People love the stuff Joss Whedon does for telly. They loved Buffy to the point of squirting, they loved Firefly even though it wasn't on for very long, and they really liked his online sci-fi musical weirdoid Dr Horrible. So it's perfectly acceptable to assume that many, many people would have been looking forward to this very, very much. But even if the delectable Eliza Dushku was onboard to play the lead, Dollhouse has had a rocky road through production and onto our screens. So, after all the hype and the troubles, was it any good?

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Eliza Dushku's character (of indeterminable name to begin with) is a saucy monkey - she likes racing bikes against boys and having subversive sexual encounters, also with boys. In an exchange with her no-strings boyfriend, he told her in a club that he would always remember her. How could she forget, she retorted. Quite easily, as it turned out.

Within minutes of him nipping off for a wee, she exited the nightclub and jumped into the back of a van, where a man took her to some sort of secret compound. She asked whether she could go back to the party after her 'treatment' because she quite liked the fellow she had been duping. Fat chance of that.

Soon Eliza Dushku's Character Of Indeterminable Name had had her memory wiped by this nefarious agency (yes, yet another nefarious TV agency) and modified so that it could be manipulated at will be these people. The nightclub and hot sex were a thing of the past as her memory was wiped. This memory wiping scene was visually represented by one of those vortexy, Doctor Who title sequence-looking special effects, where Eliza Dushku's Character Of Indeterminable Name's life flashed before her very eyes.

Now completely malleable, Eliza Dushku's Character Of Indeterminable Name was given the name Echo. "Did I fall asleep?" she asked the kindly geek who oversaw her 'transformation'. "For a little while," he replied. For a little while? She was now a part of an elite group of people who had not a care in the world, no memories of anything and brains that could be uploaded with the required information to carry out any job she was hired for.

Her first job as part of the 'dollhouse' was to hunt for the kidnapped daughter of a mega-wealthy Mexican dignitary. To do this Echo had to become an expert, hard-assed hostage negotiator. She spoke fluent Spanish, and her physical transformation was complete... thanks to a pair of glasses.

All went well until the final handover scene, when Echo (or Miss Penn as she was known) threw a wobbly. Her made-up, imprinted personality had, it was revealed by the geeks back at the organisation, actually been based on an abused child who had been kidnapped herself when she was a young girl. Echo's new personality recognised the kidnapper and was overcome by emotion that she didn't know she had. With the mission under threat (the English head of the organisation, Adele De Witt, wanted to wipe her memory, her handler wanted to her to continue), Echo finally made it back to the case and saved the girl. Hurrah!

And that was it. Oh, there were other bits too - an ex-FBI man had made it his life's work to find this mythical dollhouse and by the end of this first episode he came into possession of Echo's pre memory wipe details. So it was all a bit... unremarkable for a series opener. A bit rubbish and a bit silly. But there is hope - like most US series there's definitely an addictive quality to it all and I'll probably tune in to next week's episode. It's like Fringe all over again. Damn those Americans.

But let's look back at it again briefly. You have to admit the idea of a character that can take on new skills every week in a new adventure every week is genius in the way you can use one actor for lots of different. As an actor this must be big fun as well - one week you're a hostage negotiator, the next you're a high class escort and the next yuo run a cake shop or something. Trouble is that this has been done before, in Alias. In fact Dollhouse very much reminded me of Alias, but with a much poorer script.

Eliza Dushku has received a bit of a critical hammering in the US, many saying that she's simply not a good enough actress to carry a programme like this, where the lead assumes a different character every episode. I thought she was fine and did a decent enough job, but with all the back story and secondary characters Eliza wasn't the sole focus of this episode. The fact is that she can only as well as the lines she was given, and they were pretty poor. I'll reserve judgement after I've watched a few more eps.

So...

"Did I fall asleep?" Not quite mate, not quite.