I've been watching the ratings for the new TV season, and it looks like the numbers for everything are down, down, down. (Except Big Bang Theory, for some reason, and hey, good for it. I can only hope that America has learned to laugh with nerds, and not at them.) Unfortunately,  while Joss Whedon's Dollhouse hasn't fallen as far as some more popular series, it didn't have as much -- or any -- room to fall in the first place.

The season's second episode scored a miserable 0.8 rating, down from the premiere's already baseline 1.0 -- and this for a show that was one of the lowest-rated series ever renewed. Sure, you can blame Fox, and not without justification, for slapping the show in its traditional Friday Night Death Slot, and giving it the inexplicable lead-in of a terrible sitcom ('Til Death) and an even worse sitcom (Brothers, and seriously, Mitchell Hurwitz, what happened to you?). Oh, if only Fox had another reasonably popular science fiction show it didn't exile to Friday nights, one that might make a natural combination with Dollhouse and bring up its numbers! Say, something in a J.J. Abrams? But that's just crazy talk.

Still, to be honest, Dollhouse's somewhat listless and half-hearted season premiere is probably as much to blame for the ratings drop as the vile denizens of the Fox Marketing Department. (Motto: "At least we're not the NBC Marketing Department.")

On any of his other shows, a Whedon-penned and -directed episode would be event watching. But the episodes Whedon's made for Dollhouse have felt distracted and unfocused. Last year's "Man on the Street" was helped hugely by an amazing turn from guest star Patton Oswalt, as this season's premiere was by a terrifically written and acted showdown between Fran Kranz's mind-manipulating programmer and Amy Acker as one of his creations. But on the whole, Whedon just seemed to be going through the motions in "Vows," with yet another Echo-glitching-on-an-assignment case. And while the jury's still out on whether Eliza Dushku can consistently act as well as her costars, giving her an endless progression of identical tough-sexy-chick characters to play doesn't really help settle the question.

If you, like my brother and apparently a whole bunch of other people, tuned out after Whedon's "Vows," however, you might want to give the show a second (or third, or fourth) look. Last Friday's "Instinct" was, if not riveting, a huge improvement on the premiere. Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters, creators of Reaper, crafted a very cleverly written thriller that made excellent use of the gap between what the characters knew and what the audience knew. Their episode begins like a horror film, and ends like a horror film, but the victim and the menace switch roles over the course of the episode -- a neat trick, pulled off well. All in all, it was a much better example of what the show's capable of. Next week's contribution from Tim Minear, who wrote last season's terrific capper "Omega," is also looking good.

I'm not sure why Whedon seems to have lost a good chunk of his mojo. Perhaps he's just coming from a more despairing place than he was during his previous shows. On second viewing, the whole first season of Dollhouse is rife with images of women in cages, literal or metaphorical. Buffy and Angel regularly prevented the apocalypse, and the crew of Serenity at least avenged and absolved it. But the events of last season's "Epitath One" reveal that in Dollhouse, the end of the world is an unavoidable certainty -- and we're following the people who will make it happen. Though it has brief flashes of the humor that used to permeate Whedon's work, Dollhouse is thus far not as funny or joyful, and it has a lot less faith in humanity. If anything, it's angry.

But Dollhouse is a smart, carefully crafted, well-acted show, the kind people always say they want more of on television, but rarely bother to watch. The show's asked its viewers for a lot of faith, and it's still asking. I just can't shake the gut feeling that it'll eventually reward that faith. Then again, if the ratings stay this subterranean, that question may be purely academic.