Another ass-kicking heroine explores what it means to be human: Dollhouse (FOX, Fri., 9/8c) joins Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, Fri., 8/7c) and Battlestar Galactica (SCIFI, Fri., 10/9c) in a familiar quadrant of the science fiction universe. Dollhouse’s automatons are physically human, not machines, but, judged by this week’s pilot, that twist might be about all the show offers.

Created by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Joss Whedon and starring Buffy’s troubled slayer, Eliza Dushku, Dollhouse should have a built-in cult fan base. Its premise lives up to its pedigree; its execution—so far—does not. A shadowy, illegal organization maintains a stable of men and women (mostly women, all beautiful) whose minds have been made blank via fancy computer programming and who the company can “imprint” with various personae to hire out as prostitutes, killers, chefs, whatever wealthy clients require. But one doll, Echo (Dushku), isn’t entirely forgetting her memories between jobs. Cue meditations on personality, individuality and memory, and the reprise of the classic humanity vs. technology and mind vs. matter dialectics.

Flinty ex-cop Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix) is trying to convince himself that the Dollhouse might sometimes help its clients, or at least not get them killed, and indignant maverick FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) is investigating the organization without support from his supervisors; insert a Wire-y look at government’s failures and the inherent flaws of institutions here.

So far Dollhouse has only hinted at those sweeping themes—and so far it’s been clumsy about it. It’s a portentous slog broken up by gratuitous action scenes and layered with oblique lines that beg to be taken as weighty epigrams. Maybe that’s just first-episode awkwardness and the show will live up to its lead-in, the underrated Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Now resuming its second season, Sarah Connor forsakes the movie franchise’s Arnoldian bulk and bumble to pick up where Blade Runner left off: the machines are nearly human. Of course, here the machines have grown into rebel robots who rule an apocalyptic future and visit our era to track and kill mankind’s savior, high school student John Connor (Thomas Dekker). But as that plays out, we get to watch a guardian girl-robot (Summer Glau) seem to develop emotions and a conscience and early robo-prototypes ascend the binary ladder to sentience. The martially maternal title character (Lena Headey, reprising Linda Hamilton’s role) keeps chaos at bay, or did until this week’s mid-season restart.

Throughout the series, Sarah Connor has rose ably to the role of the promised child’s mother and protector; now, she’s reduced to needing the encouragement of imaginary conversations with her son’s dead father-from-the-future—a crutch made all the more pathetic by the woeful casting of pretty but unimposing Jonathan Jackson. Hopefully the rest of the season will return Connor to her old toughness, and iron its convoluted who-built-the-robots and who-can-we-trust plotlines into something that will garner enough viewers to keep the show on the air.

If not, there’s still the critically-acclaimed Battlestar Galactica, which resumed its writers’ strike-interrupted fourth season last month. Sentient robo-slaves called Cylons revolted against their human masters, in, yes, an apocalyptic war. The handful of humans who remain find their mythic Earth —and deal with Cylons who masquerade as human, Cylons who don’t know they’re Cylons, and Cylon-human hybrids. With an assortment of strong female leads—the 1978 series’ Boomer and Starbuck have been recast as women—the show has touched on genocide, religious fanaticism, terrorism, and unjust war. Pity it keeps forgetting what it means that a slave revolt started it all.