Dollhouse: Echoes

Echo goes back to school this week in an episode that finally starts to reveal a little about who she used to be and how she came to be at the Dollhouse. The Rossum Corporation has ties to the Dollhouse-they are both somehow part of the same organization-and has a lab named after them at the university that Echo/Caroline attended. In the present day at Rossum, we see two grad student labbies come upon their friend, who is quite literally going insane. He spouts drivel about gravity and flies as he ferociously headbutts a window until he bloodily breaks it and plunges to his death. And I thought my Mondays were bad.

A Rossum head honcho visits the Dollhouse and explains that the crazy dead kid was high out of his mind on some drug that takes control of your mind and breaks down your inhibitions to the point where you’ll do anything. There’s a vial of the stuff missing and the head honcho wants Topher to work his scientist voodoo and come up with an antidote while a team of Actives quarantines the school before the entire student body is exposed to the stuff. Supposedly the Actives wouldn’t be affected by the drug because they are blank slates and have no natural impulses; their only impulses would be the ones that are imprinted for them. Or something like that.

Ms. Dewitt assigns all of the Actives to the quarantine duty except Echo, who is on another assignment. Ms. Dewitt says that Echo can sit this one out (there’s clearly some unusual connection between Echo and Dewitt because Dewitt seems to value Echo more than any other operative). But while she’s out on her engagement-a romantic one-Echo sees a news report about all the pandemonium at the university and pieces of memory start to fire around in her head. She is suddenly consumed by the desire to save “him,” though we have no idea who that person is, and neither does she. It’s an interesting dynamic to have Echo get involved in an engagement not because she was assigned to it but through her own volition-a faculty she is not supposed to have as an Active.

When Echo arrives at the school, she is intercepted by all of the Actives working there, including Victor and Sierra. They assume Echo is just another student who has been affected by the drug. They try to drug her with a sedative but Echo escapes with one of the grad student labbies from the opening. They both want to break into the Rossum building lab, and supposedly for the same reason of finding evidence to use against Rossum. Langton intercepts them, but it becomes clear that he has been infected by the drug as well and so he doesn’t stop them.

Back at the Dollhouse, Millie-Agent Ballard’s neighbor who we learned last week was also an Active-gets injected with the drug because Topher needs to see how it works so that he can figure out the antidote. But while he’s running the tests, he and Ms. Dewitt start going bananas too-it turns out that the drug is spread by touch. Hmm, something tells me that the Actives and Dominic at the university are going to malfunction.

Even though he’s temporarily cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, Topher figures out that the drug affects Actives and manifests as “memory glitches,” which is what Echo has already been experiencing since the show started. He also learns that the drug wears off eventually, which means that the kid who killed himself was overdosed on purpose by somebody; he was murdered. The story takes a few more turns from there, but the key thing we learn is that the person Echo wanted to save was the boyfriend she had back when she was Caroline. The two of them broke into the Rossum building after they graduated because they heard they were testing on animals. Once inside they find that they were also testing on human brains and fetuses. They were caught and the boyfriend was shot. And somehow Echo/Caroline was rounded up and eventually came to be at the Dollhouse. This makes sense because like aforementioned, the Dollhouse and Rossum are closely tied together. But exactly what their connection is and how exactly and why Echo/Caroline came to be at the Dollhouse is still unanswered. It does seem apparent thought that she didn’t just volunteer but was forced into it through circumstances, a notion that is potentially far more satisfying than if she had just volunteered all gung-ho.

There are a lot of questions still left unanswered, but that’s what good tv does; it parcels out fascinating bits and puzzle pieces to the viewers but keeps just enough back so that they have to tune in again to see what happens. This show has grown on me considerably, and I think it deserves to stick around for a while.

Season 1, Episode 7: Echoes (originally aired March 27, 2009)

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