I think it's fair to say I cared more about Victor and Sierra than Echo, but I also liked what they ended up doing with Echo, making her the sum of all the imprints she's had.

The most powerful episode to me was the one focused on Sierra, when she gets revenge on the scumbag who put her there. That episode is when we truly start seeing Topher have a soul. It made the eventual scenes in the Epitaphs (where he's crazy from guilt) more understandable, since Topher very slowly realizes that his genius has F'd the world up.

Dollhouse has been very challenging when recommending it to friends. I've had several say they tried to get into it but couldn't. As a result, I usually tell people something like "the first six episodes are absolutely terrible, then immediately changes gears straight into one of the best shows I've seen." It's hard to convince someone that they should sit through six bad episodes of television, even if the following episodes are great.