Episode Guide
In this week's episode of Dollhouse, Echo is assigned to play a naughty school girl, Kiki, for a college professor. He has no idea how naughty she's going to be...
The show starts out with a man dressing what seem to be mannequins in an LPGA tour motif, until we see that one of these mannequins is sweating. They are women that have been seriously tranquilized and are being held hostage to play some sort of sick fantasy for this sociopath! One of the women tries to crawl away and stabs their captor in the leg with a hypodermic needle of his own medicine. The dose is not enough to take him down and he crushes the woman's skull in retaliation with a nearby prop: a croquet mallet. And he mumbles something about needing a new Aunt Sheila...um, what?
Our sociopath hero shuffles out onto the street, presumably trolling for a replacement victim, and stumbles right into oncoming traffic and gets plowed down by a vehicle. But it's not over yet. He is in a coma, but he has been brought from the real hospital to the dollhouse by his uncle, who is a client. He makes it clear that traditional medicine would not be appropriate for saving his nephew in time... he knows his nephew is harboring women, and he wants to find those women while they're still alive - not because he cares for the sanctity of human life, but because he thinks live women can be bribed, whereas dead bodies are harder to cover up... hmmm...
The solution is to imprint Victor with sociopath Terry's memories. Adelle brings in Ballard to interrogate Victor as Terry to find out the location of the women he's holding hostage. Terry's uncle feels that Ballard's interrogation skills won't be effective for extracting the information from him, so he creates a diversion: he pulls the electrical leads from the real Terry's chest, making the team think that he's gone into cardiac arrest - in the meantime, Uncle Brad sneaks Terry's surrogate Victor out of the dollhouse. Victor immediately turns on his uncle, smashing his head into the steering wheel of the vehicle, and slipping out of the car as it crashes into a curb.
The serial killer is now loose in LA. He walks into a night club, looking for another Aunt Sheila. He must be located before someone else gets hurt! Usually Topher could just use the GPS system to locate Victor's body, but his tag has been temporarily removed. In order to find him, they need to attempt a remote wipe. To do so, they are going to have to take down all the biolink feeds of all active dolls temporarily...
This brings us back to Echo, who is coyly working her professor over to change her flunking grade on her Chaucer paper. Not so innocent flirting turns into inappropriate student/teacher dancing, and out of nowhere Echo stabs the professor in the neck! It turns out that Topher's attempt to wipe Victor was REALLY unsuccessful - he actually imprinted Echo with Terry! Which is horrifying... but it also means that Victor became Kiki (Freaky Friday style)... which turns out to be hilarious.
Now the women in Terry's lair have almost managed to escape their cage, and they run towards Echo as she approaches them. Without missing a step, Echo (as Terry) slams the first girl across the face with the croquet mallet. The dollhouse is working to get their system back online, but Echo goes into a murderous rage, beating upon the women. In the midst of this, Echo seems to slip back for a second. In this moment of clarity, she tells the girls that they have to kill her, because Terry keeps coming back and he will never quit. One of the girls starts to wail on Echo, and Echo is egging her on, but the dollhouse security detail arrives in time to spare Echo and rescue the women.
Echo returns to the dollhouse for a treatment, but we know how well those have been working on her lately - she seems to have residual imprints left behind. At the very end of the episode, she looks over Terry's body and says "Goodness Gracious," the exact expression he uses at the beginning of the show, suggesting this ordeal is not quite over.
Vitals
Season: 2, Episode: 3Air Date: 10/9/2009
Rating: 7.0 / 10
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October 7th, 2009 4:25 AM
The main reason the episode was so great was the return of Miracle Laurie. That woman has the "It" quality. She has an enigmatic beauty that hypnotizes you. Please keep her around forever!