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.