What I’m Watching: Dollhouse

Dollhouse: Season 2, Episodes 7 & 8 “Meet Jane Doe” & “A Love Supreme” (B)

These double episodes are a lot of fun, and it certainly progresses the story quite a bit. I didn’t love this batch as much as last week’s, but they’re nothing if not exciting. Seeing Echo manage all of her many personalities and just call up imprints every moment is pretty impressive, though I have trouble with the fact that there always has to be some sort of malfunction that makes her missions go awry. This newfound relationship between Echo and Paul is really intriguing, and I love that they’re secretly working with Boyd. The first episode seemed to indicate that Adele might also be someone they could trust, but her presentation of Topher’s device to Harding and her brutal, unforgiving treatment of Echo shows that she’s really one of the bad guys. We do know, of course, that they’ll Adele and Topher will end up being quite close and even romantically involved, and seeing Topher reveal that he constructed the device he thought Harding was trying to build was haunting. I’m becoming much more impressed with Topher as this show goes on, after everything with Bennett and Victor imprinted as him, and “Meet Jane Doe” is especially poignant because of what we know will come to be by the time of “Epitaph One,” though the premature cancellation of this show may prevent us from ever reaching that narrative point. Alpha’s return in “A Love Supreme” was cool because Alan Tudyk really does a terrific job of playing this wicked villain, and Echo allowing him to escape means he should be back soon for revenge again. I can’t imagine that Paul is really dead, but at least Boyd knows what’s actually going on with Echo and can be there as her ally. These two episodes were mostly jarring to me due to the use of actives as technicians and doctors in the imprinting process, which seems like it’s putting them at great risk of realizing that they’re not themselves.