Dollhouse: Could You Run That By Me Again?
January 17, 2010 by Cameron Cubbison
Filed under Television
It’s a good thing I was able to record the penultimate Dollhouse episode because there were several scenes I rewound multiple times, trying to get my head around them. In the end I didn’t, but at least I made the effort. This episode focuses on Echo leading the resistance to the Rossum headquarters in Tucson so they can blow up the joint like Echo tried to do two years ago when she was still Caroline.
Last week ended with the (SPOILER ALERT) huge revelation that Boyd—Echo’s original protector and, as it seemed, the best and most noble guy working at the Dollhouse—is actually the secret creator of the Dollhouse and has been playing everyone since before the show even began. It turns out that he was behind Caroline becoming a doll and always saw huge potential in her. But it wasn’t her mind he wanted but actually her body, specifically her spinal cord fluid. Why? All I’ll tell you is that it has to do with creating a vaccine that is vital to his master secret evil plan. And that really is the perfect phrase for it. Boyd turned out to be such an over-the-top maniacal villain that I kept waiting for him to start stroking a white cat.
Boyd pretends to be aligned with DeWitt and Ballard, who wait in a parking lot as Boyd drives up with Topher and Echo. The crisis? Echo is all messed up and sounding crazy, which naturally puts a crimp in their plans because Echo/Caroline was their key to getting into Rossum. The reason Echo is all messed up is actually because Boyd drugged her. Victor and Sierra become privy to this via surveillance footage back at the L.A. Dollhouse. They try to catch up to everyone else to warn them about Boyd, but they don’t get there in time to stop him. But soon Echo awakens from her stupor and knows the truth about him. She’s back in the game. Unfortunately, she has to battle former Dollhouse doctor turned sleeper assassin Claire…who has also been imprinted with the other creator of Rossum, Clyde…who is still in the Attic as demonstrated weeks ago. Still with me? No? Don’t worry about it. You’re not alone.
The other cornerstone of Boyd’s secret evil plan involves mass production of the device Topher unwittingly developed that has the capacity to turn anyone on the planet into a doll with just the touch of a button. For reasons I couldn’t quite understand (besides the fact that he just may be plain bonkers), Boyd wants to use it on everyone on the planet but save a few people from becoming a doll by using Echo’s spinal fluid. Um, yeah. So we get the usual gun fights and a pretty epic cat fight between Claire and Echo, then a little irony, more automatic weapons, then a huge explosion. Did the team succeed in destroying Rossum and saving the world? It seemed like they did for a moment, but then the end of the episode teases ten years into the future and shows America in ruins and Ballard and Echo still fighting. We get to see what that is in two weeks.
The Boyd twist I never saw coming. They shocked the hell out of me. In fact, the twist was too good. The twist was so wild that I don’t believe it. Maybe Harry Lennix was just too good of an actor and faked decency and humanity and warmth and a paternal care for Echo to well over the course of the whole show that it’s just impossible to imagine that he was in fact the most evil person in the world the whole time. That’s what Joss Whedon and his team want us to believe. Maybe if I let it sink in a little more I’ll get on board, but right now I just feel hoodwinked. Hopefully the final episode will bring the requisite closure and Dollhouse can sail off into the sunset gracefully.
Season 2, Episode 12: The Hollow Men (originally aired January 15, 2010)
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It’s really not as complicated as you’re making it out; in fact, Boyd’s plan wasn’t really a “super seekrit eeeevil scheme.” Boyd and Clyde helped to create the imprinting technology. Boyd instantly saw the ramifications of this and knew, courtesy of human nature, that the tech, once invented, couldn’t be erased. He wanted to be in control of it before someone else was. When he stumbled onto Caroline, he figured out that he and whoever he selected could be protected from the wipes, so he sent her to the LA Dollhouse where she was pushed and forced into resisting the wipes long enough to create Echo, the conglomerate being, thus creating the cure.
And the whole Claire/Whiskey/Clyde thing was fairly simple, too: in “Getting Closer,” Dominic escaped from the Attic long enough to tell them all that the original Clyde is dead (maybe you missed it). Clyde 2.0, as he’s referred to, had uploaded himself into Whiskey’s body, along with several others.