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The Dollhouse is having some total recall issues!

This week on Dollhouse, the aftermath of the memory recall of last week’s episode is now a major concern of all of the staff, and the fallout is less than spectacular.

The episode begins with now-suspended Agent Ballard as Echo comes to his home. She is apparently off-engagement again as she was just two episodes ago in the Whedon-scripted “Man on the Street”. She begins to give him some information, but then jumps him, and not in the bad butt-kicking way she was before. Suddenly, Mellie/November comes in and sees them together and realizes that he has wanted her all along. It becomes one of those famous Whedon dream sequences where there’s some reality to kick it off, but then goes into the unreal dream aspects. Back at the Dollhouse, Adelle and Topher have gathered the staff of the Dollhouse, and are trying to decide what to do in the wake of last week’s “Echoes”, where Actives Echo, Sierra, Victor and November all began to recover memories of their past, which is supposed to be impossible. The proceeding evening, the four of them and a fifth Active, Mike (Teddy Sears), wake up in their pods and seem to have no real memory of who they are, but they have their personalities. Echo is still very much about saving people; Sierra is ‘damaged goods’, Victor has a very alpha-male can-do attitude; November seems distant and sad, and Mike is convinced that he’s been abducted by aliens. And thus begins their recall, and how they can get out of The Dollhouse.

Victor takes command, but definitely still has a thing for Sierra. Echo sees all the people and how they’ve been programmed, and sees caged animals who are being experimented on. Sierra knows that a man has hurt her and put her where she is. November slowly remembers that she had a daughter. Their various escape plans get them out, but Echo goes back in. She confronts Topher and Adelle about what’s going on where they are, and she is told that they were imprinted with their individual personalities and some of their memories. It’s all part of an experiment that will eventually allow them to give them back the ‘tabula rasa’ state with hopefully no possibilty of memory recall. Victor, Sierra and November get out in search of a man named Nolan (played with uber-sleazy glee by the one and only Vincent Ventresca, who genre show devotees will remember as Darien Fawkes in Sci-Fi’s great Invisible Man series), but November remembers where to find her daughter and they let her go in search of her. When Victor and Sierra finally confront Nolan, he is a very nasty man who freely admits that he put Sierra in the Dollhouse, and before Victor can completely beat the crap out of him, they are pursued by Nolan’s private security force. They aren’t able to escape, but they do come to the conclusion that they are in love. When that happens and they kiss, they both fall asleep. November is found near the grave of her young daughter, also asleep. Echo leads the Actives of the Dollhouse outside the complex, and as soon as she has set them free, she also loses consciousness.

As it turns out, they were all members of an experiment suggested by Dr. Saunders; an experiment that would give each of them something that they need: Closure. There’s something that they all need that the staff can provide and this will further their progress to keep them safe within their engagements.

This has been the hardest review that I’ve had to write for this show so far, not because of its complexities, but because it took some time for me to really formulate an opinion about it. And in my opinion, this is definitely the weakest episode so far. It just seemed like it was far too soon in this show’s mythology to do an episode like this. We know that they’re not really going to be able to escape the Dollhouse, and we also know that they aren’t going to get their memories back that easily. That is the conceit that this ep proceeds under and it just doesn’t work. It could be partly that the ep was written by Tracy Bellomo, who’s only professional writing credits were as staff writer on Smallville, and as Jeffrey Bell’s assistant on Angel. On a show like this, which has everything riding on its first few months, it’s not a time for a freshman writer. The one thing that this ep did have going for it was veteran genre director Felix Alcala, who has directed episodes of such shows as BSG, Threshold, Surface, The Shield, and the EXTREMELY underrated Brimstone, but not even he could bring the necessary gravitas this episode needed. The performances are solid, but when we’re working with this plot, it just seemed far too much like a ‘device’ episode, and it didn’t bring the mythology any further even though it was clearly designed to.

Oh, well. You can’t win them all, Joss and Company. But here’s hoping this week’s is going to work a lot better than this one.

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