SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAS AIRED TO DATE
After a solid if not strong season premiere, I was looking forward to Dollhouse bringing something new and exciting to the table in its next outing. And I suppose it did, if you consider making the main character lactate to be something new and exciting. For about ten minutes in the middle of “Instinct”, I was hooked. Oh, I see what they’re doing. Okay, this could get interesting. And then it sort of turned to crap.
Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, the writers of this episode, created the series Reaper, which I only watched once but seemed like a fun if unambitious diversion. Dollhouse, on the other hand, is an ambitious diversion, and in trying to incorporate some of that ambition into this episode, the writers demonstrated that they may not be up to the challenge. This was a disappointing outing for all involved.
To recap, Echo is assigned to Nate, a new father who became a widower when his wife died during childbirth. Topher gives Echo all the traits necessary to be a replacement mother for the baby — love, willingness to go sleepless, and that aforementioned ability to lactate. This premise is immediately ridiculous. Is Echo going to raise the baby forever? And given that the Dollhouse is a secret organization, how is the man supposed to explain the strange woman everyone keeps seeing with his baby in the park? And why is she claiming to be Nate’s wife and the baby’s mother? But whatever. Suffice it to say that Echo flips out when she finds photos of Nate’s dead wife and thinks he’s having an affair. Then when she eavesdrops on Nate’s angry phone call with Adele, she misinterprets what she hears and believes Nate is planning to have her killed.
The bright spot of the episode for me happens when Echo sees her best friend — who is actually Sierra, also on assignment — pull up in front of her house to escort her and the baby out, only to have men in a black van show up and take Sierra away. Of course, we know that Echo and Sierra are actives, and that the men in the van are their handlers. And it’s messy because we’re tempted to think, No, it’s okay because those are the good guys, even though there’s nothing good about what they do. Echo manages to flee before Paul can get to her and offer her a treatment, and goes to the police for help.
That’s pretty much where my enjoyment of the episode ended. Echo sits in an office with a nice detective who praises her for coming forward and not becoming a statistic. But as soon as Paul and Nate show up, the detective steps aside and lets Echo be wrestled into submission. It’s one of many, many moments in “Instinct” that rings horribly false. I enjoyed the idea of a cat and mouse game between Echo and the handlers, but it never went anywhere. They caught her, took her back to the Dollhouse, and Topher wiped her clean.
Well, he wiped away everything but her maternal instincts, which leads to the awful and completely unoriginal climax where Echo holds Nate’s baby in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other while he begs her not to hurt anyone. On the one hand, I can appreciate how they turned a tired horror movie trope on its head by playing with our notions of who’s the victim and who’s the potential killer. But it was so over-the-top as to be ludicrous. For one thing, the show takes place in Los Angeles — I can’t remember the last time I saw a single lightning strike in Los Angeles, let along a full on electrical storm. I also didn’t buy Nate talking Echo down. He may have been able to do that had Echo still been imprinted with the wife identity, but Nate would have had no skills in communicating with an active as messed up as Echo. The scene was mishandled from beginning to end.
But the worst sin for me was the way the episode undercut its own ideas. We’re presented with the notion that maternal love is such a deep down, base instinct as to be impermeable to a personality wipe. And yet we’re reintroduced to November, who you may recall signed a contract with the Dollhouse in the first place because she was so grief stricken over losing her young daughter to cancer. November is now completely free of that grief. If maternal (or paternal, I suppose) love were so great — if it can’t be wiped clean — then this change in November shouldn’t be possible.
So the only explanation is that it’s Echo’s unique retainage of prior imprints that is in play here, and not any special characteristics of motherhood. I guess it’s significant that the confrontation at the end involves Echo as Echo, rather than Echo as an imprinted person. That Echo is developing into a complex character, after all, is what makes the stories of Dollhouse worth telling. But they’ve got to do better than this.
In other news, Senator Perrin receives some kind of unsolicited dossier at his doorstep, which includes information on the Dollhouse and the name of someone inside. Is this once again the work of Alpha?
I’m going to be charitable and suggest that “Instinct” was meant to be a horror movie homage that missed its mark, rather than a sorry collection of cliched scenes, phony suspense, and bad acting. That doesn’t really improve the experience of watching it however. This was was rotten episode.
Rating: 
Better luck next week.
