Dollhouse is an early-2000s TV show starring Eliza Dushku as a programmable human known as a Doll. She is part of a program where a company rents out people, programmed to meet their needs, for short-term use.

Even from this simple description, the knock-on effects are pretty dystopian.

The Dolls are all known by codenames taken from the NATO alphabet. It’s a slight twist on the “no name, just a number” trope, further dehumanizing the subjects. Each has a neutral personality programmed into them. They drift around the eponymous “Dollhouse” in a cult-like haze, mild-mannered and docile. When someone hires one, they’re sat down in a medical chair and have a new personality zapped into their brain.

These new personalities can range from escort to assassin to specific people that a client misses. They acquire new skills, languages, accents, mannerisms. Frankly, just from a television standpoint, it’s a great acting stretch for the whole cast playing the mutable people.

Between assignments, memories are wiped. The dolls remember nothing. They go back to barely existing.

I’ll try to avoid addressing the plot of the series, since it’s twist-filled and occasionally shocking, and that’s part of the appeal. But let’s consider the science.

At present, very little is known about the human brain. It’s the least-understood organ and by such a large margin as to be silly to compare it. Unless we discover that humans are interdimensional beings and we’ve got organs we can’t even detect (yet), this title is likely never to be passed on.

But we are learning.

At some point, it’s not even that implausible that we can learn to not just read memories directly from a human brain but write them as well. I explore the latter in my Project Transhuman series, where the technology to copy this information leapfrogs understanding how the memories actually work.

Are there legitimate uses for this technology?

Could anyone but a secret government agency even develop it?

Who could possibly benefit?

A lot of what makes us human is tied up in that mystery. If a human mind can be overwritten like a wet, squishy floppy disk, what are we? Are we the program? Are we the meat? Do we need both together to be “us”?

If you want answers to those sorts of questions, my Project Transhuman series is your better bet. If you’re more into 90s sci-fi TV with some incredible versatile actors and snappy banter, check out Dollhouse.