Dollhouse: Jane Does, Unmotivated Love Affairs and The Return of the Crazy Killer Guy

Fox burned off another two-hour chunk of Dollhouse last night that pushed the show several months into the future and made some pretty drastic character decisions. None of it really blew my skirt up though.

As you’ll recall, last week ended with, among other things, Echo having her tracking chip cut out of her neck and going AWOL from the Dollhouse. This leaves Adelle foaming at the mouth to find her. Adelle is more than a little upset that she is no longer running the Dollhouse. Harding stepped in to take the throne after the events of last week. So where is Echo? Well Echo is filthy and alone and dumpster diving for food. This probably has something to do with the fact that all of her 36 personalities are cycling in and out of her, so she essentially has the mentality of an amnesiac child. She finds a starving Hispanic illegal and tries to steal food from a grocery store for the two of them, but the donut-munching moron cops arrive and make trouble because they have nothing better to do. One of Echo’s ninja personalities comes floating to the surface and she makes mince meat out of the cops. She gets away, but the Hispanic illegal gets arrested.

We then cut to three months later, and Echo is working as a nurse named Jane (Jane Doe, get it?!) at a hospital. How she pulled that off with no identification or social security number or real working memory we are not told. She goes out on call to the local jail to do nursing runs and visits the Hispanic illegal she (indirectly) got arrested. Inexplicably, the cop she beat up doesn’t recognize her. Yeah, I mean after all, it has been three whole months. Anyway, she tells the woman in Spanish that she will help her and hands her a vial of pills, promising to come back the next day.

Echo then goes to her apartment…but an intruder grabs her from behind! She takes him down! It turns out to be Ballard! It turns out that they were just running a drill and that Ballard has been staying with her for an undisclosed period of time! How any of this came to be is also glossed over, but oh well. Echo’s agenda is to get the woman—named Gallena—out of jail, then return to the Dollhouse with Ballard. It’s a little unclear whether Echo is back and wants to return to the Dollhouse with Ballard to help destroy it, like they had teamed up to do at the beginning of the season, or if she wants to go back to the Dollhouse because she is back to the Doll state and wants a treatment and wants to get back to work. But Ballard calls Boyd and tells him that he is bringing Echo in soon. He then tells Echo that Boyd is “ready when we are.” That to me seems to imply that the three of them are in collusion to take down the Dollhouse. I always wondered why Boyd came to work there. Maybe he and Ballard have had similar agendas the whole time.

Back at the Dollhouse, we see that Topher has designed some new gizmo that’s a remote wipe gun so that you only need to be within fifty yards of a doll to render them a blank slate. Also, Harding plans to take the best Dolls and transfer them to a branch in Dubai. Boyd implores Adelle to take back control of the Dollhouse. Maybe that has something to do with the (apparent) plan that he, Ballard and Echo have formed. Plus, Topher tells Adelle his belief that Harding and the other Dollhouse branches are trying to develop a dangerous device capable of imprinting anyone “without any Active architecture in place.” In other words, they could make anyone a doll. Topher has the blueprints for such a device and tells Adelle that Harding can’t know. Except Adelle takes the blueprints right to Harding, that evil bitch. I guess she’s trying to get suck-up points. The episode ends with Echo and Ballard making it back to the Dollhouse.

The next one begins with…Alpha! He’s back, and he’s out to kill all of Echo’s previous romantic engagements. Echo meanwhile, is getting the Guantánamo Bay treatment. Adelle has her in a straitjacket and is running all kinds of painful tests, which also exacerbate the chronic headaches she has been suffering from as of late. Ballard starts whining about it but Boyd tells him to man up because Adelle is only doing it to get a reaction out of Ballard. After Adelle leaves, Topher comes in and marvels that he has never seen brain scans like the ones Echo is producing. Boyd brings him into the fold and explains that Echo is not a blank slate and has in fact been retaining pieces of all the personalities she has worn over the years, probably as a result of her first encounter with Alpha. Echo can now more or less control those personas.

Echo gets sent out on a romantic engagement with a former customer. She shows up to find him already dead and ceremoniously displayed. There’s a note from Alpha. Adelle thinks that Alpha is working with Echo. She knows that someone was with Echo during her three month absence, but she doesn’t know that that someone was Ballard. She locks Echo up.

Paul and Boyd track down Joel Myner, the last living former client of Echo’s. They bring him back to the Dollhouse for protection, using Echo to convince him, thereby disregarding Adelle’s orders to keep Echo locked up. Adelle goes back to her office to find Alpha waiting for her. Yipes. Alan Tudyk is still really creepy as Alpha by the way, although the writers maybe could have cut back on the amount of psychopathic one-liners he has. Literally everything that comes out of his mouth is a joke. He shows Adelle photographs of Echo and Ballard together over her three-month absence. He then pushes some magic button that utters a high shriek and turns all the Dolls against their handlers. Cue an epic (but pointless) fight scene.

A pretty big event happens with Ballard, courtesy of Alpha. This brings about the knowledge that Echo is madly in love with Ballard. Um, when exactly did this happen? Those must have been three productive months. We get some pretty emotional cliffhanger(s), and overall Dollhouse has been stronger than it has ever been. It’s just hard to get invested in a show that has already been cancelled.

Season 2, Episode 7 & 8: Meet Jane Doe & A Love Supreme (originally aired December 11, 2009)

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Fridays at 9/8C on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro