In an interview with Viceland, Joss Whedon talked about women (of course) and some more thoughts on what went into creating Dollhouse, which will debut this January on Fox.

On the issue of reality versus fiction, Whedon said, “That’s the whole point of the setting, is [Eliza Dushku’s] sense of self and her assertion of herself and getting past what people—even me—expect of her… People have already accepted that she can be something else, so she’s already gotten past Faith a little bit. She has been sort of pigeonholed, though.

“I don’t think we’re trapped in the Matrix, or trapped in the way that the Matrix actually means, where this isn’t really happening. But I do think that our idea of what life really means and what we are is different than what we’ve become. And how much of us is made up of what’s expected of us, how much of us is made up of our actual free will, is a lot to pin on people, especially in this country.”

Whedon went on to riff about the mind, admitting “it’s what interests me. I get less and less subtle. It’s the thing I want to talk about: What are we? Why? And why aren’t we better? In what ways are we being held accountable for things we’re actually OK about, and in what ways are we being let off for things we really should be dealing with? Because we deal with repurposing sex and what people want from each other we see right upfront the scariest parts of us, and some of the nicer parts as well. What those are are not necessarily what you’d expect. And of course, you know, other people might disagree but we have a saying here on the show: There’s no judging in the Dollhouse.”

Of course, no interview with the writer would be complete without returning to his immortal slayer, Buffy Summers. In response to a question about the character between the final episode of the television series and the Dark Horse comic book continuation, nicknamed season eight, he admitted, “Well, the first thing you do at the beginning of any season is make everything bad so that you can have something to fight against. You take whatever resolution you had and say, Well, what were the consequences of that? Besides that, I was dealing with the fact that I had created a future where none of the things she had apparently accomplished had actually happened—I wrote them before I wrote her doing them, and that was a mistake. So trying to reconcile the two led to the tone of season eight. It is a little intense but it hopefully has a goofy side to it.”