This Week in Dollhouse

Man on the Street



Oh, yes, it was The Fabled Sixth Episode. And it was pretty good. It flipped the formula by being mostly about FBI Guy, and just a little about Echo and her assignment of the week. There were two upsides to this: FBI Guy finally had something worthwhile to do, and there wasn't all that much Eliza Dushku (it's harder to notice her not-so-good acting when she does less of it, although admittedly she did pretty well with her material this week). The episode also gave us some answers about things (mostly Dollhouse inner-workings) while bringing up more questions (for speculation funtimes!).

Oh, and it's called "Man on the Street" because it's peppered with man-on-the-street interviews for a news story about the urban legend of Dollhouse. Some of them were trite or boring, but one was genuinely hilarious. This device was also a nice way of mixing up the storytelling.

From here on out, it's all spoilers.

So, it turns out FBI Guy's neighbor, Sad Girl (who kept trying to get him to please notice her! by plying him with Italian foods) is actually a doll, planted in his building to (unknowingly, of course) spy on him. That was not a huge surprise overall, although they did do a good job misleading us within the episode. (I figured once Head Dollhouse Lady called her a "civilian" that she wasn't a doll after all.) And she's a pretty cool stealth doll, with an implanted hypnotic suggestion that allows her to go Super Ninja. That was awesome. I like Sad Girl. (Sad Girl got attacked by Jerk Handler, whom I'll talk about in the next paragraph, and I was really nervous they were going to kill her off. Since I watched it on Hulu yesterday, I was able to go find a spoiler that she was a doll instead of dead meat--which ruined it a little bit, but not as much as I would have thought it was ruined if poor Sad Girl had been murdered.)

There was a sub-plot where it turned out that Sierra (Echo's friend-doll) had been getting raped by her handler. It was supposed to be a surprise that that was who it was instead of the boy-doll, Victor (whom we already knew has a crush on Sierra, even though that's not supposed to happen in blank slate mode), but I saw it coming from the moment Jerk Handler came onscreen. He's always been hateful, so it was pretty cool that Sad Girl killed him. (Head Dollhouse Lady sent him there, ostensibly to kill Sad Girl, after he was found out by Echo's handler, Boyd [yay, Boyd!], but whoops! She's a ninja.)

The real speculation-friendly part of the episode was went Echo met up with FBI Guy and they fought, but then! She told him that she had secretly been imprinted by a mole inside the Dollhouse to tell him that, well, there's a mole inside the Dollhouse. She told him that he needed to back off for now and make the Dollhouse people think that they had won. She also said that the mole would communicate with him again, through her, so that they could take it down together, because it's much too large and powerful for him to destroy by himself. Then she set him up to make it look like he shot a cop (which she said she had to do so that the higher-ups would think she'd completed her mission). At the end of the episode, we see him turning in his badge and gun, since he's been suspended because of the hijinks, and Head Dollhouse Lady (who, by the way, is not really the head of Dollhouse, just the manager of the L.A. branch) smirking about it.

Here's what I think: there is no mole. I honestly just assumed, as Echo was giving her spiel to FBI Guy, that the mole story was purposely put in there by Dollhouse to mislead him. Let's compare:

If there is a mole, then Dollhouse's plan was just to have Echo attack and frame him and to attack his neighbor/new girlfriend. This would have resulted in his suspension, but also in the absolute confirmation of the existence of Dollhouse and that they are out to get him. He's not very smart (see: telling his neighbor all the details of his case), but he is dogged, which they know. Simply (and perhaps temporarily) stripping him of the authority and resources of the FBI is not going to stop him, which they should know. This scenario doesn't do them a whole heck of a lot of good.

If there is not a mole, then Dollhouse has just effectively put themselves in control of FBI Guy's future actions. Echo told him to back off for a while, so he's going to. Heck, they can have Echo tell him to do whatever ("You know what? You should go to Mongolia. The mole says that's where Dollhouse HQ is. Have fun!"). As long as they allow him to feel like he's making a little progress every now and then, she could tell him what to do indefinitely. (Again, he's always been much more determined than intelligent.)

Of course, if it were me in charge of Dollhouse, I'd probably just kill him. Wouldn't that be easier than either of the abovementioned scenarios?