Don't look now, but it's almost August.

That means we're just a few weeks away from the fall TV season, a fact that Joss Whedon is well aware of.

The Dollhouse creator spoke with TV Guide Magazine about the second season of his cult favorite, which returns to Fox on Friday, September 25. Here are excerpts from the interview:

On weekly assignments for the Dolls: We’ll still walk the line between standalone engagements and more arcing stories. The Actives will go out on different engagements every week and take on different personalities and be in different situations. But at the same time, we’ll be ramping up the stuff that we were getting into towards the end about what the Dollhouse is for, and what it means. So it will have a healthy dose of personal relationships and conspiracy and all the stuff behind the engagements as well as a bunch of fun engagements.

On Echo getting her identity back: That’s just going to make her life harder. We’ll also get to see more of Victor and Sierra and where they came from. And we’ll discover what got everybody there. We know Boyd is a moral guy; he was a cop so his presence here is a little incongruous. We want to tease that for a while and then actually explain it.

On Paul Ballard's future: He’s going to definitely be more intimately connected to the house but that doesn’t mean that he’s completely lost his way. Yet.

On the return of Alpha: We have plans to bring him back but not right away. We like Alpha as a looming presence. We’re going to be introducing a different kind of problem into the characters’ lives, but Alpha’s always on the periphery. We want to keep him alive and use him when we can but not to much that he loses his power.

On season two's evil presence: I can’t explain too much other than that Paul’s agenda in finding out what the Dollhouse really is starts affecting everybody’s agenda a little bit because there is more at stake than just the lives of the people there.

Matt Richenthal is the Editor in Chief of TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter and on Google+.