And yet, here’s a second season!

Yay!

Beware of spoilers ahead.

Speaking as one of those two people who actually liked the bulk of the first season, I was beyond thrilled when Fox decided to try and atone for Firefly by bringing Dollhouse back for a second go-round.  Primarily, I hoped Whedon would find a way to not squander the opportunity, and based on “Vows,” the second-season premiere, I think I’m gonna have to say that he mostly did just that.

Found a way, that is; not squandered the opportunity.  I suck at sentence construction sometimes, and there went one.  What’s that you say, “go back and change it”?  No can do.

Anybody who has ever been a fan of one of Whedon’s other shows — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and the aforementioned Firefly – knows that one of his greatest strengths is in assembling a great cast of characters to bounce off of each other.  The series struggled a bit with this during its first season; all the pieces were in place, but nobody seemed to be moving them about very well for most of the season.

That began to change at some point, and in tonight’s season premiere, it is far and away the best element.  There are numerous excellent interactions between the characters: Boyd has great scenes with DeWitt, Ballard, and Saunders (that last one is particularly great); Topher also has a great scene with Saunders; Echo has good scenes with Ballard and with Saunders/Whiskey; DeWitt has a fine moment with Victor; Sierra — and God almighty does Dichen Lachman look good in this scene — has a great scene with Ivy in which she has an anti-Asian racist imprint.

Unless I missed it, it’s not immediately clear how much time has passed since Alpha went on his rampage at the end of the first season.  Clearly some time, probably several months, have passed, but the ramifications of that incident are still being felt in some ways.  Boyd is still very suspicious of Ballard; part of this is clearly due to his promotion to head of security, but part of him is doubtless also resentful of not being Echo’s handler anymore, and is maybe even a little jealous of Ballard’s proximity to her.

Not that Ballard is Echo’s handler, either.  No, they’ve got a more complicated relationship than that.  Apparently, Ballard’s deal with the Dollhouse is that he’s allowed to be a client, renting out Echo to use as a weapon in taking down criminals he wasn’t able to take down while at the FBI. 

This is an unexpected turn of events, and Whedon — who’s in the director’s chair tonight, and also wrote the screenplay — gets in at least one terrific reversal-of-expectations moment when he reveals that this is what’s going on with Echo’s engagement.  Initially, we’re led to believe that her engagement this week — she’s getting married to Apollo Jamie Bamber — is just another example of a kinky rich dude paying for his ya-yas.

Echo, in her guise as Mrs. Apollo, walks into the back room of a shop at one point, to find Ballard sitting there waiting on her; she greets him with a cordial, “How’s it goin’, partner,” or something like that.

Now, if you’ve seen “Epitaph One,” you know that at some point in the future, Echo/Caroline develops the ability to retain her own personality while she’s also imprinted with another, and you also know that she and Ballard end up working together.  So my first thought upon hearing her switch into a different tone of voice and call Ballard her partner was that this plot element was already starting.  Instead, it’s then revealed that Echo’s real current imprint is of an FBI agent Ballard is partnered with; she’s gone undercover, seduced an arms dealer, and is on a long-con sort of engagement designed to take him down.

So, what you’ve got here is a person named Caroline, memory wiped and turned all tabula rasa in the form of an active designated Echo, imprinted with the personality of an FBI agent who in turn is pretending to be somebody else.  Um, that’s, like, pretty fucking deep.

Even deeper: Echo isn’t really Echo anymore.  She’s still dealing with occasional flashes of memory of other engagements, so in some ways, she’s still a bit of that superintelligence — or whatever you want to call it — that Alpha made her into last season.  But only Ballard knows this, so in a sense Echo isn’t Echo anymore; she’s somebody else pretending, at times, to be Echo.

This isn’t as confusing as it sounds.  I wouldn’t say confusing; I’d lean closer, this episoe, to “compelling.”

Also compelling is the sad case of Whiskey, who seems to be well on her way to the loony bin.  She’s fucking with Topher’s mind, trying to repay him for creating her.  Not at all happy with knowing she’s a fake person, she’s doing things like putting rats in cabinets for him to discover, and showing up to sppon with him and give him morning wood.  She’s supposedly trying to conquer her own self-loathing through conquering an object of external loathing, but it doesn’t work too well … or does it?

She’s been designed to want to never leave the Dollhouse, but at episode’s end, she runs away in a convertible, headed for a new role on a new series on a different network.  (Amy Acker has a role on ABC’s upcoming Happy Town, alongside Sam Neill and Steven Weber; however, she will be appearing on Dollhouse again at some point, or so “Epitaph One” assures me.)

The performances are all pretty great this week.  Starting at the top, I know a lot of people don’t like Eliza Dushku, but when she’s playing within her range, she can be really good, and she’s really good in this episode.  Whedon had to play to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s strengths and avoid her weaknesses on Buffy, and it worked; if he can keep doing that here with Dushku, it’ll work out fine.

Amy Acker is particularly good in her role; she’s got a sort of crazed, doomed, defeated thing going on, to the extent that she even professes to want to keep her scars.  Acker, as Angel fans know, gives good crazy.  That fucking Happy Town had better be quite  a show; she’s going to missed on this one.

I was also impressed this week by Fran Kranz.  Topher, as a character, was a bit of a hemorrhoid during the first season, but starting with “Epitaph One” and continuing into “Vows,” he’s growing into an interesting character.  Kranz is obviously up to the challenge, too, and that pleases me.

Everyone else is good, including Jamie Bamber, who is largely wasted, true, but it’s nice to see him anyways.

There’s also a new character introduced, Senator Perrin, played by Angel‘s Alexis Denisof.  Perrin is seen on television publicly declaring a private war against the Rossum Corporation for holding out technology that could benefit Alzheimer’s patients.  Both Langton and Ballard suspect each other of having tipped Perrin off about the Dollhouse(s); this can lead nowhere good.

I’m pleased to see Denisof back in the Whedonverse, and I can only hope that Dollhouse can stick around long enough to properly take advantage of his tremendous talents.

If the rest of the season is as improved as this first episode, then I suspect that might well come to pass.

I’ve got to be honest: the season finale of Lost is on the air right now, so I’m not inclined to take very detailed looks at these two episodes.  I’m going to put in the due diligence, though, so here goes.

In “Omega,” the finale of the first (and possibly only) season of Dollhouse, we find out a bit more of what the deal is with Alpha.  About half of the episode consists of flashbacks to Alpha’s rampage that left Saunders scarred; the rest of the episode splits time between Alpha trying to create a new mate (Omega) in the body of Caroline and the Dollhouse’s attempts to track them down.

This was a good episode, but it wasn’t entirely satisfactory.  Some of it may have played better on paper than it does in fact: much of the confrontation between Alpha and Omega/Echo/Caroline (sheesh!) seems silly and ill-advised.  The location shooting at the factory or wherever they are has an incredibly hollow feel to it, and has no visual appeal whatsoever; zero, zip, nada, zilch.  You never want that, but a season finale is definitely the wrong place for it.  I also detested the choice of wardrobe that Echo wore; the old flannel shirt and jean shorts thing isn’t hot, it’s just trashy, and while I get that that was the point, it was quite unappealing visually.

I also can’t say I was a fan of the way Alpha’s shifts between different personalities was executed.  Now, Alan Tudyk is a very good actor, and each one of his different takes on the character was outstanding … but by throwing flash edits into the mix, so that you’re literally cutting briefly when his personality changes each time, it makes it seem as if you’re having to cut around the performance in order to create the semblance of some sort of unity.  Yes, I know that the intended effect is one of disorientation and tension, but that wasn’t the effect it had on me; it made it seem like the editors weren’t confident in Tudyk’s ability to telegraph the transitions between different personalities.  That was ill-judged, in my opinion.

I’m also not quite sure what to think of the choice Eliza Dushku made to not do something similar to Tudyk’s performance in her scenes as Omega.  I might have liked to see something a little more manic.  On the other hand, isn’t it kinda cool that Echo/Caroline seems to be able to process all of these personalities and retain some semblance of normalcy?  I think it works, from a character standpoint, and I also like the authority that Dushku brings to these scenes; she feels very much in control, at least of herself.  I continue to think that she’s a better actress than she’s getting credit for being.

Lest it sound like I’m totally bagging on this episode, I’d better talk briefly about what I liked.  As I just hinted, I liked — “loved” might not be wrong to say — the fact that Omega didn’t go nuts because her core, original personality (her soul, according to Ballard) is fundamentally stable.  That’s a nice wrinkle, and that part of the story helps make up a bit for how unsuccessful the rest of the scenes in Alpha’s hideouts tend to be.

The Saunders/Whiskey storyline was satisfying.  It hadn’t occurred to me to think that “Saunders” was an Active, but it makes perfect sense.  Amy Acker is particularly good in this episode.  Why hasn’t someone figured out how to build a show around her yet?

The episode’s beginning — in which a customer’s Natural Born Killers fantasy goes horribly awry — was suitably horrific, and it’s also believable: I totally buy that someone would pay for that type of experience, and that it would be approved so long as the Dollhouse felt it could control the situation.

I also enjoyed Ballard’s new allegiance with the Dollhouse.  I’m not 100% sold on it, in terms of its believability — Ballard has been so obsessed with bringing the thing down, I’m not sure I can buy him even considering working with them — but Tahmoh Penikett has such great chemistry with Olivia Williams, Harry Lennix, and Fran Kranz that it’s easy to see why Whedon would want to push the show in that direction.

All in all, it was a good finale, but only good; definitely not great.  It was clearly an attempt to resolve many of the plot threads from the season, but I don’t think it was entirely successful in actually doing so.

There is one remaining episode, “Epitaph One,” which will apparently make its debut on DVD.  From there, who knows.  According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Fox network has been meeting with the Fox studio (they;re not entirely the same entity, it seems) to try and figure out how to make a second season a financial reality.  That’s encouraging news.

Moving on to Fringe, I was also disappointed a bit in this show’s season finale, “There’s More Than One of Everything.”  I’ll say this for Dollhouse, it at least tried to wrap up the first season.  The producers of Fringe seem a lot more interested in setting up the second season, and more or less forgot to provide a compelling episode to hang that setup upon.

The main thrust of the episode involves David Robert Jones, who shot Nina at the end of last week’s episode; we find out that he did this so he could steal an ultra-powerful energy cell out of Nina’s cyborg arm.  He uses this energy cell to punch a hole between the dimensions, through which he apparently plans to journey for nefarious reasons.  He does all this wrapped in Invisible Man bandages, which makes for some good, creepy shots.

I’m most disapointed by how little last week’s Observer-takes-Walter plotline yields this week.  Turns out, the Observer takes Walter to the cemetery (Peter Bishop 1979-1985!), and then to the beach and the old family beachhouse.  There, Walter finds a device he created that is capable of sealing holes between the dimensions.  Now, this is obviously an important device, but it doesn’t really feel that important for some reason.

Nina manages to convince Olivia, Broyles, and Charlie that William Bell is actually in one of these other dimensions, which can be accessed through thin spots between the worlds.  For anyone who’s read The Dark Tower, this might sound like a thinny; for anyone who’s read The Talisman or Black House, the title of the episode might remind you of Twinners.  (While we’re on that subject, how awesome a Speedy Parker would Lance Reddick make?)  I’m not crying foul; Abrams and company are on record as enormous Stephen King fans.

The final scene, in which Olivia side-steps into another world and meets Walter Bell, is pretty damn cool.  Nimoy is great, performing with far more energy than he does in Star Trek; you almost sense that he feels the opportunity at hand to put a solid asterisk on his career with a great role in a new hit show.  The episode ends with a pullback revealing that Bell’s office is in the a World Trade Center!  It’s a great end to a mediocre episode; a great end to a good first season.

But I’m not entirely on the Fringe bandwagon yet, truth be told.  The show is swimming in potential, but it hasn’t paid off enough of that potential for me to be a huge fan yet.  Hopefully, the second season will accomplish that goal.

After several mythology-heavy episodes, Dollhouse returns to the (mostly) stand-alone format of the season’s first five episodes.  You’re forgiven if you took that news with some concern, but don’t you worry your little head about it none, little missy; this here episode is jest fine.

Why did I just begin typing in a Buford voice?  I’m not entirely sure, but I think I might be buzzing a little thanks to this here episode I jest watched.

Now, this was not a great episode, not like “Spy in the House of Love” or “Needs” or “Man on the Street.”  But of all the standalone episodes this season, “Haunted” is far and away the best of the lot … and that suggests to me that Whedon and company have now figured out what the show is.  If they’ve gotten to the point at which a stand-alone episode can be this good, then they have clearly nailed down the concepts and concerns that lie behind the idea of the Actives/Dolls.  For a while, that didn’t seem to be true, and even after “Man on the Street,” it didn’t seem to be totally true of “Echoes.”

But here, we get a confident, compelling stand-alone. If that’s not cause to get a little giddy and start typing like I’ve got Boss Hogg stuck beneath my fingernails, well, then you and I ain’t on the same page.

The episode opens with a brief scene of a wealthy woman going for a ride on one of her horses; when her husband and his friends see the horse, suddenly riderless, they know something is wrong, and we cut to a shot of Adelle watching Echo coming up from the imprinting process.  “Margaret,” she says, “I hate to be the one to tell you … you’re dead.”

One of the stronger elements of “Man on the Street” was the notion that a client could use the Actives as a means of maintaining a relationship with a deceased loved one.  “Spy in the House of Love” may or may not have featured DeWitt doing the same thing.  Here, the idea begins to receive a fuller, more complicated treatment, and it’s now obvious to me that this is a story conceit so rife with potential that I don’t even want to think about it.  If I do, the potential cancellation of this series is going to cause that Boss Hogg voice inside me to want to take over and start commanding my body to buy several shotguns and a roll of duct tape and start Googling the home addresses of various Fox executives.  That way lies an unwanted prison marriage, so better not.

Margaret’s personality — which, Adelle says, took a year and a half of “regular, painful brainscans” — is imprinted into Echo, and she uses the opportunity to attend her own funeral.  As she points out, who wouldn’t want to do that?  It’s a seemingly universal desire, though I suspect it’s one that a great many of us would balk at following through on.  Margaret doesn’t.  However, that’s not her real goal; no, she at some point became convinced that she would be murdered, probably for her money, so she’s back from the dead, “haunting” her old house in an attempt to determine who it was that killed her.

Now, on many a lesser show, this would be a laugh-out-loud concept, so terrible that it wouldn’t just jump a shark, it would shit napalm onto it while hollering “Who Let the Dogs Out” as it passed overhead.  But here, it works pretty well, and even elicits some genuine emotion.  It’s uncomfortable watching Margaret/Echo have to sit through hearing her children and brother talk poorly of her behind her dead back.  Scenes like that play on fears we must all have at some point or another, and it’s that identification that keeps this episode (and series) from tipping over into ludicrousness.  The resolution of this plot is irrelevant, and for the few minutes that that becomes front-and-center, the episode becomes a bit boring.  What’s interesting here is the emotion, and the philosophical/moral/spiritual implications of the idea of personality imprinting.

Speaking up for some of those concerns, as usual, is Boyd, who is aghast to learn that the Dollhouse is trafficking in what amounts to ticketed eternal life.  DeWitt assures him that Margaret’s is a temporary situation, but her own plotline from the previous episode suggests otherwise.  One of the b-stories involves Topher, who is performing a “diagnostic” on one of the Actives, and that plotline also suggests otherwise.  Topher is actually reuniting with … well, with who?  It’s not clear.  A best friend, perhaps, although I’m going to guess it’s with a brother or sister.  DeWitt is aware of this; she tells Boyd that she permits Topher to run one of these “diagnostics” once each year.

Topher’s friend has been imprinted into (onto?) Sierra, and you might think that there would be some sort of kinky, inappropriate touching going on there, but apparently not.  That doesn’t appear to be what Topher needs. Ballard, on the other hand…?  Well, he took a turn for the darker this episode.

Obviously struggling with the knowledge that Mellie is actually a Doll, he gets a set of her fingerprints and takes them to a former colleague at the FBI.  They run the prints, and the computer search initially pops up a whole series of aliases, several of which are mugshots.  Then, the identities all self-erase themselves from the system.  “What just happened?” Ballard asks; “I just started to believe you,” his friend answers.

Back at home, Mellie, despondent over Ballard’s recent disinterest in her, basically tells Paul that he can treat her like a dog, just so long as he lets her stay around.  Ballard takes the opportunity to indulge in what we can assume is some intense hate-fucking.  It seems to please her, but Ballard looks positively disgusted with himself.   Mellie asks him if he’s going to spend the day trying to find another Dollhouse client.  “I found one,” he says; he’s found one in himself.

This is an interesting moment.  On the one hand, it indicates that Ballard has just achieved a certain level of sympathy for how the Dollhouse functions; after all, he just engaged in some emotional purging, and probably some dark wish fulfillment, so he has to now know why the Dollhouse is able to stay in demand.  On the other hand, he now presumably knows a bit about the depravity and cruelty and darkness that can result from that demand, and he is disgusted with himself for rolling around in that muck.  I’d guess that he is now more determined than ever to find the Dollhouse.

Where that’ll end up going, I have no idea.  But what’s interesting about Paul’s dark turn in this episode is how the other two parts of the story refute his ideas about the Dollhouse.  Leaving aside any spiritual qualms you might have about the idea of resurrection through stored mental patterns, it seems to me hard to argue that any part of what Margaret did was a bad thing.  She was able to find a sort of peace; she was able to find her murderer and bring him to justice; and she was able to reconcile some of the bad blood that her unwitting distantness had engendered in her husband, daughter, and brother.  Presumably, it also allowed Adelle to cope better with her friend’s untimely death.  None of this seems bad or evil to me.  Same with Topher; whoever that was Sierra was imprinted with, Topher obviously just wanted to use that time to share beer and chips, play laser tag, and enjoy companionship in a totally non-creepy, asexual way.

So for the first time, we’re not entirely in sympathy with Ballard.  If he’s successful in his efforts to bring down the Dollhouse, he may or may not be stopping some bad things, but he’ll also definitely be stopping some good things.  It’s a complicated thing, this Dollhouse.

The acting from the regular cast is excellent this week.  I’m still not convinced that Dushku is a versatile enough actress to be playing a part like Echo — the writers haven’t given me too many opportunities to make that call — but she’s very good this week.  She suggests the primness, the slight obliviousness of a very wealthy woman.  She has a good chemistry with Olivia Williams; the two actually seem like old friends.  She is also very funny when her son tries to kiss “Julia.”

Fran Kranz plays up Topher’s childlike qualities, and he does a good job of it.  I’m actually starting to like Topher; he’s seeming more like a Whedon character every episode.  Dichen Lachman is typically awesome in her scenes with him; she’s a superstar waiting to happen, mark my words.  Enver Gjokaj might be, also; he plays Victor imprinted as a horse-trainer/spy, and his southern drawl is easy, believable, and the probable actual inspiration for the weird dialect I was typing in there for an already-regretted while.

Tahmoh Penikett is great as Ballard.  In a sense, he’s currently covering some of the same ground he covered on Battlestar Galactica once Helo found out Sharon was a Cylon.  I would guess that those similarities aren’t lost on either him or on Whedon.  But Penikett was great at it there, and he’s great at it here, too.  Miracle Laurie also continues to impress as Mellie/November.

An enjoyable episode, and one that proves — to me, if to no one else — that this show has now really found its freshman stride.  Hopefully, it’ll get the opportunity Firefly didn’t: to also experience the second-season surge that typically accompanies Whedon shows.

Spoilers ahead — the type you can’t wash out.  And they will happen immediately, so if you don’t want to know — and trust me, if you haven’t seen the episode yet you don’t want to know — don’t do the clicky thing.

Okay, so now we know who the spy was: Dominic.  He’s been caught, tortured, and Atticked.  (Is that a word?)

But is he the only spy?  Doesn’t look that way.

This was a terrific episode that didn’t just move the plot forward, it shoved it forward, and on multiple fronts.  This is the type of storytelling we were getting on Battlestar Galactica not too many Fridays ago, and while this isn’t quite that good, it’s close.

The structure of the episode was extremely interesting.  Non-linear storytelling, by this point, is nothing new or innovative, but when it’s done well, it’s still impressive.  And it seems appropriate to this show.

Over on Lost, it’s become obvious that the entire series is dealing with the very definition of “time” and what it means philosophically; they’re doing weird, awesome stuff with structure over there, and have been for five seasons.  Dollhouse doesn’t appear to be up to any of those tricks, but here we have a concept that in some ways is about the cessation of time: for the Actives, or Dolls, or whatever you want to call them, time may as well not exist.  They exist in a world where time is meaningless; in any one of their imprinted guises, they may feel as if they’ve been that person for an entire lifetime, and in their non-imprinted state it’s not clear that the passage of time holds any relevance for them.  And yet, to their actual selves — their original selves, the original personalities who made the deals to become Dolls — time is meaningful, incredibly meaningful, because it is only with the passage of time that their contracts will be up and they will return to their “real” lives.  But since those personalities are on ice somewhere, they do not actually experience time’s passage; they don’t even have the luxury of looking forward.

Now, I’m not sure this episode is intentionally playing with any of those ideas, but it made me think of them, and thinking of them made me begin to reassess some of my feelings about Dollhouse.  The scientific, sociological, and philosophical ramifications regarding what Dolls are — and, more importantly, what they could become — are significant.  What began as a series about doofy high-end hookers now seems primed and ready, only a few episodes later, to become something much deeper … and I would be willing to bet that that is exactly where Joss Whedon and his fellow writers want to go with it.  How long will it take them to get there?  Well, if this episode is any indication, I’m guessing it won’t take long, if they’re given the opportunity by Fox and by the millions of people who aren’t watching each and every week.

Where to start in terms of recap?  Well, where else: Echo as a dominatrix, of course.  I’ll admit, I’ve got no love for S&M, in terms of my own tastes, even if we’re only talking about my viewing tastes, BUT, when you put an actress as attractive as Eliza Dushku in a leather suit, tie her hair back, give her a whip, and film it in high definition, you’re gonna capture my interest every time.  So, yeah, on that particular topic, it’s Joss one, Honk zero.  But that’s no achievement; hell, any show could do that.  This one goes above and beyond by making the scene actually mean something: it establishes the idea of trust as the main concern of the episode.

Trust, of course, has popped up on Dollhouse before.  The Actives are imprinted with a sort of über-trust in their handlers.  And sure enough, the conversation about trust takes place between Echo and Langton.  More correctly, the conversation takes place between Langton and whoever Echo has been temporarily imprinted to be.  Dominatrix Echo seems to be defending what she does, claiming that it isn’t about pain at all, but about trust; giving yourself over to another that completely is a beautiful thing, she says.  “In my experience,” says Langton, “that kind of trust always leads to pain.”

The story being told in this episode is an illustration of that philosophy: DeWitt’s trust in Dominic, who she has trusted professionally for years to be the man to keep the Dollhouse secure, is shattered.  The implication of that fact is that nothing about their world — nothing at all — is secure.  DeWitt can’t trust anything from this point on.  So much so that she breaks off an illicit affair she is having with one of Victor’s guises, Roger.  We don’t learn much about who “Roger” is, or why DeWitt seems so in love with him, or how she has managed to make this relationship happen; those kinds of answers, presumably, will have to wait for another episode.  What we do learn is that DeWitt has some sort of major attachment to this man/personality, and that what has happened with Dominic is so shattering that she is willing to set her own emotions aside to properly deal with the situation.  She does so decisively, and while it seems to cost her quite a bit emotionally (when we see her weeping, I think those tears are for Roger, and not for Dominic, as the structure of the episode might seem to suggest) she does not appear to hesitate.

However, if Dominic’s betrayal is enough to make the Dollhouse seem utterly unsafe, what does it mean to discover that Dominic isn’t the only spy?  Because that’s exactly what we learn; it’s left up to us to connect those dots, but that’s the only conclusion we can really come to by connecting them.  Dominic, it seems, is NSA, but he hasn’t been working to cripple the Dollhouse; no, he’s been working to keep it from becoming crippled, he’s just obviously been doing so at the command of someone whose agenda differs somewhat from DeWitt’s.

But whoever it is who’s been sending the messages to Ballard would seem to be operating from an entirely different agenda still: that person seems to want the Dollhouse to be exposed in some way, and unless Dominic was some weird sort of double agent, this cannot have been his work.

The finger is pointed in several directions.  Could it actually be DeWitt?  Well, it seems that she’s been reprogramming Victor, or having someone do it for her, so it’s a possibility; however, if she’s working to bring down the Dollhouse, then every other action she’s taken on the show would be contrary to that agenda, and that doesn’t seem likely.  Is it Saunders?  Langton?  They both obviously have their issues with the company.  Is it Topher?  He’s obviously too enamored of his job to want to end it.  Ivy?  She wants Topher’s job, so she’s unlikely … until you remember that November was imprinted by Ivy and shortly thereafter delivered a message to Ballard.

And yet, it could be any of them.  We don’t know enough about them to be able to say for sure that any of them is beyond suspicion.  Come to think of it, when can we say that about anyone, on the subject of anything?  We can’t, really.

Well, now we’ve come somewhat full circle, right back to the idea of why anybody would ever want to pay for an Active’s services.  This was a frequent complaint about the series in its first few weeks, and it seemed like a very reasonable, valid complaint.  We might now be approaching a resolution to that dilemma: it’s all about trust.  If you pay a company a million dollars to deliver a baby for you, you can rest assured that your money has purchased someone with impeccable skill … but you can also rest assured that your money has purchased someone you can trust, because they’ve been programmed to be trustworthy.

In a curious way, this episode begins to make that element of the series not merely more palatable, but also more plausible; what seemed to be utterly ludicrous now starts seeming a lot less so.  Again, I don’t know how much of this is intended, and how much of it is simply stuff already inside my mind that has been brought out by the show (that’s a creepy way of thinking about it!), but I do think it’s becoming plainer that Joss and friends are gearing up to start swinging for the fences with this one.

Lots of things to talk about, plot-wise.  First of all, Ballard’s reunion with Mellie.  Holy shit!  I wasn’t expecting Paul to learn so quickly that Mellie is an Active.  But it seems like a genius move, and it’s one that has a lot of potential richness.  Ballard now has a solid connection to the Dollhouse, one he can presumably exploit in some eventual way.  However, he has to be on his toes, because he’s learned his “girlfriend” is a sleeper agent whose teeth could be set at his throat at the slightest sign he’s learned her identity.  And to protect himself, he has to pretend nothing is wrong.  What gums up the works there is that Paul obviously has feelings for “Mellie”; Mellie, who doesn’t actually exist, yet does exist, right there in front of him.  What sort of damage will that wreak in Paul’s psyche as time goes by?  Will he fall further in love with someone who doesn’t actually exist?  Knowing Joss Whedon, the outcome won’t be pretty.  Remember what Langton had to say about trust?

Moving along.

Echo, it is now obvious, IS continuing to build memories of a sort, even after Saunders’ big gratification game last week.  Topher and DeWitt are both astonished — and, plainly, a little thrilled — by the idea that Echo is developing so completely that they can begin to rely upon her to protect them.  Here again, we see that people have an innate need to trust somebody.  Along those lines, DeWitt also now places her trust in Langton, whom she promotes to Dominc’s position as head of security.

A trio of final points I’d like to touch on, starting with the shallowest one:

Seriously, how hot is Dichen Lachman?  She got to go all Sydney Bristow this week (the score during that segment even sounded a bit like Giacchino’s Alias scores), and she was quite good at it.  That’s basically all I had to say about that.

Penultimately, let’s return briefly to Ballard’s conversation with Mellie/November.  “You need to investigate why it exists,” the message Ballard’s been sent tells him about his target.  “The Dollhouse deals in fantasy, but that is not their purpose.”  Well, what the sin does that mean?!?  That question can only lead to fervent, wild-eyed, fannish speculation late at night at places like Dragon*Con, and I don’t want to go there.  Okay, I do want to go there; I’m just not going to.  Such talk inevitably leads me to, uhm, imprint upon the show my own ideas about where it should go, and from there it’s a short fall to disappointment, so I don’t indulge in those types of fantasies any more than my mind forces me to.  But this bit of dialogue obviously means something, and the something it obviously means is undoubtedly huge.  Will we find out before season’s end?  I’m gonna guess no.

Finally (and here again, I’m going to mention something that practically screams out for speculation run amok), consider these lines of dialogue.  “You’re a piece of work,” says someone to DeWitt.  “So they tell me,” DeWitt replies.

Another fine episode.  Damn you, Prison Break, for making me wait two weeks to see another.

As a postscript, check out this article for some information about Fox’s plans to not air the final episode of the season.