Moving on as I’m catching up with everything I didn’t have the time to watch, I finally sat through the whole first season of Dollhouse. The first time I tried, I couldn’t get passed the first episode, steered away by a nasty combination of not-so-stellar acting, and a non-compelling story. Now that I have, I’m forced to get down to the most basic questions.

What’s the series’ synopsis again? There are dolls into which you can blow your darkest, most secret fantasies.

What kind of theme does that bring about? Identity. The separation of mind and body. What if the same mind ended in two different bodies? What if someone ran away with an active to try and live a second life? What would a long-term engagement look like?

There are enough stories to tell about our weaknesses and who we are to fill a couple of seasons right there. And yet the first 7 episodes are nothing but action tales of super-duper agents – hostage negotiator, kung-fu expert, high-end thief, etc; this looks like a string of unrelated episodes of The Pretender. You could strip the whole “dollhouse” concept out of the first 7 episodes and still retain 90% of the storyline; that’s how intricated the themes are to the episode writing.

I can’t believe the writers failed to identify the question of Identity as the main theme of the series. So why is it that the only way they found to express identity crisis was through a whole lot of action, global conspiracy or even apocalypse (in the feeble “Epitaph One” episode)?

That’s exactly what happened with True Blood, as well: supposedly a vampire story, it’s like the writers had so little to say about vampires and their society, they had to throw in a psychic protagonist and what? Shape-shifters? Damn. Whether it’s about designing a product, a service or writing stories, if you fail to identify what you’re about, you’re guaranteed to end up into a wall.