I knew it!!!
Just watch the episode.
… I didn’t.
Totally wasn’t expecting that.
Me either.
Well, I had heard that Alan Tudyk would be on the show. The rest just kind of makes sense.
Sneaky dude, that Alpha.
I didn’t, and I knew the rumors that Tudyk was going to play Alpha (I just thought the rumors were wrong). I am totally in for the last episode, but some things keep me from fully getting into this series. So fanwank me this: why is Ballard not dead? Is it really that hard for this mega powerful corporation to kill one dude? And it was worth it for them to take one $$ making doll out of commission to be his girlfriend? Also, you can create a person who is the grown up version of a traumatized young girl, to the point that ‘she knows what to expect’, but you can’t bring back Dominic as a guy who wants to help out and give answers nicely? Finally, they knew Ballard was in the Dollhouse, seems like they tracked him, but didn’t think to check out the guy that was with him? Suspending disbelief so often keeps me from really enjoying the show.
I dont think they knew there were two - likely some alarm in DeWitt’s office went off just before Alpha kicked security and they saw Ballard.
It wasn’t so easy to kill Ballard because everyone in the FBI knew he was tracking the Dollhouse. So unless they made it look like he got killed by the mob or someone else they couldn’t kill him and make everyone in the FBI suspicious of the Dollhouse.
I liked the part with Dominic. It shows that the technology is relatively new and that there are still some concepts that even the experts aren’t so clear on. I like Topher being taken back by the fact that Dominic realized he wasn’t in his own body. It was a really messed up mistake that no one saw coming. It is the kind of thing that should happen when you play around with mind altering technology.
Did anyone notice that when Victor/Dominic was first awakened, and he was thrashing about, he said “whiskey”? Someone said that he wanted a drink, but I don’t think that was it. W = whiskey in the radiotelephony alphabet.
So who’s Whiskey?
Fairly complicated episode; I’ll need to see it again on Hulu to make sure I got all the nuances.
A couple questions:
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Was the personality that Alpha came back to rescue that of the real Caroline or an imprint? She didn’t seem much like the Friend of the Earth in the Rossum Corp. flashback episode, but then the same ep alluded to something like four years elapsing before she actually signed the Dollhouse contract, and hinted that she may have become something of an outlaw during that time.
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I think I missed an important bit of dialogue. Who actually sent the flash drive with the info about the dead guy in Tucson to Dominic, since it apparently wasn’t the NSA?
Oh, and Tudyk was pretty good. Even though I had a clear idea who he was going to represent in the show way back at the start of the series, his character in the first half of the episode was so un-Alph-like that I was still gobsmacked when the scalpel came out.
Yeah, that’s weird. They should have gone there first. Although I think there’s some fan speculation that Dr Saunders is really Whiskey.
That’s my bet - she was slashed by Alpha, and couldn’t go out on assignments anymore so they made her the doctor. That’s why Alpha kept asking her about when they first met.
“Did you always want to be a doctor?”
“…yes…”
“That is a lie.”
Alpha didn’t say that Saunders was lying, just that it was a lie. As in, a lie she’d been imprinted with. 
Also, what’s going to happen to Victor? His Dominic impression was dead on.
The sleeping beauty and the prince bit was great. I think it worked on more than one level for different sets of characters.
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Hard to say yet - she recognized Alpha, obviously, but it could have been some ‘old imprint’ that had bonded with him perhaps. Or, as you said, Caroline with new experiences.
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Wild guess - could that have actually been Alpha? Making sure that they were distracted with Tucson and didn’t see him making his move until too late?
I’m very curious now about what’s happened to Alpha and his capabilities now - it almost seems like he’s capable of imprinting himself now, without the chair, and I think that was hinted at earlier.
Minor potential spoilers from the previews for next week:
Nope. Alpha looks like he is going to imprint Caroline on another doll. Her first question when she wakes up? “Has it been 5 years?”
I love how they made the initial character of Alpha reminiscent of Wash to make us fall in love with the cuddly carebear that he was in Firefly, only to rip that from us with the slash of a scalpel. 
As for the reason they didn’t kill Ballard. Because it’s more effective to discredit the whole idea of the Dollhouse by making it’s lead agent seem like a crazy conspiracy nut. It’s ok if Ballard knows about the Dollhouse, as long as no one believes him. Ballard was of more use to them as a Cassandra than dead.
I guessed Tudyk was Alpha when he was playing with the computer.
Several comments:
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Tonight’s plot made no sense. Alpha kills the environmental guy and dumps his body in Tucson (why? It made no difference to his plan) before Ballard even knows about the environmental guy, or even leaves November. How could he possibly know that Ballard would find the Dollhouse the very next day and come to him immediately? How could he even know that Ballard would make the connection between the Dollhouse and the environmental expert in time? It seems a pretty pointless exercise to dump the body (again, why Tucson?) without knowing that Ballard was on his way.
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Ballard is probably the stupidest FBI agent in TV history. All throughout the show I’ve been screaming at the screen, “Why the hell are you doing that?” And what did he really think he’d accomplish by getting into the Dollhouse all alone? However, it does explain why they keep him alive: he’ll continue to do idiotic thing to discredit himself.
There is a dollhouse in Tucson possibly the HQ.
ITs very possible that Alpha didnt plan on them Identifying the corpse (random homeless guy found dead) or it was misdirection - spend resources in Tuscon looking for Alpha while Alpha is actually ‘home’.
As for the timing with Ballard - remember that ‘someone’ has been planting messages to Ballard via the Dolls - not a stretch for it to have been Alpha thru Dominic - and that it was only a matter of time before Ballard found the clue that gets him to the enviromental guy.
Assuming Alpha is as smart as he appears, its not a stretch for him to get Ballard to do exactly what Alpha needs… The real question is why Alpha ‘needs’ Ballard to get back in - seems Alpha has all the info he needs to do it, and doesn’t really need assistance.
Whiskey - Victor said it looking ‘at’ Ballard/Boyd and Echo during the fight - more likley that Ballard is the plant, meant to bring Alpha in. This seems especially plausible given that Alpha and Ballard both have the same “mission” - saving Echo.
I agree that the doctor is likely a doll as well - who needs a real doctor when you can train your own.
You can explain a lot if you consider that Ballard himself may be a doll. I’m not sure you can reconcile that with the fact that he obviously has some kind of past that people in the FBI know him from. I don’t recall - did he transfer into the new FBI offices at the beginning of the series? Or was he there for a long time?
This could get very twisty. Imagine that Ballard is a doll implanted by Alpha to help him get into the dollhouse to save Echo. The dollhouse figures something is up, and puts their own doll across the hall from Ballard to keep tabs on him.
It’s becoming increasingly likely that the boundaries of dolldom are much wider on this show than we originally knew. It’s not just a small handful of volunteers being run by ordinary people - there could be dolls all over the place, not even knowing they are dolls. Anyone could be a doll.