Dollhouse: A Spy in the House of Love

Team Dollhouse takes a page out of the Kurosawa playbook this week, presenting a Rashomon-style episode that cuts back and forth between the same series of events as seen by different people, providing revelations along the way.

We first see Echo returning from her latest engagement, decked out in full dominatrix gear, complete with whip. Yowza! Victor is on his way to one of his engagements with Ms. Lonely Hearts. Meanwhile, Ms. Dewitt tells Dominic that she has been summoned by her superiors and will be gone for two days, leaving him in charge. Things are running well enough, even with stiff-ass Dominic, until Topher finds a chip under the programming/wiping voodoo chair. This chip enables someone to add additional parameters to any imprint without Topher knowing about it. He traced it to the NSA and he initially suspects Langton. He tells Langton that he will give him a chance to run before he calls DeWitt, but Langton tells him he isn’t the spy and instructs him to call Dewitt immediately.

So now, everyone at headquarters is going on a good old-fashioned spy hunt. Topher tells Dominic about the chip and Dominic goes ballistic, blaming it on Topher. Topher can’t get a hold of DeWitt because she’s not answering her phone…because, as we learn, she is the Ms. Lonely Hearts that Victor has been visiting. That’s right, through some misdirection, Dewitt has been arranging this for a while. The boss is dipping into her own well! It’s an interesting revelation about her and shows that she has a human side and some emotional problems. Dewitt has told Victor-imprinted as some Brit named Robert-all about the Dollhouse and her work. There’s even a moment where Victor/Robert tells Dewitt that if he could make his perfect woman, it would be her. She freezes up for a moment, which is telling. It shows that she’s not always comfortable with the Dollhouse…or what if she’s worried that she herself is an Active, imprinted to run the Dollhouse with icy efficiency? Now that would be a twist.

So since Dewitt is off…gallivanting for the weekend, Dominic is running the spy hunt. He has Sierra imprinted as a former NSA spy that now does freelance gigs, and hires her to break into the NSA and smuggle out a file that Topher has traced back to them through the chip. The file contains the identity of the spy. We get a pretty entertaining covert operation a la Mission:Impossible, using wigs and keycards and chases and gunplay and helicopters. Always a good mix.

At the same time, Echo comes to Topher and tells him to program her so that she can help him. She’s still almost self-aware, so I guess last week’s wish-fulfillment experiment didn’t really work on her. So Topher imprints her to be an interrogation and body language specialist, just like Tim Roth on Fox’s other underwatched, underrated show Lie To Me. As Sierra does her secret agent thing, Echo starts interviewing every employee at the Dollhouse. She starts with Topher, which makes him uncomfortable. She seems to be making progress when Dominic gets a call that Sierra made it out with the file. The file implicates Ivy, Topher’s assistant. But Echo doesn’t agree.

I don’t want to ruin the twist-and it is a hell of a twist-but suffice it to say that it is evocative of the twist in No Way Out, the classic Roger Donaldson thriller with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. It also leads to a first-rate fight scene, which is quickly becoming one of the show’s signatures. Some of the best fight scenes I’ve ever seen on television I’ve seen on Dollhouse. The aftermath of the spy hunt is also handled well, and it means a big promotion for Boyd.

We also get a little more development with Ballard, who has started to go a little nuts, and Millie. This is probably the best episode yet of Dollhouse, and the characters keep getting more interesting. That’s a shame, because it seems the show is all but dead in the water ratings-wise.

Season 1, Episode 9: A Spy in the House of Love (originally aired April 10, 2009)

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Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro