For the second episode in a row, Dollhouse gives us a disorienting teaser. This week it revolves around Sierra, who we find selling trinkets and artwork at the beach. It appears to be a flashback, but later, at a party being thrown by wealthy doctor and scumbag Nolan to celebrate a painting she has created for him, we see both Echo and Victor. So is this before or after Nolan has Sierra “sent” to the Dollhouse? Turns out it’s before, and the two actives on hand have been tasked with talking Nolan up so that Sierra — Priya, actually — will fall in love with him. It doesn’t work, of course. In fact, she almost leaves the party with Victor.

“Belonging” is the first Dollhouse episode (other than “Epitaph One”) to let Echo fades into the background. Dichen Lachman and Fran Kranz are the stars of this outing, and that was kind of refreshing. When Echo brings one of Sierra’s disturbing paintings to Topher, he tells her he hasn’t observed any problems with Sierra. “Maybe you’re not looking hard enough,” she responds. Topher discovers a collection of paintings in Dr. Saunders’ office, along with notes about “the bad man”. Saunders believed the bad man was Topher, but he rejects that out of hand. Being brilliant, Topher quickly pieces together that Sierra was made psychotic by drugs administered to her by Nolan. This is significant, because Sierra was brought to the Dollhouse as a means of curing her paranoid schizophrenia. If she was deliberately made that way, then the Dollhouse has been guilty of slavery.

Adele is outraged, and summons Nolan to her office. He’s a VIP with Rossum, however, and demands that Sierra be permanently imprinted and delivered to be his wife. Another Rossum bigwig, Matthew Harding (Keith Carradine) agrees, and implicitly threatens Adele with the attic if she doesn’t comply (“You won’t like our early retirement program.”). Topher also objects, but Adele chides him by pointing out that while everyone at the Dollhouse was hired for having compromised their morals, that doesn’t apply to him: “You’re here because you have no morals. You’ve always viewed human beings as playthings. That’s not a judgment. You’ve always taken very good care of your toys.” Topher finally agrees, reluctantly, to give Sierra the permanent imprint.

He doesn’t give her the imprint he’s supposed to, however. As anyone with half a brain could have predicted, Topher gives her back her original personality. So when Nolan’s perfect woman shows up at his door, it turns out to be Priya. There’s some irony in that, I guess, since Priya was the woman that he wanted in the first place. But after goading him by talking about how she fell in love with someone even as a blank slate, he begins slapping her around, and she kills him.

Despite the generally predictable nature of what transpired before this, I was fascinated by all the moving parts. Did Adele push Topher over the edge toward making a moral decision by accusing him of being wholly amoral? Did Topher know the encounter between Priya and Nolan would turn violent? And perhaps the biggest question of all, since a legally insane person wouldn’t have been able to consent to a five-year contract with the Dollhouse, why did it suddenly become outrageous to Adele and Topher when they learned Sierra had been drugged? Was Adele bothered by the moral implications of slavery, or was she just angry about being deceived? Does Sierra — who we learn, by the way, is not the first Sierra — “belong” in the Dollhouse? Does she belong to Nolan? Does Topher belong there? Does Adele? What kind of people are these anyway? It seems like no one is really free.

The remaining quarter of the show didn’t pack as much punch as the first three acts — Boyd shows up at Nolan’s house and helps Topher and Priya dispose of Nolan’s body, along with concocting an explanation for his disappearance — but there was a nice scene at the end between Topher and Priya where she, devastated by what she’s done, asks him to wipe the whole day from her memory. Somewhat disturbingly (to me, anyway) she has to go back to being a doll, but when she wakes up from being an active for the last time, she doesn’t want to know anything about the murder. Will that make things any better for her? She’s still going to remember what Nolan did to her, and that wound isn’t going to be any less fresh (unless they do some kind of neurological mumbo jumbo like they did with November). Topher, for his part, is equally horrified but doesn’t have the option of forgetting.

But it’s hard to argue that Nolan didn’t deserve his fate. As if it’s not bad enough that he kidnapped Priya, drugged her, drove her crazy, and arranged for her to be taken in by the Dollhouse so she could be made more pliant to his desires, he also did try to kill her when she again refused him at his house. Her sense of morality is clearly very different from the rest of the characters — killing is wrong no matter what, I guess — but it’s notable that Topher is also affected, perhaps because he feels he forced Priya to do it.

In the end, Priya goes back to being a doll, and walks down to the spiral staircase to meet Victor, who has been sitting on the floor waiting for her all night. Is there a sweeter romance on television right now than the one between Sierra and Victor? The moment in the show with the two painting each other’s faces was nice, and gave us an interesting — albeit brief — Victor flashback, where he remembered being a soldier during a battle (Sierra’s painted face is also called back to later when she finds herself covered in blood after stabbing Nolan). Good stuff, especially their little snuggle session in the shared pod at the episode’s end.

Echo wasn’t completely absent from the episode. After handing over the painting to Topher, Echo spends the rest of the episode perplexing Boyd by reading. I didn’t catch what the book was, but for some reason I remember it being Paradise Lost. Anyway, he’s skeptical that she would want to read a book with no pictures, but she assures him that she’s able to follow some of it. However, after Boyd discovers the book (with a little leaf as a bookmark), he manages to completely overlook that Echo has been taking notes on her pod’s glass door to help keep track of everything she knows and all the personalities she’s had.

I was trained to kill.

Victor loves Sierra.

My son killed me.

Dominic was bad.

Women are whores.

Echo is messed up. But she confesses to Boyd that she fears “a storm is coming”, and she wants to make sure everyone in the Dollhouse survives it. Boyd later leaves a gift for her: an all access keycard. Echo now has the run of the place (including, presumably, the freedom to leave).  It’s interesting.  For a titular head of security, Boyd seems to have no concern whatsoever about dolls not knowing their place — especially Echo.  When she asks him if she’s in trouble for reading the book, he responds blandly, “Not with me.”

The evolution of Topher from smug puppet-master to destroyed, regretful Dr. Frankenstein is one of the more compelling story-lines of the series, so I’m glad to see that continuing week-to-week. I also enjoyed Harry Lennix’s assured deadpan skills while Topher explains the intricacies of the human brain: “I’ll take your word for it.” And yet, this episode felt like a missed opportunity. The performances were strong, but the plot was by-the-numbers, and the final act fizzled out. But it did manage to demonstrate that there are ways to make the characters come through even when personalities aren’t permanent.

I wanted to love it, but I only liked it. But perhaps more importantly, I love where we’re going.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

With the start of November sweeps, Dollhouse is now off the air until December, when the network plans to run two episodes at a time. After that, who knows? Enjoy it while it lasts. The ratings for this episode where down 20% over the previous one, though the DVR numbers will probably look better than that.

The opening scene of “Belle Chose” was one of the strangest and most disturbing thing I’ve seen on TV in quite awhile. We open on a man with an unfortunate haircut dressing mannequins for what appears to be a line of croquet-wear. But then we see that the mannequins are sweating. And then one of them tries to crawl away. What the hell is going on? At first, I assumed these were actives, and the strange man was a rich eccentric who had contracted the Dollhouse for his bizarre role playing fantasy. But no, as one poor woman tries to escape, he beats her to death with a croquet mallet. This isn’t just a fantasy; this is his real life. He just happens to have his own dollhouse.

The parallels between what this man — Terry Karrens — is doing and what the Dollhouse does are obvious but compelling. Terry immobilizes his dolls with a powerful horse tranquilizer. Adele and Topher use “the chair”. But ultimately neither has complete control over their captives. Terry is destroyed. Can the Dollhouse fare any better?

Terry is hit by a car as he prowls the streets of Beverly Hills in search of a new Aunt Sheila for his collection (after having killed the old one), and because his uncle is a major shareholder in the Rossum Corporation, he ends up in the care of the Dollhouse’s medical team. With Dr. Saunders’ whereabouts still unknown, the lesser doctors try to manage Terry’s condition as best they can. But upon scanning Terry’s brain, Topher makes a frightening discovery: Terry doesn’t use the part of his brain associated with empathy. This clearly marks him as a bad, bad man, and Topher has concerns about waking him up. “Topher has ethical concerns,” repeats Boyd. “Topher.” Harry Lennix’s deadpan was put to good use in this episode. Adele agrees, and they rouse Terry not through conventional medicine, but by implanting his personality into Victor.

With Uncle Bradley (Michael Hogan) on hand, Paul questions Victor-as-Terry, but doesn’t get very far. He’s able to determine that Terry has a group of women he’s holding captive — forcing them to pretend to be his real life mother, sisters, and aunt — but not where he’s keeping him. And before he’s able to get that last bit of information, Uncle Bradley runs off with … Victor! Thinking Paul’s techniques aren’t going to work with Terry, Bradley figures the best solution is just to ask Terry to show him his secret hideout. Victor-as-Terry instead smashes Bradley’s face against the steering wheel of his car, causing it to crash. He walks away from the accident and into the streets of Los Angeles, a dangerous psychopath at large.

Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated subplot, Echo is sent on an engagement as Kiki, a dim, college party girl in search of a better grade in her medieval literature class. The professor (Arye Gross), it seems, has always dreamed of banging one of his students. I found these scenes perplexing for awhile, in that they didn’t seem to connect at all with the rest of the episode, but also fascinating. Though I’m not sure how a man could afford to hire the Dollhouse on a university salary, I found it interesting that the professor seemed just as interested in educating Kiki about Chaucer as he was in bedding her. His fantasy has this girl trading sex for a grade, but he can’t quite get past his instincts to genuinely teach, even though she’s not really a student (though the TA seems to recognize her when he hands her the essay she supposedly flunked).

I started wondering if maybe I’d misjudged the professor’s intentions entirely, but then we moved into preliminary “Epitaph One” territory. Since Victor’s internal GPS had been removed during his facial reconstruction surgery, the Dollhouse has no way to track him. Paul tries to find him in Beverly Hills, but just to be safe, Adele commands Topher to find a way to perform a remote wipe. Topher attempts it and fails spectacularly. Rather than wipe Victor, he ends up swapping Victor’s imprint with Echo’s. Now Victor is Kiki, who really feels like dancing — and what luck, she’s in a club! And of course, Echo is Terry, who promptly stabs the horny professor in the neck with a letter opener. Terry, who doesn’t like nor have very healthy feelings about women, is alarmed to find himself inhabiting the body of one. He decides his mannequins must have something to do with this (those whores), and sets off toward his lair so he can kill them properly.

This was an excellent episode up to this point. Once Echo-as-Terry returns to the lair and confronts the women — who are confused, but not nearly as confused as they should be to have to have this crazy women talking to them like she’s their tormentor — the whole thing kind of fizzles out. The imprint fades momentarily, and Echo tells the women they should kill her, but it doesn’t resonate because she’s only been in the room for about ninety seconds. The captive women have a history with Terry, but not with Echo. The scene feels rushed.

The episode also left me with some questions about the technology. Presumably Topher was able to perform the wipe/swap because the actives are linked into biofeedback monitoring system. How this allows Topher to mess with their imprints is completely unclear to me, but I suppose this isn’t the point to start quibbling with the plausibility of the tech. I do have to wonder, however, why they can’t use Whiskey’s GPS system to track Dr. Saunders.

I have to single out Enver Gjokaj again, who has demonstrated himself repeatedly to be the most versatile actor in the cast. He was chilling as Terry and hilarious as Kiki. But I thought the cast did a great job all around this time, except Dichen Lachman (who wasn’t in the episode). I also thought the script, by the always reliable Tim Minear, was both witty, tense, and entertaining. He found a great use for Boyd, wrote a great opening scene, and kept me guessing throughout. I was also delighted to discover that the Dollhouse has its own department store! “You’re new. And you, well, you’re always new.” This scene was not only enjoyable for its silliness, but nicely tied back to the opening scene with Terry dressing his living mannequins.

So the big question, I suppose, is this: Is Terry really any more evil or crazy than the clients of the Dollhouse? His dolls are decidedly there against their wills, but we know that at least one active (Sierra) didn’t consent to her Dollhouse contract. And even those that did agree initially now have no wills of their own. Is it really possible to consent to every possible scenario in advance? Everyone wants something they can’t have. Both Terry and the professor want women to behave differently than they do, and both take drastic steps to enforce this desire. Is the professor any less psychotic than Terry?

Belle chose translates as “beautiful thing”. That pretty much sums up the attitude at play. It’s also Chaucer’s euphemism for female genitalia. Here endeth the lesson.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This was a very promising episode after last week’s disaster, but the team still needs to figure out a way to bring these episodes to a close in a more satisfying way. The last act was really the only thing keeping “Belle Chose” from greatness.

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: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Better luck next week.

The good news is that “Vows”, the premiere episode of Dollhouse’s second season is superior to the season one premiere, “Ghost”. Actually, the good news is that Dollhouse is back at all, particularly after a season that started low in the ratings and kept sinking lower. And it deserved those low ratings at first. Of the first five episodes, only “Gray Hour” really tried to do anything interesting with the series premise. The mythos of the show will say that “Man on the Street” changed all that, with Joss Whedon finally able to make the show he set out to make in the first place, with less interference from the network.

I don’t know how much freedom Whedon has now. On the one hand, the show’s not successful enough to give him carte blanche. On the other hand, it’s not like the ratings can get worse. Dollhouse was renewed specifically because Whedon has a comparably small but insanely devoted fanbase that will watch the show online and buy the DVDs when they’re released. You might as well try to satisfy them with good storytelling because you’re clearly not going to reach anyone else, especially in that awful Friday night timeslot. The last few episodes of the first season (including the heart-stopping, as-yet-unaired “Epitaph One”) showed the many interesting philosophical explorations the series could embark upon. I sat down to watch “Vows” hoping for some of that.

Unfortunately I found it kind of ho hum overall, but it did boast a wonderful Saunders vs. Topher storyline that kept me entertained and riveted. I maintain that the primary unexamined question of this whole interchangeable personalities technology is that it doesn’t address the difference between personality and consciousness. In the world of Dollhouse, you can change someone’s personality — their memories, emotions, desires — but it’s unclear what impact (if any) this has on their consciousness, that spark of life within the brain that makes a person aware. My assumption is that that personality can be copied, but consciousness cannot. This makes the final conversation between Saunders and Topher so interesting.

Saunders, after having spent most of the episode playing pranks on Topher, sneaks into his bedroom — apparently they both live in the Dollhouse — and tries to seduce him. Once this game is suspended, Topher explains that he imprinted her with faults and fears and such because he needed her to be a fully developed human being. And he answers the question she asked in last season’s “Omega”: “I made you fight for your beliefs. I didn’t make you hate me. You chose to.” This doesn’t provide comfort for Saunders, who still feels like a puppet, a phony creation. “How do I go through my day,” she says, “knowing that everything I think comes from something I can’t abide?”

Dr. Saunders has quickly become the most interesting character on the show. Her torment over knowing she is an active, but being powerless to do anything about it makes her the — early Battlestar Galactica spoiler alert! — Boomer of the series. And her frightened whimper when Topher asks why she doesn’t just track down her original identity and have it reprinted was especially heartbreaking: “Because I don’t want to die!” And yet if her original contract is honored, that’s exactly what should happen. However, if you’ve seen “Epitaph One” … well, you know. In any case, we had fantastic work from Amy Acker this week, and I hope she’s back next week in spite of the little automobile trip she took near the end of the episode — where did she get a car? Fran Kranz, much less twitchy than last season, also impressed.

The A-story didn’t do much for me though. Echo, in stark contrast to Saunders, is still the least interesting character on the show, even with all their attempts to make her “special”. Her sham marriage to this week’s creep of the week, an arms dealer played by Jamie Bamber (another BSG connection), was about as routine a Dollhouse stunt as any other engagement, with the exception that this one was long-term and that the client was knight-in-shining-armor Paul Ballard. Paul’s unresolved (and unexamined) feelings about Echo make for some nice character stuff on his end, but do nothing to make Echo more compelling. We do learn at the end of the episode that Echo has an almost complete grasp of what it means to be an active and that she remembers all of the personalities she’s ever been imprinted with. Paul, understanding what kind of power this gives her, agrees to DeWitt’s rather implausible request that he become Echo’s handler. But there’s an implicit conspiracy between the two in the scene where this relationship becomes official. They are finally, really working together.

But what is Paul up to anyway? Supposing his takedown of the arms dealer were enough to get him reinstated at the FBI. Then what? He provides inside information about the Dollhouse, which he can easily do because he has hired them? I think he still wants to expose and bring an end to the Dollhouse, but I’m intrigued to find out what we’ll learn about former Agent Ballard this season. Suffice it to say that he is not the pure of heart hero he once appeared to be. As for the weapons, I find something ironic about Ballard using the Dollhouse to help stop a weapons smuggler when the Dollhouse itself possesses the single most powerful weapon ever built.

I enjoyed Sierra recoiling at the sight of Ivy (“I’m not comfortable with Orientals.”), then suggesting a little S&M play. As for Boyd, I still think Harry Lennix is proving to be the weakest cast member. I’m tempted to cut him a little slack because he tends to get saddled with the most expository dialogue, but he also seems especially ill equipped to handle it. Where’s Anthony Stewart Head when you need him?

Speaking of former watchers, Alexis Denisof makes an introductory appearance in this episode as a crusading U.S. senator going after the Rossum Corporation. I trust we’ll be seeing more of him.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

It wasn’t the gangbusters kind of season premiere I would have liked, but it wasn’t a dud either. And it’s clear the series is going to remain character-focused most of the time. I’ll leave you with these snappy last words from Topher and Saunders.

Topher: “You’re human.”
Saunders: “Don’t flatter yourself.”