Dollhouse: As The End Grows Near

There may actually have been a benefit to the Dollhouse showrunners knowing that they only had a short time before Fox was pulling their plug: it forced them to cut out any filler and fat, focus in, pull out all the stops and end the show as strongly as they could. That’s exactly what they did, because ever since the show came back this month in weekly two-hour increments, the episodes have been outstanding. This latest block was the best Dollhouse has ever been, with tons of kickass action better than most of what I’m seeing at the multiplex these days, emotional payoffs, great, twisty writing and character revelations all drenched with true originality. Wow. I never thought I’d be raving about the show as much as I am now. If they had done this from the beginning we would have been looking at the next great network tv cultural powerhouse.

The first hour, “Stop Loss,” is centered on Victor. He completes his contract with the Dollhouse and Boyd has his memory restored and grants his freedom. To Victor, it seems like only five seconds have passed instead of five years. He asks if the war is over. Boyd tells him no. So now we know that Victor was a soldier. Interesting. They cook up a cover story to explain where he has been for five years, then Victor hits the streets. All this plays like a mini-narrative in itself, a drama chronicling this guy’s attempt to readjust to society. It’s almost as if he just came back from Iraq or Afghanistan instead of the Dollhouse. Hell, he may not know it, but the Dollhouse was probably a more traumatic experience than even the war was. Is Victor really free? Can he start a good life? Maybe he could have, but we don’t have time to find out. On his first night out, these scary ninja guys break into his apartment. Victor puts up a good fight, but they take him down and into their evil black van (is there any other kind?).

Back at headquarters, Echo realizes Ballard’s body is missing and storms into Adelle’s office and lays the smackdown on her. Adelle assures Echo that Ballard is being taken care of. “I’m smarter, tougher and a whole lot scarier than you could ever hope to be” Echo snarls at Adelle. “Now you can be on my side or you can be on Rossum’s, but the time for playing both is over.” Eliza Dushku is awesome in this scene. We’re talking almost a Clint Eastwood or Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight level of badassery here.

So who kidnapped Victor? His old Army buddies, and they want him to join their new program…you know, because all the cool kids are doing it. Victor agrees, having given in to the peer pressure. Then they implant something in his neck. Never a good sign.

Boyd and Echo team up to figure out what happened to Victor. Turns out his Army buddies work for a classified program called Mind Whisper (really? that’s the best they could do?). Mind Whisper is another division of Rossum—basically their version of Blackwater. They use the Dollhouse architecture to link the brains of all these soldiers so that they think not as individuals but as one tactical unit. They can always hear each other’s thoughts and they’re all the same. Creepy. One step removed from Terminators basically. And now Victor is one of them. Or he will be very soon, unless Echo can get to him and snap him out of it.

Toward that end, they wake up Sierra, figuring she is the only person that might be able to break through to him and bring him back. From here, get ready for some awesome fight scenes and genuine suspense. Oh yeah, and it’s not hard for everyone to do this under Adelle’s nose because she has been hitting the sauce rather severely and is passed out. You’d think she’d be happier, being that she reclaimed her office from Harding.

The second hour picks up with Echo, Victor and Sierra in a world of trouble. They escaped the Mind Whisper joint, but Dewitt came out of her drunken stupor and took them all up to the Attic, under much protest from Boyd. If you’ll recall, the Attic is where defective dolls go. They check in and they don’t check out. No one really knows exactly what goes on up there…except that the rumor is that it is supposed to be worse than hell, and everyone lives their worst nightmare over and over again in a continuous loop. So this gives the show a chance to do all kinds of bizarre and macabre dreamscape imagery and twists and reveals, and boy does everyone deliver.

Laurence Dominic plays a major role in all of this. He was a supposed Dollhouse employee who was revealed to be an NSA (or was it the CIA?) mole last season. He kept trying to kill Echo during his time at the Dollhouse, but now we know why: he was trying to take the Dollhouse down and back then, Echo was part of the enemy. Anyway, I never thought we’d see him again, but he comes back. He has been stuck in the Attic all this time, still alive, going from nightmare to nightmare. So he gets to be the mentor figure in all of this, showing Echo the ropes and trying to help her be the first person to make it back.

Victor and Sierra are of course up in the Dollhouse as well, each dealing with their own nightmares. The team has to unite and realize that it’s all a dream, it’s all unreal. Once they know this, maybe they can find a way out. The visuals in this episode are pretty fantastic, and I was surprised by the grisly nature of some shots that Fox let them air. Great action and more than a little scary. There’s also a great twist at the very end of the episode I did not see coming. I’m actually excited to see the remaining Dollhouse episodes. If they can be half as good as these two were, it will be a really strong ending to a show that, while always intriguing, didn’t find its footing until too late.

Season 2, Episode 9 & 10: Stop Loss & The Attic (originally aired December 18, 2009)

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Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro