I tried to keep this one short, but it’s still touching on 900 words. The gist, though, is that I liked it, but I was hoping for more.

Quick plot summary: Boyd drugged Echo/Caroline so she wouldn’t be able to tell everyone that he was Rossum’s founder. Then they went straight to Tucson and got arrested by Rossum goons. Boyd ‘broke out’ with Topher and led him to the lab where they were building the remote imprinting device. It wasn’t working and Topher fixed it, at which point Boyd reveals that as part of his plan and reveals he’s Rossum’s founder. Ballard and Mellie went off to destroy Rossum’s supercomputer and as they were doing it Boyd forced DeWitt to activate Mellie’s sleeper mode. Ballard managed to get Mellie to ignore her assassin orders but not for long so she killed herself. Boyd holds Ballard hostage to stop Echo from killing him, but she shoots Ballard in the leg to get him out of the way. She gets into a tussle with Boyd and when Boyd gets the upper hand, Topher appears from behind and Dollifies Boyd with the remote imprinting device he fixed earlier. Echo tells the Doll Boyd to wear a vest of C4 and carry a grenade into Rossum’s supercomputer and pull the pin. They destroy the supercomputer, Topher has the only working prototype of the remote imprinting device and Rossum’s two founders appear to be dead. The world is saved. Cut to ten years later, the world is in turmoil, Ballard and Echo are fighting their way through the streets of LA, now an apocalyptic battleground.

As all of that was happening, Anthony and Priya headed to Tucson to help out and they did, and Dr Saunders is now a new version of Clyde, wears a suit and is still outrageously hot.

OK, so let’s talk about Boyd’s master vision. Years ago he saw Clyde’s tech, presumably before anyone else since it was pretty wildly revolutionary, and decided that because it existed it would be used, abused, and eventually lead to the downfall of man through weaponized imprinting. So, rather than destroying the technology, he decided to neuter Clyde, take the technology far beyond Clyde’s initial goals, abuse it to become one of the most powerful men in the world so he could find a vaccine for imprinting, use that vaccine on the precious few he wanted to save, and then create the apocalypse himself so that he and his followers could be the few sane people in a world of madmen.

I guess it works, but I think it would have made more sense if Boyd didn’t think he was being the good guy. He’s fomenting an apocalypse, he developed and distributed the technology he’s supposedly trying to stop. He’s not the good guy. Buffy villains always knew they were the villain, it’s what made them interesting. The Mayor of Sunnydale is the best example out there of an affable villain, and that seems like a better mold to make Boyd from. Nonetheless, it worked well enough. The one thing I particularly like about villain-Boyd was his dislike of Ballard, since Boyd and Ballard apparently have the same fundamental belief — that the technology will be abused if it exists — though one of them is obviously thinking bigger and the ways they react to that fundamental belief are diametrically opposed.

The ending was also interesting but at the same time uninteresting. Either the technology got reinvented and the world still ended, someone else took over at Rossum and finished the job, or Boyd and/or Clyde had other copies of themselves, along with the schematics for the remote imprinting device, and continued their work until they brought about the apocalypse. One of those things happened, and it might be fleshed out and explained in the series finale, but there’s a question of it really matters what particular finger pushed the button on the apocalypse. Besides, the promo for the finale made me think the show has something else planned.

And since we’re on the topic, I thought I’d pooh-pooh the finale as it is sold in that promo. It seems like they’re planning on having Topher invent a new magic that can restore people to their original personalities. And I can only assume also make imprinting either impossible or closer to the way Echo experiences it, thus making the tech mostly harmless. The world will still have collapsed into horror for ten years meaning that rebuilding the world as we know it is a long-term project unlikely to be finished in their life time. And it’s also just more magic. I know that the show is sci-fi, but inventing a new technology that fixes everything each time things get worse is not a good system. It’s what Voyager did for years and we all know how I feel about Voyager.

Still, I hold out hope that the finale will be better than that. And I guess we’ll know for sure in a couple weeks.

This review’s a short one, as promised, but mostly because I don’t have a lot to say about this episode. I liked it, but after last week’s powerhouse this one was bound to be deflationary.

First things first, Paul Ballard gets the shaft this week; he cooks Mellie/November some post-rape-slash-murder-attempt breakfast and then Mellie decides it’s over. After the brouhaha at the Dollhouse and Caroline’s old college, Mellie skips town, and Ballard tell her she knows where he is. So that relationship is apparently over. For now, at least. Which is sort of par for the course for Joss Whedon. And obviously, what Mellie experienced last episode was incredibly traumatic, but it still felt a little abrupt for me.

The rest of the story was interesting verging on cool, but it was all too cursory. The corporation behind the Dollhouse, is working on a memory drug, and one of the grad students they have developing it decided to go rogue and steal it to sell for billions. But he had a partner and he didn’t want to share. So before he took the drug and ran off, he dosed his partner-in-crime which led to a spread-by-touch craziness epidemic.

Because this drug in the wind is a huge deal to the Rossum Corporation, and they happen to own the Dollhouse, they get an army of Actives to play government agent on campus and clean up the mess while hunting down the vial of crazy juice. While all of this is happening, Echo is having another engagement with the motorcycle dude from the premiere, so she’s out of the loop. But when she sees the college on TV she leaves abruptly. She’s remembering flashes of her life before the Dollhouse.

Caroline was, apparently, a bit of a bitch. She dedicates all of her time to war protests and anti-animal testing crusading. So much so that, when she and her boyfriend break in to Rossum’s lab on campus and finds that they’re experimenting with human fetuses and mind control, she’s still most outraged by the doggie in the cage. That was a little much, and actually made Caroline less relatable to me. Regardless, it appears that this break-in is the event that led to Caroline’s enrollment in the five year “become a Doll and you live” program. So there’s one mythology mystery (mostly) answered.

When Caroline gets to the campus she’s taken in by the Doll agents, led by Victor, where she befriends the dude who is behind it all. She helps him break into the lab, where he plans to retrieve the vial so he can split town and sell it, with the memories or her previous break-in bubbling below the surface. He’s got a sad sack story about a momma with too many bills. Which is only relevant because at the end of the episode we see him being given the Dollhouse recruitment speech in exchange for them paying his mom. The cycle continues.

Along the way, Victor, Sierra, and November (AKA Mellie) all experience an unexpected side-effect of being dosed with the memory drug: they start remembering their most traumatic moments. Sierra remembers her rape by Hearn, November remembers Hearn’s attempted rape of her, and Victor seems to recall a eastern European war zone where he once worked. Whether this is before being an Active or not is unclear, but I’m sure it will be explored before the season is out. These traumatic memories fell flat for me as well. Mostly because the two that we remember are both so incredibly recent; the horror of those moments is still fresh in our minds, so it’s bizarre to experience them reliving it as something from a lifetime ago when it happened to them mere days ago. They also suffer no ill side effects from it, apparently. The drug makes them remember those things, then Topher cleans them out, which made the whole sequence feel empty to me.

And for the sake of comedy relief, Topher and DeWitt in the Dollhouse, and Dominic and Boyd on the campus all experience the effects of the drug and hilarity ensues. Topher is pantless, DeWitt jumps on a trampoline, Boyd laughs at his inability to control Echo, and Dominic is super super sorry for trying to burn Echo alive. It’s all really great, so I’ll leave those moments to be relished by the viewer on their own.

All of this isn’t to say that this episode wasn’t good. But the only parts that I really enjoyed, were the “Naked Time” moments where the buttoned up Dollhouse staff got a chance to let their freak flag fly. The rest felt subdued and simplistic to me. This was a solid episode, but one that just didn’t strike me as particularly amazing. I’m also writing this after only one viewing of the episode, whereas all my previous reviews were based on at least two viewings. So, when going back over the season after it’s all over, this may turn out to be a watershed moment for the series, but right now I’m just going to wait for the next episode and hope it’s better.