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Echo gets that new-Active smell during an engagement!

This week on Dollhouse, a great danger is revealed to the Dollhouse as the mythology of the series begins to come even more into place. Also this week, it actually feels like an original story as opposed to it just being a riff on a oft-told tale.

The episode begins with a new client, Mr. Diakos (Tony Amendola, who you’ve seen a thousand times, but can’t remember where), who wants something specific and potentially dangerous for the Active selected. Meanwhile, Echo is up in the mountains somewhere and apparently her assignment involves being a midwife. I guess even an Active needs an engagement that doesn’t involve sex and guns. Although I can’t imagine what birth is so involved that the client needs an Active to assist with. Echo gets back and has a new assignment that seems to be that of being a ‘professional’ of sorts to entertain at a bachelor party in a swanky hotel. But the ruse is soon done away with when it’s revealed that what this bachelor party is all about is a team of professional thieves, and Echo is the leader and master. They break in, and from that moment are in what is called a ‘Gray Hour’, when the security systems are rebooting from all the hacking. In the midst of the ‘Gray Hour’, they are free to do what they need to do, which is to steal an original piece of The Parthenon. But soon things go wrong when one of the team members pulls a double-cross, escapes with the piece, and locks them in the vault. Echo calls Boyd from her cell to apprehend the escaping thief, but somehow during the call, a strange signal is sent through the phone. After the signal is done, somehow Echo is acting in her ‘tabula rasa’ state, where her childlike self is restored and her imprint is gone. Echo has been remotely wiped. According to everyone back at the Dollhouse, specifically Topher, this is not possible.

As things get worse and the ‘gray hour’ winds down and the guards start to close in, DeWitt, Topher and Mr. Dominic take some desperate measures and imprint Sierra with the same imprint that was given to Echo and have her try and walk the team of increasingly desperate thieves out before they’re caught. The main reason for their desperation is that if Echo is apprehended, she could somehow lead back to the Dollhouse, and that can’t happen. So just in case, they have a team ready to eliminate Echo. The one person in law enforcement they are most worried about is the ever-intrepid Agent Ballard, who has problems of his own. After taking a bullet to the gut last ep (the result of possibly being set up by Victor), he has some down time at home but it is rudely interrupted by Victor, who claims that he is going to be killed by the Russian mob family that he works for unless Ballard can get him into some kind of Witness Protection.

This week’s episode comes to us under the veteran hands of writing team Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, who have worked together on great eps of Angel, another Whedon show, as well as the fantastic FX series The Shield, and super-veteran director Rod Hardy, who has worked on genre shows since the 1970’s, and recently has lent his talents to eps of Battlestar Galactica,The X-Files, Burn Notice (And also directed The Hoff in the hilariously bad Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD... I just watched parts of that again recently and it’s just so much fun…). These guys help propel the series from just a ‘identity-of-the-week’ show to establishing a real mythology arc that is vital to every genre show. The show has yet give the unknown quantity of Alpha a real agenda, but they are slowly but surely introducing the weapons he intends to use against the Dollhouse and possibly Echo herself. He is now becoming the Big Bad, and that’s something that every Whedon show needs. Again it’s Fran Kranz who makes with all the funny, and Dushku and Penikett that have the heavy lifting. The ep itself has some really good, powerful moments particularly when Echo is examining the art in the vault and looking at a work by Picasso and reflecting on its ‘broken’ look. It’s the only ep since the first that hasn’t relied terribly on the symbolic ‘echo’ and is starting to push the series and its mythology forward. Harry Lennix is woefully underused in this ep, but if it’s at the cost of refusing to let the series get mired in a slew of stand-alone stories, then that’s a payment
that is necessary.

Dollhouse is starting to feel more solid now as it’s starting to find its groove, and I’m starting to think that it’s not quite as doomed to failure as the fanboy pundits (including myself) thought.

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