Hey everyone, I’m Jeremy and I will be taking on recapping Dollhouse here at TMFT. As you can tell, I am off to a great start. Hey, I’ve only missed three episodes so far! Let’s see if i can get caught up…

In the season premiere, Vows, Ballard appears to be using Echo to clean up some unfinished FBI business. She has been married off to a notorious gun runner (Jamie Bamber from BSG, in full-Brit mode) in what must have been the longest Doll engagement in history (no pun intended). When he gets suspicious, she masterfully talks her way out of it, only to give herself away when, after a blow to the head, she gets confused about which personality they “made” her this time. Long story short, Ballard swoops in and saves the day essentially by beating her up until he triggers an aggressive former imprint and she blows a bunch of stuff up.

The main storyline was good enough but the real impact for me was in the interaction between Topher and Dr. Saunders. She used to be Whiskey, Top Doll until Alpha fixed that by cutting up her face, making way for Echo. The original Dr. Saunders was killed by Alpha and as a solution Topher imprinted a female version of Saunders onto Whiskey. What fun. But now she knows and is having a bit of an identity crisis, for which she aggressively blames Topher. After some deep discussion with Langton, Whiskey flies the coop, in search of herself. I am really looking forward to seeing where this journey takes her. My only quibble is this: you have to wonder why, when the truth came out, Topher didn’t just treat this all away and avoid some trouble.

At the end of the show, Ballard becomes Echo’s handler and, since she remembers everything, the two collude to bring the Dollhouse down and free all the dolls.

The next episode, Instinct, was quite an engaging piece of suspense thriller. Echo has taken on the role of a man’s dead wife in order to allow the baby to bond to “his mother” before he puts the baby up for adoption. He blamed little Jack for his wife’s death during child-birth, and has been unable to so much as touch the poor little guy. In an effort to keep this short, suffice to say things get a bit wiggy when echo’s maternal instinct kicks in and she gets VERY protective of little Jack. This all helps the father to bond with his son and he ends up keeping him after all.

Two things of note: Topher seems to have tweaked Echo’s imprint to the point of making her brain affect her body. Specifically, he made her able to lactate so she could breast feed. This concept didn’t sit well with me. It just seems like a little too much power being given to Topher’s manipulations. Luckily, that was kind of the point of the episode and I got the impression that at least for the time being, Topher has abandoned this track. The other thing we learned is that Echo is one F-ed up girl. She remembers everything. Every thought, memory and emotion that has come along with every imprint. All bouncing around her head. Yikes.

Which brings us to Belle Chose, last Friday’s episode. I loved this episode immensely. We are introduced to a twisted psychopath who kidnaps women and sets up family gatherings by arranging his prisoners as mannequins in some weird Old Navy ad from hell. When one tries to escape, he kills her and while out searching for his next Aunt Gladys, he gets hit by a car. Well, it turns out that he is the nephew of some rich dude who gives a bunch of money to the Rossum Corporation, the medical research company that parents the Dollhouse. So, the uncle calls in a favour and asks Adelle to try to save the kid’s brain with their advanced medical prowess, meaning Topher and his magical mind-machines.

To summarize, Victor gets imprinted with the nephew’s personality so Ballard can interrogate him. Because, you know, if you work for the FBI you are automatically a serial killer profiler. Anyway, Victor escapes and in order to stop him, Topher attempts a remote wipe in a new and exciting way. Needless to say, it all goes wrong, with the end result that Echo winds up imprinted as the killer and Victor as the 19-year-old college student that Echo had been imprinted as for Arye Gross. Gross is right. And that’s all I am saying about that. Except that Victor is awesome and his scenes in the club were some of the funniest stuff I have seen.

Echo fights her new personality and ends up freeing the killer’s remaining captives, rather than killing them. Ballard uses Echo’s GPS to track them down and clean up the mess. In the end, we are left with the somewhat disturbing knowledge that a little piece of the killer will be left in her brain to wreak who knows what kind of future havoc.

I really like this show.

Oh, and through it all, we have been introduced to Senator Daniel Perrin (played by Whedon staple Alexis Denisof), who has it in for The Rossum Corp and who has just received a mysterious package about the Dollhouse.