amount of hope that, if it can get on its feet, Dollhouse could become all of those things. Like Dushku's Echo, it might just take a couple of restarts and tweaks to get where it's supposed to be.

Dollhouse airs Friday nights on Fox at 9 pm.

*What? Some things are more memorable than others.