This fabulous episode cemented for me a thought I’ve had for the entire season: Epitaph One should not exist.

I know, I know, it seems like every time I talk about season two of Dollhouse, I end up complaining about Epitaph One, but that’s because Epitaph One just doesn’t fit.

This season has been expertly layering in the depths of Rossum’s evils, and hinting at a dark future ahead if Rossum’s plans go forward. We’ve seen remote wiping, presidential Dolls, and they’ve hinted at remote imprinting, and the first episode of the night was about the dehumanizing aspects of shared thought. These are all harbingers of a vague yet looming threat, except that it’s not vague at all because an unaired episode fleshed all this out before. Epitaph One hasn’t been working for me. Rather than intensifying the experience of watching this universe march toward oblivion, it serves as a spoiler.

All of the things that would ultimately lead to the apocalypse of Epitaph One were not there in the first season, or if they were it was in such a minimal form that it’s not worth discussing. And so season two’s task was to unveil that possibility, piece by piece. Which it has been doing. But it all feels empty because Epitaph One brought us there already along with a cliff notes recap of what led to it.

There’s no doubt that this season is doing what Epitaph One did but better. Which is why no one watching this show should watch Epitaph One before the second season. It just shouldn’t be done.

On to the main story for this episode. DeWitt continues to be evil¹ in the real world and Echo, Victor, and Sierra are fighting for their lives in the Attic.

The Attic it turns out is a semi-shared dream state where you’re constantly amped on adrenaline facing your worst fears. Dominic, who was sent there last season, has been jumping through minds of other people stuck in the Attic trying to stop a large black monster running through the Attic killing people. And when you die in the Attic you’re dead in real life.

Eventually, Dominic meets up with Echo and the others and they catch the killer, who morphs into a diminutive nerd named Clyde when caught. Clyde is one of the founders of Rossum, the one who discovered the tech. His co-founder encouraged him to create the first Doll as a copy of himself (Clyde) but without any ambitions of his own. Shortly after Clyde 2.0, now working exclusively for the other co-founder, sticks Clyde in the Attic, the first of many, and begins to build Rossum’s evil empire.

Clyde also became the foundation of that empire because the Attic, rather than being a place you put people you don’t want to deal with anymore, is actually a massive multi-processor computer that runs all of Rossum, and the processors are the people in the Attic. He’s been killing them basically in the hope of screwing up Rossum’s mainframe.

Clyde can’t remember who the other founder of Rossum is or what Clyde 2.0 looks like, though it’s not clear if that’s a side-effect of being in the Attic since 1993 or that they took it from his brain, but apparently there was a girl that has seen both of them and was caught by Rossum, a girl named Caroline. This is a cool twist and it finally answers the question of why Caroline was on the run from the Dollhouse. So they’ll need to imprint Echo with Caroline and use her knowledge of Rossum’s lead people to try and stop them.

And what they need to stop is basically what we saw in Epitaph One, which is also the backdrop for a bunch of this episode as its Clyde’s worst nightmare as well, an apocalypse that arises from Rossum’s evil doings. Presumably, Rossum is aware of this and would like the world not to end, since that would be bad for business and for profit margins, but we’re supposed to accept that a self-serving corporation would gleefully head into an apocalypse, so I will accept that; there was a time when I would have thought that was a completely outrageous concept but seeing how vociferously the health care industry is fighting reform, despite the absolute certainty of the total desolation of the American economy if growth progresses the way it has for the past few decades, I’m more sympathetic to the self-destructive corporation conceit.

Eventually, Echo figures out a way out of the Attic and she and Victor and Sierra all escape — the way out is dying and then magically coming back to life, but because Echo is Echo it works — and it’s revealed that DeWitt put Echo in the Attic to find out about Rossum’s weaknesses. And now everyone in the Dollhouse is in on the conspiracy and they all want to stop Rossum. So that’s a pretty cool direction for the final episodes to follow, even if it seems like the apocalypse is going to happen regardless of what they do.

This episode has little in terms of theme. The main Dolls experienced their worst nightmares ad infinitum but that didn’t really offer much new to work with. The apocalypse was brought to the forefront, and the Dollhouse hardened against Rossum, but all of this is basically plot. The idea of humans being used for their processing power is not a new one, but I think it’s done better here than anywhere else I’ve seen it; comparisons to The Matrix are misplaced, however, as that was about the body heat of a living person generating power, not about brain’s being used for computing power.

And, despite the tonal dissonance, I really liked the line about not knowing what year it is because they don’t know how long they’ve been off the air. Though if this weren’t a Joss Whedon show, I probably would have chided the writer’s for shoving a cheap meta-joke into a tense scene.

This episode was powerful for sheer narrative thrust. Not a lot happened to the characters, but the story shot forward toward what I hope is a thrilling conclusion. We’ll see in the next year.

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Footnotes

1. Completely contrary to the flashbacks from Epitaph One so any viewer who’s seen it knows this is all a ruse or temporary at the very least. [↩]

Final words for the televisual part of Angel’s story. And while I know people who weren’t fond of it when it first aired, I’ve loved it from the first time I saw the cut to credits. It’s not quite a Sopranos-sized ending but it still leaves you hanging, and even better it 100% fits with the major philosophy of the show. Just like the ongoing atonement and redemption, the fight against evil never ends, and you don’t do it for the prize at the end. Evil’s not there to be beat, it’s there to be fought.

There is a problem here though: the amulet. Why would Wolfram and Hart give it to Angel? There are some rationalizations made along the way but some contradict each other and none are particularly satisfying for me. It really comes down to one thing: it was a double-edged deus ex machina. The first being the thing that will save the thirty slayers from the army of twenty million ubervamps to cap off the most climactic battle in Buffy history. The second to bring Spike to Los Angeles. And dei ex machinis annoy me. But and they are not unprecedented in the Buffyverse, so I can manage.

If you ignore that little qualm, which doesn’t much interfere with your enjoyment anyways unless you’re someone who tends to quibble the minutiae, this season not only caps off one of the best shows that ever graced Television but also introduces some larger ideas that the show could have explored in future seasons. Previously, the show explored the ideas surrounding Faustian bargains and Pyrrhic victories, and those themes are expanded on this season which puts the phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” to the test.

Angel and his team have been offered a powerful weapon to wield against the dark forces of the world, the only problem is it exists because of those dark forces, so to keep the weapon you have to pick your battles. Therein lies the rub, and man do the senior partners rub that shit. This season, above anything else in the series, shows that Wolfram and Hart are not really evil. They operate because of the evil in the world, and the evil inherent in the way businesses are run. Firefly had a company, Blue Sun Corporation, that arguably was the greatest force of evil in that universe, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Joss Whedon was in an anti-corporate mood when breaking these stories.

The interesting thing about this season is how various ignorant factions of evil battle each other and the casualties are all Angel’s friends. Gunn was given knowledge of the law, which led to the rebirth of Illyria inside of Fred. Meanwhile, Lindsay was employing the amulet, used in the finale of Buffy, to garner favour with the senior partners and join the Circle of the Black Thorn. And the senior partners were slowly wearing away the team’s once heroic worldview. As Lindsay said near the end of the season, heroes don’t compromise with the world; they see the world the way it is and they fight it.

All of these evils twist and distort our heroes intentions, making them less and less heroic, whether they know it or not. And when Angel is finally returned to the right path, it made sense that Cordelia would be the one to do that for him. Not because Cordelia was Angel’s most recent Love — we’ll exclude Nina since they weren’t dating yet — but because she’s the one who’s been with him since the beginning. She’s seen his ups and downs and knows what he wants to hear and what he needs to hear. It was a fitting end to the character, though if they hadn’t made her so damned mature over the past couple years it would’ve been entertaining to see her get completely swallowed up by the glitz and glam of the Wolfram and Hart lifestyle.

There are some who feel like the ending for this season was bad: they are wrong. It was the most tragic yet uplifting ending the show could have done and it’s the melange of those two characteristics that has always made Angel such a fantastic show.