"Dollhouse" Review: "The Public Eye" and "The Left Hand"
WARNING: This is a critique and recapitulation of the two Dollhouse episodes aired on FOX on Friday, December 4th, 2009. It contains plot details and spoilers throughout.
When coming up for air from the thrill-ride that was last night's two-part Dollhouse run (literally; if the episodes had been aired in their original intended form they were two parts of a continuous episode), I had two main questions running through my mind:
1) What just happened? The entire ant farm that is the Dollhouse universe has just been shaken...
and
2) Why didn't they start the first two seasons of Dollhouse with episodes like this?
Now, it's important to keep this in perspective. I am a fan of the show Dollhouse, but I am not too completely attached as to say that the show never had weak points. That was actually the worst part of Dollhouse: when they failed, they failed miserably (case in point, season one episode three “Stage Fright”). However, when Dollhouse succeeds, it fires on all cylinders and achieves what all good media should strive for - it provides pure escapism, allowing you to live and breathe in the world of its characters rather than as a detached observer.
Dollhouse is at its best when it is one of three things: first, mythology-based. In it's two seasons, Dollhouse has had eight standalone episodes. Of these, there were perhaps three episodes that were actually memorable. While Dollhouse is usually interesting and at the least exciting, it's hard to be emotionally invested in a show when you feel as a viewer that you could skip one or two episodes and still be able to dive right back in later and not have missed anything.
Thankfully the writers of season two have learned (for the most part) from season one's mistakes. The season two opener, “Vows,” was a self-contained episode but it laid the groundwork for the rest of the season. “Instinct” and “Belle Chose” were both shining examples of when a standalone episode could succeed - but they still failed to attract that same feeling. “Belonging” was a stunning triumph of Dollhouse mythology and pathos. “The Public Eye” kept to that same path, and wasted no time in jumping directly into the show's weighty themes and digging in to stay.
Secondly, Dollhouse shone when it was shrouded in mystery: when the Rossum Corporation, the shadowy corporation behind the Dollhouse's technology, was shone, or when the characters were racing against time to defeat the various forces struggling to take them down (Alpha, the FBI, the NSA) in the first season. Now that we are again confronting the disturbing subject matter of the Rossum Corporation touched upon in “Echoes” and then masterfully unfurled in “Epitaph One,” “The Public Eye” smashes that slam dunk as well.
Finally, Dollhouse works best when it reaches new heights of disturbing subject matter. Dollhouse is not television for the absent-minded or for the faint of heart. The central themes of Dollhouse are essentially philosophical as well as science-fiction: what are the moral and ethical questions raised by the ability of technology to change or alter our memory? If technology could erase a personality, could it achieve the erasure of a “soul,” or the central animus that makes us individuals? If these questions can be raised, who should be entrusted with this technology? If people indeed have a deep-seated psychological need for wish/dream-fulfillment, can the actions of the Dollhouse be argued to be, in a sense, morally right?
Witness the grace with which “Belonging” handled this-it showed every benefit of the Dollhouse's technology, as well as each and every one of the consequences of that technology, to a heartbreaking and horrifying degree. “The Public Eye” and “The Left Hand” pulled no punches in these arenas, either, as was made clear from the beginning.
First, we catch back up with Senator Daniel Perrin, who has made it his life's mission (apparently) to bring the Rossum Corporation (and through it, the Dollhouse) down. An unknown individual left him a bin of information on his stoop earlier in the season, and this bin apparently gave him information on Madeline Costley. The rest of us know her better as November, the Active who played “Mellie” in the first season in order to keep an eye on Paul Ballard. That information included photographic evidence of when November was used as a sleeper agent to kill ex-handler Joe Hearn.
When Madeline is confronted with this, Perrin finds it all too easy to convince her to go public with her knowledge of the Dollhouse and how it recruited her. Watching all of this in their computer room are Ballard, Boyd Langton, Topher Brink, and Adelle DeWitt. While they try to find as much information on Perrin as possible, Topher makes one of his more interesting statements of the episodes: “He is such a demagogue. He wants to put a freeze on medical research and send us right back to leeches.” This is, in a way, true - now that Topher is struggling with a growing sense of empathy and morals, he is trying to focus on the benefits of the Dollhouse technology.
Echo, now more self-directed than ever, directs their attention to Perrin's wife, who “isn't right.” It becomes immediately apparent that Perrin's wife is a doll. When DeWitt has another tumultuous meeting with Harding, the cold son-of-a-bitch Rossum executive who forced her into sending Priya Tsetsang (Sierra) on a permanent engagement with her rapist. Since DeWitt outsmarted him in that situation, he has now apparently taken it upon himself to end her and her Dollhouse permanently, for that is Rossum's endgame with Senator Perrin:
They gave him the Dollhouse through Madeline. He would then expose the Dollhouse as an entity completely separate from the Rossum conglomerate. Rossum would then be honored by the United States Senate as being able to essentially make their own rules when it comes to neuroscience. And with half of the senate in their pockets thanks to outlets like the Dollhouse, Rossum would then be able to do exactly as it pleased in researching the brain - and while they were at it, allow Perrin to take down the Los Angeles Dollhouse, giving the public an enemy to defeat.
This is obviously a chilling look at the beginning of the dark and twisted road to the events of Epitaph One. For those of you who haven't watched that episode, the basic breakdown is that Rossum used this newfound freedom to perfect remote-wiping and also mass-wiping, sending that signal through any and all technology that they could. They took over America first. There is a small group of freedom fighters, calling themselves the Actuals, who have banded together to fight back against Rossum. This takes place in 2019, less than ten years after the events of The Public Eye and The Left Hand.
Adelle DeWitt has played around with morality through the episodes of Dollhouse, but her stance becomes crystallized after the events of “Belonging.” DeWitt has always believed very strongly in all the ways that the Dollhouse's technology could help individuals in need of wish-fulfillment. She's also displayed a very deep mother-hen attitude toward the Actives under her charge; even visiting them after their contracts are finished and ensuring that they are happy after the fact. As she's come to realize that her viewpoint is mocked by Rossum, and that the corporation she's served was perfectly willing to allow Sierra to be permanently sold into sexual slavery by the man who sold her to the Dollhouse to begin with, DeWitt has finally been forced to make a stance: “We're going to stop them,” she vows coldly to Topher and Langton.
Therefore, Echo is imprinted as “Bree,” a hooker who drugs Senator Perrin and videotapes them naked in his bed, telling him to “back off.” Perrin is not so easily manipulated, however; as Langton and Ballard have pointed out, he has a very strong moral code and he easily detects that Bree is actually a doll. He resolves to bring her to his wife and a protesting Bree follows, wondering if he's crazy. Meanwhile, Madeline is viewing pictures of herself as “Mellie,” sleeping with Paul and also killing Joe Hearn. The guilt and disgust is eating at her and Cindy Perrin (Perrin's wife) urges her to use that to stop the Dollhouse.
Paul Ballard is going through his own crisis, as well, as he volunteers to free Madeline from the Perrins so that Rossum can't use her as a tool once again. Topher has used what was left of Alpha's remote-wiping technology to create a Disruptor (“Is that too Star Trek? You know, TOS? I'm so alone,” he laments) that is essentially an Active-stun grenade. Ballard sneaks into the safehouse where Madeline is being kept and uses it, even knowing that it will still knock Madeline out due to her brain having once been tampered with by the Dollhouse. “No one ever leaves this place, do they?” he asks rhetorically. Even knowing that he is steps away from helping Echo and bringing down the Dollhouse, which is what he's been trying to do for years, it's clearly becoming harder and harder for him to compromise his morals in order to achieve his goal.
Everyone - including the unsuspecting audience - gets a shock when the disruptor works...but Cindy Perrin is not an Active, she is a handler - Senator Perrin's handler. Bree, struggling with Echo's memories, panics and grabs Perrin and drives away. Cindy quickly gets Madeline out of the house and has Ballard tied to a chair while she tries to figure out what's going on. Meanwhile, Bree and Perrin are both panicking as more and more of their programming becomes apparent, leaving Perrin on the side of the road having a life-crisis.
The viewers have to give this one to the writers. Last season, the “he/she's a doll” reveal was used three times, and it wasn't used well - revealing Ballard's contact “Lubov” to be Victor was handled well, but nearly everyone knew that “Mellie” was actually a doll, and that Alpha was pretending to be Stephen Kepler. This season, however, that was all thrown out the window - the reveal of Senator Perrin was handled masterfully and was as shocking as it was intended to be.
But how can he be a doll? Topher is just as confused as DeWitt, but he does some more digging. It turns out that Perrin isn't necessarily a doll, per se - he is actually the degenerate and spoiled black sheep of the politically powerful Perrin family. Rossum abducted him and programmed him to be ambitious and full of moral rectitude, then planted Cindy in his life in order to keep him on track. His entire investigation into Rossum was manipulated from day one. Is this even possible? According to Topher, yes. This, of course, raises a wealth of moral issues - if one or two small things can be changed in one's mind, how can one ever know what's real?
When Cindy catches up with a troubled Echo/Bree and a horrified Perrin, she holds off Echo/Bree with her gun and reminds Perrin that she is his wife, saying their cute little catchphrase: “Remind me why I love you,” she says. “I'm your white knight,” Perrin says. “And I'm your damsel,” Cindy replies, which triggers a newly awakened memory in Perrin of her saying that while he was bathed in purple light: the same procedure that imprints an Active to trust their handler, revealing that she has been controlling him since the start of their “marriage.”
Echo/Bree tries to use this to her advantage by going after Cindy, but Cindy pistol-whips her to the ground. This is apparently the final straw, and Echo truly wakes up - or does she? She makes short work of Cindy, despite Perrin's protests that he still loves her. Echo takes control of the situation and leaves Cindy unconscious on the street (while also getting the best line of the episode as she says, “Lady, you just woke up a lot of people, and they all think you're a bitch!”) as she and Perrin make their getaway. Here, now, Echo is finally fulfilling all of the issues that arose in the first half of the first season.
In the first five or six episodes of Dollhouse, audiences complained that it was hard to care emotionally for the just-waking Echo, who was still very much a doll in between engagements. While the second season has pussyfooted around with the fact that Echo is aware that she is waking up - especially in “Belonging,” where it is revealed that Echo not only has taught herself to read chapter books but also to lie for her own protection, and a chilling portrayal of the notes that she has scratched into the glass of her sleeping pod to remind herself of her surroundings - but now we know that Alpha succeeded in making Echo truly wake up.
Echo tries to take Perrin to the LA Dollhouse, and she and Perrin have a conversation about how she is, indeed, waking up, and their conversation eerily recalls the profound conversation between Topher and Whiskey/Saunders, as she reveals to Perrin that she is “afraid of Caroline.” Echo has finally become a true person, not just a conglomerate of personalities and a blank slate. She knows that if she finds Caroline and re-imprints herself with her old personality, she, Echo, will essentially die.
Cindy breaks in here before anything else can be said and uses the disruptor to knock them both out, taking them to the Washington, D.C. Dollhouse, where she is from. As Madeline is being escorted to the airport, she sees Ballard (who finally had a decent fight scene and broke free earlier), and confronts him about Mellie. He tells her how he set her free, and she uses that to convince him to allow her to make a mistake, if he really has freed her. Ballard ignores a phone call from Langton and watches her walk away, self-loathing on his face (note - this is also the last we see of Ballard for the rest of the night). DeWitt and Topher travel to DC to retrieve Echo and try to further prevent Rossum's plans for Perrin.
Here, though, is where we finally meet Bennett Halverson (played masterfully by the ever-wonderful Summer Glau), the DC Dollhouse's genius programmer. Halverson is a creepy and weird character who has a dead arm in a black glove in a sling, and she is fully aware of how discomfiting she is and uses that to control her office with an iron fist. The gloves (so to say) come off, however, when Echo is brought in. She puts Perrin to the side, and takes Echo alone into her room.
“You promised you'd come back to me, Caroline,” she says, and then proceeds to torture her.
End The Public Eye, begin The Left Hand
Continuing where “The Public Eye” left off, Halverson continues to torture Echo, without explaining why. She maintains that the “why” will hurt Echo much more than the what, as she continues to amplify the power on her torture device. Said device won't even allow Echo to pass out from the pain. While we're left mystified as to the whys ourselves, the show turns its attention to DeWitt and Topher, who have arrived at the DC Dollhouse to meet Stewart Lipman (played wonderfully by Ray Wise).
As Topher heads down to meet Halverson (where DeWitt has him attempting to steal Perrin's brain-scan to send back to the LA Dollhouse), DeWitt squares off with Lipman, who proceeds to inform her that she's (big shock) firmly on Harding's shit list and unlikely to get Echo back should Lipman not want her back. Apparently the fact that Echo overcame her “hooker” programming and succeeded in knocking out a handler and nearly getting away with a confused Perrin in tow hasn't escaped Lipman's notice.
DeWitt then puts the moves on Lipman, ending with sticking her hand down his pants and putting the squeeze on him. Olivia Williams continues to delight as DeWitt, switching from compassionate and seductive to the goddess of vengeance as she says “I will send someone to cut these off, and you will die, slowly, and painfully.” Naturally, Lipman concedes to call Halverson and give Echo back.
However, if we thought that any of the actors were brilliant thus far, that's because we hadn't yet seen Enver Gjokaj. I've said it before and I say it again, I greatly respect Eliza Dushku as a character actress. She doesn't quite have the ability switch in and out of the different imprints, but her evolution as Echo has been informative and believable. The actor who's shown that he can truly pull off the role of an Active is Enver Gjokaj as Victor. He gave an unbelievable performance last night as Topher - apparently Topher imprinted Victor as himself so he'd have someone else at the Dollhouse to receive Perrin's brain-scan.
Now, last season we saw Victor imprinted as Lawrence Dominic (played by Reed Diamond) after said character was sent to the Attic (more on that later). Gjokaj pulled off Reed Diamond to a chillingly perfect T, and that was once again in evidence tonight. His portrayal as Fran Kranz's Topher was so accurate that it was actually weird to watch. While it was funny to watch the two of them interact, ultimately his portrayal allowed a sort of unsettling feeling to set in - it's perhaps one of the first times that an imprint feels like a true personality.
In any case, Topher meets Bennett Halverson, who it's clear has an outrageous geek-crush on Topher. There's some very amusing awkwardness between the two, who are both attracted to each other and caught off-guard because of it. In “Epitaph One” and also in the Dollhouse prologue, so to speak, called “Dollplay” that you could play during the first season on Fox's website, we found out that Topher helped to develop the imprinting process and also that he cut the time of imprints from a few hours to a few minutes, and even he is cowed by Halverson, which is a terrifying thought.
As they flirt and Topher and Victor secretly converse, Echo and Perrin somehow escape after Halverson planted the memory of what happened to her arm in Echo's head, effectively killing Echo's left arm, a psychosomatic side-effect that Halverson no doubt wanted. While Topher is stealing her computer, she calmly slams her head into a television screen and informs the world that Echo did it to her while she was escaping.
Perrin and Echo share a creepy scene slicing each other's tracking chips out of their necks, while Topher and Bennett continue to flirt while using it as subtext to steal each other's ideas. Bennett gets the idea that she and Topher could twist the disruptor and plug it into the biofeed network in order to target specific Actives, thus allowing Echo and Perrin to be brought in more easily. Bennett then uses this in order to reprogram Perrin as a sleeper-assassin and sends him to kill Echo at his family home.
When Topher finds out, he and Bennett have a confrontation about their morals, and Bennett finally reveals that not only did she know Caroline, she was Caroline's best friend. Caroline apparently left her crushed underneath a massive pylon, which is what happened to her left hand. Now, this is fascinating, because up until now what we knew of Caroline Farrell is that she was a do-gooder college student who wanted to save the world and tried to expose Rossum's animal testing. What happened instead was that she stumbled onto their brain-wiping conspiracy and her boyfriend was shot and killed in front of her. For an unknown amount of time after this, she went on the run, finally being brought before DeWitt and turned into Echo.
Could it be that during that time Caroline changed, that she hardened, became as ruthless as the people pursuing her? Could she actually be somewhat morally compromised? Did she actually leave Bennett to die, as Bennett and her memory implant in Echo's head suggest, or is that another part of Bennett's psychosis? Whedon and Co. have no problem creating morally flawed heroes (witness all five seasons of Angel, which dug into much deeper and weightier moral themes than its parent, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever did), and this is a fascinating angle that I hope is explored deeply in the remaining episodes of the series.
Bennett again makes a telling statement when she states that Caroline has always had a power over people, and that she's using it again even as Echo when Topher accidentally calles Echo his "friend." Her words ring somewhat true. In any case, Topher again has a moral choice to make and he knocks Bennett out, running from the lab with Perrin's information, which he and Victor/Topher use to stop Perrin...but not before he murders one of his security detail and strangles Cindy to death. He and Echo have a vicious fight but she manages to get away after convincing her arm to work again while trying and failing to convince Perrin that he can overcome his programming. Echo escapes.
When Perrin, apparently freed of his programming, resurfaces at the press conference where Madeline is anxiously waiting, the entire Dollhouse staff watches on television as he proceeds to exonerate Rossum entirely, discredit the existence of the Dollhouse, talk of a deeper conspiracy that led to Madeline being incarcerated in a mental hospital where she was programmed to believe in the Dollhouse, and then inform them all that a car bomb had killed his wife.
DeWitt and Topher speculate that Perrin is being groomed to eventually become the fascist President of the United States(!!!!!!) firmly under Rossum's thumb. They are left with the haunting question of whether or not that was the Dollhouse's doing, or whether the ambition they programmed into Perrin overtook him and caused him to try to take Rossum out from the inside, something Ballard has been trying and failing supremely to do for more than a year now. Madeline, heartbreakingly, is led from the conference in tears and straight into Bennett Halverson's hands, where she presumably either dies or again becomes a doll, helpless.
Echo, meanwhile, has vanished into the world at large, and crosses a street when the left hand for walking lights up the crosswalk, free, or so it seems.
Final Thoughts
These were absolutely fantastic, knockout episodes of Dollhouse. They hit all the right notes and explored every facet of the show that made it so fascinating: the political, moral, and disturbing ramifications of the technology, the idea that that technology in the wrong hands will lead to the death of the free world, the fascinating conspiracy-interplay between the two Dollhouses and the Rossum Corporation, the strong ensemble cast as well as Echo's final awakening and the question as to whether or not she (or we) even want Caroline back...
While I've loved Dollhouse, ultimately, I can be glad that it's going to end, because even if it was renewed or had a full 22-episode second season, I can't see the concept being able to extend beyond three, maybe four seasons. The fact that the second half of the first season and all of the second season can be watched as a supremely strong moral and philosophically challenging fantasy will guarantee that the show never overstayed its welcome. I'll be fascinated to see how it all ends.
Coming Next Week
“Meet Jane Doe” - After her entanglements with Perrin and the DC Dollhouse, Echo finds herself in the world at large, struggling to live and to overcome the effects of her multiple personality imprints. Topher discovers the dangers of the Rossum Corporation's technology that could have a devastating impact on the future, and DeWitt and Harding engage in more power struggles.
“A Love Supreme” - When Echo's previous romantic engagements begin to surface as murder victims, the Dollhouse fears that Alpha and his obsession with Echo have returned with a vengeance. DeWitt continues to grow suspicious of Ballard, who seeks allies in Topher and Langton. But nothing can prepare any of them for when the dolls seemingly turn on their handlers and one member of the Dollhouse is left permanently mind-wiped.
When coming up for air from the thrill-ride that was last night's two-part Dollhouse run (literally; if the episodes had been aired in their original intended form they were two parts of a continuous episode), I had two main questions running through my mind:
1) What just happened? The entire ant farm that is the Dollhouse universe has just been shaken...
and
2) Why didn't they start the first two seasons of Dollhouse with episodes like this?
Now, it's important to keep this in perspective. I am a fan of the show Dollhouse, but I am not too completely attached as to say that the show never had weak points. That was actually the worst part of Dollhouse: when they failed, they failed miserably (case in point, season one episode three “Stage Fright”). However, when Dollhouse succeeds, it fires on all cylinders and achieves what all good media should strive for - it provides pure escapism, allowing you to live and breathe in the world of its characters rather than as a detached observer.
Dollhouse is at its best when it is one of three things: first, mythology-based. In it's two seasons, Dollhouse has had eight standalone episodes. Of these, there were perhaps three episodes that were actually memorable. While Dollhouse is usually interesting and at the least exciting, it's hard to be emotionally invested in a show when you feel as a viewer that you could skip one or two episodes and still be able to dive right back in later and not have missed anything.
Thankfully the writers of season two have learned (for the most part) from season one's mistakes. The season two opener, “Vows,” was a self-contained episode but it laid the groundwork for the rest of the season. “Instinct” and “Belle Chose” were both shining examples of when a standalone episode could succeed - but they still failed to attract that same feeling. “Belonging” was a stunning triumph of Dollhouse mythology and pathos. “The Public Eye” kept to that same path, and wasted no time in jumping directly into the show's weighty themes and digging in to stay.
Secondly, Dollhouse shone when it was shrouded in mystery: when the Rossum Corporation, the shadowy corporation behind the Dollhouse's technology, was shone, or when the characters were racing against time to defeat the various forces struggling to take them down (Alpha, the FBI, the NSA) in the first season. Now that we are again confronting the disturbing subject matter of the Rossum Corporation touched upon in “Echoes” and then masterfully unfurled in “Epitaph One,” “The Public Eye” smashes that slam dunk as well.
Finally, Dollhouse works best when it reaches new heights of disturbing subject matter. Dollhouse is not television for the absent-minded or for the faint of heart. The central themes of Dollhouse are essentially philosophical as well as science-fiction: what are the moral and ethical questions raised by the ability of technology to change or alter our memory? If technology could erase a personality, could it achieve the erasure of a “soul,” or the central animus that makes us individuals? If these questions can be raised, who should be entrusted with this technology? If people indeed have a deep-seated psychological need for wish/dream-fulfillment, can the actions of the Dollhouse be argued to be, in a sense, morally right?
Witness the grace with which “Belonging” handled this-it showed every benefit of the Dollhouse's technology, as well as each and every one of the consequences of that technology, to a heartbreaking and horrifying degree. “The Public Eye” and “The Left Hand” pulled no punches in these arenas, either, as was made clear from the beginning.
First, we catch back up with Senator Daniel Perrin, who has made it his life's mission (apparently) to bring the Rossum Corporation (and through it, the Dollhouse) down. An unknown individual left him a bin of information on his stoop earlier in the season, and this bin apparently gave him information on Madeline Costley. The rest of us know her better as November, the Active who played “Mellie” in the first season in order to keep an eye on Paul Ballard. That information included photographic evidence of when November was used as a sleeper agent to kill ex-handler Joe Hearn.
When Madeline is confronted with this, Perrin finds it all too easy to convince her to go public with her knowledge of the Dollhouse and how it recruited her. Watching all of this in their computer room are Ballard, Boyd Langton, Topher Brink, and Adelle DeWitt. While they try to find as much information on Perrin as possible, Topher makes one of his more interesting statements of the episodes: “He is such a demagogue. He wants to put a freeze on medical research and send us right back to leeches.” This is, in a way, true - now that Topher is struggling with a growing sense of empathy and morals, he is trying to focus on the benefits of the Dollhouse technology.
Echo, now more self-directed than ever, directs their attention to Perrin's wife, who “isn't right.” It becomes immediately apparent that Perrin's wife is a doll. When DeWitt has another tumultuous meeting with Harding, the cold son-of-a-bitch Rossum executive who forced her into sending Priya Tsetsang (Sierra) on a permanent engagement with her rapist. Since DeWitt outsmarted him in that situation, he has now apparently taken it upon himself to end her and her Dollhouse permanently, for that is Rossum's endgame with Senator Perrin:
They gave him the Dollhouse through Madeline. He would then expose the Dollhouse as an entity completely separate from the Rossum conglomerate. Rossum would then be honored by the United States Senate as being able to essentially make their own rules when it comes to neuroscience. And with half of the senate in their pockets thanks to outlets like the Dollhouse, Rossum would then be able to do exactly as it pleased in researching the brain - and while they were at it, allow Perrin to take down the Los Angeles Dollhouse, giving the public an enemy to defeat.
This is obviously a chilling look at the beginning of the dark and twisted road to the events of Epitaph One. For those of you who haven't watched that episode, the basic breakdown is that Rossum used this newfound freedom to perfect remote-wiping and also mass-wiping, sending that signal through any and all technology that they could. They took over America first. There is a small group of freedom fighters, calling themselves the Actuals, who have banded together to fight back against Rossum. This takes place in 2019, less than ten years after the events of The Public Eye and The Left Hand.
Adelle DeWitt has played around with morality through the episodes of Dollhouse, but her stance becomes crystallized after the events of “Belonging.” DeWitt has always believed very strongly in all the ways that the Dollhouse's technology could help individuals in need of wish-fulfillment. She's also displayed a very deep mother-hen attitude toward the Actives under her charge; even visiting them after their contracts are finished and ensuring that they are happy after the fact. As she's come to realize that her viewpoint is mocked by Rossum, and that the corporation she's served was perfectly willing to allow Sierra to be permanently sold into sexual slavery by the man who sold her to the Dollhouse to begin with, DeWitt has finally been forced to make a stance: “We're going to stop them,” she vows coldly to Topher and Langton.
Therefore, Echo is imprinted as “Bree,” a hooker who drugs Senator Perrin and videotapes them naked in his bed, telling him to “back off.” Perrin is not so easily manipulated, however; as Langton and Ballard have pointed out, he has a very strong moral code and he easily detects that Bree is actually a doll. He resolves to bring her to his wife and a protesting Bree follows, wondering if he's crazy. Meanwhile, Madeline is viewing pictures of herself as “Mellie,” sleeping with Paul and also killing Joe Hearn. The guilt and disgust is eating at her and Cindy Perrin (Perrin's wife) urges her to use that to stop the Dollhouse.
Paul Ballard is going through his own crisis, as well, as he volunteers to free Madeline from the Perrins so that Rossum can't use her as a tool once again. Topher has used what was left of Alpha's remote-wiping technology to create a Disruptor (“Is that too Star Trek? You know, TOS? I'm so alone,” he laments) that is essentially an Active-stun grenade. Ballard sneaks into the safehouse where Madeline is being kept and uses it, even knowing that it will still knock Madeline out due to her brain having once been tampered with by the Dollhouse. “No one ever leaves this place, do they?” he asks rhetorically. Even knowing that he is steps away from helping Echo and bringing down the Dollhouse, which is what he's been trying to do for years, it's clearly becoming harder and harder for him to compromise his morals in order to achieve his goal.
Everyone - including the unsuspecting audience - gets a shock when the disruptor works...but Cindy Perrin is not an Active, she is a handler - Senator Perrin's handler. Bree, struggling with Echo's memories, panics and grabs Perrin and drives away. Cindy quickly gets Madeline out of the house and has Ballard tied to a chair while she tries to figure out what's going on. Meanwhile, Bree and Perrin are both panicking as more and more of their programming becomes apparent, leaving Perrin on the side of the road having a life-crisis.
The viewers have to give this one to the writers. Last season, the “he/she's a doll” reveal was used three times, and it wasn't used well - revealing Ballard's contact “Lubov” to be Victor was handled well, but nearly everyone knew that “Mellie” was actually a doll, and that Alpha was pretending to be Stephen Kepler. This season, however, that was all thrown out the window - the reveal of Senator Perrin was handled masterfully and was as shocking as it was intended to be.
But how can he be a doll? Topher is just as confused as DeWitt, but he does some more digging. It turns out that Perrin isn't necessarily a doll, per se - he is actually the degenerate and spoiled black sheep of the politically powerful Perrin family. Rossum abducted him and programmed him to be ambitious and full of moral rectitude, then planted Cindy in his life in order to keep him on track. His entire investigation into Rossum was manipulated from day one. Is this even possible? According to Topher, yes. This, of course, raises a wealth of moral issues - if one or two small things can be changed in one's mind, how can one ever know what's real?
When Cindy catches up with a troubled Echo/Bree and a horrified Perrin, she holds off Echo/Bree with her gun and reminds Perrin that she is his wife, saying their cute little catchphrase: “Remind me why I love you,” she says. “I'm your white knight,” Perrin says. “And I'm your damsel,” Cindy replies, which triggers a newly awakened memory in Perrin of her saying that while he was bathed in purple light: the same procedure that imprints an Active to trust their handler, revealing that she has been controlling him since the start of their “marriage.”
Echo/Bree tries to use this to her advantage by going after Cindy, but Cindy pistol-whips her to the ground. This is apparently the final straw, and Echo truly wakes up - or does she? She makes short work of Cindy, despite Perrin's protests that he still loves her. Echo takes control of the situation and leaves Cindy unconscious on the street (while also getting the best line of the episode as she says, “Lady, you just woke up a lot of people, and they all think you're a bitch!”) as she and Perrin make their getaway. Here, now, Echo is finally fulfilling all of the issues that arose in the first half of the first season.
In the first five or six episodes of Dollhouse, audiences complained that it was hard to care emotionally for the just-waking Echo, who was still very much a doll in between engagements. While the second season has pussyfooted around with the fact that Echo is aware that she is waking up - especially in “Belonging,” where it is revealed that Echo not only has taught herself to read chapter books but also to lie for her own protection, and a chilling portrayal of the notes that she has scratched into the glass of her sleeping pod to remind herself of her surroundings - but now we know that Alpha succeeded in making Echo truly wake up.
Echo tries to take Perrin to the LA Dollhouse, and she and Perrin have a conversation about how she is, indeed, waking up, and their conversation eerily recalls the profound conversation between Topher and Whiskey/Saunders, as she reveals to Perrin that she is “afraid of Caroline.” Echo has finally become a true person, not just a conglomerate of personalities and a blank slate. She knows that if she finds Caroline and re-imprints herself with her old personality, she, Echo, will essentially die.
Cindy breaks in here before anything else can be said and uses the disruptor to knock them both out, taking them to the Washington, D.C. Dollhouse, where she is from. As Madeline is being escorted to the airport, she sees Ballard (who finally had a decent fight scene and broke free earlier), and confronts him about Mellie. He tells her how he set her free, and she uses that to convince him to allow her to make a mistake, if he really has freed her. Ballard ignores a phone call from Langton and watches her walk away, self-loathing on his face (note - this is also the last we see of Ballard for the rest of the night). DeWitt and Topher travel to DC to retrieve Echo and try to further prevent Rossum's plans for Perrin.
Here, though, is where we finally meet Bennett Halverson (played masterfully by the ever-wonderful Summer Glau), the DC Dollhouse's genius programmer. Halverson is a creepy and weird character who has a dead arm in a black glove in a sling, and she is fully aware of how discomfiting she is and uses that to control her office with an iron fist. The gloves (so to say) come off, however, when Echo is brought in. She puts Perrin to the side, and takes Echo alone into her room.
“You promised you'd come back to me, Caroline,” she says, and then proceeds to torture her.
End The Public Eye, begin The Left Hand
Continuing where “The Public Eye” left off, Halverson continues to torture Echo, without explaining why. She maintains that the “why” will hurt Echo much more than the what, as she continues to amplify the power on her torture device. Said device won't even allow Echo to pass out from the pain. While we're left mystified as to the whys ourselves, the show turns its attention to DeWitt and Topher, who have arrived at the DC Dollhouse to meet Stewart Lipman (played wonderfully by Ray Wise).
As Topher heads down to meet Halverson (where DeWitt has him attempting to steal Perrin's brain-scan to send back to the LA Dollhouse), DeWitt squares off with Lipman, who proceeds to inform her that she's (big shock) firmly on Harding's shit list and unlikely to get Echo back should Lipman not want her back. Apparently the fact that Echo overcame her “hooker” programming and succeeded in knocking out a handler and nearly getting away with a confused Perrin in tow hasn't escaped Lipman's notice.
DeWitt then puts the moves on Lipman, ending with sticking her hand down his pants and putting the squeeze on him. Olivia Williams continues to delight as DeWitt, switching from compassionate and seductive to the goddess of vengeance as she says “I will send someone to cut these off, and you will die, slowly, and painfully.” Naturally, Lipman concedes to call Halverson and give Echo back.
However, if we thought that any of the actors were brilliant thus far, that's because we hadn't yet seen Enver Gjokaj. I've said it before and I say it again, I greatly respect Eliza Dushku as a character actress. She doesn't quite have the ability switch in and out of the different imprints, but her evolution as Echo has been informative and believable. The actor who's shown that he can truly pull off the role of an Active is Enver Gjokaj as Victor. He gave an unbelievable performance last night as Topher - apparently Topher imprinted Victor as himself so he'd have someone else at the Dollhouse to receive Perrin's brain-scan.
Now, last season we saw Victor imprinted as Lawrence Dominic (played by Reed Diamond) after said character was sent to the Attic (more on that later). Gjokaj pulled off Reed Diamond to a chillingly perfect T, and that was once again in evidence tonight. His portrayal as Fran Kranz's Topher was so accurate that it was actually weird to watch. While it was funny to watch the two of them interact, ultimately his portrayal allowed a sort of unsettling feeling to set in - it's perhaps one of the first times that an imprint feels like a true personality.
In any case, Topher meets Bennett Halverson, who it's clear has an outrageous geek-crush on Topher. There's some very amusing awkwardness between the two, who are both attracted to each other and caught off-guard because of it. In “Epitaph One” and also in the Dollhouse prologue, so to speak, called “Dollplay” that you could play during the first season on Fox's website, we found out that Topher helped to develop the imprinting process and also that he cut the time of imprints from a few hours to a few minutes, and even he is cowed by Halverson, which is a terrifying thought.
As they flirt and Topher and Victor secretly converse, Echo and Perrin somehow escape after Halverson planted the memory of what happened to her arm in Echo's head, effectively killing Echo's left arm, a psychosomatic side-effect that Halverson no doubt wanted. While Topher is stealing her computer, she calmly slams her head into a television screen and informs the world that Echo did it to her while she was escaping.
Perrin and Echo share a creepy scene slicing each other's tracking chips out of their necks, while Topher and Bennett continue to flirt while using it as subtext to steal each other's ideas. Bennett gets the idea that she and Topher could twist the disruptor and plug it into the biofeed network in order to target specific Actives, thus allowing Echo and Perrin to be brought in more easily. Bennett then uses this in order to reprogram Perrin as a sleeper-assassin and sends him to kill Echo at his family home.
When Topher finds out, he and Bennett have a confrontation about their morals, and Bennett finally reveals that not only did she know Caroline, she was Caroline's best friend. Caroline apparently left her crushed underneath a massive pylon, which is what happened to her left hand. Now, this is fascinating, because up until now what we knew of Caroline Farrell is that she was a do-gooder college student who wanted to save the world and tried to expose Rossum's animal testing. What happened instead was that she stumbled onto their brain-wiping conspiracy and her boyfriend was shot and killed in front of her. For an unknown amount of time after this, she went on the run, finally being brought before DeWitt and turned into Echo.
Could it be that during that time Caroline changed, that she hardened, became as ruthless as the people pursuing her? Could she actually be somewhat morally compromised? Did she actually leave Bennett to die, as Bennett and her memory implant in Echo's head suggest, or is that another part of Bennett's psychosis? Whedon and Co. have no problem creating morally flawed heroes (witness all five seasons of Angel, which dug into much deeper and weightier moral themes than its parent, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever did), and this is a fascinating angle that I hope is explored deeply in the remaining episodes of the series.
Bennett again makes a telling statement when she states that Caroline has always had a power over people, and that she's using it again even as Echo when Topher accidentally calles Echo his "friend." Her words ring somewhat true. In any case, Topher again has a moral choice to make and he knocks Bennett out, running from the lab with Perrin's information, which he and Victor/Topher use to stop Perrin...but not before he murders one of his security detail and strangles Cindy to death. He and Echo have a vicious fight but she manages to get away after convincing her arm to work again while trying and failing to convince Perrin that he can overcome his programming. Echo escapes.
When Perrin, apparently freed of his programming, resurfaces at the press conference where Madeline is anxiously waiting, the entire Dollhouse staff watches on television as he proceeds to exonerate Rossum entirely, discredit the existence of the Dollhouse, talk of a deeper conspiracy that led to Madeline being incarcerated in a mental hospital where she was programmed to believe in the Dollhouse, and then inform them all that a car bomb had killed his wife.
DeWitt and Topher speculate that Perrin is being groomed to eventually become the fascist President of the United States(!!!!!!) firmly under Rossum's thumb. They are left with the haunting question of whether or not that was the Dollhouse's doing, or whether the ambition they programmed into Perrin overtook him and caused him to try to take Rossum out from the inside, something Ballard has been trying and failing supremely to do for more than a year now. Madeline, heartbreakingly, is led from the conference in tears and straight into Bennett Halverson's hands, where she presumably either dies or again becomes a doll, helpless.
Echo, meanwhile, has vanished into the world at large, and crosses a street when the left hand for walking lights up the crosswalk, free, or so it seems.
Final Thoughts
These were absolutely fantastic, knockout episodes of Dollhouse. They hit all the right notes and explored every facet of the show that made it so fascinating: the political, moral, and disturbing ramifications of the technology, the idea that that technology in the wrong hands will lead to the death of the free world, the fascinating conspiracy-interplay between the two Dollhouses and the Rossum Corporation, the strong ensemble cast as well as Echo's final awakening and the question as to whether or not she (or we) even want Caroline back...
While I've loved Dollhouse, ultimately, I can be glad that it's going to end, because even if it was renewed or had a full 22-episode second season, I can't see the concept being able to extend beyond three, maybe four seasons. The fact that the second half of the first season and all of the second season can be watched as a supremely strong moral and philosophically challenging fantasy will guarantee that the show never overstayed its welcome. I'll be fascinated to see how it all ends.
Coming Next Week
“Meet Jane Doe” - After her entanglements with Perrin and the DC Dollhouse, Echo finds herself in the world at large, struggling to live and to overcome the effects of her multiple personality imprints. Topher discovers the dangers of the Rossum Corporation's technology that could have a devastating impact on the future, and DeWitt and Harding engage in more power struggles.
“A Love Supreme” - When Echo's previous romantic engagements begin to surface as murder victims, the Dollhouse fears that Alpha and his obsession with Echo have returned with a vengeance. DeWitt continues to grow suspicious of Ballard, who seeks allies in Topher and Langton. But nothing can prepare any of them for when the dolls seemingly turn on their handlers and one member of the Dollhouse is left permanently mind-wiped.