Turns out Terry's the nephew of Bradley Karrens (Michael Hogan), a bigwig of the Dollhouse's financiers, the Rossum Corporation. The comatose and badly injured Terry is brought to DeWitt's (Olivia Williams) attention and Topher (Fran Kranz) brain-dumps Terry's personality into Victor (Enver Gjokaj) so ex-FBI profiler Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) can interrogate him about the whereabouts of several missing women...In the B-story, Echo (Eliza Dushku) is imprinted as bimbo college girl Kiki (yep, it's pigtails and knee-high socks time again), and sent back to school to fulfill a fantasy for Professor Gossen (Arye Gross), a lecturer teaching a class Geoffrey Chaucer, who gets a kick out of seducing Kiki (essentially a modern version of Chaucer's character Allison from "The Miller's Tale") during extra-curricular lessons at his house.
For about half the runtime, "Belle Chose" (Chaucer's term for a vagina) was a slightly frustrating episode in some ways. Terry's storyline was loosely engaging, but it felt a bit unfocused and testing -- mainly because we never understood the reason for Terry's psychosis (a terrible matriarchal upbringing, one assumes as an armchair shrink), so he quickly became a rote psychopath. It was also a disappointment to see Michael Hogan (the second Battlestar Galactica alumni to guest this season) totally wasted, and for the Dollhouse security to let his character escape with Victor/Terry so easily. Perhaps the biggest frustration was how Echo's engagement felt disconnected to anything and painfully flat, to begin with...
However, "Belle Chose" managed the difficult trick of fizzing into life shortly after the halfway point, by knotting Terry and Echo's stories together in an unexpected way. With Victor/Terry loose in Beverly Hills after he escaped his uncle's custody by crashing his car, Topher decided to neutralize the escaped serial-killer by performing a remote brain-wipe. Unfortunately, his efforts backfire and Victor's imprint is instead swapped with Echo's -- thus, the pigtailed co-ed became a callous killer, and Victor was transformed into a promiscuous party girl. Kudos to Enver Gjokaj, who was simply marvelous through this episode; plausible as a reticent psycho, then joyously credible as a dancing teenage girl.
Overall, the latter half of "Belle Chose" was a notable improvement and entertaining enough to scrub memories of its weak start. There were still the usual bugbears about the incompetence of the Dolhouse staff and glitchy technology (seriously, do they ever have successful engagements?), and the script sometimes clubbed you over the head with the similarities between Terry's psychotic need to play with adult "dolls" and the Dollhouse's stock in trade. Dushku was her usual self -- a convincing sexy bimbo, an unconvincing psycho (not helped by the fact she was required to imitate the superior performances of Sikora and Gjokaj.)But, y'know, there was more good than bad here.
27 October 2009
The Sci-Fi Channel, 10pm
written by: Tim Minear directed by: David Solomon starring: Eliza Dushku (Echo), Harry Lennix (Boyd Langton), Fran Kranz (Topher Brink), Tahmoh Penikett (Paul Ballard), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Olivia Williams (Adelle DeWitt), Liza Lapira (Ivy), Arye Gross (Professor Gossen), Michael Hogan (Bradley Karrens), Joe Sikora (Terry Karrens), Matt Winston (Franklin), Danielle Langlois (Aunt Sheila), Susan Ziegler (Mother), Deanna Douglas (Little Sister), Tara Holt (Big Sis), Ed Wordie (Male Handler), Keith Pillow (Doctor) & Andrew DiPalma (Frat Boy)
