Recap: Dollhouse 102, "The Target"

Previously on Dollhouse: Some stuff happened. Let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not the target audience for the previouslies.

We open with a flashback. We can tell it’s a flashback, partly because of the subtitle that says “three months ago”, but also because it’s shot in a hyper-saturated, glowy yellow tone. The Dolls are being herded into their beds as an alarm goes off. They’re confused and frightened—and also upset that they hadn’t had their usual pre-bedtime shower—but they comply, and the recessed beds seal up. Meanwhile, Dominic leads a squad of black-clad men with very impressive-looking guns (I hereby dub Dollhouse’s security squad the Toy Soldiers.) as the sweep the main area, stepping over some bloody bodies as they go. They track down Topher, who is also impressed with the guns and asks if he can have one. Dominic and DeWitt are unamused. DeWitt says they’ve had a “composite event” and that Alpha has gone berserk. Dominic wants to know how that happened, since Alpha should be mindwiped, and Topher says it can’t, and shouldn’t, but it did. The squad sweeps into the shower, where there are a pile of slashed-up naked Dolls. In the middle of them is Echo, naked and confused, saying “They won’t wake up!”

And… credits. Much shorter teaser than last time. La da da daaaa….

When we come back, Adelle is doing a sales pitch in voiceover. She explains the tabula rasa state of the resting Dolls, the imprinting process, and the mindwipe as we see matching footage of Echo in the Dollhouse, on an engagement, and in the Mental Dentist Chair. We end up in DeWitt’s office, where… it’s the Middleman!

(It’s Matt Keeslar, costar of ABC Family’s “The Middleman”, an adorably clever but criminally underappreciated and low-rated cult show that was canceled after a single half-season, and... oh, dear. Well, I promised myself I wouldn’t freak out over this, so we’ll just move on.)

Keeslar is playing this week’s client, a Mr. O’Connell. He calls the process a “neat trick”, but DeWitt insists it isn’t a trick at all—it’s the truth. Whatever you want, an Active will actually be. She also adds that she needs to charge a small premium to the price tag because his plans are a little risky. The “small” price tag raises O’Connell’s eyebrows, but he pays it.

Apparently the plans involved whitewater rafting, hypercompetitive banter, kissing, and rock climbing. Topher and Boyd are monitoring Echo’s vitals remotely—Topher from the Dollhouse, Boyd from a van in the woods. Boyd is worried about the high heart rate and adrenaline levels, but Topher says it’s normal, and that he’s been “watching the squigglies” long enough to know the good kind of excitement from the bad kind. Boyd’s signal is low, so he asks Topher to “retask an auxiliary satellite.” So, the Dollhouse operation isn’t hurting for gadgets. Topher does, then begins to sarcastically express his deep, deep man-love for Boyd, so Boyd hangs up and he and his driver commiserate about being stuck out in the woods.

We cut to Ballard pulling up to the kidnappers’ house from last week. (I guess when the father got shot, the got some of the law enforcement attention they were trying to avoid.) The agents assigned to the case are already working the scene. One of them is an actor I can only think of as Badger from Firefly. (Though he’s making a concerted effort to be in every TV show I watch, with recent gigs on Leverage and Burn Notice.) Agent Badger mocks Ballard a little for his obsession with Dollhouse while explaining his theory that a fifth kidnapper killed the others and took the money. Ballard points out that the killer had to blow the door in, and also reveals that he’d talked to the victims, that the dad fits his profile for a Dollhouse client and that the daughter said she’d been saved by a “pretty lady”. Ballard then finds the glasses that Echo left on the scene and hands them to Badger.

I’ve been thinking a bit about why this episode came second, when in many respects in makes a much better pilot than “Ghost” did. I think Agent Badger’s reaction here could be the reason: It’s fairly easy to conceive of the Dollhouse as, basically, a high-class brothel. To keep that from being the primary impression, we needed to see, early on, an engagement that didn’t involve sex. So, the hostage negotiator episode had to come before the, erm, “outdoor adventures” episode. Too bad, though—for reasons which I’ll return to later.

Speaking of outdoor adventures, we cut to O’Connell showing Echo how to use a very impressive-looking compound bow. He does this in the time-honored manner of using a demonstration of a physical skill to get one’s arms around a girl. (See also: shooting pool, swinging a bat.) He does kind of spoil the mood by talking about how hunting one’s lunch fits his philosophy on life, which he inherited from his father—that you need to earn your way by working hard, “shoulder to the wheel”. The philosophy comes with a hand motion: a slap of the opposite shoulder. In this case, you prove you deserve lunch by shooting it—or lunch proves it deserves to live by getting away. Hey, look! It’s the first appearance of our friend, the Foreshadowing Fairy.

During the talk, Echo spots a deer and shoots it, followed by some celebratory post-deer-killing sleeping bag sex. Echo wants to go again, but O’Connell gets out of bed and puts some pants on as he says she needs to get going: he’ll give her a five-minute head start, then he’s going to hunt her.

And so, we get another confirmation that hiring a Doll isn’t something a healthy, normal person does. Or, to put it another way, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

As Echo runs through the woods, we take another saturated amber flashback, this time to Boyd’s first day. DeWitt is explaining that, in light of recent events, they’re hiring handlers with a “more intensive” background. Boyd asks what happened to Echo’s previous handler, and gets his answer from Dr. Saunders: “You’re standing in him.” Where she has scars in the present, she now has freshly-stitched wounds. She acts distant and morbid as she’s introduced to Boyd. When she mentions that she still has the previous handler’s body in her office, Boyd asks to see it. DeWitt tries to tell him he doesn’t really want that, but he firmly insists.

Dominic shows Boyd the body, which he deduces was hamstrung and then sliced up by someone who is very, very good with a knife. He thinks the attacker took his time, but Dominic corrects him: it happened in 8 seconds. Boyd thinks that’s impossible, and Dominic agrees—unless someone was imprinted with the skills.

In the present, Ballard is calling his Russian mob informant, giving him a friendly series of threats as a reminder to keep Ballard updated on any progress finding out about Dollhouse. At his desk, Ballard endures some ribbing from other agents in the bullpen about his tendency to investigate fairy tales, then finds the envelope from last week, with a picture of Echo as Caroline and the message “Keep looking.”

In the woods where they’re playing The Most Dangerous Game, Echo’s head start is up, and she’s hit the cliff they climbed up before. She starts to climb back down it. When she reaches the bottom, O’Connell lines up a shot that grazes her across the leg. A second arrow misses, and Echo runs off.

Meanwhile, Topher is telling Boyd that the satellite should be coming on line, but Boyd doesn’t have time to check, because a cop car has pulled up behind where their van is parked. He and the driver get out and pretend to be a lost news crew. The cop asks for ID, which they have, and he seems to accept it. Everybody is starting to relax when the cop pulls out a silenced gun and shoots the driver twice. Okay, the Foreshadowing Fairy is kind of falling down on the job here. She’s supposed to warn me when things like this are about to happen.

Another glowy flashback. Boyd is meeting Topher for the first time, and questions him a bit about Alpha. Topher looks embarrassed, saying that there were some “unpredictable remainders”, and that they’re still “working out some kinkies.” Boyd notes that the kinkies include blood, death, and screaming, then muses a bit about how helpless the blank Dolls are. He asks why the default state doesn’t include ninja skills, and Topher says they tried that once, but… blood, death, screaming. Topher asks Boyd what he thinks of “his new girl”, but Boyd says, “She isn’t a girl. She’s not even really a person—just an empty hat, until you stuff a rabbit in it.”

In the less-glowy present, Echo is running through the woods some more, and Topher has noticed that her squiggly lines are not the good kind. He calls up Boyd, but Boyd has the fake cop’s gun pointed at his head. Boyd assures Topher that everything is fine, which is apparently what the fake cop wants him to say. Then, awesomely, Boyd adds, “except for the gun pointed at my head”, ducks under the gun, and attacks the fake cop. They have a nasty, close-quarters fight in the back of the van that ends with Boyd choking the fake cop into unconsciousness.

Back at the Dollhouse, Dominic is presenting a file on Ballard to DeWitt. He’s insisting that Ballard is a threat—that he’s too obsessive to give up and will figure something out eventually. He wants a kill order. DeWitt thinks he’s giving Ballard too much credit, and says that the appropriate measures have already been taken. (Note that she didn’t rule out killing an FBI agent because they couldn’t, just because she thought it was disproportionate.) Topher interrupts, saying they have “a situation—the kind you need to shoot at.”

In the woods, Echo discovers that O’Connell has slashed a hole in the raft they’d used to come down the river. O’Connell, meanwhile, is rappelling down the cliff. His desire to test himself against an unarmed girl in the woods apparently doesn’t extend to forgoing his ropes, climbing harness, and binoculars.

Echo comes into a clearing to find a ranger station, and she looks like she can’t believe her luck. As the Foreshadowing Fairy and I can both tell her, that’s the kind of feeling you should trust. The station is empty, but she finds a canteen and chugs a drink. Then she hears the crackle of a radio, which leads her to the closet, where she finds the ranger—or at least his corpse. Once she stops screaming, she grabs the radio and calls for help, but only O’Connell is on the other end. She asks why he’s doing this, and he repeats the refrain from earlier: she has to earn the right to live, shoulder to the wheel. “Prove you’re not just an echo,” he says, which is awkward enough of a line that I’m going to have to assume he knows her code name and is making an intentional pun. Echo says she’s going to kill him, but then she starts coughing and O’Connell reveals that he drugged the canteen.

Glowback. Echo is in the Mental Dentist Chair for what Topher calls a “very special treatment”: the active-handler bonding imprint. Boyd is nervous and uncomfortable about magically becoming best friends with a blank slate, and Topher assures him it’s not about friendship, it’s about trust, and that after this, Echo will automatically trust him. We get a Topher character-defining line: “This is art, not an oil change.” Then we’re on to the procedure. In what manages to be both a kind of manipulative plot set-up and a pretty cool piece of fake neurology, Boyd has to hold Echo’s hand to “enhance the bonding protocol,” and there’s a call-and-response script that calls up the trust program: “Everything’s going to be all right.” “Now that you’re here.” “Do you trust me?” “With my life.”

O’Connell busts through the door of the ranger station, but Echo is gone. He taunts her over the radio, saying that they guy who gave him the drug said it wouldn’t kill her—just “put a spin on things”. And it does—Echo sees herself as Caroline. When Woodsy!Echo runs up to Caroline!Echo, Caroline!Echo repeats her line from the yearbook video: “Hey, get that thing out of my face.” In shock, Woodsy!Echo falls into the river. (Multiple visions of oneself are murder on pronouns, by the way—almost as bad as time travel is on verb tenses.)

Meanwhile, the monitoring van is rocking, and you should only come knocking if you want to see Boyd badassedly interrogating the fake cop, who is tied to a chair. Boyd wants to know how many others might be out there, and when the fake cop plays dumb, Boyd shoots him in the leg. When he still says he doesn’t know, Boyd shoots him in the other leg. The fake cop then spills that he never met the guy who hired him, and that his assignment was to have Boyd stall the rescue team, then kill him. He says it’s just business, and that Boyd shouldn’t take it personally. Boyd doesn’t take it personally—but he does pistol-whip the guy back into unconsciousness.

Echo spits up water, and she’s flashing back to the shower where Alpha killed the other Dolls. She can see his body and the knife, but not his face. He’s saying, “Wake up.” She does, and finds she’s on the shore of the river, and the voice is O’Connell on the radio, doing a little more taunting.

Cut to Agent Ballard coming home to his dingy apartment. His neighbor meets him at the door, carrying lasagna and a torch. (One literal, one metaphorical. While in this case the lasagna is literal and the torch is metaphorical, I would like to point out that “Metaphorical Lasagna” could be a good band name. Or, possibly, a sequel to the 80’s classic Mystic Pizza.) Anyway, she clearly wants some of the attention that Ballard is currently giving to Caroline’s file, but Ballard is too obsessed to notice.

Back in the woods, O’Connell is getting close, and Echo hides behind a tree and grabs a big stick to use as a club. She jumps out when she hears footsteps, but it’s Boyd. He starts the trust litany: “Everything’s going to be all right.” It seems to work, because Echo relaxes and replies, “Now that you’re here,” even though she can’t remember how she knows him. Then Boyd gets an arrow under the ribcage and we cut to commercial.

We come back to a flashback, where Echo is apparently coming back from an engagement with someone fat and ugly who is willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money for someone to look past his appearance-- as long as that someone looks like Echo, I guess. Just like last week, with the motorcycle dance party guy, Echo asks Boyd if he’ll wait to take her back. Unlike last week, though, Boyd just looks stiff and bored when he says he’ll wait. He still gets a boisterous hug from Fatty-loving!Echo, though.

In the woods, Boyd is bleeding but he and Echo can’t stop running from O’Connell. Echo tells him about the drugs and describes the visions. She’s looking panicked, so Boyd tries to start the litany again, but it doesn’t work. Boyd seems a little shocked, but Echo seems to have absorbed a bit of O’Connell’s philosophy, complete with hand gestures: they’ve got to prove they deserve to live by killing O’Connell, “shoulder to the wheel”. Boyd doesn’t understand all of it, but he doesn’t think Echo has the right imprint to take O’Connell on. (He corrects himself to “training” when he realizes Echo doesn’t know what she is.) Then Echo reverses the call-and-response: “Do you trust me?” After a second’s hesitation, Boyd replies, “With my life.”

With that, he hands Echo a gun and asks if she knows how to use it. She cocks it and says she learned from her four imaginary non-Democrat brothers. She says he should keep the gun in case O’Connell catches them. Boyd, awesomely, pulls a second gun out of his pants: “You didn’t think I’d give you my only gun, did you?” Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ve just met Boyd Langdon.

With Echo now armed, she trades threats with O’Connell on the radio. O’Connell says he thinks his dad would have liked Echo—but he’s still going to kill her. Echo takes a shot, which grazes O’Connell’s arm, and as he dives for cover she runs off.

She’s still drugged, though, and as she’s running she bumps into herself, as Caroline again, this time in the outfit she was wearing when she accepted DeWitt’s deal. She repeats a line from that conversation: “I just wanted to make a difference.” Echo’s shaken by the hallucination enough for O’Connell to catch up, and they end up in a standoff-- which is always a good time for an act break.

When we come back, they’re still pointing their weapons at each other. O’Connell tries to talk Echo into walking away, but she’s still upset about the whole thing where he poisoned her and shot at her with arrows. He says they should both lower the weapons on a count of three, and they do—but then he quickly pulls up again to shoot, and Echo shoots back. Echo gets grazed on the arm, which makes her drop the gun, and it looks like the bullet takes O’Connell in the gut. Echo charges him, knocks him down, and looks to be getting the better of a fist fight for a few seconds, but O’Connell is bigger and still has enough strength left to reverse the hold and start choking her. As she’s struggling, she gets another vision. This time there are three copies of her: the yearbook video version, the deal-accepting version, and one I don’t think we’ve seen before, who looks a little haughty as she tells Echo, “I try to be my best.”

Echo’s best apparently involves grabbing the arrow shaft off the ground and stabbing O’Connell in the neck with it. O’Connell stumbles off, shocked and almost amused to find himself bleeding out. He says, “He was right about you. You really are special.” Then he repeats “shoulder to the wheel” a couple more times as he dies.

Echo comes back to Boyd, who’s leaning against a tree in pretty bad shape. Two helicopters appear and the Toy Soldiers run out to sweep the area. They seem to be pretty good at sweeping the area after something bad has happened.

Mindwipe. Echo wakes up in the chair, and this time Boyd is waiting for her, and takes her hand without prompting.

DeWitt wants to know how O’Connell got past their background check, and Dominic says everything about him was an elaborately constructed fiction, which is pretty recursive if you think about it. They can’t ask the fake cop any questions about what happened, either. Because he’s dead. At the autopsy, Dr. Saunders says Boyd’s double gunshot wounds successfully left him alive but they found him carved up in Alpha’s signature style. She insists that the Toy Soldiers have already found Alpha and killed him, but Boyd thinks the Dollhouse isn’t overly committed to truth-telling.

Meanwhile, post-wipe Echo is on her way to the pool when she bumps into Dominic. She blankly says she’s sorry, and Dominic decides to vent on her, which makes me feel pretty good about picking “slimy” as one of my first two adjectives to describe him. He says people tend to die around her, and asks bitterly how that makes her feel. Interestingly, he says if was up to him, he’d put her in the attic— but I’m guessing maybe the capital letter is implied, and the Attic would be where they put Dolls who are past their usefulness. He checks her eyes, concludes there’s nobody in there, and storms off. Echo, still looking a little blank, slaps her left shoulder with her right hand.

So, some thoughts. First, like I said near the beginning, I think this was both a better episode and a better pilot than “Ghost”. We get much more meat on Boyd’s character, which gives us someone sympathetic to root for while we wait for Echo to get her bearings. (Which seems like a bit of a risk—last week, Eleanor Penn did something brave and then ceased to exist.) Also, it becomes clearer that Echo is more than a product of her programming. Plus, Alpha gets developed as something more than a name on a file. Oh, and Topher at least gets some dialogue that could be described as Whedonesque, which was totally missing before.

So, why not put it first? Well, there’s the brothel issue from earlier. And on a related note, “Ghost” highlighted the moral ambiguity of the Dollhouse operation as a whole—creepy and exploitative, yes, but they accomplished something good, and it showed that Adelle at least harbors pretensions of helping people. There’s not much good about Dollhouse’s role in this one, so the moral ambiguity is specific to Langdon’s split between his protectiveness of Echo and his complicity in her, well, enslavement. Presumably he’ll have to deal with that later—but without seeing the Dollhouse do some good early on, we’d basically be watching a version of Alias where Sidney never realizes SD-6 is evil.

And now, your weekly dose of rampant speculation: There were a couple of interesting lines that sound like throwaways but could be important later. First, there’s someone higher on the Dollhouse food chain than Adelle, because when she hands O’Connell the price tag she refers to “my employer”. I already flagged Dominic’s comment about “the attic”. (Or “the Attic”?) And finally, O’Connell says a couple of interesting things that he probably wouldn’t have if they didn’t mean anything: You don’t say “The guy who gave me the drugs said they wouldn’t kill you” if the guy isn’t important—you just say “the drugs won’t kill you.” Also, as he’s dying, he says, “He was right about you.” Obviously right now signs point to him being a plant by Alpha, especially since Alpha covered his tracks by killing the fake cop. And it looks like his goal might have been to expose Echo to the drugs and possibly also to the self-reliant philosophy.

Recap: Dollhouse 101, "Ghost"

We open on security footage of two women: One is serving tea from a Japanese-style tea set while being British and implacable. The other is refusing to drink tea, sprawled back in her chair and looking sullen and shell-shocked. (I was going to hold off on naming the characters until they were named in the show, but avoiding names in print gets annoying at, frankly, an astonishing rate. So: Implacable British tea-server is Adelle DeWitt. The shell-shocked tea-avoider is our heroine Echo, or at least will be shortly. For now, Adelle calls her “Caroline.”)

Caroline is apparently in a lot of trouble, and DeWitt is offering a way out. DeWitt mentions a clean slate. “Have you ever tried to clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before,” Caroline snorts thematically. She protests that she doesn’t deserve this—that she was just “trying to take my place in the world, like she always said,” but we don’t find out who the “she” is, yet. Finally, she seems to accept the deal, agreeing with an earlier statement that “actions have consequences.” DeWitt looks very pleased with herself as she counters, “What if they didn’t?”

We cut to two motorcycles racing through city streets at night. One of the riders tries to take a shortcut through an alley and wipes out, and when the helmet comes off we see that it’s Echo. She catches up and they continue the race into a fancy Chinese restaurant and pull up on a dance floor with a banner over it wishing Matt a happy birthday. Matt, presumably, is the driver of the other motorcycle, with whom Echo engages in some hypercompetitive banter before they decide to just dance instead. (Buffy fans might experience a flashback to the episode “Bad Girls” here. Viewers who are attracted to females might also experience… other feelings.)

After the dancing, Matt pulls Echo aside. There’s some complicated innuendo about strings and ropes, and then Matt tells her he’ll always remember this weekend. “What, like I’d forget?” asks Echo, because Joss Whedon loves dramatic irony. He is well known at L.A. restaurants for ordering two bowls of dramatic irony instead of dessert.

Matt gives Echo a heart on a necklace and they kiss. Clearly knowing his time is almost up, Matt excuses himself to get another drink. Echo walks happily back towards the dance floor. Then, suddenly, her face goes blank and she makes a sharp turn to the right. She leaves the restaurant and gets into a big black van where her strong-jawed, paternal-looking handler is waiting. Back at the party, Matt makes a Cinderella reference.

The van unloads in a place with many similar vans, including one being loaded with a girl in a geisha outfit with a comically enormous bow on it. Echo asks her handler if he’ll take her back to the party after her “treatment.” He says, with a hint of guilt, that he’ll wait right there. Echo grins and says, “You’re good people,” and it’s suddenly way more than a hint. (Again: avoiding a name is getting rough. Paternal, square-jawed, guilt-stricken handler is Boyd Langdon.)

Echo walks through some high-tech gadgetry, changing clothes and babbling excitedly to the staff about how excited she is about where things are going with Matt. The staff includes a geeky, straw-haired technician who says he’s happy for her as he helps her into an assembly that looks a good deal like a dentist’s chair, except with more glowy bits around where your head would go, and less bitching from the hygienist about whether you’ve been flossing.

Geeky, straw-haired technician (Topher Brink) flips the switch and we see what a mindwipe looks like from the inside: dozens of tiny screens running backwards video. It zooms in and goes forward long enough for us to pick out some events (and see the source of the earlier innuendo about ropes) before we get to the key line from Matt: “An experiment-- to see how much fun we can have in three days.” From there, we speed through some scenes of childhood and Echo drops the necklace. When she wakes up, she wanders off, placid and dreamy.

Topher pulls a hard drive out of the dentist chair and takes it to a computer outside, where Boyd is waiting to check that the wipe went normally. Topher defensively confirms that it did. Sensing Boyd’s guilt, Topher defends the operation in Shakespearean terms: “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” He calls it “humanitarian”: Both Matt and Echo enjoyed themselves, and Echo’s not hurt by the wipe.

Topher:“Not a care in the world. She’s living the dream.”
Boyd: “Whose dream?”
Topher: “Who’s next?”

Next we see some cute telephone banter between a father and a daughter. As soon as the daughter hangs up, someone off screen puts a cloth over her mouth and a guy in a creepy leather mask bundles her into a sack.

And… credits. The theme song won’t inspire the same headbanging glee that the Buffy theme does, but it’s effectively plaintive and the visuals are a disorienting mix of Echo on missions and in the Dollhouse. If anyone got through the first act still unsure whether the show was going to ignore the creepy undertones of the premise or face it head on and subvert it, the last measure of creepy, clinky theme music would have settled the issue.

When we come back, the girl’s father is in DeWitt’s office (which closely resembles the working conditions at Wolfram and Hart), asking for help. He’s willing to pay and he doesn’t want to involve the police, so he wants a negotiator. DeWitt says they’ll help, and reminds him that the Active won’t remember where they came from, so he shouldn’t discuss the Dollhouse with them or they’ll get confused and leave.

Back in the Dollhouse, Echo is getting an exam from a skinny brunette doctor with some impressive facial scars. Her knee is still hurt from the motorcycle accident, but of course she can’t remember what happened. She seems a little puzzled by that, but not upset. Skinny, scarred doctor (Claire Saunders) says they’ll look after her. Echo reaches out to touch her scars and asks, “Does someone look after you?” Dr. Saunders flinches away, saying she’ll set up a massage session to work on the knee.

Echo wanders upstairs, through Topher’s office (which is packed with games—chess, darts, pinball, whack-a-mole), and towards the mindwipe room, where there are flashing lights coming from behind the door. A blonde girl is in the chair, dressed only in strategically placed bandages, with electrodes stuck all over her body. She’s obviously in pain. Topher, who was overseeing the operation, tells the technicians to keep “mapping the tissue” and hustles Echo out the door. He tries to comfort her by saying it’s the girl’s first time, and that soon she’d be strong and will have forgotten all about the pain. He says Echo will have a new friend, and that her name is Sierra. (Thus saving me from at least two sentences of adjective-heavy nicknames later in the recap. Thanks, Topher!) Finally, he distracts her with the promise of the massage. As she leaves, Topher makes a gesture at Dr. Saunders that translates roughly to “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m pretty sure it’s your fault” in gesturese.

Some fanwanking here: If they don’t want to be interrupted during procedures in the Chair of Evil, shouldn’t they just lock the door, and maybe make it out of something other than glass? I think it’s possible that we’re supposed to take from this setup—and from Topher’s reaction-- that Echo’s curiosity and empathy are unusual for an inactive Doll. Or possibly they just haven’t had time for extensive renovations since acquiring their office space from the Wolfram and Hart liquidation.

Next we meet FBI agent Paul Ballard in a pair of interlaced scenes. One is a kickboxing training match. The other is the textbook-standard “renegade agent receives reprimand from superior officer” scene. While he’s being pummeled in the ring, we learn that in the course of his investigation into the Dollhouse rumors, he’s assaulted a Senator, boarded a Saudi prince’s yacht, and gotten divorced. The superior officers tell him to back off. He says it won’t be a problem. Meanwhile, in the kickboxing match, he peels himself off the mat and feeds his kneecap to his opponent in a manner that suggests he’s not being entirely honest about his propensity for giving up.

In DeWitt’s office, Adelle and a slimy blonde aide are giving Boyd a briefing on the kidnapping case. They emphasize that the purpose of the mission is to make the exchange safely and that his priority is ensuring Echo’s safety. “We’ll skip any ex-cop heroics, if you don’t mind,” the slimy aide expositions. “Who does she think she is?” asks Boyd.

For an answer, we see Echo opening the door of the father’s mansion in a serious-looking suit and librarian glasses. The father is surprised that his negotiator is a hot young woman; he was expecting Edward James Olmos. Echo—who says her name is Eleanor Penn—insists that she’s the best person for the job. She points out that the kidnappers are professionals, and then, when the father’s security chief tries to talk to the father in Spanish, she replies. She says professionals are the easiest kind of kidnapper to deal with.

From the surveillance van, Boyd asks Topher if the glasses are an attempt to make people take Echo seriously, but Topher says she’s actually nearsighted, or at least that her brain is convinced that she is. Boyd asks why he’d handicap her on a job like this, and Topher says that, to get someone who’s the best at something, they need to be overcompensating or running away from something else. While he’s saying this, the camera turns ominously onto Dr. Saunders and her scars—but apparently we’ll get nothing but foreshadowing on that front tonight. Topher points out that the personalities he creates are made from parts of real stored personalities.

Back at the mansion, Echo as Eleanor is handling a phone call with the kidnapper. She convinces him that she’s not a cop and insists that the kidnapper call her Ms. Penn, which prompts him to crack some jokes about her as a schoolteacher. In a surprise move, she bumps the ransom up to eight million, “two million each,” and tells them to call back to let the father talk to the daughter. The father says it would have been polite to ask about giving away three million dollars of his money, but he’s still willing to pay it. Elly says she’s getting everyone involved used to doing things her way. He asks how she knew there were four kidnappers, and she says it was a guess—four is a typical kidnapping crew.

We cut quickly to Ballard, following a lead about a Russian human trafficking ring by following a slimy showoff to a nightclub.

At the mansion, the kidnappers call back asking for ten million and Elly hangs up instantly. They call again and let the daughter talk to the father. The daughter tries to sneak in hints about where she’s being kept, but Elly interrupts her, asking if she’s been hurt.

When the call is over, the father berates Elly over the interruption, but she says she was doing her job—which doesn’t involve attempting a rescue or letting the girl put herself at risk by passing information. On the roof, the father is having doubts about Echo’s abilities, and grills her in an attempt to prove she’s qualified. He laughs when she says “You have to trust that I’ve done this many times before,” because Joss Whedon loves dramatic irony. He’s just waiting until Massachusetts makes it legal for him to marry an abstract concept.

The father pushes Elly past citations of her dedication, experience, and education until she finally admits that she was herself kidnapped and molested as a child. The father shakes his head, saying, “The terrible memories these men put into your head—why would they do that?” (Joss Whedon has a pool in his basement filled with dramatic irony, and he goes down there and soaks in it until his fingers are all wrinkly.)

In the nightclub, Ballard follows the slimy showoff into the bathroom, sneaks up behind him, and puts a gun to his head while he’s at the urinal. Ballard tells the mobster to find out which of the Russians’ clients are connected to the Dollhouse, and heads out, reminding his new informant to wash his hands—and his shoes.

Back to Elly and the father, who are getting ready to make the exchange on a dock. Boyd is in a covering position with a sniper rifle. Everything seems to be going fine, with Elly in control of the situation, until she gets a look at one of the kidnappers’ faces and panics. She tells the father that they’re not going to give his daughter back, so he chases after them insisting that they let the daughter off the boat. The kidnapping ringleader shoots the father, Boyd shoots the ringleader, and the rest of the crew drives off in the boat with the daughter and the money. Boyd moves in to extract Echo, who is shaking on the ground repeating “You can’t fight a ghost.”

In the van on the way back to the Dollhouse, Echo is flashing back to her childhood trauma, which explains the ghost line: It was something her abuser told her. Boyd realizes that Echo thinks that the kidnapper is the same one who took her as a girl, because her memories were lifted from someone who he really had kidnapped. He presses her for details and she predicts that, once the money is counted, the molester will kill his partners and take the girl. Boyd tries to figure out the boats range, and even though she’s still clearly shaken, Elly points out that the boat was riding too high to have much fuel in it. She theorizes that the kidnapper in the mask is connected to victim.

In the Dollhouse, Topher is insisting that what happened wasn’t a glitch in his programming, and that the breakdown is something that happened to Eleanor. I'm starting to think this storyline is kind of a metatextual criticism of the tendency for writers to try to substitute a single defining childhood trauma for motivation and depth. Topher tried to straightforwardly leverage trauma as motivation and it blew up on him-- and Elly, like a real trauma victim, has to face the trauma's aftereffects head on in order to keep moving.

Boyd storms into DeWitt’s office to ask that they hold off on Echo’s wipe long enough for her to solve the case. Slimy blonde aide (Laurence Dominic) thinks too much damage has been done already and wants to cut the whole thing loose.

DeWitt: “It’s complicated. We don’t have a client.”
Boyd: “We have a mission!”
DeWitt: “We prefer to call them engagements. I know you haven’t been here as long as some of the others, so I’ll overlook the error.”
Boyd: “I’ve been here long enough to know you like to think that what we do here helps people. Let Echo help this girl!”

This is apparently the right argument, as Boyd runs back to the mindwipe room to see Echo emerging from the chair, but she’s still Elly. She asks for her glasses and announces that she knows how to find the girl.

Elly thinks that the initial conversation with the kidnapper suggested that the inside man was one of the girl’s teachers. Dominic leads the team to take Echo out to track them down, while Boyd stays at the Dollhouse to await DeWitt’s judgment. Elly insists on going in before the team to try to bargain the girl out safely. This puts her face to face with her abuser again, which obviously scares her, but she fights through it enough to tell the other two kidnappers what the molester is planning to do. She knows enough details of his history to start to convince them—including that they’d have put the girl in the fridge with the shelves taken out, and tied shut because “they don’t lock these days.” Right, that bit was enormously successful on the "understatedly creepy" front.

When the molester threatens her, she throws back, “You can’t hurt me any more. You can’t fight a ghost.” He hits her and a gunfight breaks out among the kidnappers. Elly rushes for the daughter in the fridge. One of the kidnappers, bleeding from a wound in his arm, tells her to take the girl and go, which she does. On the way out, she sees that her abuser is dead.

Suddenly, the door gets blown in and Sierra storms through it, dressed in black combat gear. She shoots the two surviving kidnappers, getting the second one by shooting him through a wall. Elly seems a little put out, saying that she had it handled. Sierra, though, apparently made room for her double serving of badassery by leaving out her empathy module. She asks if the girl was injured, suggests that Echo get over it, then orders the team to clean up the evidence and take the ransom money.

Over footage of Echo and Sierra back in the Dollhouse’s communal shower, Dominic is trying to tell DeWitt that the engagement was a solid win: the client survived, the daughter was returned, both Actives performed well, they got to keep the ransom money, and their exposure was contained. DeWitt says it almost came crashing down on them, and hands Dominic a file labeled “Alpha,” asking how they’re going to contain that.

(Side note: A communal shower? The fan ficcers are going to have a field day with this one. It's like the Room of Requirement and the Astronomy Tower put together.)

We cut to footage of Echo, presumably while she was still Caroline, being interviewed for her college’s video yearbook. Asked about her plans, she says she wants to “take my place in the world, like Mrs. Dundee taught us.” So, I guess we know who the “she” from the teaser is. The camera pans from the screen to give us a glimpse of someone watching the footage who is definitely not fully clothed. He writes “Keep looking” on the back of a picture of Echo and slips it into an envelope addressed to Paul Ballard. The camera keeps panning to show us a couple of unidentifiable dead bodies. I’m just guessing here, but I think we might have just met Alpha.

On the video, Caroline’s list of ambitions includes Doctors Without Borders, and traveling around the world in a jet she designs and pilots. As we cut to Echo falling asleep in the Dollhouse’s crazy recessed beds, Caroline says, “What can I say? I want to do everything. Is that too much to ask?”

(Joss Whedon has run out of veins in his arms to inject the syringes full of dramatic irony, and has to shoot it directly into his eyeballs. True story.)

Blogging Dollhouse

I'm starting to think that, somewhere between Firefly and Arrested Development, I lost the ability to really enjoy a television show without being simultaneously terrified of its imminent cancellation. Veronica Mars, The Middleman-- maybe it's something about the near-certain knowledge that you're watching something too lovely and clever and delicate to last. And, of course, there's that little twist of martyr-flavored satisfaction in knowing that your taste is so tragically better than that of the unwashed hordes.

And now, with Dollhouse, Joss Whedon is back on television. And the premise of his show has a couple of county lines between it and commercial bankability. And there are reshoots and scrapped pilots and network notes and it's scheduled on Friday nights, and I have to start wondering: if the first time history repeats itself is tragedy and the second time is farce, what's the fifth time? The seventh?

So what I want to do here is break myself out of the masochistic cycle of doomed obsession. I'm not going to use this space to track Nielsen ratings or bitch about marketing. I'm not going to proselytize or launch petitions. I'm not even going to chase down spoilers-- there are better places all over the internet for that sort of thing.

What I want to do is to basically ignore Dollhouse as a commercial product and focus on Dollhouse as a story. I'll start with recaps: a synopsis and commentary on the episodes soon after they air. A little snark, a little adoration, a lot of nerdy pop culture references, and probably too many nerdy science and literature references. If all goes well, we'll have a pristine record of the show's early days, untainted by ratings-induced panic and self-pity. Sound like fun?