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 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.”

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.

I suppose one of the most difficult balances to strike when writing a serial is the one between stories that advance the masterplot and stories that generally don’t. In theory, a stand-alone episode should give the audience an opportunity to get to know the characters a little better, laying the groundwork for the pathos that arises out of seeing them battle their larger demons at season’s end.

This week’s stand-alone Dollhouse entry didn’t really do that though, because Echo embodied the personality of a recently dead friend of Adelle DeWitt’s. This wealthy lady apparently visited the Dollhouse at regular intervals over the last few years to basically create a backup copy of herself, meant to be deployed in the event of her death. Paranoid and generally unloved by her family, she suspects murder from the moment Topher implants her in Echo’s body.

The notion of a person preserving her own life through the Dollhouse is brilliant, but why did it have to be couched within a silly murder mystery? I’m reminded of Patton Oswald’s software baron resurrecting his wife every year. Why not show the flip side of this scenario, and explore the ways such a use of a doll could be unsatisfying for all involved? For that matter, is Echo really the dead woman returned to life? Do the contents of our mind comprise all that we are? Or maybe the woman does think she’s been murdered, only to discover that no one felt strongly enough about her to go to the trouble. Maybe her death wasn’t as dramatic as she always assumed it would be. That might have been a good story to explore.

How would it feel to attend your own funeral and witness your own corpse lying in a coffin? In the universe of Battlestar Galactica, you freak the hell out and debate the very nature of your existence. In the universe of Dollhouse, you snicker quietly about the mourning losers listening to your eulogy. But I guess that’s how you have to act when there’s a mystery to solve! There’s no time for sober introspection.

When Dollhouse misfires (so far), this is generally how it does it: good idea, weak execution. Then again, you can almost hear the FOX execs saying, “All the sci-fi and philosophical stuff is okay, but give us an episode where Echo has to solve a murder!” So…there you go. And it was hardly terrible. If nothing else, Eliza Dushku gave one of her most convincing performances of the series so far. Credit director David Solomon (a reliable veteran of Joss Whedon shows) with that. I didn’t believe the son would make the connection between the young woman in his mother’s house and the Dollhouse however. That was writing at its most lazy and convenient.

Actually, this wasn’t a completely stand-alone episode, because we got a little advancement of the Paul-November (aka Mellie) plotline. After a night of reluctant, wild sex with Mellie, Paul responds to her questions about his pursuit of Dollhouse clients with the devastating line of the night: “I found one.” I continue to believe that regardless of billing, Paul is the center of the show. When we follow his character, we invariably get good stuff — like looking up November’s fingerprints, and having the computer find multiple matches before realizing it has said too much and clearing the search results. Suddenly Paul’s former FBI colleague is a believer (which means she’s probably doomed).

The third storyline of the week had Topher imprinting Sierra with the personality of a female Topher so he could have a fun evening talking about “science fiction errors” and playing laser tag and video games. When Boyd does his usual “Do you really think this is a good idea” shtick, Adelle declares that it’s important not to get too lonely — which she should know, of course, having previously been one of her own clients with Victor.

If nothing else, this will certainly be the last stand-alone episode we get this season (and possibly ever, if the show doesn’t get renewed). Then again, the “lost” episode 13 will supposedly be of this variety, but FOX has no plans to air it. I find myself wondering whose side Boyd is on. He seems contemptuous of everything the DH does and stands for, but doesn’t care enough to do anything about it. This is something I’d like to see explored more: why do the DH employees work there in the first place? How do they put their ethical reservations aside in order to do their jobs?

So … better subplots than main plot this week, but I expect the next two weeks will be gangbusters.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Comment away, but please no spoilers for future episodes.