Compare that to Victor and his repeated Lonely Hearts assignments – if there's any direct prostitution going on we've only seen it with a male Doll.

"Offered up for physical abuse"? Since when? The actions in episode 2 came about because of a failing in the Dollhouse – that was the entire point of the episode. Any other time we've seen physicality involving a Doll it's usually been part of the deal and therefore they've been programmed to deal with it.

At the end of the day, if you're getting bad vibes from the Dollhouse's operations then that's the entire point – they're not doing all this for fluffy reasons.

I can fully understand your opinions being based on disappointment for the show and as a result you're perhaps not paying as much attention, but if your comments are indicative of your full opinion I fear you've missed many, many things.

Yes, OK, the big twist in episodes 6 was yet-another faceless global mega-corp conspiracy, but so what? JJ Abrams seems to make a living rehashing that same premise with every new show, but nobody seems to complain (and rightly so – Fringe is fantastic).

I'm not saying that FOX is entirely to blame for Dollhouse's woes. As I said, I felt episodes 7 and 8 were weak (certainly 7 stopped me caring about the main damn character) which comes from when, apparently, Joss took the reigns back from FOX – which isn't a good thing, but when it's good it's very good and the simple fact is FOX has never given Dollhouse proper support to allow it to find its feet. OK, they did have faith in letting him build that huge set and commissioned the show without a pilot, but did that faith translate into marketing, public awareness and a half-decent timeslot?

Episode 6 was sensational, 9 made the entire show and its direction very clear, 10 opened up big cans of technological and ethical worms and 11 kicked in that last piece of the puzzle.

If anything's really killed it for me it was getting some backstory on Caroline in episode 7 – getting an idea of who she was put me off her so much I no longer care about Caroline and don't want Echo to be undone. By extension I want Ballard's motivations to be bringing down the Dollhouse its own reason, not to save Caroline.

But there is enough going on with Ballard's inside "man", the increasingly human Adelle de Witt, the organisation as a whole and Alpha's motivations and backstory to keep me interested even if Caroline has pissed me off.

The show was never fully about her anyway.

Top it off with unlikeable characters and a icky, anti-woman vibe, (our heroines are basically being offered up for sexual and / or physical abuse with each assignment), and it's easy to turn it off. Especially after the much-hyped sixth episode basically turned out to expect us to be wowed by a Bog-Standard International Evil Corporation Conspiracy, (are there any benevolent ones in Sci-Fi?), and the yawn-worthy revelation of a character as a Doll, whose only reason to be in the show from her first appearance was to be later revealed as a Doll.

Fox didn't create the premise and characters and suggest the episode plots.