Dollhouse Episode Review
In which Boyd is evil now. Yes. I'm sure.
What Happened
Boyd dopes Echo as she comes out of the chair, delaying the reveal that he (Boyd!) is Rossum's co-founder. Needing a chance to blow that Rossum mainframe thingie, Adelle decides to take everyone to Tucson and they'll turn themselves in and see what happens.
What happens is that Clyde - in Whiskey's body - puts Echo in a lab for evaluation and locks everyone else up. Boyd stages a bit of a breakout, then sends Ballard and Mellie off looking for guns while he and Topher try to find the mainframe.
Boyd takes Topher into the Rossum lab, where his prototype Tech for remote imprinting still needs some work. Pointing out that things will be ever less bloody if they can just zap people into a docile state, Boyd persuades Topher to finish the device.
Just as he does, Echo appears and reveals all to Topher and Adelle. Boyd explains that he needed Caroline for her unique physiology. Every time she resists an imprint, she creates an enzyme that inoculates against imprinting. Rossum plans to harvest this from her to protect themselves from their own technology.
Needing to deal with Ballard, Boyd broadcasts the trigger for Mellie's sleeper program. She starts shooting at Paul, but regains enough control not to kill him. Unwilling to be used any further, Mellie turns the gun on herself.
Sierra and Victor's arrival adds to the general confusion, until Topher finally uses his device on Boyd, leaving him in a Doll state. As the others leave, Echo gives Boyd a grenade and an explosives vest and tells him to detonate it after they are gone.
The Good
Logic and explanations. Always good.
Obviously the problem with developing any doomsday device is that you might be caught in the fallout, so it makes sense that Rossum would need a way to protect themselves. This explains why Caroline was so special (physiology) and why Echo was so special (she was always intended to resist the imprints).
We are relying on some pseudo-science here, but this is television. To my mind, it has an internal consistency, so I'm satisfied.
The performances, particularly from Harry Lennix as Boyd, also carry things along. The core cast of this series was very strong and this episode gives everyone something to do.
The Bad
Not enough time.
Not enough time to deal with Mellie and Paul and really build to what she does. They were essentially coasting on good-will left over from the first half of season one - which was the last time these two were being played together - and they almost but not quite have enough juice to get there.
Doesn't help that the scene itself is something of a cliche. "You can fight this," he says melodramatically. And it is something of a sidetrack from the main plot when the issues it raises deserve more examination.
And I really wish I knew when Claire became Clyde. Was she Claire in the hotel room in "Getting Closer," honestly in love with Boyd and he messed with her head before bringing her back to the Dollhouse? Or had he gotten to her weeks before then and done some reprogramming to pull her in line with his plans? Figured as long as he had her there, might as well get laid?
Or was "she" Clyde all along and hello gender and identity politics can open, worms everywhere? Not enough time to really play with the possibilities here.
Finally, Clyde has a throwaway line about how his original "got stuck in a loop," indicating that someone, likely Boyd, is using the imprints in ways closer to what they did to Perrin and selectively changing personality traits rather than doing wholesale wipes. Which is and in some ways always was a truly subversive and creepy possibility that I wish they'd played with more.
In the moment, it plays into Boyd's declaration that he wants his family about, albeit only if they play along with him. (Shades of "Belle Chose.") But there's no time to pull it out and look at it closer.
In fact, we don't even know if Boyd is Boyd. Body-swapping is the whole point. How do we know it wasn't a scam from the start and that they didn't just grab some random schmuck off the street and program to think he's a criminal mastermind?
The Cliche
"Let's blow up this one gizmo and that will solve everything!" It's like the violent flip-side of "Let's put on a show and raise enough money to save the farm."
Oh, you poor naive little kids. Like this multi-gazillion dollar corporation isn't going to have back-ups to the back-ups when they have back-ups to the senior partners' brains?
What Did I Think?
To be fair, the last five seconds of this episode (and all of "Epitaph One") argue that the writers have thought this out, even if the characters have not, because obviously Rossum still went ahead with their nefarious schemes.
There's one more episode to pull it all together.
