Dollhouse

It’s the episode after all the big revelations - there are more undercover dolls than we knew about, rotten things within the Dollhouse, a spy in the system and Agent Ballard’s had to go freestyle. Does this next episode add much more to the mix?

A little, yes. Certainly more about Echo. And possibly more about the Dollhouse, who funds it/may have created it etc. But how much more?

This week’s big adventure

A bunch of students in a test laboratory start acting weirdly - weirder than normal students. For one, weird to the point of violent suicide. So far, so Fringe. But then the Dollhouse are brought in to clean up the mess, dropping everything for the client - some big cheese in the Rossum Corporation (whatever that is) who are developing the drugs. At this point the programme-makers just threw a whole bunch of syllables into something pharmaceuticalish. The student had ingested "a psychotropic modification of ridiculouslongmadeupnamix". This drug seemed to act like a recreational drug: Giddiness, hallucinations, loss of impulse control. And then, in one case at least, a little mild death.

Plan was, since the drug worked by doing something to repressed memory blocks in the hippocampus randomwordus, the Dolls wouldn’t be affected. Because they don’t HAVE those bits. In theory. So they were sent in, with Federal badges and scientists brains, to clear up the mess before anyone died. But what happened? Another job for the Dollhouse and, oh my, look at that, it went wrong (again).

Except this time the weak link wasn’t the Dolls, it was the handlers, the other operatives, the Dollhouse controllers, anyone who came in contact with the psychotropic notawordamol. So all the grown ups went a little loopy - in a comedy way - while the actives (the Dolls sent in to save the day) all coped fine … until the drugs started poking at them in a different way, exposing repressed memories.

As it turned out, the death was a murder, an isolated incident brought about by a naughty research scientist who was brought to justice quite accidentally by Echo - who wasn’t officially ON the engagement, but joined in all the same as part of her own repressed memory flashback carnival. It was all a bit of a mess, really.

Whoopsies!

Don’t get me wrong, I love those ’everyone starts behaving inappropriately’ episodes as much as the next TV-geek. It was endearing and funny in, say Band Candy (Buffy 3.6) - because the characters out of their element were both well-loved ones like Giles and Joyce, characters you knew and loved. But here? It was Topher - who takes pleasure in fiddling with people’s brains; DeWitt - who recruits people to Maybe-slavery; And Mr Dominic, who just seems to want to kill Echo. All suddenly behaving like kids? Funny, cute and really very grating at the same time.

Or is it better for that? In this case: these are the master manipulators, the only people who can end the situation for the dolls if they chose to, are manipulated themselves. I don’t know, are they people we can identify with? Or want to? Then, who IS?

The things we learned this week

 Who the Dollhouse is funded by. Or perhaps created by. The Rossum corporation was doing some crazy testing, and Caroline referred to them in her sign-up interview for the Dollhouse, when asked if she’d give five years in return for a lot of money.

 Echo, back when she was Caroline, was an activist of, it seemed, the most annoying kind. The kind that has a boyfriend that says: "We can’t go to EVERY war demonstration, darling!" in bed. And who breaks into animal testing labs with said boyfriend, to save the world. Or did, until they broke into the Rossum lab and discovered they were testing on humans as well as animals. Then boyfriend got shot, and died. And that was the event that brought Caroline to the attention of the Dollhouse.

 There seemed to be some kind of scene cut where DeWitt and Mr Dominic were inappropriate with each other: certainly, they weren’t as inappropriate as to justify the extremely embarrassed scene when they came back to the office and their senses.

 Agent Ballard and Mellie/November broke up, and Nellie moved out of the flat next door to Ballard, and into that chair in the Dollhouse where they dry-clean your brain.

Next week, I believe, is better - but this seemed underwhelming in comparison to last week. Or maybe that was just me. Anything you saw that I didn’t?