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But Whedon said he always wanted look more closely at the desires and fantasy lives of the Dollhouse's clients. Even into the show's second season, however, that idea made Fox "twitchy," according to Whedon.

The idea of sexuality was a big part of the show when it started and when that fell out, when the show turned into a thriller every week, it took something out of it that was kind of basic to what we were trying to do."

"the other implications of what was originally supposed to be somewhat more of a fantasy. The real-world version of [this kind of activity] was I think what made the network really twitchy and I can’t really fault them for that. I just thought when I went in and pitched it ...you know, it frightened me too [but I thought] we all got that that was what we were doing."

"I mean, there has to be a reason behind the story, [something] besides the story itself. Even I just want to evoke something that I remember," he added. "Even if it’s that small, there still has to be some reason beyond, 'We need to squeeze out another 40 minutes of entertaining people.' It has to go further than that or I get not only bored, I get a little ashamed."

"The restrictions [in cable] are fewer, but the process of developing it with a studio and a network, even a cable network is still rough. It takes an enormous amount of time to run a show and to get it off the ground takes just a huge amount of steel. I’m interested in it,"

residual payments for "Dollhouse" were "pennies, because they're not re-running it, they're just putting it on Hulu."

The artistic community is more and more left out of the equation, so the trick is going to be finding out how to make the Internet work in such a way that people [can get by] because it’s not going to pay TV money. It’s not."

Production on the series finale, "Epitaph Two: Return," which airs Jan. 22, gets underway soon.

Each of these actors is at the top of his or her game, and "Dollhouse's" twisty story of secrets, lies and coverups promises to get even more strange, complex and compelling before the show ends its run.

s I said before, it’s the same way we did [things] on "Buffy" every year. You go in knowing how many episodes you’ve got and you make sure that you can have some sense of closure in that time if you don’t get any more. It’s how I’ve always operated. It makes this a little bit easier because we were headed for something of an ending, obviously. We would have gone a different route had they told us to, but we always had this one in our pocket.

s. "Come with me now to the time of Mag and Zone and tiny Caroline and we’ll see where their trip eventually led and what happened to everybody in that timeline."

Basically the show didn’t really get off the ground because the network pretty much wanted to back away from the concept five minutes after they bought it and then ultimately, the show itself is also kind of odd and difficult to market. I actually think they did a good job, but it’s just not a slam-dunk concept. It wasn’t like our numbers were huge and plummeted. They were tiny and still somehow managed to plummet. We alienated both our viewers.

I mean, midway through Season 1 [it was,] "OK, here is the show." We got the espionage that the network wants, but it’s the questions about identity that we want. There are other things about the show that never came back and I didn’t really realize it until the second season, [there were] things that we were ultimately sort of dancing around.

The idea of sexuality was a big part of the show when it started and when that fell out, when the show turned into a thriller every week, it took something out of it that was kind of basic to what we were trying to do. And then also the fact that it was a thriller every week meant that we couldn’t go from genre to genre, which is really what I wanted to do. But we did manage to keep the questions about who we are and the interpersonal stuff and [there was] the amazing ensemble and everybody shining and doing cool stuff.

Well, it’s just in the sense that, part of what was going to be the show was the idea of who these people were -- [part of it was going to be about] these clients and what their fantasies were, what they expected, what they wanted. You know, what do we get from each other in our most intimate relationships, be they sexual or [whatever else]. The interest in the client kind of moved away.

First of all, network television has taken great treads backwards in terms of dealing with sexuality or the body or anything. I mean, now on cable everybody is prancing about naked and whatnot. On the networks it’s gotten different since I was last making TV.

It’s the classic American double standard --torture, "Great." Sex, "Oh, that’s so bad."

Exploitation wasn’t the whole theme. It was going to be a question of, how much of this fantasy will people let us have. Now, I didn’t make exactly the same show [that was pitched], but we did get to delve in the territory a little bit. The idea was always, how much of the fantasy will [viewers] accept and how much will they go, "You know what, this just is too much like real-world situations that are truly appalling and so I can’t let the fantasy happen."

, but it was more about the idea of our identities and what we consider to be ourselves and how relating to other people affects that, how we incorporate other people in ourselves and how we project ourselves onto people and how everybody relates to everyone in their lives through the filter of their own beliefs, experiences and memories.

No, for me it was enormously different and I absolutely am thrilled with what we were able to achieve. Lisa Wiegand, our director of photography, just brought so much energy and so much texture. And working in HD beats the hell out of film as far as I’m concerned. It’s a lighter package. You move faster. It is not the future. It is the present and I can’t imagine shooting on film again.

I’m the guy who gets twitchy when shooting takes too long, who gets twitchy when he has to pull the same trick out of the same bag, because ultimately I’m interested in two things. I’m interested in entertaining people with stories and I’m interested in breaking those stories down and going, "Why am I doing this? Why are you entertained by this? What does this mean? Why?"

I mean, there has to be a reason behind the story, [something] besides the story itself. Even if I just want to evoke something that I remember. Even if it’s that small, there still has to be some reason beyond, "We need to squeeze out another 40 minutes of entertaining people." It has to go further than that or I get not only bored, I get a little ashamed.

As far as cable, I’ve started taking a couple of meetings and stuff. I’ve definitely learned "Oh, cable and network TV are different." [laughs] I’m not the brightest fellow and so I’ve just started to go, "Those guys can do whatever they want!"

Of course that is not actually the case once it gets up on the screen. The restrictions are fewer, but the process of developing it with a studio and a network, even a cable network, is still rough. It takes an enormous amount of time to run a show and to get it off the ground takes just a huge amount of steel. I’m interested in it. But for me, the Internet is slightly more interesting right now just because I feel like we have to get in there and start figuring out how to create entertainment without the networks and the studios, because they’re basically trying to figure out how to create and entertain without us.

Yeah, but people aren’t going to make what they want to make anymore. That’s not going to happen. The rainbow, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow got smaller, significantly smaller. [Television is] less and less of a lucrative equation.

Residual checks that are so important to the writer, they’re coming in for "Dollhouse" and they’re pennies because they’re not re-running it. They’re just putting it on Hulu. So that whole system is crumbling and with the advent of the new technology, crews are going to get smaller and when things move to the Internet, there is no format where people make the kind of money they’ve made in television.

You know, we didn’t win the [writers'] strike. It didn’t go our way. The artistic community is more and more left out of the equation, so the trick is going to be finding out how to make the Internet work in such a way that people [can get by] because it’s not going to pay TV money. It’s not. In fact, people are going to have to be entering the business less with the idea of making a fortune and more of the idea of just making product, getting it done, getting it out there and then hoping that there is a way in which it can support [a creative community].

Whedon: You know, the thing that I do to waste time is think of things I want to make. That’s how my mind is employed. So I’m going to get to make at least a couple of them next year and that’s very exciting for me. I have more things to say.

an assault on one's very perception of reality.

The novella's mix of science and satire takes unusual form. Like the hero of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Shterer narrates his experience of time travel to a group of rapt fellow intellectuals; he lingers on the mechanics of his machine but unlike Wells's hero doesn't actually get around to telling his listeners about what he's seen in the future. Krzhizhanovsky, an admirer of Wells, seems curiously uninterested in using the premise of time travel to imagine the world of the future. The novella is clearly not the kind of Russian utopian science fiction that was popular in the years before and just after the revolution, when leftist writers like the Bolshevik revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov, the author of Red Star (1908), projected their ideal of a technologically advanced communist society into the distant future. But neither is it a futuristic satire in the vein of Zamyatin's We. Krzhizhanovsky does not intend "Memories of the Future" as a corrective to the problems he observes in Bolshevik society; there are no satirical extrapolations from the present, no details about what exactly awaits his countrymen. It is an expression of pure pessimism that suggests correctives are useless.

Until the end of the 1920s there was a good deal of literary ferment among writers on the left. These writers could still openly argue with one another over how -- if at all -- they should be serving the socialist state, and they debated both how to write (realism? fantasy? abstraction?) and how to live (like a regimented factory worker or a nineteenth-century bohemian?). But at the end of the decade new party directives swiftly changed literary culture. The range of permissible art forms narrowed to the kind of conservative, ideologically driven parables that would later be called socialist realism; the great Modernist experiments of the revolutionary era came to an end.