Recap: Dollhouse 111, "Briar Rose"

A homeless guy, digging through trash, discovers a body. I check my clock to see if I've accidentally tuned in during "Law and Order".

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.

Recap: Dollhouse 110, "Haunted"

We open on town council of Preppyville: four guys in pastel polos around a table and a woman on a horse. The woman tells one of the men, apparently her husband, that she's taking the horse for a ride around the park. The men are drinking Long Island Iced Teas and avoiding playing tennis. The horse comes back, sans rider. One of the minor preppies asks, "Jack, where's Margaret?"

Echo wakes up in the chair, and Adelle is waiting. Echo recognizes her (and calls her "Addy") and says she looks terrible. Adelle, looking grim, says, "I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. You're dead."

And, wow, the credits already. So far the show has been making use of its extended run time by putting in some seriously long cold opens-- "Gray Hour" ran almost 12 minutes before the credits. This was much more of a traditional teaser. Jane Espenson, who is awesome, is writing this one, and it's her first, so there might be some differences from the usual.

After the credits, Boyd comes into Topher's office, and Topher teases him a bit about his promotion. ("You were no fun before as Echo's handler, now you can be twice as no fun as head of security.") They comment on how the Dollhouse is mostly idle since the Dominic incident, then Boyd fishes, not terribly subtly, for information on Echo's mission. He's disturbed when he hears that she's hosting a dead woman. Topher says it's a special friend of Adelle's-- but not a special friend. (Here he has a hilariously ambiguous hand gesture.) Boyd worries some more about the implications of life after death.

As he's about to leave, Topher stops him and says he needs Boyd to assign him an Active for an annual diagnostic. Boyd says Sierra has been idle the longest, so Topher can use her. (If the Dollhouse has been shuttered since the Dominic incident, how has Sierra been idle the longest? She had an engagement that day. Ahem. Probably too much continuity nitpicking.)

In the Fortress, Adelle is serving lunch to Margaret!Echo. Margaret is saying it's stunning, which I guess it would be. She figures out that her memories only go back to her most recent scan, about a month ago, so she doesn't remember dying, which she sees as a plus. She checks out her borrowed boobs and congratulates Addy on her work. Then she wonders if being young always felt this good. "I seem to recall it being rather nice," Adelle says archly, "I wonder why we gave it up."

Adelle reminds Margaret that the arrangement is only temporary, and Margaret lays out her plans. She wants to go to her funeral. Adelle contemplates hearing what the world really thought of you and doesn't seem very happy with the prospect. Then Margaret finishes, with a dramatic head tilt, "I thought maybe I'd solve my murder."

And that's an act break. If she keeps using them at this pace, Jane's going to run out. She has manage to land them on good lines, though.

Adelle accompanies Margaret!Echo to her funeral. Outside, before it starts, Margaret explains why she thinks she was murdered. The autopsy said massive heart attack, but she was young and in perfect health. Also, she was incredibly rich. She tells a story about a nanny who put ground glass in her snack tray as a child, intending to catch it and be a hero. She snuck a cookie and spent weeks in the hospital. Then she says that, while she always said she'd be late for her own funeral, she didn't mean it, and they go inside.

Once there, Margaret introduces Adelle to her friends and family: Nicolas and Jocelyn, her children, in the front. Her brother William, who she hasn't seen in ages, stupefyingly drunk. Her young husband, Jack, whose presence made her a vastly less frequent customer at the Dollhouse. The scene is pretty exposition-heavy, leavened by Adelle's reaction shots, and Margaret's closing line: "I was a lucky woman... until recently."

Back in the Dollhouse, lights flash in the Chair Room as Topher runs his diagnostic on Sierra. He pulls the last switch, then looks at Sierra expectantly. She sits up, then grins when she sees Topher. "Tell me you got SpeedForce 3," she says. "And the bonus maps!" he says. He also says he's invented a new version of Battleship that has real explosions. They break out beer, order pizza, and flop on the couch to play video games.

Meanwhile, Paul and Mellie are having an awkward dinner. Mellie asks if he's okay, and he's sullen and snappish but says he's fine, and she's adorable. Mellie moves to clear the dishes but Paul jumps in, because he has an ulterior motive. He slips Mellie's wine glass into a bag and hides it.

At the McDuck Mansion, Echo is playing Margaret playing Julia with Margaret's family. The cover story is that they met in Morocco and stayed in touch. Julia says Margaret would gush about her loved ones, and the family is skeptical-- there's a bunch of chatter, but the upshot is that they don't remember Margaret as a bundle of warmth. It goes on in this vein for a while, with the family acting unconcerned and "Julia" sticking up for Margaret as best she could. It comes out that Nick, Jocelyn, and Uncle Bill are splitting the money three ways, while Jack was left with just the horses, which they interpret as a smackdown. Julia!Margaret!Echo says that she thinks it was a gesture of trust-- the horses were her most treasured possessions and she wanted to tell him she knew he wasn't in it for the money. Nick tells her, "I know we're being terribly shocking, and you're charmingly loyal. You may be here to mourn, but the rest of us just live here." The shock of this makes Margaret want to head outside for some air.

Outside, she recovering and Nick comes out to talk. He says Margaret was a hard woman who wouldn't have wanted sentiment. Julia asks if Margaret was really that hard, and Nick says he always felt pushed and badgered. Julia tries to convince him that Margaret told her how much she cared about him. Since this involves her complimenting him on having grown into a handsome, charming man, Nick takes his chance and kisses Echo. Who is his mom, pretending to be his mom's friend. When she finishes gagging, Nick apologizes for misreading the signals and tries to pin down what went wrong, but Echo runs off as quickly as she can.

She runs into a bedroom, where she finds Jack drinking. They start talking, and she explains about how Margaret viewed leaving him the horses. He realizes she was with the rest of the family, and wants to know if they suspect him of murder, or just gold digging. Julia acts shocked at the suggestion of murder, and Jack sneers that his inheritance was hardly worth killing for.

Finally, at bedtime, Julia!Margaret!Echo is on the phone to Adelle, crying. "I love these people, but I don't like them," she says. She wonders if one of them killed her, and asks Adelle if that makes her paranoid. Adelle points out that Margaret came in for monthly painful brain scans on the suspicion that she would be killed, so paranoia is definitely on the table. "So much anger," says Margaret. "At least when I died the first time I though people loved me. A worthless illusion."

"Illusions aren't worthless," insists Adelle. "They're at the heart of most relationships." And, of course, the Dollhouse business model. As Margaret says she thinks she should have stayed dead, a shadowy figure watches her through the window.

After the act break, Boyd storms in to the Fortress of Dollitude, saying, "Eternal life?" Adelle: "Good adjective, excellent noun." (The "And your point is?" is silent.) Boyd is worried about the implications of offering it as a service. He says that Christianity, and most models of morality, don't exist without the fear of death. Adelle says she doesn't intend to preside over the end of Western civilization, and that it's only temporary. Boyd doesn't think that anyone is going to die on command, but Adelle says she has a new chief of security who handles that sort of thing.

Okay, Jane, we need to talk. You know I love you for Buffy and Firefly and BSG and your blog, but I kind of think you're blowing this one. I mean, I think Boyd is wrong here in a general sense-- morality doesn't fall apart in the absence of death. Recalculated, sure, but not gone. And Christianity really shouldn't be the religion of the post-death cookies of salvation-- when it is, it's usually because something is terribly off-balance on this side of the curtain. But that's beside the point. I disagree with lots of great characters on lots of great shows.

The problem is that Boyd is wrong narratively. He stands in the Fortress and blathers about implications that don't surface. He's talking about the story I want to see-- someone who decides that, since he or she has access to functional immortality, they've transcended morality. They have nothing left to fear. You can have your moral argument in the form of a story. Granted, the Takeshi Kovacs novels got there first, but it would still be good television.

Instead, what we actually get is a paint-by-numbers procedural mystery with a twist of Poor Little Rich Girl. And if there's a moral lesson, it's that the fear of death can be adequately replaced by the fear of Adelle DeWitt. (Which, come to think of it, might be true.)

I'm hoping Boyd's worries have thematic payoff, maybe in the Alpha storyline. Otherwise it's a lot of telling and no showing.

Ahem. Back in the conversation, Adelle tells Boyd that just because he's not Echo's handler anymore doesn't mean he can't help her. Boyd has already taken the liberty-- he looked into the horses and found that one used to be a Derby contender and could be worth a lot of money. He's sent in Victor as a breeder with a curious streak.

At the McDuck's, Jocelyn, the daughter, is crying over a picture of her, Margaret, and Nick. Echo walks by and sees her. Jocelyn apologetically says "God, I'm so emo." Julia says she's not sad to see someone mourning. "You just lost your mother; it's only natural you'd be Elmo." When Jocelyn corrects her to "emo", Julia!Margaret!Echo says indulgently, "That's not a word, sweetie."

Jocelyn complains that Margaret didn't even know her, including never attending one of her photography exhibitions. "You were serious about that?" asks Julia. Then, realizing, "You're right. That was... very bad of her." Jocelyn complains that Margaret would lecture her about being practical, then threw herself at "a tropical cookie." Would that be a chocolate chip and pineapple? Mango oatmeal? Anyway, Jocelyn suspects Jack was sleeping around, and this worries Margaret. Jocelyn suggests she try it herself. "When your ass hits the sheets, you'll know." Then Jocelyn summarizes her relationship with her mother: "It was okay that she never let me in, because she never let anyone in. Then there was Jack... and now there's you." She sniffles. "Whatever."

Ballard is hiding behind the door of Database Lady's office at the FBI. He wants her to run the prints he lifted from Mellie's glass. He says they might belong to a missing person, but DBL knows he thinks it's a Doll. "They're missing people. They just don't know it," says Ballard. DBL hesitates, then runs it. There's a hit, and a hilariously violent-looking mugshot of November. Then there are dozens of hits. Then they all disappear. "What just happened?" asks Ballard. DBL says, "I just started to believe you."


In the Dollhouse, Sierra and Topher are tossing a Nerf football around while Sierra rattles off classic sci-fi flaws like planets with a single ecosystem, human-alien hybrids, and noisy explosions in space. (Which I am taking as a Firefly shoutout.) When she gets to sexy alien chicks, Topher protests that she's just attacking good storytelling. Sierra wants to "play with the sleepies". Plan A is to make them fight and bet on them like gladiators, which Topher nixes. Then she suggests making them act out sketches they write, filming it, and seeing who gets more hits on YouTube, which Topher is tempted by but ultimately rejects. He suggests chess. She suggests a variant. He suggests blind-- and when you lost a piece, you drink. Sierra accepts, saying, "Advantage: me."

At the Poor Little Rich House, Echo finds Jack packing. He says he doesn't belong here anymore. Echo starts trying an awkward seduction, which, given the metaphysical implications, is probably natural. Jack gets mad-- he assumes the family has paid her to scope him out. ("It's sick, what you're doing. Wearing her perfume!" Nice touch.) He marches her out and says to tell the family that he's selling the horses because he can't stand the reminder of Margaret, and that if they're looking for a killer they should look at Uncle Bill, who is riding the next float in the Red Herring Parade.

Margaret thinks Bill came in for the funeral, but Jack says he arrived the day before Margaret died. (Echo doesn't remember because it was after her last scan.) They watch him down the stairs as he eyes vases appraisingly. Jack guesses he wanted to borrow money and Margaret says no.

After the act break, Victor is checking out the horse, and Nick is bitter that Jack is cashing out. Victor is surprised to find the horse might have another year of racing in him, but Nick says it's not for sale.

Inside, Bill asks Echo if she believes in ghosts. He does-- he thinks Margaret is here, and angry. Julia!Margaret!Echo asks why Margaret would be angry, but he apparently just means she wanted more time. He goes through their backstory-- estranged for years, too stubborn to pick up the phone, until he finally showed up on the doorstep last week and they realized they didn't have anything to stay mad about. He says he's the lucky one, and that Jack would be doing better if he had talked to Margaret about his debts. ("Addiction. Not for the faint of heart," he says as he pours another drink.) That's news to Margaret.

In the Dollhouse, Topher is crouched behind a tasteful Asian-inspired sofa, doing a cheesy "In a world..." voiceover. He and Sierra scramble around serene vases and tranquil pools until Sierra decoys Topher with the Nerf football and shoots him in the back. They trade terrible anatomically-themed action hero one-liners like "I told you I'd have your back" and "The quickest way to a man's heart is through his back" until they decide it's going nowhere and start the next round, best of 11.

In Ballard's apartment, he comes home to find Mellie has laid out dinner already. She has a key, but wants to assure him that she's not in there nuzzling his shirts, although his shirts are clearly nuzzleworthy... you get the idea. She babbles, Ballard is grumpy and distant. Finally, she says they have to talk, or rather that she has to talk at him.

"I like being with you," she says, "In fact, I love it. And you say everything is fine, so I'm going to stop asking, even if that means lying next to you when everything's not fine. I'm going to give you what you need. If you want to give back, give back, but it doesn't have to mean anything." Oh, honey. Remember when you developed self-respect and I started liking you? I guess her parameters involve staying close to Ballard.

After the speech, they kiss, and Ballard starts getting a little violent. He pushes her against the wall and they kiss roughly for a while, and then they head for the bedroom where he throws her to the bed and (shock!) takes off his shirt. One thing he's always managed well in this role is projecting much more menace than one would expect from the heroic FBI agent type, and well, this is menacing sex.

Possibly intentionally, we cut to Echo riding a horse. Gleefully. She puts him back in the stable and Nick catches her. He says the horse doesn't like most people. Then he asks, "Did you think I wouldn't recognize my own mother, mother?" Which, as act breaks go, is a good one.

When we come back, Nick and Margaret are sitting on a bench in the stables, talking. Margaret says it's a relief and asks how he knew. Nick says it was lots of things-- the way she moved, her bedtime routine, the horse-- but after the kiss. He knows about the Dollhouse from being a customer, but apparently thinks the Manhattan branch is the only one. He comes clean about his gambling debts-- he says at first he was a little relieved that she dies before she knew, but now he just wants her back. Margaret shares her suspicions about her murder with him, but they're interrupted by Victor talking to Jack about the horse.

Turns out the horse had been drugged, then treated with a masking agent. He could pass for race-ready for the sale, but then he'd wither. "In layman's terms," says Victor, "you just made yourself a four-million-dollar pet." Echo is shocked, and Jack pitches a fit, banging on things with a shovel. Echo lets out a little scream, which leads to Jack looking around. When he finds Nick and Echo, he attacks Nick with the shovel, and Nick responds by jabbing him in the side with one of those hay-hauling hooks.

In the Fortress, Boyd tells Adelle that he ran an analysis and found that the same masking agent was used on the horse and on Margaret. He wants to get involved, but Adelle is firm that he defer to the new handler. Boyd awkwardly asks if she's aware of the "Topher situation". She is. As she sits quietly in the dark, she says that loneliness only leads to detachment, and the people most in need of reaching out are the least capable of it. She says she allows him one diagnostic a year, and we see Sierra serve him birthday cake. "So Topher can make friends," Boyd says.

Echo and Nick run from Jack in to her room and lock the door. As Jack bangs around looking for a way in, Nick suggests a way they can make Jack pay for the murder-- if Echo writes a letter and postdates it, suggesting that she suspects she'd be murdered, with how and when, they could use it as evidence. Echo buys it and starts writing. As she does, she gets to the part about the drugs and the masking agent when she realizes Jack doesn't know about horses. Nick tries to explain for a bit, then gives up and pulls out a syringe. "You never could just let things lie, mother."

When we get back from commercial, Nick is still monologuing. He needed the money for his gambling debts, and drugged the horse in case that was all he got in the inheritance. He pins Echo on the bed and tries to inject her. Jack, at the door, has traded his shovel for a shotgun and blows his way into the room. Jack and Nick fight, and Jack finally knocks Nick out. William comes by to investigate the noise, and Echo sends him to call an ambulance. In the confusion, she burns the letter blaming Jack.

On the bed, Jack says he hopes Margaret didn't know about Nick, as it would have killed her. "It did," says Julia!Margaret!Echo.

The next day, William reads a new handwritten note from Margaret that pins her upcoming death on Nick and rewrites her will, including the phrase, "So that means more for everyone else. Yay!" Jocelyn asks, "Mom wrote this?" Bill goes on to read, "Jocelyn, I know the tone of this document may seem out of character, but I feel wiser and full of warmth in these last days and I have some things to say to each of you." Heh.

In Ballard's apartment, Mellie is tidying while Paul is in the shower. She says, "Pretty crazy last night, right? I mean, I liked it, but not all the time, you know? Not all the time. So, what are you doing today? More hunting for Dollhouse clients?" Ballard is in the shower, looking self-loathing. "I found one," he says.

Julia!Echo!Margaret has one final conversation with her tropical cookie and hands him a letter.

Finally, she's with Adelle in the Mental Hygiene Chair. Adelle is looking about what you'd expect an incredible hardass who is watching her friend die to look like. She asks gently if Margaret was tempted to take Echo's body and run for it. Margaret says maybe a little, but she had her turn and the people she loved are moving on. "Besides," she adds, "I know you. You're too much like me. I wouldn't have gotten as far as the airport." Then, a little hesitant, she asks, "Addy? Will I see my life flash before my eyes?"

"Every single moment," vows Adelle.

Mindwipe.

Okay, I feel like I owe Jane a little something after the mid-recap complaining. I loved the B plots here-- Topher and Ballard's reveals were great. Honestly, I'm quite relieved that Topher spends his one day with a Doll of his own playing laser tag and eating pizza, rather than something orders of magnitude skeevier. But it makes sense, and humanizes him in a pathetic sort of way. And of course puts him in the same position Adelle was in the last episode-- not only the least capable of reaching out to others, but also the least able to indulge in the self-delusion it takes to get what you need from a Doll. And Ballard... wow. Lovely and horrible, and the funhouse mirror version of Topher and Adelle.

Recap: Dollhouse 109, "Spy in the House of Love"

Echo and Sierra walk across the floor of the Dollhouse. Upstairs in the chair room, there's muffled shouting and flashing lights. Sierra wonders what's happening, and Echo answers: "She made a mistake. Now she's sad." Then there's a gunshot, and a smear of blood spatters on the window of the chair room. I think we can assume that wasn't a routine imprint.

A title card reads: "12 hours earlier". Hooray, it's an interwoven timeline structure. Now that I'm behind on the recaps, that just feels like piling on. Anyway, Boyd and Echo are in one of the signature Dollhouse vans, and Echo is in a seriously over-the-top leather dominatrix outfit: corset, chains, slits, collar, and whip. She's explaining to Boyd that S/M isn't about the pain; it's about trust. Boyd: "In my experience, trust like that usually leads to pain." Echo says he sounds like he could use a session in her care. Boyd, amused, turns her down. Echo points out that she showed she trusts him by getting in the van.

In the Dollhouse parking garage, Boyd and Echo coming in pass Victor and his handler on their way out. The handler complains about being sent on another Miss Lonelyhearts gig. ("How pathetic is that old bag?") Victor objects mildly to the trashing of his beloved in a British accent. He sounds fond and indulgent. This whole conversation seems like an odd one to be having in front of the imprinted Dolls. After all, Victor's imprint Roger doesn't know he's an imprint being hired to do whatever the old lady wants. That's the point of the Dollhouse. If she wanted a gigolo, she could hire one. I assume the Dolls are programmed to accept a little fuzziness in their cover stories at the beginnings and ends of their missions-- later on, November doesn't freak out when she looks out onto the Dollhouse floor as Mellie, and they have to not freak out when they wake up in the chair and get herded into the vans. Anyway, Echo caps the conversation by snapping her whip at Victor's handler's ankles: "It's love. Show some respect." Boyd takes her whip and sends her in for her treatment. She shrugs: "Okay, sometimes it is about the pain."


At Echo's mindwipe, Ivy is handling the post-imprint script. Right after she finishes, though, Topher is there to critique it. He says it needs to be more pleasant, and to provide a counterpoint Dominic bustles in and orders Echo out of the chair. He asks Topher why they're behind schedule and Topher reminds him about his computer getting shot last week. Dominic yells at Topher and sends Echo off to see Dr. Saunders.

Outside of the chair room, Dominic delivers a report to DeWitt, and DeWitt hands him control of the Dollhouse, as she's been called in by Rossum. Dominic, looking worried, asks if she knows why. "Considering everything that's gone on here recently, I'm sure they want to pat me on the head and tell me I've been running a crackerjack operation. Maybe there'll be cake." Hee. Sarcasm sounds better in British. Dominic protests on her behalf that none of it was her fault, but Adelle says it was her responsibility-- and, for the next few days, it's his.

On the Dollhouse floor, Echo greets November on her way to Dr. Saunders's office. When she mentions Dr. Saunders, November gives the same response the Dolls always do: "She's nice." It's one of those creepy little touches-- a little Manchurian Candidate-ish. Dr. Saunders is the kindest, bravest, warmest person I've ever met in my whole life. A staffer interrupts and takes November off for a treatment.

In Saunders' office, Echo gets her exam, and Boyd decides to check in. He wasn't comfortable with the last operation, which seemed unnecessarily rough. Claire points out that unnecessary roughness is kind of part of the whole dominatrix gig, and lays out her theory that the kinky sexual missions can be philanthropic, too-- that having a deep inexpressible desire can be debilitating. Boyd doesn't buy it, and sarcastically tells her that she's got the sales pitch down and could sub in for Adelle while she's gone. Claire bristles a little at the disapproval: "I believe the system is flawed. Maybe irreparably. But not for the same reasons as you." Echo leaves the exam room, and Boyd follows.

Outside, Topher nervously flags down Boyd. He says, "In a couple of minutes I'm going to make a call to DeWitt. If you were to do something in those couple of minutes, like get some air, or run, I wouldn't know you had done that." He raises his eyebrows significantly. (Aww, Topher is looking out for his "man-friend".) Boyd has no idea what he's talking about, though. Turns out that Topher, while doing maintenance on the Chair after it had that run-in with Echo's gun, found a chip planted in it that would have given someone access to the imprints. He explains: "I make a cheerleader, they make it a cheerleader who kills people. Or an assassin who does cheers. Whatever: any Active, any time, with parameters we don't know about." Boyd translates that they have a spy in the Dollhouse. There's a beat, then: "And you thought it was me?" Topher shrugs: "Not in a bad way!" Boyd points out that Topher would have gotten in a lot of trouble for warning him if he had been the spy. Topher says he's boned anyway, and goes off to call it in. In the background, Echo waves enthusiastically at someone off camera.

Echo is in the arts and crafts room doing bonsai. She watches as Topher calls Dominic into his office and looks worried as Dominic pitches a miniature fit at Topher. Dominic storms downstairs, giving orders to put the whole Dollhouse on communications lockdown. He grabs Sierra and takes her upstairs for a treatment. Echo sees Sierra in the chair, and then watches Dominic push Topher around a little. Dominic and the imprinted Sierra storm past Echo, and Sierra comments that, when she worked at the Agency, she'd kill anyone who exposed her as much as Topher had.

Echo wanders into the chair room, and says that everyone is unhappy today. Topher, busy with rebuilding the Chair, is dismissive: "Someone put their tiny little thinking cap on!" Dolls not being very good with sarcasm, Echo carries on: "He was mad at you. Were you not your best?" Topher apparently thinks it can't hurt to have a Doll listen to him complain about Dominic, so he lets out a rant that ends with him pointing out that he has no idea how to catch a spy. Echo says she could help. Topher snorts: "Why would you want to?" Echo: "Why wouldn't I?"

Topher tries to put together a retort, then, a little stunned: "Did I just lose an argument to a Doll? Anyway, thanks, but you can't help." Echo, still blank and innocent but insistent: "You make people different." She climbs into the chair. "You can make me help." Yeah, that deserves a "whoa". Nice work... and credits.

On the second watch-through, it became clear that the whole teaser was an Echo POV. She's present even in the conversations that aren't directed at her. And she witnesses enough just in the teaser to put together the situation. Taken that way, it's an interesting commentary on how everyone, even-- when led that way-- the audience, tends to treat the Dolls like furniture. And maybe how that might not be very wise of them.

After the credits, we come in to a title card that says "Imprint: November". I'm not sold on the whole title card thing. I mean, "12 hours earlier", I can live with. Wacky timeline, check. Thanks for the heads up. "Imprint: November", though? November's right there. She's in the chair. Being imprinted. I get it. I guess they're just emphasizing the nifty structure of the episode, one imprint per act, interwoven timelines, but you know what's even cooler than a nifty structure? Doing a nifty structure and then trusting your audience to pick it up. Really, it's what I'm here for.

Ahem. Anyway, November wakes up as Mellie, complete with memories of a flight back from her mother's in Iowa-- a redeye with a crying baby. Jeez, after all the ethically murky acts the Dollhouse goes through, implanting memories of bad flights just seems like casual sadism. Bastards. Did they make The Pink Panther 2 the in-flight movie?

Again, ahem. I have managed to work two parenthetical recapper comment paragraphs in before November has actually gotten out of the chair. I'll move on. November gets out of the chair. (Yay!) Ivy goes to double-check something technical and November wanders out of the Chair room onto the catwalk overlooking Dollhouse floor. Echo waves up at her as Topher talks to Boyd. November realizes she knows her, but doesn't remember where. (Which either shows for the first time that the memory leaks go both ways, or shores up my theory that the imprinted Dolls recognize and protect one another.) Her handler comes out to take her to the vans.

November, as Mellie, is opening the door of her apartment when Ballard busts out from his place across the hall pointing a gun at her. He sees it's her and relaxes-- well, relaxes a little. The whole gun thing has also made Mellie understandable tense. He says it's not safe to talk out in the hall and asks her in. Once she's inside, he begins working on an impressive set of locks and deadbolts on the door. When he's done, he tells Mellie about the bug and says he wants to check her place, too. Mellie agrees and wanders into the living room, where Ballard has a full-blown Wall of Crazy going: news clippings, maps, pictures, sketches, bits of yarn and pushpins, the full Nash. Mellie is, still understandably, a little shaken by the fact that her sort-of boyfriend has become a classic paranoid in a matter of weeks. Ballard does some paranoid babbling that doesn't help the impression-- he's discovered deeper and deeper connections with everyone imaginable, and he thinks the Dollhouse is literally underground. Finally, he realizes he sounds crazy and Mellie is looking scared.

He tells her she should go back to her mom's, but she doesn't want to. First, she's in Iowa and sets her up with losers she dated in high school. Also, she realized she was running away from her life. She takes off her coat and starts tidying up the scattered takeout boxes that are TV code for "obsessed man living alone". I would just like to point out that this obsessed dude living alone is a perfectly competent cook, thank you very much. Ballard tries again to talk her out of it-- he says he realizes he's obsessed and paranoid, he can't sleep, and sometimes he can't even remember why he wants to find the Dollhouse so badly. Mellie says that's why he needs someone to keep him grounded. When Ballard asks how she'll do that, she kisses him, and suggests they both head to the shower.

They're kissing on the way there, and Ballard starts undoing her top button when she freezes. Ballard tries to figure out what's wrong. In a calm, blank voice, November says, "I have a message for you from inside the Dollhouse." Ballard thinks she's joking for a second, but she stays serious, and she uses the word "imprint", which he knows from his research and Mellie, presumably, does not. She says the person sending the messages thinks his control will be discovered soon, and warns him that Mellie is a Doll sent to spy on him. Ballard thinks they got to Mellie and mindwiped her, but November corrects him: "They did this long before you met me. Mellie exists because of you."

Ballard is shaken and pissed. November says, "Now you understand how dangerous their technology is." She warns him not to tell Mellie anything about the investigation, and also not to let her know he knows she's a Doll: "If they know you know, they'll kill you, and they'll have Mellie do it." Damn. This leads to an explanation of Mellie's trigger. Ballard says, "You can't just destroy my life and give me nothing!" He asks, again, where the Dollhouse is, but November gives the same answer Echo did: "The Dollhouse deals in fantasy, but that is not their purpose. Investigate their purpose." She says this is the last time he'll be contacted by Doll. "Who sent you?" Ballard asks desperately, but November shakes her head. "I'm not imprinted with information you're not supposed to have." She warns him again not to tell her, and then Mellie is back. It's her turn to try to figure out what's wrong, but Ballard says it's nothing, and they start kissing again.

It's an act break, so I'm allowing myself another parenthetical: One of the things that this episode does really well is highlight the self-deception it takes to use a Doll. Adelle's sales pitch is right-- the Dolls don't lie. But the client is the one who has to convince themselves, and that takes a willful act of denial to maintain the illusion. Ballard finds himself thrust into that position, in a way that, seriously, sucks beyond the telling of it. Again, nice work.

A title card reads "Imprint: Sierra". Shockingly, Sierra is in the chair, being imprinted. Dominic is in there with Topher, asking if it will work, and Topher says he mixed in all his best secret agent bits. Dominic says he can't get in touch with DeWitt, and he's worried their spy might have gone after her. He presses Topher for a list of people with access to the chair, and it's a long one: Ivy, the handlers, Dr. Saunders, the staff... oh, and some Dolls wander in. Dominic shoves Topher back into the chair, which was the part Echo saw. As Dominic and Sierra head out, Topher asks what's going to happen when Adelle gets back. Dominic says, "Her wrath is going to come down on me. Then, I'm coming for you." On the way out on the catwalk, Echo overhears Sierra's line about killing Topher.

In the Fortress, Dominic briefs Sierra. They need the NSA's files, and Topher has broken their RSA encryption (Ahem. Holy shit. I mean, obviously the computers that can fit a working model of the brain onto a hard drive aren't standard issue, but if Topher can just sit down and crack NSA encryption on them, they don't need to run the Dollhouse to make tons of money.) but only on the internal network, which means they need someone on the inside to actually retrieve the file. Sierra says it's a tall order-- just so they understand how awesome she's going to be when she does it.

She dresses in a white ruffled blouse, zips up some heels, puts on a short black wig, and head out. She's on a train headed down the coast, and sits down next to a short Asian woman wearing exactly the same outfit and hairstyle. Sierra politely asks if she can borrow a pen. When the target recognizes that Sierra is dressed as her double, her eyes barely have time to widen before Sierra stabs her with a sedative hidden in a pen, steals her ID card, and scans her retina with a cell phone.

Sierra uses the stolen ID card to walk past security, apparently banking on the fact that white people really do think all vaguely Asian-looking people look the same. In Sierra's case, even in the wig, she's Asian-looking only in the vaguest sense possible. Inside, she opens her camera to retrieve a contact lens that has apparently been printed with her double's retina patterns, which is a pretty neat trick. Finally, she passes through a final check into a file room, opens a drawer, and retrieves something that looks a lot like a blank sheet for an overhead projector with some shiny bits on it. She squints at it for a second, peels something off of it with her fingernail, and heads out.

On the way past the check, an alarm goes off and the security guard moves over to sweep her with a wand. She goes along with it for a second, then grabs his arm, punches him out, and flips him over. In the elevator on the way out, she pulls the sheet out from under her blouse, frowns, and flicks something else off it with her nails. "Even Mossad doesn't double tag," she says, sounding a little impressed. (If the countermeasure to their tagging system is scratching it off with a fingernail, maybe they should reconsider.) As a general alarm goes off, she hurries in to her double's office and plugs something from the computer onto the clear sheet, which lights up with text and a blurry picture. While she's trying to read it, a security guard comes in and ushers her out for the general sweep. Walking out, she calls for extraction. She draws some attention for going the wrong way, and has to run from security and find an alternate path to the roof, where a helicopter is waiting. She yells into her radio, "I have a name, but they're closing in." Act break!

Another redundant title card: "Imprint: Victor". Victor wakes up and is informed that Catherine is waiting for him. As he heads out, Topher and Ivy snipe about who's responsible for the Chair running slow. Victor and his handler pass Dominatrix!Echo in the garage, as we saw. In the van outside his destination, his handler tells him to have fun and stay out of trouble. Rougishly, he says he promises nothing. An old lady answers the door and he delivers his bouqet of roses, which she says are her favorites. As she's putting them in a vase, Victor smoothly walks out the back door, climbs in to a gorgeous vintage Porche, and drives away. He pulls up at another house, calling for Catherine, and finds her on the deck out back. She turns around, and...

Holy shit, it's Adelle.

I'm going to need a minute.

Okay, I'm back.

Adelle's face softens visibly when she sees Roger!Victor, and they kiss.

Yeah, I'm going to need another minute.

Adelle's phone rings, and she sees tenses again when she sees it's Topher, but Roger grabs the phone and offers to throw it over the ledge. Adelle agrees: "It's a very slippery phone. I've often complained about that." Victor tosses the phone off the deck and into the ocean. Adelle starts to have second thoughts, but Roger cuts right to the chase.

Roger: "You're trying so hard to relax-- which makes me want to know why you're trying so hard to relax."
Adelle: "Am I that transparent?"
Roger: "No, but I have X-ray eyes."

Adelle says things are rocky at work, and Roger apparently knows about the Dollhouse. Adelle complains that she used to head a division that grew new organs out of stem cells, and then she could tell people what she really did. Victor asks if the Dollhouse is really that bad: "Isn't it just helping lonely people?" Which is a perfect set-up for some Whedonian irony from Adelle: "Pathetic, self-deluding souls." (Again, this episode is about the self-delusion it takes to use a Doll. Adelle clearly wants to lose herself in the fantasy but can't.) Victor ends it by asking if they should take this elsewhere.

Elsewhere, apparently, is a fencing match in the living room. Wow. This is one of those character touches that's so perfect it seems obvious once it's happened. Of course Adelle fences. She would have held the top seed at her small liberal arts college's team. A couple times a year, her sheer intensity would intimidate an opponent straight off of the mat. And there's no one to fence against anymore, and she misses it.

So they fence, and Victor takes the first point. On the second, Adelle's slash cuts Victor across the arm. He looks at it for a second, then comes at her hard, ignoring the boundaries. It's violent enough that I start to wonder whether this is an assassination attempt by the person who's been messing with the imprints, but during the fight he tells her, "This is what you wanted, or you wouldn't have cut me." He disarms her and pins her to the wall with his point at her throat. Then he lowers the sword and kisses her, hard.

And then they totally do it.

So, Adelle's constructed fantasy person can read her perfectly so she doesn't have to talk about things, and wrests her out of her own control-- sometimes at swordpoint. Yes, I beleive it.

Afterwards, Victor tells Adelle, "You are perfection. If I could make a woman, I'd make you." He goes on to say that if he were a Dollhouse client, he'd order one of her, with a spare for when she's in the shop. Adelle is clearly a little wierded out by the possibility: "I think the universe might collapse under that one." Victor laughs and says he doesn't intend to become a client: "I want the real you." "I want the real you, too," says Adelle. And once again, Dollhouse provides 500% of the USDA recommended daily allowance of dramatic irony.

"The irony is, I think you're the most real person I've ever met," says Adelle. "That's not irony. You know, people always get that wrong," says Roger. Meta-irony! If it gets any denser it will tear a hole through the fabric of the universe.

Adelle cynically complains about the layer of lies surrounding relationships: "When you're dating, it's about hiding your flaws. Then you're in a relationship and it's about hiding your disappointment. Then you're married, and it's about hiding your sins." (Which adds another layer to the theme of self-delusion. At least according to Adelle, the mental steps required to pretend that someone else is what you want them to be aren't that different from using a Doll.)

Roger suggests that they run away and buy a bar near a beach. Adelle gets into the fantasy for a while, saying they won't have clocks or computers or sexy businesswoman shoes. (Victor: "I'm keeping my sexy businesswoman shoes.") But finally the impossiblity of it crashes down on her and she tells him they can't have that. She kisses him desperately and tells him to trust her, and we fade to black.

Afterwards (again), Victor is alone in bed. Adelle walks in, fully dressed and looking shell-shocked. She sits on the edge of the bed and cries as Victor holds her.

During the act break, I ponder the possibility of a spin-off where Adelle and Roger!Victor own a bar on the beach, and maybe a houseboat. They fence and drink rum-based cocktails. Adelle has a jury-rigged version of the Chair in the basement for emergencies. They fight crime.

Last title card: "Imprint: Echo". When she wakes up, she goes right to business, asking Topher for personnel records, security logs, access to the mainframe, and some clothes. "I can't catch a spy in my pajamas."

Once she's dressed, she barges in to the Fortress and hands Dominic a list of people she wants to interview. Dominic says he's got it handled already, but Topher pushes the idea and Dominic asks how she's programmed. Topher says she reads body language, knows advanced interrogation, and has a little Sherlock Holmes thrown in. Dominic gives in a looks at the list. Echo wants to start with Topher, which freaks Topher out. He reminds them that he discovered the leak, and Echo says that means he's either dangerously incompetent or trying to throw them off his trail. Dominic is tickled: "I'm sorry I ever doubted your programming abilities."

In Echo's interrogation of Topher, she asks why he's at the Dollhouse. He's says, basically, that he's there to do cool stuff. "I don't want to brag," he says, and Echo raises an eyebrow. "Okay, I want to brag. I'm kind of a genius." Then he asks, kind of defensively, "You don't really think I'm incompetent, do you?"

Echo answers with a question: "So it matters what people think of you?" But when the camera swings back across the table, it's Ivy answering the question. (Thus giving me two Whedonverse flashbacks in under a minute. Spike totally did the "I don't like to brag/ I love to brag" thing in his very first episode, and this intercut interrogation structure is right out of the Firefly episode "Safe". It was funnier in Firefly. I think my favorite part was Jayne just sitting there looking surly. Or possibly Zoe being as tight-lippped as possible intercut with Wash gushing enthusiastically. "That curve at the top of her thigh, definitely. Or above that, that's nice too. Have you ever been with a warrior woman? What was the question again?")

Ivy complains about being treated as a snack fetcher and, in the process, admits she has the expertise to work the equiment without Topher knowing. She realizes what she said, but Echo leans in and says, "I'm not trying to incriminate you. I'm just trying to nail down your feelings about the Dollhouse."

This time it's Boyd answering: "We're pimps and killers. But in a philanthropic way." Echo realizes she trusts him, but can't figure out why.

Then she's interrogating Dr. Saunders, where she points out that Claire hasn't left the Dollhouse in weeks. This worries Echo, who says, "Such intense focus on your work can leave other areas of your life neglected and open to exploitation. Do you have any friends outside the Dollhouse?" We never hear her answer, though, because Dominic's phone rings. He says Sierra's been extracted and she has the mole's identity.

When he comes back, Dominic is dragging Ivy into the Fortress. She's protesting her innocence, but Dominic has the file. He threatens her with the Attic, and has Topher fill in the details, which means we finally find out what it is, too. Topher: "It's a mental sock. You know that feeling when you have a name on the tip of your tongue but you can't get it out? It's like that, but with every thought you ever have." Creepy.

At the desk, Echo is looking at the file that implicates Ivy. She asks, "How long?" Dominic thinks she's asking when DeWitt will get back so they can proceed with putting Ivy in the Attic, but Echo corrects him: "How long do you think you can keep this up? You work for the NSA." Dominic scoffs-- he points out the file as evidence, and asks sarcastically if Ivy's body language is saying she's innocent. (In the background, Ivy points out that her language language is saying she's innocent.)

Echo goes on, saying that when the call came in, everyone else tensed up, wanting to know who betrayed them, but Dominic relaxed. Echo thinks that's because he knew what would be in the file, and that it would get him off the hook. She says he contacted the NSA and had them plant the file for Sierra to retrieve. Dominic points out that the Dollhouse was on lockdown the whole time, but Echo says the Fortress itself wasn't, and that a call went out from there. While Dominic is protesting that anyone could have snuck in, Echo admits she didn't have enough evidence, which was why she was stalling-- she needed one more sign. "What was that?" asks Dominic. Echo says, "Twenty seconds ago, you unsnapped your holster."

Dominic draws and fires, and he and Echo fight. As they do, Echo tries to convince him it's useless to fight now that he's blown-- he can't get away from the Dollhouse. Dominic has a plan, though: If he kills Echo, he can say that she went off mission again and can go back to the original plan of blaming Ivy. Of course, he'll have to kill Topher and Ivy, too.

Topher and Ivy, meanwhile, are cowering under a couch. Ivy thinks they should help. Topher says he contributed when he gave Echo kung fu skills, but Ivy can jump in any time. Meanwhile, Echo and Dominic keep fighting using the shards of the window that got broken when Dominic shot it. (In a touch of practical badassery that I frankly wish se'd seen more of from him, Dominic rips off the sleeve of his suit and wraps his hand with it before he picks up his shard of glass.) Finally, Echo reverses a thrust from Dominic and dangles him out the window, saying, "I'm not broken."

(Which makes me wonder a little about the nature of her imprint. She didn't freak out when Dominic told her she was a Doll. She just objects strongly to being called a broken Doll. Did she know the whole time? Was she just Echo with some skills added in?)

Later, Adelle is back. She's interrogating Dominic while Echo stands in the background. She says she trusted him with a gift, but he doesn't think it's right to call the Dollhouse a gift. Adelle asks about the people they've helped, and Dominic tosses back with the people they've hurt. Adelle challenges him to name one, and he looks back at Echo. Adelle, astutely, points out that that's an odd position for a man who has repeatedly tried to kill her himself.

The philosophical debate over, she moves on to tactics. She wants to know why the NSA wants them, and Dominic says he was assigned to make sure that Rossum didn't self-destruct. They're worried about what happens when Rossum loses control, which he says means he never lied about his methods or his goals. He says if it wasn't for him, Ballard would have found them by now. Adelle doesn't think the NSA are the right people to step in, but Dominic calls he naive-- for believing in the Dollhouse, and in him.

Adelle's calm snaps back into place, and she talks over Dominic's head to Echo: "Get what you can from him about the NSA, then have Topher prep him for the Attic." Dominic snorts that she's signing his death warrant like it was a business transaction, and Adelle demurely agrees. He says the Agency will come looking for him, and Adelle says when they do, he'll be there to tell them he's just fine. The situation seems to sink in for Dominic, and Adelle goes on: "What, did you think I'd show you mercy, or rage? Three years by my side; I thought you'd know me better than that." Dominic: "You're a piece of work." Adelle, distantly: "That's what they tell me."

In the van with Echo, Dominic is slouched in a corner, smiling grimly. Echo says he doesn't have much to smile about. Dominic cocks his head and says, "After they beat me to a pulp, they're going to erase me." He pauses, then finishes, "But first they're going to erase you." Echo says she can take care of herself, and Dominic says he knows. "That's why I'm smiling. One day, you'll be erasing them. And after all this, they still won't see it coming. Sooner or later, everyone gets theirs." You know, if we'd seen more grimly nihilistic Dominic, I might have liked him better.

After the break, we see the struggle and the flashing lights that Echo and Sierra saw in the teaser, but now we see it's Dominc being forced into the chair, with a foam pad stuffed in his mouth. In the struggle, Dominic grabs one of the handlers' guns. (My notes here read: "LD grabs gun and goes for HIS OWN HEAD OMG.") It goes off in the struggle and hits Adelle in the gut. Boyd tries to check on her but she waves him off. Topher and Ivy set up the wipe, and Adelle gives the order.

Adelle staggers out onto the catwalk. Topher comes out, gingerly holding a drive containing "the unabridged Laurence Dominic". Topher notices Adelle bleeding from the gunshot wound to the abdomen and freaks out, but Adelle is still just wondering how she didn't see it. Topher says no one saw it, but Adelle points out that Topher suspected enough to imprint Echo to help.

Topher admits he can't take credit, and tells Adelle about Echo having the idea. Adell looks fascinated and a little proud. Topher asks if he should try scrubbing Echo again, but Adelle says no-- she just saved the Dollhouse. She tells him to watch her, because she might be useful. Then, changing the subject, she says that Miss Lonelyhearts told her to shelve the Roger imprint. Topher jokingly asks if a hunky octogenarian swept Miss Lonelyhearts off her feet, but Adelle bitterly says that it was nothing so dramatic. "She finally realized the indiscretion was unwise."

Dr. Saunders sews up Adelle's gunshot wound in her office. Adelle refused anasthesia. (I don't mean to take away from the aura of totall badassery that Adelle's giving off, here, but-- maybe the Dollhouse handlers should look into stepping up their sidearms to a calibre with a little more stopping power.) Claire tries to talk to Adelle about it, starting with, "I know you were close..." but Adelle just puts her shirt back on and says, "I worked closely with him. There is a difference." Claire says, "It's okay to feel something." DeWitt replies, "That would imply I'd lost something." Claire: "Didn't you?" Adelle looks out at Victor on the Dollhouse floor and says, "Nothing I can't live without."

When she leaves Dr. Saunders's office, Boyd reports to her that he's doing ongoing background checks, but right now it looks like it was just Dominic. Adelle promotes him to head of security. Boyd protests that he wants to stay with Echo and take care of her, and Adelle watches Echo thoughtfully for a second while she says, "I think she's taking care of us."

In the chair, Echo is being imprinted to a new handler-- an mustachioed Asian man named Travis. During the script, though, Echo's eyes still fix on Boyd, who stands with Adelle, watching.

Whew. That was eventful. And some incredible chracter work on Adelle. It does leave me with some questions, though. Topher said the chip would allow someone to alter imprints. The altered imprints we've seen were Echo and November's messages to Ballard, so I guess we're supposed to assume that was from Dominic. Dominic said he was genuinely working to keep Ballard away from the Dollhouse.

Now, he could have been lying to try to get some mercy from Adelle, but that doesn't seem right. There are two alternatives I can think of. One, Dominic wasn't the one altering the imprints and that whole plotline isn't really settled. Or two, Dominic was risking his neck by playing a very deep game with Ballard, and the messages weren't intended to help him find the Dollhouse at all, but to get him to go along with his suspension quietly, and then to deepen his paranoia. That seems like small gains for high stakes. I guess we'll see if that gets cleared up at all.

Recap: Dollhouse 108, "Needs"

Apologies to my loyal readers, if I have any, for falling a full week behind. If it helps, it was a hell of a week. There was a confluence of work stuff, school stuff, and a visit from my parents that barely left me time to watch the episodes, much less write a recap. At the same time, I've started having much more to say about each ep, and that's not stopping this week. So, let's get on with it and maybe I'll get caught up.

We open on Agent Ballard, shirtless. This appears to be a recurring motif, but I'll speculate on its thematic implications later. He answers a knock at the door, and it's Echo. She says she has a message from inside the Dollhouse, and that she has something he needs. Then she kisses him. He breaks it off, saying he's not a client and he doesn't need that, but she says, "You know you do."

Breathless, he says, "Caroline?" and she says, "Save me, Paul," and leads him to the couch. They're getting intimate when they're interrupted by Mellie, who has apparently returned from her vacation. "I know this is confusing-- for all of us," Ballard explains in an oddly calm voice. "I have something she needs." (I bet he does.) "I need you to finish what you started, Paul," says Echo.

"She doesn't need anything anymore," says Mellie, "She's dead." And indeed, suddenly, she is-- stiff and pale, which I would imagine makes his current situation even more awkward. Ballard tells Mellie he's trying to stop everything when she starts bleeding from her scalp line. "How did they know what we shared?" she asks.

Finally, we get the traditional "bolt upright in bed" version of "it was all a dream". Okay, I'll give you points for a dream sequence that started out moderately plausible and got progressively weirder, but could we not come up with a better ending? Has anyone, ever, actually bolted upright in bed when waking up from a bad dream?

Speaking of waking up, it's morning in the Dollhouse, and Echo, Sierra, Victor, November, and a Doll we haven't seen before named Mike are getting out of the recessed floor pods, stretching and smiling.

Upstairs, there's a general staff meeting going on in the Fortress. Topher runs in late, with the excuse that he was backing up his drives-- which is a good call, since the Dollhouse is upgrading its electrical and security systems and it's causing brownouts.

DeWitt, leading the meeting, says that the house is "out of balance." She runs through the recent string of incidents and says she needs everyone to be hyper-aware and report anything they think is strange. Dominic breaks in to say that he knows the handlers can get attached to their Actives, and that's good, but it's better that they think of them as pets, not children. When Dr. Saunders objects to the metaphor, he expands: "If your child starts speaking, you're proud. If your dog starts speaking, you freak the hell out." He says that any developmental progress could lead to another Alpha. Boyd asks what happened to the first one, and Dominic says he whereabouts are unknown, so I guess they're no longer trying to convince everyone he's dead. (Which seems odd-- nothing has really changed on the Alpha front since Topher had to get his clearance raised to hear he wasn't dead in "Gray Hour".)

Topher unleashes some neurobabble about what he's going to do to try to correct things, which includes giving us a reason why the Dolls sleep in pods, instead of, say, stylish Asian-inspired bunk beds: they pump the environment full of gases and pheromones. Topher wants to tweak the mix, and Dr. Saunders objects, saying he could mess everything up. Topher points out that it could also fix the problem, and that he knows what he's doing. "I know what I'm doing, too," she shoots back, "and I care."

DeWitt reiterates that she wants reports, and Boyd worries about overreacting-- he doesn't want to condemn Echo to the Attic over someone's hunch. Adelle says that his devotion to Echo is admirable, but his primary duty is to the house. She finishes: "A tide is coming in, and until we figure out how to turn it back, we pile up the sandbags. Together. Unless someone has a better idea."

Back on the Dollhouse floor, Echo looks placidly in a mirror while Ballard's voice plays in her head: "Your name is Caroline. You're being used." Sierra, walking past the plate glass doors, flashes back to the rape, including a really gut-twisting shot of her face over Hearn's shoulder. She's shaken, but as she walks into the pod room she makes eye contact with Victor and seems to calm down.

As Echo goes to sleep, she experiences flashbacks to old engagements, then a shot of mountains, and a voice says, "Caroline. Wake up!" She does, and starts pounding on the glass in panic.

Credits. When we come back, Echo is prying her pod open and cuts her hand on the glass. Victor is fighting his way out, too. He grabs Echo and asks who she is, and they establish that neither of them know why they're there. They help the others out, and they start theorizing. (This is fun. This episode's hook is that they have their old personalities without their memories, which, like in the first episode, is kind of a metatextual test for writers: how much of a character is backstory? They have very little to work with, and I think they do a pretty good job of having every single line reveal something.)

Mike thinks they've been abducted by aliens. Victor thinks they might be in a nuthouse. Echo feels "a little lab ratty". November starts giggling hysterically, then fights it down and wonders if they're supposed to be here. Sierra says, emphatically, that she didn't do anything. That's when they all realize they don't remember anything.

Victor wants to lay out a strategy. Sierra wants to run-- strategically. She thinks it's a deranged millionaire serial killer, and Mike says, "What, that's not crazier than aliens?" Victor shoves Mike, and Echo breaks it up.

Then, they start to realize they have small shreds of memories. Victor says he thinks he knows Sierra, but he doesn't know how. Echo remembers mountains, and wants to get to them, because everything will be okay there. November says she lost something, but she doesn't know what. Mike thinks the aliens want to study their genitalia, which makes Victor take a vote on who wants to put Mike back in the box. They all freeze as they see other Dolls through their pod room's translucent walls. The doors open.

So, in the space of a one-minute string of one-liners: Echo wants to reach a serene place, breaks up fights, and thinks they're lab rats. Victor likes strategies, remembers Sierra, and will employ violence on her behalf. Sierra doesn't think she did anything to deserve being there and thinks a psychopathic rich man is responsible for it. November thinks she deserves to be there, has lost something, and giggles when she's nervous. Mike is a hyper-paranoid nerd. That, as we'll see, is some solid, forward-looking work, and all very natural-sounding. Well, natural for five people who have awoken in five-star floor coffins with no memory.

The doors to the room open. Sierra wants to make a run for it. Victor will follow where ever Sierra goes. Mike wants to see what the aliens look like. November is scared. Echo won't leave her behind.

They work themselves into the flow of Dolls, and Victor tells them all to blend in until they figure out what's going on. A staffer comes by and calls them all by their handles. Victor recognizes the code as military. They enter the Dollhouse floor and stand flustered for a bit-- and we get a full pan over the central Dollhouse floor, with Topher in his office overlooking it, and it really is all a bit impressive. Echo notes that it looks peaceful, and November suggests that maybe something bad happened to them, and this is helping them heal. Victor starts to think maybe things aren't so bad. Another staffer comes up to them and says brightly they're having banana pancakes for breakfast. A blonde female Doll (Tango) walks by, and says in that placidly excited Doll-voice: "I like pancakes." Victor: "We're all going to die."

Side note: Having now met E, S, V, N, M, and T, with references to F and A, I'm wondering what happens to the Dolls with the less-glamorous phonetic handles: Golf? Hotel? Uniform? Also, does anyone ever have a fantasy/requirement that doesn't involve fantastically physical attractive specimens in their mid-20s? (OCD historical note: the client in the pilot expected a "Edward James Olmos-type") I'm picturing a spin-off in which Golf, a late-50s fatherly Latino, Hotel, a wiry early-70s lady, Uniform, a 300-pound bodybuilder, and Quebec, a former plus-size model, solve the problems the other Dolls won't touch. The Dollhouse Irregulars.

Ahem. Back on the show, Ballard has correctly interpreted at least Mellie's last line in his dream: "How did they know what we shared?" He's tearing his apartment apart looking for the bug, and he finds it hidden in the air conditioning vent.

At the International House of Mindwipes and Pancakes, Echo and Mike are sitting with Tango, who expresses the deep thought that she likes bananas because they are naturally sweet. Eager to blend in, Mike mentions that they are also high in potassium, like the earth's core. "That's not a fruit," says Tango, confused, and, prompted by Echo, Mike starts trying to name other fruits. (Rather unsuccessfully. The last one we hear is "mayonnaise".) Meanwhile, an attendant has noticed Echo's improvised bandage and sends her to see Dr. Saunders.

Echo walks nervously into Dr. Saunder's office. When she sees the scars, she flinches. She asks if "they" did that to her, but Dr. Saunders, characteristically, ignores it. She tries to quiet Echo down, and points out the cameras. Echo deduces that she works for them, and starts asking questions, but Dr. Saunders says she can't help: "I'm not your friend in here, Echo." (This scene seems to be a relatively straightforward instance of Saunder's sympathy conflicting with her duty on the first run-through, but it obviously has to be re-evaluated later. I'll get to it.)
When Echo gets back out on the main floor, Mike has apparently given himself away. Two orderlies are dragging him upstairs while he tries desperately to pretend he's a blank Doll: "I'm happy! I like pancakes! I want to swim in the pool! Isn't that what you want?" The fact that he is screaming hysterically undermines his clever subterfuge somewhat.

The other four decide there's nothing they can do. They follow the crowd of Dolls off the floor and into the communal shower, which comes as something of a shock. Sierra can't believe it. Echo says they have to go through with it, and November grins and says it's no big deal. She's the first to hand her robe to the staffer. (Hmm, maybe the Dollhouse staff need a nickname, too-- they've come up a lot in this recap. I'll think on it. Or take suggestions from my legions of loyal readers.)
Sierra warns Victor to keep his eyes to himself. Victor starts reciting baseball line-ups under his breath. (And, incidentally, still totally doesn't keep his eyes to himself.) While they're showering, Mike comes in. They're glad to see him and hustle him into the nearest space they can find without a camera-- the sauna. (Which seems like something of an oversight on the Dollhouse's part. I mean, they film the showers, but they leave the saunas private? And remember how hard Boyd had to look for a blind spot to catch Hearn?)


Anyway, once they’re in the Sauna of Secrets, they start asking Mike what happened. He says he had a treatment. Echo realizes that he doesn’t remember anything, and he heads out to go swimming. This convinces Sierra that they have to leave now, and Echo reluctantly agrees.

Fortress. Dominic tells DeWitt that they have four rogue Actives planning an escape. Adelle smiles and says, “Right on schedule.” But, of course, she uses the British pronunciation of “shed-yool”, evenly accented, and not “SKED-jyuhl”. Which led to me rewinding that line 4 times trying to figure out what it was. Time for an act break, is what it is.

Dominic and DeWitt are continuing their conversation when we get back. Dominic wants to warn security, but Adelle wants to let it play out—she says the Dolls need real opposition. Dominic says they don’t have a kill switch on this operation, and if it gets out of hand they could lose them all, but Adelle has made her decision.

Victor tricks a Toy Soldier into the Sauna of Secrets, then chokes him with a towel. He takes his ID, then explains to some passing Dolls: “He’s very tired.”

Victor and Sierra use the ID to open a door, then drop the card in a plant pot. They find themselves in a very institutional-looking hallway, like a hospital: glossy dark paint up to shoulder height to prevent scratches, tile floor, fluorescent lights. Kind of a reminder that someone has to cook the banana pancakes and wash the matching Asian-inspired casual china and take the solid-colored tank tops out of the hampers.

Echo is biding her time watching yoga class, and sees Tango being taken upstairs for a treatment. November comes up to tell her it’s time. Meanwhile, Victor and Sierra wait crouched in a doorway. Victor tries making small talk, but Sierra points out that they don’t remember anything to chat about. Victor says he thinks he remembers some things, like her. Sierra noticed his attempt at baseball self-distraction and asks if he remembers the Yankees, and he says it was the Mets, but to forget about it. (Man, I don't know much about baseball, but I know enough to know he must really be in love to overlook that one.) He says he remembers that something bad happened to her—something more than what happened to all of them. He asks if she remembers, but Echo and November arrive before she answers.

Boyd is talking to another handler, who he calls Sophie, in a room we’ve never seen before. It looks like a locker room for the handlers. There’s a gun safe where Sophie is putting up her weapon. They do a little business chatter—Sophie just came off a gig where the Doll was used as bait in a divorce case; Boyd says he’s happy to have some time off while Echo’s being rested. Sophie doesn’t think Echo will last, and says Boyd will have to get used to the idea: “Sometimes even a good dog needs to be put down.” The escapee Dolls get a glimpse in as they pass, and seeing one of the handlers with a gun makes Sierra flash back: “Men, they had guns, they took me away.” Victor promises they’ll get the guys who did it, but pulls her along to escape first. Echo notes that there are no windows—they’re still underground.

They find themselves in a costume room. Each of them has a rack of clothes. November is excited and starts trying things on. They all grab clothes. Victor wonders if the clothes are from their old lives, then shuts down that line of speculation when he finds a pair of leather chaps lined with pink lace on his rack.

Meanwhile, November found a prop stroller and is standing there, stunned. She remembers that she had a daughter named Katie, but she doesn’t know where she is. She begs the others to help her find her, and they say they will.

Someone comes in to get clothes, and the Dolls pair up to hide among the racks: November with Echo, and Victor with Sierra. There’s some of that good old-fashioned life-in-peril romantic friction between Victor and Sierra. (We don’t see Echo and November that much, so I can’t speak to that atmosphere.) (I’m reminded of Season Two Cordelia and Xander: “I didn’t even really like him. We just kept getting put in these life-threatening situations, and that’s always all sexy and stuff.”)

Once the staffer leaves with the clothes, the escapees run down the hall and use the ID card to call the elevator. Victor worries about what happens if someone’s in it, but Sierra points out they don’t have much choice. The elevator arrives, empty, and they take it up to the surface. They arrive at the motor pool and start checking doors to see if any are unlocked. They debate calling the police, or the FBI, but Victor says they don’t know who they can trust. As someone pulls in, they hide behind a car. A Doll in camouflage is telling his handler about dealing with the trauma of what he had to do. While crouched behind the care, they start making plans. Echo asks Sierra to try hard to remember the name of the guy who put her there, and she does—Nolan. Echo tells November to try to remember what she can about Katie. Meanwhile, Victor saw the handler put the keys in a safe by the elevator door and breaks in.


They pile in to an SUV, but have to hide again when another handler-Active pair comes out of the elevator. It’s Tango, speaking French, in an outfit that says either someone has an extremely odd fetish or a very wealthy casting director couldn’t find anyone for the lead in his production of “Cabaret”.

In the Fortress, Dominic puts a description of the vehicle out to security. As the escapees are about to pull out, Echo makes them stop. After seeing the costume room, the soldier, and Tango, she’s figured out what the Dollhouse does, and she can’t leave everyone behind. November wants her to come with them anyway, and Victor points out that it’s a rough tactical situation, but Echo wants to try to make a difference, and she goes back down the elevator.

In the handler locker room, Sophie catches Echo trying to knock the lock off of the gun safe with a fire extinguisher. She tries to keep Echo calm, speaking softly and using the words “Boyd” and “treatment” as often as possible. (I’m assuming she’s trying to tap in to some of the base programming.) When she pulls out her phone, Echo sprays her with the fire extinguisher and they fight. The fight includes Echo ducking a sick-looking elbow smash move from Sophie. Sophie manages to throw Echo to the ground and starts moving towards the phone she dropped when Echo swings the fire extinguisher at ankle height and sweeps out her legs. Sophie takes a nasty fall—she’s unconscious and there’s a pool of blood under her head when Echo goes to take the keys from her. Echo takes a gun from the safe and heads down the hall.

Ballard is in a run-down electronics shop, trying to get information about the bug from a tech guy named Jimmy. Jimmy takes some convincing, but Ballard eventually intimidates him into looking at the device, which then blows his mind. "This doesn't exist yet. Me and everyone I know powwowed couldn't figure this thing out." Ballard wants to know if he can trace it, and Jimmy's doubtful: "If you were ET, maybe." Ballard lowers his sights and just wants to know how to scramble it. Jimmy has some ideas for that, but warns Ballard not to get hopeful: "I don't care how big you think you are. Someone who can afford this is bigger."

The Road Trip of the Dolls isn't going so well. Victor has been driving in circles following Sierra's hunches about where Nolan lives. November sees a woman with a child in a stroller, and asks them to stop-- she knows where Katie is. Victor and Sierra want to stick together and handle one problem at a time, but November won't wait, and Sierra says they left so they could choose for themselves, so they let November out. She walks, looking mopey.

Fortress of Dollitude. Dominic calls for a separate tail on November, and DeWitt spots Echo on camera in Dr. Saunders' office. Again, Dominic wants to call it in, but Adelle stops him. She says, "I should have expected this. This is Caroline, after all. Without the memories, but still..." Dominic wonders if she thinks she can take them down alone, and Adelle says, "Caroline never was very realistic." Heh. Thanks, Adelle.

Just then, though, the power fails. Dominic gets DeWitt's wordless permission to call in the Echo situation, and DeWitt calls Topher to ask him to keep an eye out. She also asks if the Actives seem afraid of the dark, and Topher says he can't tell, because it's dark. Before he hangs up, he says: "I am, by the way. Afraid of the dark." And he should be-- Echo is behind him with the gun.

On the main floor, a friendly PA voice is asking everyone to gather calmly. Topher suggests they join the others, but Echo isn't having it. Echo asks him what he does here, and he tries to demur-- first by saying it's complicated, then by actually saying some complicated neurobabble, but eventually he settles on "I program them." Echo says people aren't computers, and Topher says they're not that different-- computations performed by electrical impulses. He just hacks the system. Echo asks what year it is, and when she gets her answer, she asks how long she's been in. Topher deflects some more: "Kind of a while." Echo makes him show her the Mental Hygeinist's Chair.

Victor and Sierra are knocking on Nolan's door. He opens it and recognizes her-- he calls her "Priya". Victor shoves him inside as Nolan asks if this is some kind of "frequent buyer reward." Sierra asks what she did to him that made him put her in the Dollhouse, and he says she said no-- and no one ever says no to him. Sierra can't believe he would take her entire life away just because she wouldn't have sex with him, and Nolan says that, with the money it took him to pull it off, he could have bought an island, but "owning you is better than real estate." Victor hits him. (I'm aware that male aggression isn't a winning strategy for protecting women from male aggression. Sometimes, even for someone as physically unthreatening as I am, it's still a comforting fantasy. I just hope, for the story's sake, that when it comes time for Sierra to deal with this, she does it herself. Boyd and Victor can't do it for her.)

The punch made him realize this isn't an official Dollhouse visit, and that they've escaped. He says that doesn't matter-- they don't exist anymore. Sierra shoots back that she's more of a person than him. He comes back: "You're programmed to give me-- and anyone else-- whatever we want. And you do. Frequently. With great pleasure." Beat. "Sometimes you beg." Victor hits him again.

He tells them his security team is on the way. Sierra says, "You will see me again." Nolan says he's looking forward to it: "It will be even better now."

November is outside a church, and kids in Catholic school uniforms are pouring out the doors.

Echo, in the Mental Hygiene Room, is holding a drive containing an imprint. "What is wrong with you people?" she asks. Topher gamely tries to give Adelle's sales pitch about helping people by giving them what they need, but he's not very good at it. (And no wonder-- he doesn't care about that. He's there because he gets to do really, really cool stuff.) Echo counters: "You kill people. You gut them, and use their bodies as playthings. Who was I before you killed me?"

Topher points out that she's not dead, and tells her she volunteered. Echo doesn't believe him, but Topher points out that she can't remember that and she starts to doubt. She asks what he made her the last time she was in the Chair, and he says it was her, as she was when she came, but without memories. He says she'll get to be herself again after her five year term, and will have a truckload of money to go along with her old personality.

Echo asks why she's not blank like the other Dolls, and Topher says they're running a test on her. She asks about her mountain memory, and he says he didn't put that there-- that's hers, and it's real, and it's what she needs. The power comes back on, and Topher says he can give her her memories back. Echo says that would involve her getting in the chair, and suggests Topher go first.

Victor and Sierra are running from security down a stairwell. Sierra asks Victor what they want, and he says they'll send them back. Then two bullets ricochet off the walls and he amends his projection. When they come out of the stairwell into the parking garage, the exit is block, so they hide in a utility closet.

Echo forces Topher into the chair and puts the drive in the slot, and Topher starts to panic-- he says you can't imprint on top of a normal brain. Echo asks if it hurts, and Topher deflects again: "Pain is just nerves talking to your brain." He pleads "I'm just the science guy," which is not really a way to gain Caroline's trust. She accuses him of playing God and tells him to let the Dolls go. He protests, "I don't have that kind of power!"

"I do," says Adelle. Butter wouldn't fucking melt, man. Act out.

When we come back, Adelle tells Echo to stop the imprint, and she does-- by shooting the chair. Adelle tells Echo that she wanted to forget, and that she eased her suffering. "By taking away basic human rights? To choose, to remember? Free will?" (Apparently on-the-nose dialogue is another of Caroline's character traits.) Adelle says she freely relinquished her rights, and Echo asks why she would do that. Adelle refuses to tell Echo: "I would be breaking a promise to you. Suffice to say you could no longer live with the consequences of your actions." She tells Echo that she's free to leave, but she can't decide for the others. Echo, quite rightly, thinks that maybe Adelle isn't in the best position to talk about deciding for others, but Adelle says she made the same promise to each of them, to protect them from their memories, and she won't return them. With that, Echo empties a couple of rounds into the computers around the Chair and says, "We agree, then-- no one gets in the chair."

Outside, November walks past the crowd of children and through the gates of the church's graveyard.

Victor and Sierra are still in the utility closet at security closes in. Sierra says it's her fault, and that Victor would be free if he didn't try to help her. Victor says he's where he wants to be. He remembers the Doll state, and being stuck inside his own head, and that someone in there hurt her like Nolan hurt her. "I can see it happening. I can see his face, but I couldn't stop it." That makes Sierra remember, too: "I trusted him. Why did I trust him?" Then another memory: "You wait for me. At night, when we go to bed. You wait for me to make sure I'm okay."
As the forces outside start to break down the door, Sierra says she doesn't know which ending to hope for: "It feels like dying either way." But Victor says going back isn't the end: "We'll look for each other, like we always do. And we'll finish this." Aww. They kiss.

November kneels in front of a gravestone that says "Beloved Katie".

Adelle tells Echo she can't take the Dolls outside, as they'd be overwhelmed. Echo: "They'll do all right. Your unbearable truth, lady? You're not as important as you think you are." She aims the gun and says "The next one goes where your heart should have been. Show us out."

A crowd of Dolls walk out the tunnel to the surface. Dr. Saunders is with them, and at the back marches Echo with the gun still held on DeWitt. As she steps out into the light, she smiles. Then she collapses. Handlers move in and herd the Dolls back indoors. One of them picks Echo up and carries her inside.

In the closet, Victor and Sierra collapse. November, sobbing, falls against the gravestone. Handlers gather them up.

We flash back to Adelle's last line of the staff meeting: "We pile up the sandbags, together. Unless someone has a better idea." Someone, it turns out, does. Dr. Saunders suggests that they give them what they need: closure. She says experiences during engagements can unlock emotional needs that the Dolls had before they came. Those needs are open loops that drive their developing consciousnesses. She suggests that they let the Dolls, or at least the worst cases, take a self-guided journey. "Let the tide come in. It's the only way to let it out again."

Nice. I mean, it's hard not to feel a little cheated-- it looked like this was going to be a game-changing episode. All the way up until Adelle gave it away in the third act break we we supposed to think it was a real escape, a mistake in Topher's pod conditioning. On the other hand, this is a pretty cool move, too. First, I want to give props to Dr. Saunders for her delightfully Hofstaderian conception of consciousness as an open loop. (Even as the pop psychobabble about "closure" makes me cringe a bit.) Second, it's kind of a meta-blow against the show's meta-premise. (Where the "premise" is:"Eliza Dushku is programmed with different personalities for different jobs", the meta-premise is: "The human need for freedom and self-expression and self-construction is stronger than our desire to avoid our pain.")

Maybe the human need for freedom and self-expression isn't indomitable. Maybe you can give someone just enough freedom to tamp it down. Maybe we can get by on freedom rations. Maybe we already do. (I'm reminded of how the Party operative in 1984-- O'Brien, was it?-- helped write the book that had inspired Wilson and Julia to their rebellion, because it made rebellion easier to handle.) Up to now, Dollhouse was a dark and disturbing show with an optimistic humanism at its heart. If the Saunders plan works, I'm not so sure about that heart anymore.

(Also, it would seem that Dr. Saunders is more Machiavellian than I had given her credit for. I kind of thought she was in Boyd's camp, respecting the Dolls as both nascent people and former people and resenting the Dollhouse while feeling a responsiblity to protect the Dolls. As we'll see, I guess that's still true-- she just has a very different conception of what looking out for the Dolls means. And I think we have to chalk up her behavior during Echo's exam as a little push to help them get their escape started and not as genuine, if limited, sympathy. Maybe I'm being too harsh, there, though. Maybe it's both.)

In Dr. Saunders' office, Boyd is acting a bit bitter. "Are they better?" he asks. Claire says they were programmed to sedate themselves once found the closure (twitch) they needed. (I like the interplay in this scene between Boyd's and Claire's philosophies, but I'm finding the plot retrospective a little on-the-nose.) Boyd runs through their needs: November needed to feel her grief, Sierra needed to confront Nolan, Echo wanted to free "us" all. (Interesting pronoun choice there, Boyd.) He's confused by Victor's need, but as Claire says, it's not that confusing-- he was in love.

Boyd says, wistfully, "When she was leading them out... I would have liked to have seen that. Even if it was just a game." He pauses. "Your game." Dr. Saunders acts hurt, asking if he thinks she had fun. "I don't know you very well," says Boyd.
"You have to look after Echo. I have to look after all of them," she says. "She wasn't leading them to freedom. She was leading them into a world of pain and chaos that would have destroyed them."
"She's not leading them anywhere anymore," says Boyd.
"You should be grateful," says Dr. Saunders.
"I'll work on that," says Boyd. That's pretty much his only scene this week, but he worked it like... a thing that really works.

The five Dolls climb into their pods again.

Ballard has assembled his bug-blocker and turns on his phone to find he has voice mail-- from Echo. She found his name in her file when she was going the Dr. Saunders' office. She says she's going to try to get out, but if she can't, she thinks they're somewhere underground. "Please find us."