Dollhouse 2x03 Review: Bait and Switch

“Belle Chose”
Written by Tim Minear
Directed by David Solomon
 
The Story
A psychopath who likes kidnapping women and pretending they’re his female relatives so they can play croquet (or so that he can pose them mid-swing, since he’s injected them with paralytics) kills one of his victims, but not before she stabs him with a syringe of the paralytic. He stumbles into traffic and gets hit by a car. His family sends him to the Dollhouse in hopes that they can wake him up. But what they really want is for them to use their technology to get an opportunity to speak to him and find out where his victims are so they can pay them off. Topher sticks him in Victor’s head, but not before discovering that he has the same brain chemistry as a serial killer. Adelle wants to be very cautious about this, but the psycho’s uncle blows it by letting him out. Paul realizes Terry!Victor could lead them right to the victims, so this could be a good thing. Elsewhere, Echo is on an engagement to a pervy professor whose fantasy is sleeping with a student. Adelle orders Topher to figure out a way to remote wipe Victor so Terry can’t hurt anyone else. Topher almost pulls it off, except that Victor and Echo swap imprints. Terry!Echo stabs the pervy professor and goes to finish off the remaining victims. Kiki!Victor parties at a club until Paul finds him and takes him back to the Dollhouse. Echo manages to fight against the Terry imprint enough to stop him killing the other women, but it’s hard, and she thinks the only way to really stop him is for them to kill her. Luckily, Paul and the Dollhouse’s special ops guys get there in time to make that unnecessary. Adelle implies it would be awesome if the real Terry never woke up from his coma, and Paul pulls the plug. But now Echo will always have Terry in her head, since wiping doesn’t really work on her.
 
“Belle Chose” is one of the better engagement-focused episodes, mostly because of the imprint swap shenanigans. Victor’s side of that is hilarious. There’s clearly supposed to be some parallelism between the Chaucer story, the Dollhouse, and Terry Kerrens, but since I finished my master’s before the Chaucer class was offered, I have very little context for it. I can definitely see the parallelism between Terry and the Dollhouse’s general clientele, though. He thinks people should be at his disposal, completely moldable to his will, even if that reduces them to little more than mannequins.
 
Things I Liked

• “There is no need to continue to translate me.”
• “The good news is that he’s in a coma!”
• The wardrobe guy who thinks his job is more important than Topher
• Paul and the other handler waiting grudgingly for their actives to get dressed
• How fascinated Adelle is while she watches Paul interrogate “Terry”
• Adelle flatly ordering Topher to come up with remote wiping technology
• Kiki!Victor
• Paul’s reaction to Kiki!Victor
• “You always said ‘Be a man.’ You do make it a little difficult!”
• The gross professor getting stabbed in the neck instead of having sexy professor/student time. Made that whole storyline worth it.

 
Things I Didn’t

• The freaky serial killer with the fetish for putting people in poses
• So...a university professor makes enough money to afford a doll?
• Terry’s uncle is very stupid

 
The Characters
I like Paul much better as a Dollhouse employee than as a fed. His way of thinking makes him an excellent addition to the team. And what’s especially cool about it is how aware Adelle is of his usefulness. She is a very calculating person, and it doesn’t take long for her to realize exactly how someone can be a valuable asset to her. And yet she isn’t as cold as she acts. She might recruit people for their usefulness, but she does get attached.
 
Overall Rating
4/5