Last Night's Television - Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestors: the Link, BBC1; Dollhouse, Sci-fi

The visual rhetoric of Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestors: the Link was pure Da Vinci Code: crash zooms accompanied by ominous subterranean booms, a raking lurid light, the sort of sinister orchestral scurrying that accompanies albino killer monks and earth-shaking secrets. And if you believed Dr Jens Franzen nothing less than "earth-shaking" would do the story justice. "In the moment when the results of our investigations will be published," he said, "this will be just like an asteroid hitting the Earth." Well, it's true, the unveiling of the fossil remains of Ida – a lemur-like primate dating from 47 million years ago – did command quite a lot of column inches last week, particularly since it had been calculatedly marketed as a "missing link" in the evolutionary chain. But you probably only felt the ground shaking beneath your feet if you worked in the field of palaeontology, and even then some of the vibrations may have been caused by indignation at the media carnival that surrounded the announcement.

The adoption of a thriller accent for the documentary about Darwinius masillae, as Ida is more formally known, had an unfortunate effect. It started to make you worry about provenance, an anxiety that wasn't eased by the frequency with which the contributing scientists said things that could reasonably have been paraphrased as "it's too good to be true". It's unheard of," said Dr Jorn Hurum, the ringmaster of this scientific circus. "You have to get to human burial to get to something this complete." "This is like a Holy Grail for paleontology" said someone else. Add in the slightly cloak-and-dagger nature of the acquisition and you couldn't help but wonder whether there'll be a follow-up in 10 years' time on the biggest hoax since Piltdown Man, scientists being no less susceptible to over-eagerness than the rest of us.

The assurance that Ida was the real deal was a little cursory here. "You cannot fake the inner structure of a bone... it's impossible," explained Dr Hurum confidently, reassuring us that X-rays had established that the fossil was genuine. Given that he'd forked out $1 million for Ida, one assumes that talented forgers are even now working on this problem, but I take it on trust that they haven't cracked it yet, and that the remarkably preserved skeleton of this little animal is authentic. Whether it counts as our direct ancestor or just one of evolution's side branches is a little harder to say. It would have been quite nice – in the midst of the intriguing details about Ida's bone structure – to have someone point out that the idea of a single missing link is misleading nonsense anyway, since a chain that stretches across nearly 50 million years is likely to have quite a few of them, but I'm guessing that Ida's PR handlers felt that wouldn't make quite as good a headline.

From one adorable liquid-eyed primate scrambling through primeval woods to another – Eliza Dushku, who plays Echo in Joss Whedon's very creepy nerd-boy fantasy, Dollhouse, and who this week found herself hired out as human prey to a psycho outward-bounder. Echo is an Active, one of a box-set of human dolls whose consciousnesses can be wiped and re-recorded with whatever configuration and skill set their human clients want. "Everything you want, everything you need she will be," explained Olivia Williams, who plays the English madame of this hi-tech bordello. She then sensibly extracts a damage-waiver fee from her latest customer, since he wants to take Echo white-water rafting and rock-climbing.

The undercurrents of sexual control and submission in the basic concept here are borderline psychotic themselves, it seems to me – the sort of thing that a disturbed adolescent might conjure up in between torturing cats and jerking off – and the show itself does nothing to tone it down. In between "engagements", the Actives are actually stored under the floorboards of the Dollhouse headquarters, creatures with the bodies of California calendar girls and the minds of a biddable six-year-old. The slow-burn plot arises because both Echo and Alpha, a male Active, appear to have manufacturing defects, which threaten to uncover the deeper secrets of the Dollhouse. Alpha has just run amok and Echo is beginning to get flashbacks to her previous characters.

In the fog of dark hints and red herrings there are occasional flashes of Whedon's talent for tart writing. When Echo's handler gives her a gun to shoot the man who's tracking her for sport he asked whether she can use it: "Four brothers... none of them Democrats," she replied, cocking the weapon in a practised way. For Whedon fans – only a whisker away from converting their admiration into an official religion – every episode will be counted as a holy day of obligation. But if you don't already have the faith I'm not sure this is going to convert you.