River is definitely human, but the damage that’s been done to her brain leaves her struggling to hold on to the remaining fragments of her identity and to her sense of herself as a person at all. And the details of River’s attempt to hold on to herself make her a much more complete and engaging character than the saner members of the crew. In one of the funniest scenes of the series, an onboard minister called Shepherd Book finds River marking up his Bible and rearranging the pages in an attempt to make literal sense of the stories in it. “So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden,” River says, dead serious. “We’ll have to call it ‘early quantum state phenomenon.’ Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammals on the same boat.”

The episode makes River seem crazy, but it also establishes her genius through an exploration of religion and science that resonates in our own world. Whedon also shows viewers that despite her intelligence and her insanity, River is a plausible girl, whether she’s making-believe with her brother in flashbacks, or playing jacks and giggling over gossip with another young woman. Without those details, River might merely be a damaged freak. But when she cries to her brother, “I function like I’m a girl. I hate it because I know it’ll go away!” we care, because we’ve seen the humor and idiosyncrasy that slip away when she descends into madness.

Unlike her predecessors Dawn and River, who fight against the loss of their selves, Dollhouse’s Echo has voluntarily given up her identity, though the pilot implies that she did so under to escape an even more terrible fate. That setup raises important questions about consent, but because repeated memory wipes have left her with no sense of original self, Echo can’t remember that she consented, much less consider how she felt about signing herself over. “I’m a bad guy?” she asks an accomplice during an assignment when her programming malfunctions, leaving her without a personality. “You are a talking cucumber,” he corrects her.

Despite the fantastical circumstances his women find themselves in, Whedon has been unusually successful in bringing them to life by grounding them in the common experience of women, and portraying that experience with a sympathy and verisimilitude extremely rare in male directors. “There is an amazing amount of unbelievable shit happening to women all over the world every single day,” Whedon said in an email from Canada, where he is shooting the horror movie The Cabin in the Woods. “A lot to cull from—and to fight against.”

But thus far, though it’s early in the show, Dollhouse has not managed to channel the common experience of women. Echo is quite literally a doll: beautiful, malleable, and detached. She communicates with the scientist who wipes her memory in call-and-response dialogues. “Did I fall asleep?” she asks every time he finishes erasing her brain. “For a little while,” he responds in a tone that’s laced with sickly sweetness. The only fragments that Agent Ballard has of her prior identity are a photograph and a college video yearbook.