Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B- | 2 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Pleasantkill
By Couch Baron | Season 2 | Episode 3 | Aired on 10.09.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.There's a creepy dude who dresses like he's from the fifties and kidnaps women in order to force them to participate in twisted fantasies. No, not sex stuff -- I'm talking croquet. At the beginning of the episode, he offs a girl with a mallet, but not before she injects him with his own extremely strong drug, which causes him to wander into the street, get hit by a car… and end up in the Dollhouse, because as it happens, his uncle is a valued client and major Rossum shareholder. Topher does a brain scan on the comatose nephew and discovers his pattern looks like that of a serial killer, information unknown to Adelle before she took him in. She confronts the uncle and gets the real scoop -- there have been many female victims over the years, some of whom have survived and been bought off by the family, and basically, if I understood right, the uncle wants to revive the nephew to find out if there are any unknown living victims out there so as to be able to buy them off and effectively cover the family's collective ass, or something. Unfortunately, since the nephew stubbornly won't come out of the coma, they do the next best thing, which is to imprint his persona into Victor.
Meanwhile, Ballard is getting disturbingly attracted to Echo, especially when she becomes a student/sex fantasy for some college professor, so he's happy enough when he gets yanked off the assignment in order to interrogate the nephew-in-Victor. Echo's imprint is a super-annoying bimbo, and the less time spent on her, the better, so let's go back to Ballard, who's figured out that the nephew is abducting women to recreate some fake version of his family for some dumb reason. Ballard takes the tack of informing the nephew about his body's current predicament, which seems to work when the nephew starts opening up about what he did. Unfortunately, the uncle then stupidly breaks the nephew-in-Victor out of the Dollhouse, thinking he can just have a little chat with him about his crimes, and the nephew repays his misplaced trust by killing the uncle at his first available opportunity. Ballard figures out that he's going to return to his living victims, so he pursues him while Adelle charges Topher with figuring out how to remotely wipe Victor's imprint. The wipe seems to be working until the power cuts out in the Dollhouse, and we see Echo suddenly stab the grossly boring professor in the neck, which at least endears her to me again. The reason she did this is that the remote wipe somehow caused the nephew's persona to end up in her, but the far more amusing part is that the bimbo's personality is now in Victor, because watching Enver Gjokaj dance like no one's watching is pretty fricking hilarious. Echo shows up to finish the other three women off, but her Season Two Mental Powers kick in, and while she's fighting off the nephew in her own mind, she tells the women to kill her, which seems drastic even if the ratings are still pretty grim. Of course, she's rescued before that can happen, but it does make you wonder if the personality of a serial killer is now a permanent part of her. Especially since she kind of makes that explicitly clear at the end.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We open with ironically jaunty music playing as some creepy guy with hair like George McFly is straightening the clothes on what appears to be three mannequins, who are dressed for an afternoon at a country club in the fifties. The creepy guy says, "Goodness gracious!" before remarking on what a nice day it is to be outside, and since we're on one of Fox's least-expensive indoor sets, we know this guy is cracked, but just how cracked only becomes clear when a bead of sweat runs down one of the "mannequin"'s foreheads -- these are actually real women he's apparently tranquilized in order to place them in this creepily wholesome tableau, and I definitely give credit to the makeup and lighting efforts for making the women look so plastic. Noticing the girl start to crawl away, he berates "Aunt Sheila" for abandoning the game, and injects her with more of the drug he's using and then starts to drag her back toward the others. Unfortunately, he neglects to retrieve the hypo (and convenient that there was still some of the drug left in it, I suppose), and "Aunt Sheila" has just the wherewithal to grab it and inject the guy in his Achilles tendon. Unfortunately, this causes the doofus to pick up one of the croquet mallets and brain her with it while whining, "This is not how we play the game!" If it were, I bet croquet would be a lot more popular. He murmurs that "they" now have to find a new Aunt Sheila...
...and then he's out on the street, dazedly checking out women as they walk by. He sees one across the street that apparently fits the bill, but when he starts to cross, a car hits him and pitches him off the windshield and back down onto the street. And while I couldn't see the license plate, I'd lay odds that the driver was not from around there, because if you're not used to avoiding pedestrians who walk like cars are ethereal objects that could never actually do them bodily harm, you haven't lived in L.A. for more than five minutes. Credits.
When we return, we start on one of the evening's subplots I will be skipping through, as Ballard finds Echo in the shower and can't help checking her out, and thus is barely able to remember to send her for a treatment, so diminished does the blood flow to his brain suddenly become. Next!
Downstairs, Adelle and Boyd have a discussion about whether Claire disappeared or merely left, and since you can guess who's on what side and it also is barely above the "Did not/Did too" level of discourse, let's move ahead to where Victor, in a fetching black tank top, hears them mention "Dr. Saunders" and says there's a man in the infirmary who's "not his best," and Claire maybe could help him...