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Misty watercolor memories…

This week on Dollhouse, the unleashing of an experimental drug leads to murder and unlocked memories for the Actives! Uh-oh…

As those of us following the show know, last week’s ep kicked the series into high gear because just about everything changed. Ballard finally faced Echo with two separate imprints and got clues to the existence of the Dollhouse and of someone working on the inside to expose them; Ballard’s sweet neighbor Mellie was revealed to be an Active known as November; Ballard was suspended from duty because of his insubordination and the accidental shooting of a beat cop. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it was. And this week, we go further into the pasts of some of the Actives, especially Echo, upping the stakes even further for this show.

At the episode’s opening, we have Echo, prior to her becoming an Active (when she was just Caroline), discussing her future and her fate with Adelle. The discussion touches on things that she saw, which I was assuming were bad, and the mysterious Rossum Corporation, and how Adelle asks for five years of Caroline’s life in exchange for her freedom for the rest of it. Then we’re back in the present day, and two students walk into a lab on the campus of Freemont College where a third is standing there in his underwear, talking to flies in a jar. He then runs face-first into a window and starts beating it, trying to break through it. The other two students start acting like they’re really high. It is revealed that the lab they’re in is in The Rossum Building. Back at the Dollhouse, one of the heads of Rossum, Clive Ambrose (Philip Casnoff) is telling Adelle and Topher about an experimental memory drug that they were working on at their Freemont lab and how it’s been released. The drug manifests itself first as something like a recreational drug (like a combo of marijuana and LSD), and then in more extreme cases, more extreme behavior, like one of the students killing himself. Topher is assigned to find an antidote to the drug, and Adelle is ordered to send in a whole team of Actives to contain the situation. Echo is on her own engagement with the young man from the very first episode, and they’re about to get pretty kinky, but Echo sees something on TV about the problems on the Freemont campus, and she is compelled beyond her reasoning and her imprint to save someone unknown, but we can only assume it’s someone important if it causes her to completely go off her imprint.

Back at the apartment of Mellie/November, Ballard has a discussion with her about the nature of their relationship and his obsession with getting the people responsible for The Dollhouse and her attack. Mellie is afraid that someone will try and hurt her again, and despite Paul’s promises, she can’t let go of the trauma of the attack. They essentially go on a break, and that is the extent of Tahmoh’s work in this episode. We know that Paul can’t let go, and if Mellie were not secretly an Active, we could certainly understand her fear. We can anyway, despite her being an Active… which is the point of the whole show.

Back on campus, Victor and Sierra are imprinted with NSA and CDC credentials respectively, much to the dismay of Mr. Dominic, since he’s been relegated to working under Victor’s supervision. The reason that Actives have been sent en masse to the campus to weed out the cause of this outbreak is because since they have no working memories available to them, and the part of the brain that the drug attacks is the memory center, they should be immune to the effects… at least in theory. Back at the Dollhouse, Topher and Adelle start working on an antidote using November as a guinea pig of sorts. But what Topher and Adelle soon discover is that somehow, they have both been affected by the drug, and start with the more mild side-effects, mainly acting very wacky. On campus, Echo arrives, and Boyd follows her, but he starts succumbing to the effects, because they seem to be spread via physical contact with anyone who’s had the drug in their system. While Echo is there, she begins flashing back to her previous life as young and passionate activist Caroline Farrell. She seems to be living a comfortable life with her boyfriend Leo (Josh Cooke), and they suspect that The Rossum Corporation is up to something very unethical on the Freemont campus in respect to the treatment of animals. They plan to break into the lab and get video evidence of Rossum’s misdeeds and post it on the internet. But during the break-in, they discover that animals are not the only victims of Rossum’s pharmacological experiments. The very protective security guards discover them, and they attempt to escape, but Leo is shot and killed while trying to get away. Caroline is captured as well, and is apparently assumed to be a good candidate for the Dollhouse, leading her to exactly where she is today. And today is not a good day for anybody, especially since one of the students working at the lab, Sam (Mehcad Brooks) is not at all what he seems.

This episode comes to us via the wonderous writing team of Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, who also wrote the episode “Gray Hour”, and was directed by Whedon alum James Contner, who other than directing an ep of every single previous Whedon show (my favorite work of his being the brilliant episode of Firefly called “War Stories”), also has directed a lot of other genre television, many of which are other favorite shows of mine, like Smallville and Sci-Fi’s The Invisible Man. This is a nearly invincible creative team for Whedon, because they’ve done so many great episodes of his other shows, that they have a perfect fit with Dollhouse. This episode benefits from really tense moments (particularly when November regresses to part of her trigger phase), emotional weight given to many of the characters as the Actives flashback to traumatic memories (Sierra and the ‘games’ she played with her former and thankfully dead handler and Victor and a very traumatic experience he had as a soldier), and a hefty amount of humor from the normally straight-faced and straight-laced Adelle and Mr. Dominic (“It’s so heavy…”, “I could eat that word.”) creates wonderful tension-breakers. And again Craft and Fain put together an episode that is forward-thinking as far as the mythology of the series is concerned; not so much in the aspect of who the bad guys are, but thematically, exploring what some of these people were before, and how they come to work in The Dollhouse, whether by choice or coercion. It was nice to see Olivia Williams and Reed Diamond and Harry Lennix cut loose and have a bit of fun for a change. The only problem that I had with this ep was the more whimsical aspects have been seen a very similar episode in a Whedon series past with Angel and “Spin The Bottle” (one of my favorite episodes of that show), but instead of memory gain, it was memory loss. I love that episode, and I just don’t want to see Whedon and Co. apeing their own work.

Slilght complaint aside, great episode. Keep it coming, because this is really hooking me now.

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