Eliza Dushku is hot, and critics aren’t watching her show for the plot

Eliza Dushku is hot. That’s pretty much all you’ll get out of this piece, which has the most incomprehensible lede I’ve read all day:

Dollhouse (Fox, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), created by Buffy the Vampire Slayer maestro Joss Whedon, stars Buffy alumna Eliza Dushku as a sort-of Stepford wife, a not-quite Nikita. The character, named Echo—like the Narcissus-type nymph and the Marvel Comics supervamp samurai—has an obscure past and a nonexistent present. An “Active” controlled by a stealth organization, she lives as a supple puppet without a real memory or a stable consciousness. Regularly brainwashed and reprogrammed by a computer geek with an indie-rock haircut, protected by a dark-skinned handler to whom the script allots just the slightest Driving Miss Daisy-ing, manipulated by a head honcho with the viciously posh accent of Olivia Williams, she is whatever the Dollhouse’s ultrarich clients want her to be. “Where I come from, we called them ‘hookers,’ ” Lisa de Moraes has quipped in the Washington Post. “Whatever.”

Hey, as long as we’re throwing inscrutable metaphors around, this reads kind of like the Lattimore translation of the Iliad, as adapted for the screen by Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven on shrooms. What in the hell is Troy Patterson trying to say?

As always, Polansky puts it better: “I just saw Eliza Dushku’s photo, then everything went hazy and Dreamweaver started playing from somewhere.”