Dollhouse

Pre-Season One Flashback

Topher sends Echo out on an assignment and Adelle tells him about a potential replacement for Sierra. She sends him to the psychiatric hospital where Priya is going bat-crap crazy. She screams that the men have been drugging her with poison, torturing her and are liars. When Topher offers help, she accepts through hysterical tears.

We then see people bringing Sierra into the Imprint Room, where she is wiped for the first time.

Present Day Part Deux

Topher completes the mission and sends the newly imprinted Sierra on her way, while Adelle drinks herself into a stupor and Victor still sits in wait. Adelle comes to see if the job is done and after saying that Topher didn’t have a choice, he says to himself that he didn’t while holding Priya’s original cartridge in his hand.

Back at Nolen’s, Sierra arrives and Nolan is like a sick bastard opening his Christmas gifts that all feature snuff porn. But his happy stance is drained when he realizes that the woman sitting on top of him is not some imprint, but Priya herself.

And she’s beyond pissed.

Back at the Dollhouse, Boyd confronts Echo who feigns ignorance until Boyd reads right through her. He explains to Echo thatshe is starting trouble and that people are not going to take lightly to that. She tells him simply that she doesn’t car and that there is something bad heading their way, a storm of sorts, she “wants everyone to survive it.” Boyd tells her to watch herself, before she brings trouble upon herself.

While Priya gives Nolan the third degree on how she knows everything he did before she entered the Dollhouse and while she was a Doll, Nolan still thinks that he achieved getting Priya to love him by changing her. She tells him that was far from the case and that she met someone else who she really loves and she is crazy about him and it sure as hell isn’t Nolan. He gets pissed and starts slapping her around and beating her, something that a loving man wouldn’t do. He then picks up a knife and tries to stab Priya with it, but she kicks his ass then kills the bastard by stabbing him repeatedly in the chest. Back at the Dollhouse, Topher gets a call from Priya and he runs to help her. When Topher reaches the place, he finds Priya a bloody mess. Boyd shows up a few seconds later and takes care of the body in a way that would make Winston Wolf proud. While cleaning up the mess, Topher repeats the line from the beginning of the episode and Boyd explains that Topher had his first moral dilemma and it went wrong. When Topher declares that Priya doesn’t belong in the Dollhouse, Boyd counters that she does and that it’s time for the lies to start. After calling someone named The Goose to help him make someone disappear, Boyd lies to Adelle that Nolan skipped the country and left “Sierra” at the house, which means that Sierra is back in the Dollhouse. When asked if he will look into the matter any further, Boyd declares it would time-worthy. Boy, if that secret is ever exposed, heads are going to roll like a batch of Critters on a food march.

Priya wonders why Topher woke her up and explained all of the things that happened to during her Doll status only for her to kill a man. Basically, she “woke up from one nightmare into another one”. Topher says that he didn’t know and that he was tricked. She sees Victor (who is still sitting in the same spot, waiting) and she realizes that he was the one she loves and asks Topher if that is real. He says yes, and that Victor loves her back.

Priya makes one request: when Topher “wakes” her up again, she doesn’t want to remember anything that happened and wants to be reset to the way she was a year ago. She then asks Topher if he can keep their secret. He says that he can, but he doesn’t know if he could live with it. She says she wouldn’t be able to live with it either, but now she doesn’t have to.

Conclusion

Topher escorts the newly wiped Sierra back to Victor and he takes her hand and they walk off. In the Dollhouse sleeping area, Echo sits down to read and in place of her leaf bookmark is a note that says “For the Storm” wrapped around a key card. Echo continues reading, watching over Sierra and Victor as they sleep in a pod together.

Now we have to wait a frakking month to see what happens next…

FRAK!!!!

What We Now Know…

- So Echo is planning for what’s to come, i.e. the events of “Epitaph One”. I think it’s safe to say that Echo is slightly “playing” her Doll role and is aware of everything going on, but is doing her damnedest to not draw attention to herself. Plus, does this mean that Victor is starting to remember bits and pieces like Echo was at the beginning of Season One? It would make sense that Sierra is not remembering on her own yet since she is a fresh Doll, but how long has Echo and Victor been in the Dollhouse and have anyone really successfully completed their entire contract without a hitch?

- The argument about morals and ethics SCREAMED at us last night, but it did it in a way that was exciting, engaging, and entertaining, while keeping the preaching at a minimum. Maurissa Tanchareon and Jed Whedon delivered a great script that should win over naysayers and people who have bowed out of Dollhouse too early in it’s run. The series’ ongoing themes of morals, the human condition, and redemption, all which are also ongoing theme’s of Joss Whedon, was at top form tonight and I applaud and thank them for bestowing their offering to the public.

So see you guys in December! I hope…