This was an insidious, and brilliant, episode. It gave us game-changing events, leaps in character development, further unraveling of the Dollhouse mythos, all while hitting the reset button on the lot of it. Let’s talk about that shall we?

This episode was about, as the title indicates, needs. The Dollhouse needs their Dolls to function as required at all times. And recently, particularly after the memory drug from last week’s episode brought up the traumas of their past, some Dolls’ glitching has gotten out of hand. So, in the face of these repeated glitches, they instigate a radical plan: give the Dolls what they need. Rather then further sedate them, or attempt to further wipe their minds, or anything like that, simply give them a chance to resolve the issues that are causing their instabilities. Give them closure. This hearkens to an idea I discussed in my review of the premiere when Echo’s actions were implied to resolve the internal conflict of the personality she was imprinted with at the time. Even though the person for which these fears existed, facing them gave a sort of closure. To what, I’m not sure.

Echo, Victor, Sierra, November, and Mike all awaken early in the episode to find themselves back to their old selves, minus any specific memories of their old life. Their personalities, without any of the events that forged them. When Mike is taken away and returns as calm and docile as the other Dolls, the remaining four band together to find a way out of their situation, whatever it may be.

So, here we are with the personalities, but not the memories, of the Dolls original lives waking in their sleeping pods attempting to figure out where they are, how to get away, and what to do next. Echo, as was implied by last week’s episode, wouldn’t need to be free to find closure: she would need everyone to be free, she would need the Dollhouse to no longer exist. So rather than leave with the others in the inevitable escape she stays behind to free the other Dolls. A pleasant side-effect of Echo’s behaviour this episode is that it washes away the unpleasant taste Caroline’s personality left with me last week. Rather than being quippy despite the dire tasks, she takes on the role of saviour and wholeheartedly seeks the demise of the Dollhouse. I’m much more willing to accept this week’s Caroline as a character I can invest in.

Sierra confronts the man that put her in the Dollhouse, both a proxy to the closure she needs for what Hearn did to her and a legitimate trauma in and of itself. What’s interesting about this is that while Adelle DeWitt is discussing the voluntary nature of the Doll life, we discover that Sierra was made a Doll by a powerful man who wanted to control her and make her do whatever he wanted. This is the first time the pseudo-voluntary nature of a Doll’s tenure has been explicitly denied by the show.

And apparently Victor just wanted Sierra. It’s a little simplistic, but it works because Victor’s personality in this episode was both the most appealing and humourous, and he quickly took on a role as the de facto leader of the escapees so his closure was more related to the obtaining of closure for those under his “command.” Relatedly, Victor’s calm and controlled manner of leading the others makes me think that Victor’s original life was in the military, and so the traumatic war-time memory of Victor’s that we saw last week was of his original life. Which opens the question of whether Victor joined the Dollhouse to escape the horrors he’d committed on the battlefield or was taken from a happy life.

November’s past is the most sympathetic. In her original life, it seems her daughter died and she never fully recovered from it. It’s implied here that she gave herself to the Dollhouse to escape the sadness in her life. But with all of these stories what really got accomplished? The one weak point of the show, in retrospect, is how Dominic and DeWitt have early scenes together where they pretend as though what’s happening is not what they wanted. Put simply, there are too many head-fakes.

The episode starts with Topher saying he can mess with their drug levels, implying that doing that caused the unexpected “awakening” of the Dolls original personalities. But then DeWitt later pretends as though this is part of a training exercise for their staff. Then ultimately, it’s revealed that after Topher’s initial suggestion in that earlier scene Dr Saunders suggests that they give the most problematic Dolls emotional closure so that they can be reset to normal and those internal conflicts will no longer combat the programming of the Dollhouse. So, it all makes sense except for that one scene implying it’s all a training exercise. If that scene weren’t there, this episode would be perfect. We would have seen lots of character growth, the development of the romance between Victor and Sierra was particularly touching, and then ending the episode with all of that being a part of the Dollhouse’s plan. Not only that, but the ultimate reveal that it was Dr Saunders, one of the staff more sympathetic towards the Dolls, that perpetrated this plan was excellent; the show has worked very hard making her sympathetic to the audience, so showing the darker more twisted side of her psyche was a smart, and subversive, move on the writers. But all of it seems weakened by that one little thread that doesn’t mesh with the rest.

As usual, Ballard’s story is mostly dissociated from the Actives — though Echo does manage to leave a message on his voicemail before she manages to set the Actives in the Dollhouse free, thus triggering her “closure achieved” mindset and rendering her unconscious — but he does realize that the Dollhouse has been spying on him for an indeterminate amount of time, and that their technology is well beyond the local black-hat spy gear. Not completely revelatory, but it furthered Ballard’s investigation. But, unless the show offers up some tangible results to his investigation sometime soon, I’ll definitely start to find these scenes tiresome.

I’m a little annoyed that this episode resulted in not only no tangible emotional growth for the characters, but actually cancelled out what growth we’d seen thus far. But it’s also brilliant on the show’s part to twist our minds like this: the “happy ending” of the episode is the Dolls going back to normal. To return to their slavery. Really great stuff. Episodes six and eight were both being pushed as exemplary episodes, and they were both excellent. Let’s hope the quality level is maintained or surpassed as the season concludes.