Alpha male Alan Tudyk talks about 'Dollhouse' finale

Tudyk, who played Hoban "Wash" Washburne on Whedon’s “Firefly,” surprised fans when he popped up last week as baddie Alpha, who has been haunting Dollhouse operations off screen all season. The rogue “active” tricked FBI agent Paul Ballard into thinking he was an environmental engineer who could help him break Eliza Dushku’s Echo out of the Dollhouse.

One of Alpha’s 43 personalities is a genius, but not the one Ballard thought he had recruited. He’s an avenging killer who is strangely fascinated with Echo and wants her for himself.

“He’s screwing with the Dollhouse, and it’s always [about] his obsession with Echo,” Tudyk said. “… Now he has her, and he gets to fulfill his plan, which is to make her like him.”

Fans love that buddies Tudyk and Whedon have reunited on the show. Tudyk said Whedon told him about the Alpha character during a night of playing Pictionary at “Firefly” star Nathan Fillion’s house. (“He set me up really well because he didn’t tell me he was offering it to me.”) Before the night was over, he had the job.

Playing the character was a lot of fun, Tudyk said, because he doesn’t often play the bad guy. Wash, as any Whedon fan knows, was a laid-back, fun-loving, wisecracking pilot who fans mourned when he died. Fun or not, playing Alpha was mentally exhausting, Tudyk said, joking that it gave him a “stress rash.”

“In this coming episode, you see the effect of what 43 people is on one person,” he said. “Alpha has a little bit of difficulty controlling them ...

“It was a bit crazy-making trying to wrap your head around the lines and make them real for yourself when you’re saying them, [because] you’re saying the exact opposite of what you just said.”

In Friday’s finale, Alpha and Echo “take it on the road,” Tudyk said, so that Alpha can complete his diabolical plan—whatever it may be.

“He’s got [to get] one more thing in place before they can really go on their worldwide-domination killing spree, ruling-the-world spree,” he said. “It’s about making her in his own image, really, as far as he’s a god. In his mind, he’s a god ... and he wants to bring her up to his level of a multi-personality person.”

Tudyk was tight-lipped about Alpha’s future beyond Friday’s finale, should Fox give the show a second season.

You can almost read a resolution in this response, however: “I can’t say, because Alpha may not make it through the next episode. He does have Echo, and Alpha is a formidable person to deal with, but he has Echo, and that’s playing with fire. It could blow up in his face.”

Whether or not Alpha or “Dollhouse” returns, Tudyk has two surefire places to line up more work: those Pictionary game nights at Fillion’s. He has worked on one of director James Gunn’s “PG Porn” shorts for Spike TV after meeting him at Fillion’s. He met “Dollhouse” co-star Amy Acker there too, or at Whedon’s, where the director’s friends sometimes gather to put on Shakespeare plays.

“We’re all friends so we’ll get together,” said Tudyk, naming the best Pictionary artists he’s seen at Fillion’s. “Other than me? Nathan is a very good drawer. He’s very good. My team won last time. Joss did well; he was on my team.”