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.