In this golden age of television, we have been gradually losing the plot. Whereas character-driven shows like Six Feet Under or Deadwood once felt novel and fresh, today they are everywhere. Lost, a show conceived as an island adventure, has instead served as a five-year exploration of daddy issues. On Mad Men, that grand re-creation of the 60s, so little happens in the first season you could sum up the whole show in nine words. (Don Draper is not who he says he is.) And then there’s USA’s advertising campaign — “Characters welcome” — which seems to say, Nothing really happens on our shows, but Tony Shalhoub is hilarious.

I’m all for shows with character — James Gandolfini’s volcanic Tony Soprano; Will Arnett’s desperate, scheming G.O.B.; The Wire’s gallery of rogues. But on a bad character-driven show, like Lost in its senescence, characters disappear inside themselves, narrative be damned. To watch a Locke or a Kate or a Jack episode of Lost is to shout who cares?! at every flashback. The fan boys and girls are still marveling at the Oceanic Six’s time travel; to me the more interesting violation of the laws of physics is how Jack’s head taveled so far up his own ass.

But deep in our age’s desert of character, I am happy to report, there is an oasis of narrative. Not a glum procedural like Law & Order or CSI, but a wide-ranging drama with a delicious premise and an ever-expanding universe of plot twists. The show is Dollhouse, and it wrapped up its first and potentially only season on Friday night. It needs to come back for a second, because after a rough start it got better with every episode.

The premise is a touch ludicrous: A company treats its agents like rewritable CDs, imprinting new personalities on them so they can be deployed in whatever dangerous situations their clients require them for. These engagements are often sexual in nature, some quite kinky. (The show briefly made me wish I was straight, if only for a few minutes, so that I might properly enjoy the sight of Eliza Dushku in her dominatrix gear.) The Dollhouse, in other words, is a 21st-century brothel, run by a chilly British madam named Ms. DeWitt.

So far, so WTF. But Dollhouse creator Joss Whedon has several neat tricks up his sleeve, and he plays them all simultaneously. (Mild spoilers follow.) For starters, there’s an FBI agent investigating the Dollhouse, eager to bring it down. Later, we learn that a male doll named Alpha went insane, killed several people and escaped the Dollhouse, where he remains at large. And most intriguingly of all, Echo — the show’s tabula-rasa lead, played by Dushku with a bovine stare — isn’t quite the blank slate she appears to be. At the end of some episodes, she gives a hint that her mind hasn’t been wiped completely. She’s starting to put things together.

Any one of these threads wouldn’t be substantial enough to weave a show from. But put them together, at the fringes of an otherwise self-contained episode filled with action, and you’ve got a show that accomplishes the central mission of all great drama: to make you wonder what’s going to happen next. The show has rewarded its viewers with one twist after another, and not of the lazy it-was-all-a-dream variety. The wild, pulpy plot papers over all manner of deficiencies, from Dushku’s uneven acting to Fran Kranz’s deeply unfunny comic-relief genius-nerd Topher. And thanks to the end-of-episode memory wiping that turns every agent back into a docile, sheep-like “doll,” the show never grows overly concerned with character.

In praise of what it’s not
It has, however, tackled an even trickier problem: morality. In another writer’s hands, Dollhouse could have run as a procedural. Turn the amoral, neuroscientist pimps who run the joint into lantern-jawed do-gooers, and the dolls could go into the world and right wrongs, a latter-day version of Charlie’s Angels. But over Dollhouse’s first season, the creators confront the morality of their central conceit at every turn. DeWitt and her crew tell themselves that, because the dolls have volunteered to have their memories wiped, and will be restored to life at the end of their five-year contracts, their business is on the up and up. But they’re lying to themselves, and they know it. At best, they have turned their dolls into prostitutes and slaves. At worst, they have put them into fatal situations. What keeps them going is money — clients pay well for the service — and the chance to play God with their gorgeous employees.

Yet they can also do good. In the sixth episode, “Man on the Street,” the FBI agent interrupts one of Echo’s engagements in an effort to save her. She escapes, but the man who hired her — Patton Oswalt, in the second-best thing he’s ever done, after Ratatouille — does not. As Agent Ballard interrogates him, we learn that Oswalt is a billionaire computer scientist. His wife supported them for years while he worked on his inventions. The day he finally hit it big, instead of telling her right away, he invited her over to a mystery location — which, it turns out, was a house he had just bought for them. On the way, before ever learning of her husband’s success, she dies in a car accident. And so once a year he hires a doll to play the part of his wife, coming home to see the big house, and discover that they will be financially secure for the rest of their lives. It was the first time we had ever sympathized with anyone who had hired a doll. The show had turned back on itself, and taken us with it.

Dollhouse is dark, uncomfortable sci-fi. As Wax Banks put it:

The characters with self-knowledge do evil, and the ones without it are pawns. The deck is stacked.

How could you possibly enjoy this story? There’s no blinking arrow saying ‘This Is Right.’ Order is provisional, law is ad hoc, love is electrically-induced, pity is corporate, memory is false, the good guys are nuts, the bad guys mean well.

I understand why the TV ratings are anemic. It’s a tough show to warm up to, and it airs on Friday nights, when most of its target audience is at happy hour. What I don’t get is the subpar critical response. Most of the people who reviewed Dollhouse initially focused on Dushku’s acting skills and Joss Whedon’s pedigree. But just after they stopped watching, Dollhouse transcended all of that. Its first 12 episodes were some of the most provocative, kinky, suspenseful hours of network television I’ve seen. If the show is renewed, critics owe it to themselves to give the show a second look. In the meantime, I just hope Fox gives the show another chance — and a better timeslot. As usual, Dollhouse has me desperate to know what’s going to happen next.