Wow was this a good episode. So many interesting moments from so many of the characters…
Does anyone know who played the creepy evil doctor guy? My wife thought he was very familiar, but IMDB doesn’t seem to know.
He’s Vincent Ventresca. I’m used to seeing him in fun roles, so this was different.
Boyd was…prepared. For a smart guy, Topher was not.
Did any one get a screencap of Echo’s pod?
I wouldn’t have expected Jonathan Frakes’s directing to fit with Dollhouse, but it worked very well.
Interesting how this episode had very little Echo, and was a very good episode, yet the opening credits are just a montage of Echo. This episode hopefully shows that the series isn’t afraid to focus on other parts of the ensemble.
Where was Ballard?
I really, really liked the episode. What I particularly liked was that it seemed to me to force the viewer to re-evaluate their perspective of the Dollhouse. I find the idea of sending of a doll an a permanent assignment abhorrent, but up until last night I still thought there were some shades of gray to the Dollhouse itself, since the dolls are limited to 5 years. However, last night blurred the line for me and I found myself questioning the difference between a 5-year engagement and a lifetime one. They both seem to objectify humanity in a way I’m not comfortable with.
In summary, I liked the ethical dimensions of the episode.
I’ve only recently started watching Dollhouse (last season in the time zone I was in, it was on against Flashpoint and Battlestar Galactica, so it was third on the priority list) but I really liked this episode. It seemed more accessible to a newbie than some of the others I’ve seen.
When Vincent Ventresca’s character started getting creepy, I jokingly told myself it was just Quicksilver Madness. I think maybe I watched too much Invisible Man back in the day. It was interesting to see him play such a bastard with no chance of redemption.
Funny moment during the watching: everyone in my household is up on casting spoilers for the next episode, but my mom for some reason though that Summer Glau would be appearing in this episode, not the next one.
So when one of the characters in last night’s episode said something like “We think we’ve found the new Sierra. She’s 22 and a paranoid schizophrenic” we all though they meant you-know-who, not that it was a flashback moment.
This was great. Good job by both writers, good job by director J. Frakes, great work by [del]Olivia & Fran[/del] all the regulars. This was amazing stuff.
I love how they’re layering Topher’s character. The whole thing is catching up to him; and I get the idea that this is the first time he’s been “caught” by anything he’s done before.
Bit of a surprise moment for me – I had no idea Topher was a medical doctor. I thought he came to them entirely from the computer geek/hacker/programmer angle, and the medical/brain stuff was learned for the job. (I suppose it makes more sense if he’s actually got a medical background, but still. He’s such a Big Nerd, I wouldn’t have thought he’d seek out the medical knowledge on his own, but only because he needed it to work on his computer toys.)
I think Topher is becoming my favorite character. (And I wish Amy Acker would come back so we see more of the conflict between the two of them!)
Well, come on… sure he’s smart, but he’s a computer geek, not a psychologist and certainly not an expert in covering up a bloody crime. If someone presented me with a dead body I wouldn’t know what to do with it either.
Well, apparently the first thing you do is to cut the caratid artery and then pump the chest to empty the blood - makes it easier to dismember.
Why’d they need to cut the body up anyway? Won’t acid work on an intact body?
More surface area for the acid to dissolve.
The season has been pretty uneven so far ,but this episode was really great. I liked that it focused on the non-Echo characters. And interesting that a lot of how the staff has been justifying things to themselves (“voluntary” non permanent dolls) has been pretty much blown. Also interesting that someone new knows Echo’s secret and they are covering for her too. I’m having trouble deciding whether Eliza’s acting is getting worse, or if she’s just effectively playing a doll that is retaining memories.
No, no, the femoral artery. 
There’s some twisted logic that a former cop would know the mechanics of dismembering bodies – and have a “friend” who could make people disappear – maybe he used to work in homicide? But still – Boyd, that’s just creepy.
One question: why would Priya “have” to go back to the Dollhouse? They made Nolan disappear, and the folks as Rossum knew he wanted her permanently, so why not make her disappear too? Give her a fake identity and a plane ticket, and there you go; as far as Rossum knows, Nolan went on the lam and took Priya with him. What’s the difference if one disappears versus two? It’s seems like a prime opportunity for Topher to right the wrong he accidentally committed, since she was never a volunteer Doll in the first place and should never have been a part of the Dollhouse.
She wanted to forget the murder ever happened.
That seemed more like a “as long as I have to be back here, let’s take advantage of it” kind of statement from her, though. Plus, it didn’t seem like Boyd consulted her at all on what she wanted – just told her to clean up, pack Nolan’s bag, and then he decided that she “belongs to the Dollhouse now” while chopping up the body.
I suppose he could have asked her off-screen, but it sure didn’t seem like it (when would it have happened? he took charge of the whole thing the second he walked in the door), and it’s confusing to have it off-screen, if so. And I think the writers are better than that, anyway.
The only reason I can think of is that he wanted to have her “story” unenmeshed with Nolan’s, in case Rossum stumbled across her alive and well later on with no Nolan… but that seems rather weak to me. If they did find her, she could just say that Nolan “disappeared” while they were on the run – went out to meet someone and never came back, say.
I question the wisdom of dissolving a body into acid. That just leaves you with a very nasty human acid soup, that’s not easy to get rid of. And that bathroom better be bloody well ventilated. Topher should have worn a respirator.
I’d google it, but something tells me googling ‘how to dissolve body in acid in a tub’ may ping a few boards in the DHS world.
Return to watching ‘Max Headroom’ reruns
Dissolving a body in an acid bath came up on one of the CSI shows (fiction, I know), so I’m guessing in addition to Uosdwis R. Dewoh’s concerns about Topher, they would have done some serious damage to the bathtub. I can’t imagine the first cops on the scene from the missing persons report could miss the mess in the bathroom. Perhaps there’s an engagement-gone-bad team to clean up the real messes?
I knew I was doing something wrong…
I thought this was the best episode so far. I don’t get why Priya is still a doll, unless it’s to get some money for her new life–since her old life was pretty much destroyed by creepy evil doctor dude.