Dollhouse 2:4
Posted by dorolerium on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Remember how I thought the last episode was pretty tense? Well, this one managed to ratchet it up a bit.
This episode is Sierra centric, so we learn about her past and what got her into the Dollhouse. Originally, Sierra was an Australian girl called Priya who sells paintings on Venice Beach. She is commissioned to do a bigger work for this guy, Nolan, who is in love with her but she is absolutely uninterested.
Nolan is a doctor who specializes in brain and psychological stuff, with connections high up in the Dollhouse, as well as being someone who contributed to what they actually do. He enlists the Dollhouse to get Priya to fall in love with him, but it doesn’t work. In fact, something interesting to me is that she was attracted to Victor basically from the moment she met him. They had a chemistry right away.
For those of you who watch both Dollhouse and Dexter, or if you saw the first season of Deadwood, you’ll recognize Keith Carradine. Or you may recognize him from other things, cuz he’s a pretty prolific actor. But for me, he was first Special Agent Lundy, then Wild Bill Hickock, and now plays Matthew Harding, a higher up in the LA Dollhouse or Rossam Corporation.
Sierra paints a lot of pictures that always have a black shape, and Echo takes one of these pictures to Topher. She keeps startling him, so he says he’s going to put a bell on her and says, “You’re like a ninja!“ Topher goes on a quest to learn more about Sierra before she was in the Dollhouse, and to try and figure out who “the bad man” is, represented by the black shape.
We all know that Echo has been evolving and is remembering things, but what I found interesting is that in this episode, it really seemed like all the main dolls were more aware. Sierra and Victor were having more normal conversations with each other, and Victor himself has a flashback to his life before the Dollhouse.
Langton notices Echo behaving strangely, and specifically that she is reading and using a leaf as a bookmark. At first I thought he was turning all company man, but he tells Echo she isn’t in trouble with him, although she needs to be careful because she’s starting to get dangerous. She tells him she doesn’t care, and people need to wake up for when the storm comes.
We learn something new about several of our non-doll characters as well. Adele apparently has some indiscretions in her past, and Lundy Harding forces her to send Sierra to Nolan with a permanent imprint. Something Adele is not willing to do at first because it turns out that Nolan gave Priya medication to turn her into a paranoid schizophrenic, rather than it being a natural condition she needed treatment for. Basically, he couldn’t get Priya to date him, so he got her committed to the Dollhouse so he could order her out instead. Classy!
Topher also has problems with this arrangement, and Adele says this rather important thing to him:
Everyone here was chosen because their morals have been compromised in some way, everyone except you. You were chosen because you have no morals.
This makes me wonder what Langton’s moral indiscretions are, because you know I adore him. Also, what do they consider to be Ballard’s? The fact that he’s romantically interested in Caroline?
There’s also a brief glimpse of the underside of the glass that goes over Echo’s sleeping chambers, where she has been writing things. The shot didn’t linger long enough to really read much of it, so I wonder what it says, what she’s using to write with, and how will this come into play in the future.
Another question I wish had been answered, mostly just because this is a Sierra history episode, is how did Nolan manage to start giving Priya the drugs to begin with? I wish there had been a little scene thrown in to show us!
So Topher sends Sierra off to Nolan with her permanent imprint. Except he is sneaky and gives her back to herself as Priya, fills her in on the details before she goes. Priya arrives, confronts Nolan, and ends up stabbing him to death. Which is both intense and satisfying. She then calls Topher, who comes to help her, and Langton shows up within minutes because as head of security, he hears all the phone calls and knows he needs to get involved in this one.
This is where we learn a wee bit about Langton – he was certainly involved in some maybe illegal things before he worked at the Dollhouse. Along with Topher, we discover that Langton actually knows how to dismember a body. I think he’s been watching Dexter in his free time. He also calls a friend to get Nolan disappeared, and this makes me wonder what the consequences will be down the line for that.
At the end of the episode, we also learn that when Langton took Echo’s book and talked to her about the bookmark, he hid a security pass in the book with a note that says “For the storm.” From the start, I have wondered what he is doing at the Dollhouse, because despite his questionable past, he seems like a genuinely good guy interested in doing what’s right. Kind of like Ballard. And it’s nice that both of them are devoted to Echo and helping her bring down the Dollhouse.
I wish I could say we were going to have a follow up soon, but Fox very kindly decided to remove Dollhouse from the November schedule. So we won’t be seeing another one until December. Are you sad? Help keep Dollhouse alive by watching it when it comes back!
As a side note, this episode was directed by Johnathan Frakes, aka Commander Will Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yes, I knew that without looking it up. What can I say, I review TV shows!
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