Dollhouse: Belle Chose

By Sonia Aurora

This is what a great episode of Dollhouse looks like! I was beginning to lose hope, honestly, though there are those who disagree that the show hasn’t faltered, I still had been losing my enthusiasm. Maybe that’s why I was so jaded with last week’s episode. Took me a couple of days to cue up the ole DVR and watch, and I have to say I ended up pretty psyched by the end.

So little Mr. Psychopath Terry Karrens apparently drugs up women to play House with, we ascertain, in some random warehouse space. “Aunt Sylvia” becomes lucid enough to stick him with his own poison – some kind of animal tranquilizer, but it’s not enough to knock him paralyzed or out, as he’s able to swing a mallet and kill her- His hair mussed, he realizes – “goodness gracious” – that he will need to get a new Aunt Sylvia. But in his outdoors excursion, he gets hit by a car.

Enter the Dollhouse, because Psychopath is well connected, of course, being a part of some Kennedy-esque legacy. His Uncle Bradley (played by Michael Hogan – I’m waiting for the entire cast of BSG to take over by the end of the season…hey, I won’t begrudge Joss for it; given the opportunity, I’d hire all of BTVS to be on my show someday). Dear Uncle is forgiving of the boy, but he’s well aware all is not right with the kid. Doing a brain scan they realize he’s got the “serial killer” mapping. They surmise he has captives, somewhere. Uncle works up a series of potentially kidnapped women, and then, in order to find them, they brain dump Terry’s persona into Victor, which means every memory Terry has down to the final moment when he got hit by the car.

Meanwhile, Ballard is having a hard (emphasis on that word) time with Echo. He goes to the showers looking for her and she comes right up to him stark naked. Seriously, does he still not get how naïve about their sexuality the Actives are? So he’s trying to be professional through his fluster, then she gets imprinted for a romance with a Professor. Apparently, Prof likes airheads, which is essentially what Echo is. She’s Kiki, all bouncy, gum chewing bubbly. In a great sarcastic scene, Ballard brings her to “wardrobe” and the snarky staffer at the desk makes all sorts of comments that fly over her head in a delightfully inside joke kind of way. He delivers the best line of the night: “So, not exactly a rocket scientist; normally that would be irony but here, one never knows.” As Ballard waits for her to get outfitted, he sits next to another handler that thumbs through a magazine. “I won’t even do this for my wife,” says Handler. “I was trained at Quantico,” replies Ballard. Classic. As Ballard watches Echo bounce around in little skirt and pigtails, Landgon comes in to relieve Ballard because they need an FBI profiler to question the new Terry (Victor). After a longish glance at Echo, Ballard thanks God and hightails to do his thing.

So while Kiki gets a failing grade and the Prof tries to explain how she can use her sexuality in the way that Chauncey’s – I mean, Chaucer’s – The Wife of Bath did, Ballard goes up against the serial killer barraging him with questions. He even shows Victor the real Terry, unconscious and hooked up with tubes and IV’s. They don’t make much headway with him and then real Terry starts to seize which is a ruse for the Uncle to kidnap Victor and have a heart to heart with him. Clearly he’s an idiot because as soon as he hangs up on DeWitt, Victor knocks the uncle against the steering wheel. Their car careens into a parked one, and Victor walks away, unscathed and back to his search for a new Aunt Sylvia.

At first DeWitt isn’t worried –after all, all the Actives are outfitted with GPS trackers…except, because Victor underwent extensive surgeries to get rid of his scars, his was removed and Dr. Saunders was the one keeping record of that. Since she vamoosed, no one remembered to re-outfit him. Crap.

Ballard tracks the Uncle’s car (with it’s own GPS) but they know Victor’s gone, and start to figure out where he could have gone, narrowing it down to the area where he was originally found. Topher, meanwhile, is trying to do a remote wipe, which will require a fingers-crossed let’s-hope-this-works method, to clear Victor of Terry and reel in the serial killer. Langdon gets a call, briefing him that the system might shut down for a bit, and Echo dances with the Prof. The blanket wipe happens, the systems restarts then shuts down again, and as it looks like the Prof is gonna get lucky, Echo stabs him in the neck. She examines herself in the mirror: “I am an incredible woman. Goodness gracious.”

Uh-oh.

So it turns out Topher’s idea to remote wipe actually scrambled identities, so Echo leaves, zooming past Langdon who’s going in to retrieve her. He finds the Prof, still alive, and the word “Whore” written in blood on the mirror. Meanwhile, Ballard’s almost got Victor, who had entered a club, and is now Echo’s Kiki, dancing around seductively in a short sleeve button down and khaki’s. This is more hilarious than I can ever depict in this article, so please, if you haven’t watched this episode, please do if only for the image of Enver Gjokaj as Victor as Kiki, writhing, throwing back his head at the pretence of having long flowing hair, touching himself as if he had, well, Eliza’s body, and then trying to come onto a group of frat boys. When Ballard swoops in the save the day, their tender, if somewhat homoerotic embrace and Ballard’s “You got a problem?” remark to the clubbing patrons just about killed me with a giggling fit.

Terry’s house of women is finally snapping awake from the drugs and finding their way out of their cage, when Echo descends upon them, swinging the mallet. Topher gets the system back online, and Echo starts to short circuit, going back and forth between her Active self and Terry, telling the women that he will always look for them, that he’s inside of her, that they have to kill him and by rights kill her. The strongest of the group, “Mother” won’t do it, until Echo relays how Terry stalked her, giving her chilling details of her house and her son. Before she can bring the mallet down on Echo though, the cavalry comes in.

At Terry’s bedside, Ballard and DeWitt talk about getting into his head and having him moved to a hospital. Ballard questions if he’ll ever wake up. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he didn’t?” responds DeWitt. I couldn’t help but agree. Echo, presumably wiped clean from everything, comes in and looks on Terry. “Goodness gracious,” she says.

This was a great episode for many reasons. For one, it focused on the Dollhouse as a whole, and not just zeroing in on Echo and how “special” she is. Also, instead of telling us she’s special, they simply showed us she was. Her glitching scene was exceptional, but overall this really did showcase that with the right material (or “imprint”) Eliza can be amazing. And it was nice to see the transformations from Echo to Kiki to Terry and then Echo, who is becoming more and more damaged, and, if this were reality, a liability. That she and Ballard are keeping it from the higher-ups Echo is still feeling her imprints is just a nice secret and connection between them, something stronger than any other handler-active coupling. I still lament Langdon’s diminished role though, as I loved the dynamic between he and Eliza. That he’s more a Company man now and as elusive as Dominic was occasionally annoys me, even though I understand the logic and storyline progression of it. I just hope the writers can integrate him a little more, engage him a little more. I’d like to see more confrontation/competition between Ballard and Langdon too. It does seem that the Dollhouse is finally starting to get in its groove of showing how everyone lives and copes in that world. And seeing as the next episode is Sierra-centric, and Summer Glau is joining in only a few weeks, consider my hopes lifted.

About Sonia Aurora: Aspiring screenwriter and seamstress, Sonia’s dream is to write life-changing films while product-placing her own line of handbags. In 1999, she wrote, co-directed and co-starred in the short film Dr. Lovestrange, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bug, a satirical homage to Stanley Kubrick set amidst the panic of Y2K (Featured on ifilm.com & Coming Soon to YouTube!). While Sonia waits patiently for the Studios to call, she continues her selfless, humanitarian efforts (think Mother Teresa) through her scripts, short stories and sewing (a true triple-threat!), knowing all the while that someday her efforts will indeed save (or at least mildly tweak) the world. She still struggles with which picture to kiss before bedtime: her boyfriend’s or Bruce Campbell’s. And, in the interest of time, she’d like to start thanking the Academy now.

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