Scans_Daily

Cell worked from a disturbingly similar initial premise, 'telephone signal scrambles people's consciousnesses, reverting them to lizard-brain behaviors'. It's done by unnamed terrorists, and slowly the victims start to accrete personality back, though they've been zotted down to some level sufficient to come back as a NETWORK of minds, provided you have enough of them together in one place. By the end of the story, it's 'some people who survived the initial waves and chaotic mindwiped' and 'the telepathic hivemind that grew out of the chaotic mindwiped', but they figure out (sort of) that you may be able to reboot the mindwipes to original save. So, same vector (phone), same attack (mindwipe), similar initial results (dummies and ferals), different consequences (blank disks versus hivemind), similarish cure (mechanical based on original attack).

And Cell was in 2006.

I liked some of the stuff the show was angling towards exploring, but I don't think it executed it in a way that most people wanted to watch. And I'm an avid sci fi reader, so I had examples at mental hand of some of the concepts being done much better, which didn't help.

Having a (literally) tabula rasa main character you CAN'T empathize or identify with because she doesn't really exist as a character, and so has nothing to latch onto (until they dredged her original back up towards the end of the first season, and all the synthesis 'composite' stuff along with) was one of the major execution fails, for me. That, and using Eliza Dushku to try and act distinct multiple personalities every week was kind of like trying to use a sock in place of a Swiss army knife.