'Dollhouse' will go back to the future in season two

This is how Joss Whedon greeted a group of reporters visiting the set of "Dollhouse" on Friday:

"Welcome back to the biggest surprise of my career, our season two."

FOX's renewal of "Dollhouse" for a second season did indeed qualify as one of the bigger shocks of the spring. Whedon is unsurprisingly psyched to be back, and he says he and his fellow writers have "more excitement and enthusiasm about the show than we did by a country mile last year, because we are in it now."

But the show is also in something of a strange position thanks to "Epitaph One," the final episode of the first season which depicted the future for Echo (Eliza Dushku) and the rest of the characters and presented a possibly radical new direction for the show.

The episode screened at Comic-Con and is on the show's DVD set, but FOX didn't air it, and it's not available (at least not legally) online -- which means that a portion of the audience will head into the second season without knowing what happened in the episode.

"'Epitaph One' did present that particular problem of serving two masters -- people who had seen it and people who hadn't," Whedon says. "I am used to that -- I made an entire movie ['Serenity'] that had that problem and only that problem."

Joking aside, though, Whedon says that the first episode of season two -- which airs Sept. 25 -- will revisit that future and bring those who didn't see "Epitaph One" up to speed. However, "the actual bulk of the show takes place three months after the events of 'Omega.' But we will be visiting that future every now and then."

While the "Epitaph One" situation is unusual, Whedon notes that even if it had aired on FOX (or didn't exist), he would still be reintroducing the show to potential new viewers.

"We have so many regulars and relationships and so much mythology already around the central premise of 'this woman can be anyone' that this episode has a lot of catching up for any viewer whether or not 'Epitaph' was a part of it," he says.

The writers' goal for season two, Whedon says, is to "build Echo up from nothing ... and really give her a sense of momentum and purpose that will ground the show in a way it couldn't be last year." At least for the first week, it's working, Dushku says.

"I am already sort of astonished by the emotions and reactions just in ... this episode," she says. [Thursday], full on burst into tears in the middle of a take. It was a giant scene ... and there was something that happened and I haven't had that kind of -- I was just surprised at my emotion and I hadn't really had that. I was like, All right, this is kind of a nice kickoff for the season. Everything's out on the table and we've already had the first season to sort of have our insecurities and have our guard and a little bit of that, and now we just get to open it up and search into humanity with you."

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