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This season finale took remarkable twists sprinkled with wry humor that relieved the bleakness for brief pauses, only to deepen it in contrast. Two kinds of trust were explored, exploited, and broken. The first kind is a more general emotion that makes you willing to follow another: a belief that you will not be betrayed. The second is trust in a person to behave in a consistent manner or at least according to the picture you have of them.

We already know that the actives are imprinted with the first kind of trust in their handlers. The imprint Alpha uses to get Echo to leave the dollhouse with him has, naively, this sort of trust in the person she believes him to be.

The second is the kind of trust that DeWitt has in Ballard, as her statements to Boyd (in whom I suspect she has the same kind of trust) show. She trusts that she knows what he wants and that he will continue to act according to that; indeed, when we see that he has joined the employ of the dollhouse, it shows that what he wants has been programmed. The ex-agent exchanges service to an entity he considers to be evil for the freedom of a woman whose body he fell in love with because of the dollhouse. He gets to feel not only that he is a savior, but also (inaccurately) that he has atoned for raping her, and this is why he chooses freeing Madeline over freeing Caroline.

Similarly, Alpha trusts that when he implants all of Echo’s personalities into her, she will see the world the way he sees it. Her turning around and hitting him with the pipe (which I was hoping for since the moment she began to say she understand) shows how wrong this is. The difference in their responses is at least in part due to their original personalities: Alpha was a serial killer, Echo when she was Caroline was a recent college graduate who wanted to improve the world. Implanted with a composite of personalities, Echo can rebel not only against Alpha but also against the dollhouse; Caroline tells her that she needs to fulfill her contract, but Echo argues that no one can sign a contract to be a slave.

It is troubling that, in order to fully rebel, she must first have a set of personalities implanted by Alpha; only the person created by Alpha and the dollhouse (since it is the dollhouse that recorded the personality wedges in the first place) can defy their power. This is, however, realistic: only the people we become because of an experience of oppression can turn around and stand up against that oppression. Only people shaped by another’s power can fight against that power for themselves. Of course, you still have to decide to rebel; Whiskey accepts her implanted personality instead. This may depend upon who you were before.

This brings up the question of why Caroline trusted the dollhouse in the first place—why she signed the contract. Her other choice would likely have been jail. In the dollhouse, by contrast, she would be pampered: luxurious surroundings just enough of an Asian overlay to appeal to Orientalist desires, spa treatments, five-star dining. She traded her free will for pampering and a promise of riches in the end: many a recent college graduate could be said to do the same though less explicitly.

In the end, Echo is back in the dollhouse, but two things indicate that she is still struggling. First, she reaches out to touch Topher‘s chest (looking at how unsettled he has been over the last few episodes, I have to wonder if he will end up being an ally in struggles against the dollhouse eventually) then, at last, she whispers her real name while in the sleeping pod.

I’m expecting great things from season two, though it would sort of fit the tone of the show if it just ended there with her still fighting but without any sign of how she might succeed.

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Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, is an obvious analogy for the situation of the dollhouse‘s inmates, but this episode made good use of it. Little Susan’s efforts to edit the fairytale so that Sleeping Beauty saves herself represent not only the way victims may blame themselves for not escaping but also the desires of the audience: we want Caroline to wake up and kick ass. (The uncomfortable corollary to this is that we may be said to blame her character, just as much as the writers who created her, if she does not. What we may be getting here is a heroine closer to Anne Sexton‘s Briar Rose than to Buffy.) At the same time, little Susan’s suggestion that the Prince has simply come at the end of the curse to take the credit and Susan-Echo’s statement that Sleeping Beauty made the Prince and made him fight for her alert the audience that saviors may not be as virtuous or independent in action as the traditional tale would have us believe.

All along, Paul Ballard has been guided by messages sent through Mellie and Echo; once Caroline was able to tell him that she was underground. In the last episode, we saw him as a rapist; in this one, Agent Loomis has to remind him that the actives are victims, not dolls. He has, without even entering it, taken on the attitudes and language promulgated by the dollhouse. This is not because of his personal weakness per se but because of how the organization behind the dollhouse manipulates pre-existing attitudes, particularly those of rape culture.

Not one of the men who fight over/for Caroline-Echo asks her what she wants. In part, this is because it is impossible (for Ballard, at least) to reach the real Caroline. Alpha, however, implants her a persona who at least lusts for him (and who doesn’t seem to resemble the original Caroline). A desire to act similarly lurks behind Ballard’s efforts to rescue her.

How this turns out remains to be seen. Briar Rose has set up the potential for a dramatic season finale. Ironically, it seems we may see Caroline kick ass after waking up in the chair—just not in a way that involves saving herself.

ETA: BuddyTV has a petition going to save Dollhouse from cancellation.

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While the situation into which Echo was placed in this episode was quite cliché, this episode was, to me, the most disturbing yet. Echo receiving the implant of a dead woman’s personality had a lot of potential and served to create another warning of the dollhouse‘s apocalyptic potential (this time voiced by Boyd Langton rather than by a professor, though he was following a logic I don’t entirely agree with). That said, the character of a wealthy woman who comes across as cold to her loved ones but then learns to express affection after her death is simply not sympathetic, nor does her coming back in the body of an active rather than as a ghost add a sufficiently unique spin to make the storyline otherwise interesting. (Perhaps better acting would have helped?)

Of moderately more interest was Topher manipulating Boyd into allowing him to create a temporary friend. At least, I thought it was only moderately more interesting until Boyd’s conversation with Adelle DeWitt about the situation. When she says she allows him to have his “tests” because those who most need to reach out and that it only happens once a year (while Sierra brings him a be-candled twinkie) I had to feel sorry for him. Given how obnoxious his character had been, I had never expected to feel that way, but you know? I’ve been there. I know what it’s like not to have anyone to celebrate your birthday with (which obviously doesn’t excuse violating another person’s autonomy).

The most interesting and most disturbing storyline this week, however, was that of Paul Ballard and Mellie-November. First there was the awkwardness of his trying to walk the line between not let her know that he knew she was an active, not taking advantage of her when the woman to whom the body really belong could not consent, and not hurting Mellie because even if she was created by the dollhouse, he cares for her. Then came her very troubling speech: “I will give you what you need and let you take it from me.”

I didn’t want him to respond the way he did; I couldn’t watch beyond a certain point. I would like to say it is an inaccurate portrayal, that it unfairly implied that men are animals carried away by lust, but the fact of the matter is that it was unblinkingly unrealistic. What Mellie said gave him the framework in which to believe, at least as long as he needed to believe, that it would be OK—and the dollhouse is precisely expert in giving people what they need in order to believe that rape is OK.

This was the closest to the sort of rape I experienced that I have ever seen portrayed on TV: a man who sees himself as a force for a better world allowing himself to believe the lies of rape culture. It bothers me that the only confirmation of it being wrong is his regret, evident in the shower the next morning, but given the show’s constraints, I’m not sure what more could be done.

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The structure of Spy in the House of Love emphasizes the ensemble nature of the Dollhouse series, following each of four actives as they are implanted with new personalities and instructions. Overall, the episode itself is not particularly interesting thematically. There is some play with the idea of trust: before the main action, Echo-as-dominatrix gives a standard speech to Boyd about how BDSM is about trust, though the way she suggests inverting the active-handler relationship does make it mildly interesting. Then, in the end, she hesitates to say that she trusts her new handler with her life. [ETA: Maia at Alas explores this theme in greater depth.] More important than this are the character work and foreshadowing the episode performs.

Paul Ballard has descended at least into the appearance of paranoia with his string-web linking clues and maps. Given Mr. Dominic‘s claim that, if it weren’t for him, the former agent would have already found the dollhouse, one has to wonder if he has been false leads; the message, sent through Mellie, that he needs to search for the dollhouse’s goals may be another red herring. Or it may be a sign that it is this purpose that he sees as needing to be reined in. Then again, perhaps there is another spy. Whatever the case, I wish that more time had been given to showing Ballard’s feelings of guilt and regret after learning that Mellie is a “doll”.

The revelation of Dominic’s being an NSA spy raises questions about his efforts to kill Echo. Were these genuinely an effort to protect the dollhouse as he claims? Or is Echo more intimately caught up with the ultimate aims of the organization? Certainly this would explain DeWitt‘s reluctance to commit her to the attic and why she values Echo’s protecting the dollhouse just one episode after claiming the house is out of order because of the development of the actives.

We see a little bit more of DeWitt during this episode. Her dalliance with Victor surprised me but is ultimately somewhat stereotypical: a woman with tightly controlled emotions escaping into a fantasy romance which she herself labels as pathetic then gives up. More significant is that Dominic’s characterization of her seems to confirm my earlier observation that she is a True Believer in the aims of the dollhouse’s parent company.

Echo too continues to develop more in her tabula rasa state. If Dr. Saunders‘ closure exercise didn’t fulfill her needs, one has to suspect that the same is true for the other actives. Indeed, her conversation with Sierra forms a frame for the show. When we see the wiping of Dominic from the perspective of Sierra and Echo, at the beginning of the episode though near end of its action, we hear Echo say that “she made a mistake”. Is that mistake Adelle DeWitt’s and is it only in trusting Dominick? The promise is that we will find out.