This week was the season (and possibly series) finale of Dollhouse. It left me feeling a little conflicted.
Last week’s episode ended with Alpha imprinting Echo with a personality who thought she was his True Romance-style criminal doomed love girlfriend, and taking her out of the dollhouse while Ballard had Adelle and Boyd distracted. Since it was kind of Ballard’s fault Alpha just got to waltz into the dollhouse and have a convenient cover for his activities, he decides to give Adelle his help in recovering Echo and capturing Alpha.
Ballard puts his FBI skills to work and almost immediately sees a pattern to Alpha’s initial attacks that no one else had (somehow I found this hard to believe, that they didn’t put any kind of criminal profiler on the case…but maybe it was a situation they thought they understood and therefore saw no reason to bring in an outside analyzer for).
We see flashbacks to Alpha’s past where he immediately notices Echo and becomes obsessed with her. His initial attack was on an active named Whiskey (who had originally used the crazy girlfriend imprint he gives to Echo), who was the best and most requested active when he attacked her. He says “why don’t you let Echo be number one?” before he slashes her face and then goes on his rampage. Whiskey is the character we know as Dr. Saunders–who, we see, had originally been a real person and one of Alpha’s victims. So the doctor isn’t actually real; it’s Whiskey’s low-risk assignment to finish out her contract now that she’s already been “ruined” for regular assignments.
Alpha took all of Echo’s imprints with him, as well as the original Caroline scan. He and Echo kidnap a store clerk, while Topher searches for the imprint Alpha used on Echo and Boyd and Ballard try to figure out where Alpha might have taken her. When the most logical “off the map” place they know of Alpha ever going on an assignment turns out to be a warehouse he went with Whiskey, Topher checks that scan and realizes who Echo thinks she is. Boyd and Ballard set off in hot pursuit.
Meanwhile at the warehouse, Alpha imprints the store clerk with Caroline in his MacGuyver-rigged imprint machine, and tries to explain to Echo what’s going on. That task is made difficult by Echo’s current imprint’s limited intellect and by Alpha’s own personalities getting in each other’s way. Alan Tudyk did a great job of being frighteningly crazy and his own comic relief at the same time, which is pretty impressive, when you think about it.
Alpha’s job of explaining the realities of the world to Echo gets easier after he imprints all 38 of her personalities on her at once–what happened to him–to create her “Omega” personality. She doesn’t react as he expects, however; instead of bonding with Alpha and wanting to join him in forming a new world order with them as the Ubermensch, she attacks him for trying to hurt Caroline. She “understands everything” including that none of those 38 minds in her head at that moment is actually her own. Alpha shoots the store clerk in a fit of temper and takes off with the Caroline imprint. Echo chases him toward the roof of the building. He tosses the imprint off the edge and tells her to go get it if she wants to save her “real” self.
The imprint is on a construction ledge and Echo knocks it off. But Ballard and Boyd have arrived just in time for Ballard to heroically save Caroline. Literally Caroline, as Echo has saved herself already.
They got the girl…but Alpha escapes.
Back at the dollhouse, Ballard reiterates his demands to Adelle for his help, that “the girl” be released and paid in full for her contract. When she walks in to sign the papers, it’s Mellie and not Caroline Ballard has chosen to rescue. It was unexpected until I thought about it; then it made complete sense and was just really sweet.
Echo is shown coming out of the wipe and back to her usual mostly blank–but never completely, of course–self. As she lays down to go to sleep, she whispers a name: Caroline.
So in all, as a finale, it was good in that it had a lot of action and tension, and it concluded the story arc well enough that if this is it, we can all live with it. But there were some question marks for me. Mostly in that Ballard came over to the dark side pretty damn quickly. Maybe he just realized that Alpha was a much worse threat than the dollhouse itself, but by the end he was still in bed with them and not looking like he was going to leave any time soon. Also I was not all that surprised by Echo’s rejection of Alpha’s philosophy and plans, so that was a bit anti-climactic. Unless the whole moment had been built up to watching Alpha get his, and proving that Echo is even more special than Alpha was (and more special than he thought), in which case it is so inevitable it loses punch.
But it was still a good finale. I liked that it left a lot still open. How will Echo evolve, since she is obviously still evolving and going in a different way than Alpha did. What will Alpha do next? Why was it so important for Dr. Saunders to hate Topher (which was the only question the doctor had about her own imprint once she realized she was Whiskey)? What will Ballard do now that he is essentially on the dollhouse’s payroll? There’s plenty of more ground to cover if it gets a second season, and I really hope it does. I think it deserves one, because it can grow in a lot of interesting ways from here. The show is still evolving…just like Echo.
