But no, here's Echo, reading a fairy tale to a bunch of kids. It's the Sleeping Beauty story, and they win points from me by remembering that her name isn't "Sleeping Beauty" but "Briar Rose". (If her name really was Sleeping Beauty, it would seem her parents were using the Great Big Book of Unfortunately Prescient Baby Names. That's not really a good idea, as the parents of Remus Lupin and Otto Octavius can attest.)
A sullen-looking girl in the back of the room says the story is crap. Echo calls the sullen girl "Susan" and asks what's wrong with it. Susan raises a couple of interesting logical flaws, like the fact that Rose was cursed to sleep for a hundred years, so the prince just came along in time to steal the credit. But it seems the thing she really doesn't like is that Rose didn't save herself-- and she doesn't like it enough to start pulling the pages out of the book, which brings story time to an early end.
Echo muses to the teacher that it looks like she hit a trigger, and that she thought it might happen because that story always bothered her as well. The teacher looks a little shocked that Echo seems to have set that off on purpose, and asks why. Echo says "Someone said I could help."
In his apartment, Agent Ballard is packing, sulkily. Mellie is standing behind him, even more sulkily, asking what's going on and if he was planning on telling her he was moving. Ballard says they're not good for each other. Mellie says he's stressed and they can back off and take a break, but Ballard seems set on his "break up and move away" plan. Mellie says, "I know you're upset. But you have to place the blame where it's supposed to be. Look at me, and ask yourself if I've ever told you anything I didn't believe in my heart." Which is nice, because it's true for Mellie. Ballard does look at her, and says, "You just said exactly what I needed to hear. And that's why I'm leaving." Mellie says this is killing her, and Ballard says she'll get over it.
In the Fortress, Adelle is holding a data stick. Boyd says it was addressed to Dominic, and he assumes it's from the NSA and be encrypted so only Dominic can read it. Adelle says they should ask him, then. Boyd looks confused for a second, but Adelle doesn't think they should let a little thing like putting Dominic in the Attic stop them from occasionally asking him for a favor.
Back at the home for troubled youth, Echo gets a rundown on on Susan from the teacher. She's troubled, violent, always has knives on her. Her mother died and her stepfather was a pimp who put her to work early. Echo guesses that she's useless in group and lies to her therapist. The teacher notices that Echo has some very specific predictions for someone who just met the girl.
Which brings us to Topher and Ivy, in Topher's office, looking at brain scans. Topher is pointing out similarities between the two-- Echo's current imprint is designed to be a best-case scenario of Susan's grown-up self. Ivy catches on the plan: Echo knows what Susan needs to hear, and Susan gets a model.Topher looks pleased and says it was his idea. Ivy asks how he sold DeWitt, which must mean Ivy doesn't know DeWitt very well. DeWitt would be all over this-- it would help her in her continual quest to convince herself she's not a monster. Which is basically what Topher says: "Everyone likes to be righteous, when they can afford it." Ivy makes up for her earlier character blindness by noticing that this includes Topher.
Then the phone rings, and Topher's pride is replaced with some more customary self-loathing. He tells Ivy to prep Victor.
Mellie is shambling aimlessly down the street, crying. She pauses on a bridge and watches traffic pass for a while. Before anything nastier can happen, her handler comes up behind her and offers her a treatment. In the van, she sobs that she did everything she could. As the van pulls in to the Dollhouse's underground garage, the camera pulls back and we see that Ballard was tailing her. He looks at the cameras and razor wire, and the image fades into Susan's storybook, and the thorns around the castle.
Credits.
When we come back, Susan is scratching out the lines of the the storybook with black crayon. Echo sits down next to her and makes a joke about her future career as an editor. Turning serious, she says that it always bothered her that Briar didn't save herself, too. She points out that Briar Rose was fifteen, and that if she was even younger... Susan cuts her off, saying you can always run. Echo says that, when it was her, she couldn't. She'd get ready in the night, and then in the morning, he'd be there, acting like everything was normal, and it seemed easier to pretend that all the other stuff never happened. She says she ended up feeling as guilty as he was, and that every time someone calls her a victim, she feels like the biggest liar in the world. Susan just nods.
Wow, that was pretty rough. And genuine, and sympathetic. Also, it fits right in with something that's getting to be a major theme in Dollhouse, which is complicity.
In the FBI, Ballard is talking to Database Lady. (We get a name for her! I think I heard him call her Lois. Maybe I'll stick with DBL.) He's ranting; she's nervous. She asks if he's certain Mellie is... "A Doll. Yes, I'm certain." "I was going to say 'victim'," she says, gently. (Victims, and complicity, and the illusion thereof.) Ballard says he went into the building-- rode the elevators, looked in the conference rooms, and didn't see anything. He thinks the Dollhouse is underground, like Caroline told him in "Needs". He's pulled files and found that the building had an unusual contractor-- a guy who specializes in closed environmental systems. DBL lifts a skeptical eyebrow at Ballard.
In the Mental Hygiene Chair, Victor is channeling Dominic. (Hilariously, in my humble opinion. For some reason, actors playing each others' characters never ceases to amuse me.) Slowly, Dominic realizes he's not in his normal body. (Again, a funny moment when he realizes he's in Victor.) He realizes that this means his old body is in the Attic, and freaks out. Adelle asks Dr. Saunders to sedate him. As she does, Dominic grabs her arm and pleads, "Whiskey." Dr. Saunders thinks he's asking for a drink, and Adelle dryly says she doesn't blame him.
(Okay, I guess there are advantages to getting behind on my recaps. That would have flown right by me until I saw it on DVD. If you're unspoiled, well, read the next recap.)
Once the sedative kicks in, Adelle tells Claire to give him something to make him more receptive to their questions, and she gives him a second injection. (Question: they can presumably modify the templates they've captured, right? Could the make Victor into a copy of Dominic who really, really wants to cooperate? Seems like that would cut down on the need for sodium pentathol.)
Back at the shelter, Echo sympathizes that it's hard to go to authority figure when he says he knows them all. She asks Susan if she ever had a chance she didn't take. Susan says she had four. Echo says she couldn't have gotten herself out, and that sometimes it's okay to be rescued. She tells Susan to read the story again, but this time to think of herself as the prince. She suggests that maybe Briar Rose was dreaming of getting free, and the prince was her dream. Susan points out that the prince is a boy, and Echo shrugs, "Yeah, but that's not his fault." The teacher comes in to say that it's time to go. Before she leaves, Echo quietly tells Susan that she noticed that Susan let Echo sit close to her and talk, which tells her she felt safe, which tells her Susan has a blade on her somewhere. Susan hands it over. As she leaves, she tells the teacher that Susan is close to moving forward, but that it's going to hurt. Guess that mirror image thing goes both ways.
Ballard knocking at the door of a dingy apartment. There's the sound of lots of locks unlocking, and a bleary-eyed Alan Tudyk pokes his head out. It's Wash! Hi, Wash. We missed you. "You're not from the Thai place, are you?" asks Wash. Wash wants to talk in the hall, but quickly gets agoraphobic, so Ballard pushes past him into the apartment, where he finds a small forest of marijuana plants. "These are carrots," Wash says nervously. "Medicinal carrots. For personal use. That were here when I moved in. And I'm just holding them for a friend." Ballard doesn't want to talk about the carrots, though. He wants to talk about closed environmental systems. Wash goes on an environmental rant, and offers Ballard a jar of recycled urine, or pomegranate juice.
Ballard tries to steer the conversation towards the possibility of building a self-contained building. Wash fudges a bit, but says it's basically possible, if you have the money. Ballard suggests building it underground, and Wash starts talking about the advantages-- insulation, structural support. Then he suddenly realizes that Ballard doesn't really have the money. He starts stalling-- Ballard should make an appointment with his secretary, or email him, or don't ever email him, and he's not comfortable with people in his apartment who aren't bringing him tofu satay.
Ballard names the Dollhouse, and Wash says they'll kill him. Ballard pulls his gun, and once Wash is done freaking out he reluctantly says he can get them in. Ballard says he's the only one who knows where to find the Dollhouse, and Wash is the only one who knows how to get in, and that makes Wash his new partner. "Then can I hold the gun?" asks Wash.
Once we get back from the act break, Dominic is still strapped to the chair, looking very relaxed but still denying he knows who sent the disk. It's not from the NSA, he says, since they never communicated like that. Adelle asks who else would try to contact him covertly, and she, Boyd, and Dominic all think of Alpha. They plug in the stick and find there's a password. Adelle says, astutely, that it doesn't really matter who it's from-- it was meant for Dominic so he should be able to open it. Dominic guesses the Greek character alpha-- he says that one of the first signs that something was wrong with Alpha was that he used the lower-case alpha to sign his projects in art class. (They thought it was a fish.)
The guess works, and it turns out that the stick had a picture of a huge statue of Paul Bunyan on it. ("Did not anticipate that," says Topher , speaking for all of us.) Boyd notes that these statues are common in the northern Plains states. Adelle recognizes this one-- from right near Rossum corporate headquarters in Tulsa. Boyd runs a quick search and finds the slashed body from the trailer. Adelle is not pleased at the prospect of her botched project showing up in a Rossum corporate boardroom. She tells Boyd to send Sierra, right bloody now.
In the car outside the Dollhouse, Wash is fretting as Ballard preps for the assault. Wash says they should stop for planning and supplies. ("Rope is always good," he says. And he seems like the sort who would have learned that from long experience-- in D&D.) Ballard says it has to be now, because he figures that once they figure out why he ditched November they'll know he's on to them. Wash asks if they're going to save her, and Ballard doesn't want to. "She said it herself, she can't be trusted," he justifies, and tells Wash to get moving. "This is like one of those buddy cop movies, where you're the hard-nosed FBI agent, and I'm the guy who hates buddy cop movies!" says Wash, miserably. Ballard threatens to tell the DEA about Wash's carrots. "If we go in there, then we're in there," argues Wash, "and that's more people in there!"
"They're not people," says Ballard.
In the Chair Room, Sierra wakes up from an upload and immediately starts fretting to her handler about how she's losing information as the body decomposes. As she rushes out the door, Topher tells Boyd that once Sierra's rush-job forensic pathologist goes out and Echo comes in they can shut down for the night.
Outside, Wash points Ballard at a giant pit, saying it's their way in. Ballard gets ready to go, and Wash is disappointed that a look at the pit didn't make Ballard give up. "You showed me this hoping I'd give up?" asks Ballard. "Where's the real entrance?"
"This is the real entrance. I just thought you'd give up," says Wash as he miserably follows Ballard down. "I wish we had some rope."
In the Chair Chamber, Echo gets her mindwipe.
Outside, Wash is pitching a fit as Ballard helps him down. Once he's down, he decides that the bottom of the pit is clean and enclosed, and he wants to stay there. Ballard kicks in a grate. Wash whines, "Just because we can move forward, we must? This is the same expansionist thinking that led to the Trail of Tears, man!"
We cut to Susan, taking Echo's advice and rereading the story as the prince. "I'm as strong as any spell, as strong as any thorns. I won't let anything stop me from reaching her. I will go and rescue this sleeping beauty." In the Dollhouse, Ballard sees the pods. "It's real," he says. He sounds relieved.
In Tulsa, Sierra is examining the body and freaking out the local coroner with her tendency to sniff the body. She learns from the scent that the victim was too clean to homeless, and had just been buried under a shallow layer of fresh garbage.
In a dark corridor of the Dollhouse, Wash says they told him this would be the new Eden. (I got to that imagery six episodes ago, Wash, but thanks for keeping up.) Ballard says Eden wasn't a prison, and Wash looks incredulous. "Are you kidding? Even the apples were monitored. Plus, they didn't have a system to recycle human sweat." Wash admits he could probably control security from a computer, but they have to get to one first. Ballard steps out in front of a Doll and asks the Doll to follow him. Wash protests that he's not good with people, or with their blood and viscera. But Ballard's not getting violent yet-- he just asks the compliant Doll for his clothes and gives them to Wash.
Ballard and the bedolled Wash try to pass up into Topher's office, but Topher notices them and challenges Ballard. Ballard makes up a story about doing a security sweep, which let him get close enough to whip out a taser and knock Topher out. Wash approves: "I mean, officially I abhor violence, but that was totally worth the loss of karma points." They drag Topher into his office where Wash tries to log on but is thwarted by Topher's paranoid layers of personal security.
Ballard notices the Mental Hygiene Chair and gets creeped out. Wash notices that, while he designed the environmental systems, he didn't include the feng shui, scantily clad hotties, or massive massage facilities. "This is a bad place," says Ballard. "Bad people," says Wash, "Good place. This is the future. We're all cells in a body, and the best we can do is try not to kill it from the inside." "No," says Ballard, "there's more we can do." With that, he drags Wash down the stairs in search of another computer.
On the way down, Wash is freaked out by his phobia of stairs without risers-- he says he's always afraid something will reach out between them and grab his foot. Ballard isn't really listening, though, because he sees Victor on the Dollhouse floor and realizes Lubov was another Dollhouse plant. "My whole life isn't real," he complains.
They find their way into Dr. Saunders' office. Ballard wants to find where the Dolls sleep. Wash warns him that the pods are alarmed, and that he shouldn't open one that still has the light on. He points Ballard in the right direction and settles in to start shutting down security.
Ballard finds the pod room and opens the first pod to unlock. It's November. He looks a little angry and a little regretful as he says, "I can't trust you. You'll kill me without even knowing it. I'm sorry." He moves on to the next pod. It's Echo. He smiles as she slowly wakes up. Then there's the sound of a gun cocking behind his head.
"Sorry, Agent Ballard. You don't get the girl," says Boyd.
Boyd tells Ballard to give him his gun. (I just realized that my by-now firmly established convention of referring to Boyd by his first name and Ballard by his last name seems a little odd when they're in a scene together. However, it is both alliterative and, as mentioned, firmly established, so I'm sticking with it.)
Ballard calmly says he doesn't have one. "You didn't come in here without one," Boyd almost sighs. "Put it on the floor." Ballard does. Echo, now awake, asks Ballard who he is.
"I'm Paul," he says, throwing another wrench in my nomenclature convention. "You called me and asked me to come get you." Boyd suggests that Echo go for a swim, so she heads off. As she gets up, Ballard swings at Boyd. He knocks the gun away, but Boyd knocks him down.
"What are you, her pimp?", Ballard sneers. "I keep her safe," says Boyd. "You think you're helping, but you're not. You can't get her out. I could bring the whole house down on you, but I'm giving you this one chance: Go back the way you came, now." Ballard, naturally, doesn't take the offer. As a counteroffer, he launches into a tackles and the two men grapple right through the glass of Victor's pod. Victor wakes up in a panic.
So, it rapidly becomes clear that Boyd's not really having this conversation, or this fight, with Ballard. He's having it with himself, or he's reenacting a fight he's already had with himself. This is lovely and heartbreaking, and ties in again with examining his complicity and self-justification. (I'm starting to think that this season's overriding question is "How can you live with yourself?")
It's also encouraging because it shows that the Dollhouse writers know what Buffy knew at its best, and what George Lucas knew about lightsaber battles in Episodes 4-6 and forgot in 1 and 2: In good drama, a fight isn't acrobatics; it's an argument, with punching.
I'm also mentally using Boyd's tendency to see Ballard as his more idealistic self as an excuse for Boyd's commission of the cardinal sin of using a gun on television: treating a gun less like a metal object that accelerates smaller metal objects and more like a magic wand that makes people do what you want. Under this delusion, the professional badass Boyd cocks his gun right behind the ear of another professional badass, which lets him swing around and knock the gun away before any smaller metal objects can accelerate into him.
It's my understanding that you can cover an almost shocking amount of ground in the time between most people will decide to shoot and when they actually do, and that if you want to keep someone covered with a gun you need to stand much, much further away from them than you think you need to. I'm also reminded of Terry Pratchett's beautiful formulation from Men At Arms:
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear...
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
Here, though, I'm attributing Boyd's hesitance to not having decided Ballard deserves to die rather than to sadism.
Was that enough nested digressions? Back to the fight.
Ballard gets free of the mess and catches up with Echo, trying to escort her out. Echo flashes back to their fight in the kitchen from "Man on the Street" and screams at him. Boyd catches up with them, having recovered his gun. Echo throws Ballard over the railing of the stairs onto a table, which shatters under the impact. As he recovers, Ballard throws a chuck of the table at Boyd's gun hand and follows with a tackle to knock the gun away again.
Meanwhile, Wash keeps turning off security systems. Dr. Saunders notices the mess in the pod room and find Victor, cut from his pod door breaking. "People were fighting on me," he reports.
Boyd has Ballard in a choke and is back to arguing. "You think they'll just let her go? Let her live outside? If you did get her out, they'd hunt you down and kill you both." Ballard scrambles for the gun, which has fallen in the pool by the yoga area. He can't quite get it, so he grabs a rock from the bottom instead and clocks Boyd in the head.
Echo's having another flashback, to Boyd saving her life in "The Target". Boyd tells her to run, and she does. Boyd and Ballard engage in some manly punching on the stairs, but their standoff is broken when Echo reaches through theriserless stairs and grabs Ballard's foot. Boyd subdues Ballard and tells Echo to wait. "I trust you," says Echo. Boyd looks stricken.
As Dr. Saunders brings Victor into her office to treat his cuts, Wash jumps out from her desk and rapidly slashes Victor across the face. In shock, Dr. Saunders recognizes Wash as Alpha.
Well, that's a good time for an act break.
Alpha!Wash is doing his best to creep out Dr. Saunders while Victor lies moaning on the floor. He calls scars his gifts, and says every set is unique. He asks her if she's always wanted to be a doctor. Slowly, she says yes. "That's a lie. Should we try another?", asks Alpha.
Boyd drags Ballard to Adelle in the Fortress of Dollitude. "Did you really think you could just walk into the Dollhouse when everyone knows it doesn't exist?", she asks. In response, Ballard tries the stoic silence routine.
Alpha asks Dr. Saunders to tell him about the first time she saw him, which she says was his exam when he came in for his first wipe. Alpha asks dryly if he was fine, healthy, intact. Dr. Saunders says yes, and Alpha says he wishes he had more time for questions.
In the Fortress, Ballard tries to bluster his way out with his status as a federal agent, but Adelle dismisses him. Ballard tries appealing to Boyd's conscience next, and Boyd deflects by pointing out that Ballard broke in and assaulted him. "Yes, there's indignation enough for everyone to have seconds," sighs Adelle, awesomely.
"If you didn't want me here, maybe you shouldn't have filled my life with quite so many interesting lies," says Ballard, raising a very, very good point. They really have spent several months scheduling multiple engagements from three Dolls for the purpose of, basically, fucking with him. Since it was Adelle doing it, I'm assuming there's a reason for it, but she doesn't really clarify. Instead, she asks Boyd if they should put him in the Chair.
Downstairs, Dr. Saunders calls to Echo, who comes into the office to find Alpha with a knife to Claire's throat and Victor still on the floor. Echo looks at Alpha and says, "I remember something about you."
"I remember everything about you," says Alpha.
In the Fortress, Boyd says they shouldn't put Ballard in the Chair, since he hasn't agreed to it. A call from Sierra interrupts them. She identifies the body as Keppler , and Boyd recognizes the name as the environmental consultant who built the Dollhouse. Next, Sierra says the he was killed in LA and planted in Tuscon. This detail, plus Ballard's confusion, tips Adelle off. She sees the action in the doctor's office on the monitor and realizes that Alpha wasn't in Tuscon.
Alpha puts Echo in the chair. When she wakes up, she looks at him and drawls, "I know you." "Of course you do," he drawls back, and they kiss toughly. When Echo pulls back, there's blood on her lip. They ride out on the elevator, reminding me of nothing so much as a Southern Gothic Spike and Drusilla.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment