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.

When fans of Dollhouse mourn its inevitable cancellation this month, we will point to three episodes as evidence of what might have been. “Man on the Street” and “A Spy in the House of Love” will be two of them. “Briar Rose”, this week’s excellent entry and the penultimate episode of the season, will be the third.

I have been very, very careful to avoid being spoiled about which actor would be portraying Alpha, the former active who went crazy and started slicing up people’s faces. I knew it was a casting choice that excited people, so I guessed it was probably a Whedon alum. When I saw Alan Tudyk’s (Firefly) name in the opening credits for this week’s episode, I figured he was probably the guy. When they introduced him instead as a housebound, marijuana-growing expert in environmental systems, I began to wonder if maybe they decided not to credit the Alpha actor, and were going to have, say, James Marsters show up at the end. But as soon as Tudyk started gleefully shutting down all the Dollhouse security systems (after telling Ballard that he couldn’t), I knew my initial instincts were correct.

And by the way, what a performance! Tudyk was hilarious for most of the episode (and credit Jane Espenson for writing some wonderfully zany dialogue), but his transition for neurotic tech expert to stone cold psychopath was startling and entirely convincing. It makes me sad that we had to wait the entire season to get this character, and now … well, how much more of him will we get?

“Briar Rose” is full of solid performances. Special mention has to go to Enver Gjokaj (“Victor”) for his spot on impression of Reed Diamond’s boxed NSA agent Dominic. Even Topher seemed unusually subdued (for him) while explaining his idea to implant Echo with a grown up version of a troubled young girl in need of help. That storyline, by the way — Echo counseling the child prostitute — was both resonant and out of place. Yes, it ties neatly into Paul’s attempts to rescue Echo from the Dollhouse (and suggests that Echo may need to “think of herself as the prince”). But during those scenes, I felt like I was watching another show. I do hope we get some kind of resolution about the little girl though. There’s a good philosophical debate to be had about whether the DH can be a force for good as well as … well, maybe not “evil”, but certainly less morally defensible motives. If Echo’s grown-up disturbed girl can turn the actual disturbed girl’s life around — well, does that even the scales at all?

Ballard remains my main source of joy with this series, and his early kiss-off to poor Mellie was just so painful to watch. He makes a comment to Alpha early in their quest that, in effect, the dolls aren’t actually people. Shades of Battlestar Galactica there — not surprising, I suppose, considering Espenson wrote for that series and Tahmoh Pennikett was a regular. It gets a little meta-heavy, though, when Topher uses the word “frak”. Anyway, there’s no question that Mellie’s pain over the way Paul treats her is genuine — hell, she’s ready to fling herself off a bridge before her handler shows up and takes her back to the DH. Poor, Mellie. She really drew the short straw.

But how would Ballard have reacted if Mellie really had jumped off the bridge? Doll or not, that’s the permanent end of someone’s life (not accounting for the possibility of implanting her original personality in another body, which to me is nothing more than a photocopy), even if her emotional attachment to him can be chalked up to “programming”. But she’s not Caroline, and for some reason, she’s the only doll Ballard has any real interested in rescuing. Oh, he wants to bring the whole operation down, yes. But his single-minded purpose is to bring Caroline out of there, even though he really should have no reason to think that would be any less dangerous to him than rescuing Mellie would be.

We’re left with Boyd and Adelle debating whether or not they can put Ballard in the chair. Boyd rejects the idea on the grounds that Ballard hasn’t agreed to it. Adelle, who sent Dominic to the attic without a second thought, naturally disagrees. Which brings me back to a thought I had early on in the series: why don’t they just capture Ballard and write over his real personality with a nearly identical one that doesn’t have any interest in pursuing the Dollhouse? Isn’t that a more sensible solution than trying to kill him? Well, maybe that’s what they’re going to do.

Right now, though, the threat of Alpha — who has written a specific though heretofore unknown personality on Echo and left with her — seems more important. For the moment, Ballard and the Dollhouse have the same goal.

I can’t wait for the finale next week.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Carrots! I’m growing medicinal carrots. For a friend. They were here when I moved in!” Comment away, but please no spoilers for future episodes.