Dollhouse: Meet Jane Doe/ A Love Supreme

By Sonia Aurora

Ask and ye shall receive: Echo (and Eliza) finally begin to demonstrate her specialness without cramming it down our throats. But, of course, this comes now, after the ax has fallen. Two of the most rounded, mystery answering and deepening episodes air with only a handful left ever for the story to finish. Bleh. Why does the Joss Whedon genius finally start to kick in now??? But, alas, I’ll just have to enjoy while the getting’s good.

So, our Echo wanders the mean streets of a town. DC? LA? LA standing in for DC? She’s got the homeless vibe and that vacant Doll look. She needs food and money and doesn’t know how to get them, nor does she get sarcasm either. She watches a young Hispanic woman try to cash in food stamps for food and not succeed, so Echo grabs some bags of bread and runs out, giving them to her. The store manger comes out just as the police are coming up, and Echo and the girl part ways, running. The girl gets caught, but in the alleyway Echo experiences a rush of personalities and gets Roadhouse on the cop.

Enter Lifetime subtitle of “Three Months Later” to explain away some of the incredibility that Echo is now a nurse and acts imprinted. She’s working with Ballard, AWOL from the Dollhouse, who’s helping her harness and hone all the imprints that she feels. In that alley, she felt all of them rush in, and now she can “recall” them, like shuffling a deck and picking the right card (imprint). She’s essentially like Alpha, only with conscience intact. And her idea on what pushed her programming into this new existence is the Caroline memory of Bennett’s. Once that dumped in, it rounded out Echo. And, we soon learn she isn’t going to want to give her body back to her “real” self.

Back at the Dollhouse, DeWitt’s being kept on a short leash by Harding, who’s essentially running the show. DeWitt’s not happy about her demotion to little more than a glorified administrative ornament. Boyd wants to take the Dollhouse back, but DeWitt’s so beaten down that she asks him how instead of when. Topher’s still lamenting that his potential perfect (Bennett) wound up being crazy, and he’s been at work on a remote wipe device with Sierra and Victor’s imprinted selves helping.

Echo’s self-challenge is to break out that girl from 3 months ago (Galena); she sets everything in motion when she arranges to cover the regular nurse’s shift at the prison. With Ballard’s help she trains, she explains and expresses her love for him. Ballard resists, feeling he’d be taking advantage of her Doll self. Plus, Echo’s test is whether or not this will work, whether or not she can actually keep her imprints under control, and then re-infiltrate the Dollhouse. How? With Boyd’s help, as I squeal with delight. I love that he’s front and center in the revolt.

Meanwhile, Topher’s perfected the remote wipe but he’s also realized that each Dollhouse “Topher” is working on separate pieces of a whole – to imprint regular people anywhere, for the Rossum greater good. Topher not only figures out what they are doing, but figures out how to build it. He shares his blueprints with DeWitt, terrified at the prospect.

Echo does her infiltration, injects Galena to disguise her as dead for only a few minutes, but can’t sneak her out in time. Not only that, but she starts to glitch, bad. She goes to Doll state, then back, incapacitated by a headache of migraine proportions. But Echo just needs a second to breathe, and in Matrix-like fashion she recalls how to pick a lock and how to ride a motorcycle out. Ballard intercepts the chasing cops, playing them some incriminating dialogue. They send Galena out with new papers; now she’s Lisa, with a new lease on life. Echo and Ballard are ready to give themselves up and Boyd comes on in.

DeWitt’s also willing to give up…Topher’s blueprints to Harding. Yes, she’s willing to give up to the “greater good” to regain control, at sacrifice to any trust or friendships she can have. She’s also get her bite back, as she accepts Echo back into the fold with suspicions as to her “just” being found by Ballard, and, despite Echo’s painful headaches, believes Echo can sustain a few more days without any treatment for them; after all, she’s special. I like the cynicism her denial carries, that cynicism I think the audience has felt all along. That want for proof of special, which this first hour did really start to show in a much better way than in yadda yadda yadda prophecy talk we’ve had to be shoveled down our throats like bad cough medicine.

And then, in hour 2, enter Alpha. Ah, Alan Tudyk…how I crush on you. You and your awesome acting talents and wicked ways as Alpha. Yes, I did swoon, if just for a moment. (And I did love the 3 piece suit). Alpha has been on a healthy killing spree, of all of Echo’s romantic engagements. Echo, meanwhile, is tortured by her headaches, in a padded cell, because DeWitt doesn’t trust her or Ballard. She’s convinced Alpha must have been helping her; after all, if not him, then who? Ballard can’t blow his cover, so he stays mum. DeWitt does bend and sends Echo out for a romantic engagement since it’s a regular but, unfortunately, comes to find her date in a very deadened state.

Meanwhile, Topher is in on the fact that Echo is “special”, though he keeps it from DeWitt (as payback, I’m sure, to her confiscating and sharing his “Doomsday” device).

Sierra comes back from her engagement and it turns out her “date” was really Alpha with a message about the next lover to die, one who “ages well”; it’s her date from the very first Dollhouse ep, who explodes on the top of a building. (Alpha, if nothing, insists on flair.) Ballard, Boyd and DeWitt piece together that almost all of Echo’s ex paramours are dead, except Joel Myner (Patton Oswalt), internet mega mogul whose yearly engagement with Echo was to bring back his late wife who never got to know his success. Only the “wife” would know how to find him; Ballard and Boyd send Echo out and she convinces him to come back to the Dollhouse, despite the fact he’s finally moving on and marrying again.

DeWitt makes sure that all the Dolls are wiped in case Alpha got to any of them; in the meantime, she’s pissed that Boyd and Ballard went behind her back about Echo and she gets quarantined again. She gets to her office to try and regain some authority but Alpha comes in. She’s terrified, but Alpha at least substantiates that Ballard was the one helping Echo with his slew of PI pics. He then goes to the Dollhouse ground floor with DeWitt; when Ballard and Boyd try and take action, Alpha unleashes a handheld device that emits a high pitch and makes all the Dolls go kung-fu crazy on the handlers and other Dollhouse personnel. Alpha, twisted genius, knew they would wipe the Actives, so he infected Sierra with a computer virus. She got wiped, but also got imprinted with badassness, along with all the others, with a press of a button. Everyone is fighting everyone, it feels, and Ballard goes to protect Myner, but it turns out Alpha didn’t want him – he was actually after Ballard. Ballard comes to in the chair, where he gets interrogated. Echo loves him, but why? She’s destined for a Love Supreme, and what is it that Ballard can possibly have to make her love him? Alpha flips the chair switch, zapping Ballard’s brain – he can’t find why she loves him in his brain patterns. And then he goes too far…

Echo’s managed to escape her cell and bring down some of the Actives though she’s insistent to be careful –they still are people. Boyd and Topher run to the manufacturing room to get the remote wipe device and start doing just that.

Echo finds Ballard, who looks dead. Alpha’s tossed him aside like a carcass, after all. It appears Ballard is now brain dead. Echo and Alpha get into a physical and verbal fight, where she tells him that Ballard is 10 times the man he is “and you’re, like, 40 guys!” Echo knocks Alpha down and through him Ballard speaks, telling Echo that he’d wished they’d had more time, that to do him the favor of ending his life. I can’t tell if Alpha imprinted himself with Ballard (which is the natural thought process) or if it’s Ballard’s ghost, or something else that’s To Be Explained. I don’t allow for the confusion to settle in too long. Echo can’t kill Alpha and he escapes for another day, with Ballard’s brain, as Echo watches over Ballard’s body, sustained by machinery.

Both episodes were great, fulfilling stories, even if there were some holes in both (none to really need to shine a light on). But Ballard, wow, that really threw me. I actually got a little sick in my stomach, when I realized it was that…final, I guess. In the Dollhouse, when it comes to brains, I suppose nothing’s final, really, but I didn’t expect that to happen to him. Even though Joss is willing to sacrifice main characters for sustainable (believable, in his world) story lines, I did get blind-sided. Because, presumably, this got shot before the show got axed. And to dismantle a main character like this one is a huge risk with a truncated time frame and space to finish telling the story. So I wonder if Joss does get the chance to tell it his way, however shortened. I guess the only question to ask then, to borrow from Buffy, is, where do we go from here?

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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