Dollhouse
Episode Twelve: Omega
The twelfth installment of Dollhouse, simply
entitled “Omega,” serves as the finale for the first season’s
plotlines regarding former FBI agent Paul Ballard and rogue active Alpha.
While there is a degree of closure in the episode, it centers more on
those two stories finally coming to fruition rather than any sense of
finality for either of the characters. It also continues to explore
Echo’s evolution, including an epic fight scene with Alpha while
having a philosophical debate on identity and being.
Although
“Omega” picks up immediately where the last episode ended,
it also contains a number of flashbacks that fill in the details of
Alpha’s evolution from simple active to a manifestation of all
past personas. The first deals with Alpha and a female counterpart imprinted
as criminal lovers similar to the Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis
characters from Natural Born Killers. As the unseen female
dances in the background, Alpha interrogates/tortures the client, who
has been tied to a chair. The active believes that he is working for
the authorities, or at the very least not being truthful about who he
is. Alpha, however, is only partially correct.
“You’re
not real,” the client finally confides to Alpha. “You think
you’re on a cross-country crime spree and you’re not. You
think you have a doomed love—it’s not doomed, it’s
not even love. I paid for this. It was supposed to be my fantasy; I
just wanted to have a little fun.” Alpha doesn’t seem to
care, and is intent on killing the client regardless. First, however,
he calls his counterpart over. As she moves out of the light blocking
her facial image, it turns out to be Dr. Claire Saunders.
In another
flashback, we find that Saunders’ active code name is Whiskey
and that the real Dr. Saunders was an elderly gentleman with a grandfatherly
aura about him. He comments that Whiskey is overworked, but her handler
responds that she is the Dollhouse’s “number one active.”
It is also revealed that Alpha first noticed Echo the very day that
Caroline was brought into the Dollhouse and apparently was instantly
smitten with her. He later even tries to kiss Echo, telling her, “I
like you. You’re special.”
It was
that infatuation that eventually pushed Alpha over the edge. When Whiskey’s
handler again refers to her as “number one,” Alpha slashes
the active’s face while insisting that she should let Echo be
number one instead. He is immediately dragged to the imprint room where
a confused Topher Brink tells Adelle DeWitt that he doesn’t know
how the attack could have happened.
“Some
residual memory, some active neurons from a previous engagement,”
he suggests. “All I can do is run a full-ranged diagnostic. I’m
bringing up every last one of his prior builds to see if anything matches.”
Alpha resists, however, and in the confusion the imprints that Topher
has called up to analyze indeed get dumped into Alpha’s brain.
The active then kills his handler, as well as the original Dr. Saunders.
In the
present, Alpha and Echo (who has been imprinted as the doomed-lover
from the first flashback) have gone on a shopping spree, kidnapping
a sales clerk in the process. While Echo believes the memories she has
are real, Alpha is aware that they are actually fake. “I didn’t
know you when you were thirteen,” he confides. “None of
us did… one of us did,” Alpha continues, apparently bouncing
around between the various personas he now carries around in his head.
Back at
the Dollhouse, Topher Brink asks, “Why is there a tall, morally-judgmental
man in my imprint room?” He is referring to Paul Ballard—despite
the former FBI agent’s restless pursuit of the organization, he
has been persuaded to help find both Alpha and Echo. He starts by asking
Topher who the first person Alpha attacked the day that the “unfortunate
technological anomaly” occurred. Topher, however, takes offense
to Ballard’s tactics. “You can’t profile Alpha,”
he explains. “He’s not a person. He’s like Soylent
Green—he’s people. He experienced a composite event. Forty-eight
personalities. Not split personalities. Full, total, complete personalities
got dumped into his coconut all at once. He snapped.”
While Ballard
understands what Topher is saying, he still insists that there was rhyme
to Alpha’s reasons: “In a mass killing like this the first
victims will often be whoever’s in the way. Who was the first
individual that Alpha went for the moment he had a choice.” Posed
that way, the question triggers something in Topher as he suddenly understands
the implications. “Himself,” he answers. “The first
individual? He came over here to the self shelf. That’s where
I keep my primaries stored, the original personalities that the ‘volunteers’
first walk in with. He took his original self and he smashed the hell
out of it.” Topher then looks for Caroline’s wedge but finds
the original missing and the back-up destroyed.
Alpha,
meanwhile, has built his own imprinting device and has used it to erase
the sales clerk’s mind. “There’s only one that can
hurt you now, just one, and that’s what we’re here to take
care of,” he explains to Echo. The person he is referring to is
Caroline and he programs Echo’s original personality into the
sales clerk. “This whining pathetic creature, this self-hating
human, that was you,” Alpha tells Echo, who is still imprinted
with the doomed lover. “She’s responsible for all of the
terrible things you can’t remember.” He goes on to say that
there is something different, something special, about Echo that will
allow her to evolve in the same way that he has.
“Forty-eight
personalities, each with its own rich history, and none of it tells
me anything,” Paul Ballard remarks once back in Adelle DeWitt’s
office. “Who’s Alpha?” DeWitt respond the same as
Topher, that Alpha is all of those personalities but Ballard again balks.
“I know you’re all very invested in your vaunted technology
and it is very impressive,” he tells DeWitt, Topher Brink and
Boyd Langton. “But I still don’t believe you can wipe away
a person’s soul.” Now its Topher’s turn to balk, but
Ballard continues. “Their soul, who they are at their core,”
he elaborates. “I don’t think that goes away.”
Langton
explains to DeWitt that Alpha destroyed his original personality and
knowing who Alpha was before he came to the Dollhouse may indeed be
of benefit. DeWitt eventually acquiesces and hands over the file. “When
the Rossum Corporation first began its investigation in to neural science,
some of our recruits were furnished by the Department of Corrections,”
she tells them. “We offered the opportunity to exchange lengthy
prison sentences for five year terms of service with us.” Alpha
was thus originally in jail, convicted of kidnapping and attempted murder.
“Based
on what I’m reading, this man was well on his way to becoming
Ted Bundy,” Ballard states after glancing through the file. “The
only reason he didn’t kill anybody is because the victim got away.
When they finally picked (him) up they found a whole murder kit in his
car. He was evolving.” Ballard and Langton team up together and
go to the apartment of Alpha’s original victim. When they meet
her, Ballard’s theory of a remnant of Alpha’s personality
still remaining within him is proven correct as her face was apparently
slashed in the same manner as Whiskey’s.
Alpha has
by now moved Echo into the imprint device in order to turn her into
an “ascended being,” but sales-clerk Caroline tries to reason
with the persona residing in her original body. “Look where you
are,” she says. “You’re in a lair, an evil lair, and
you’re sitting in some messed-up dentist chair letting a guy who
talks to himself attach wires to your head.” Alpha ignores her,
believing that Echo will do the same thing that he first did when downloaded
en mass—kill her original self. With a simple comment of “Alpha
meet Omega,” he pushes the button on the imprint machine and the
process begins. When finished, however, the end result is different
than Alpha expected because instead of killing Caroline, Echo turns
on her fellow active instead.
“You
think we’re gods?” she mockingly asks Alpha after hitting
him with a pipe.
“We’re
not just humans anymore,” Alpha replies. “We’re not
multiple personalities, we’re many personalities. One of my personalities
happens to be a multiple personality but that doesn’t make me
a multiple personality.” While he concedes that they are indeed
not gods, he turns to philosophy to further justify their existence.
“Nietzsche predicted our rise,” he tells Echo. “Perfected.
Objective. Something new.”
“We’re
not new,” Echo counters. “We’re not anything. We’re
not anybody because we’re everybody. I mean, I get it. I understand
it. I’m experiencing like thirty-eight of them right now. But
I somehow understand that not one of them is me. There’s no me,
I’m just a container.”
Alpha and
Echo end up fighting it out, with Echo eventually winning the battle.
She goes to untie Caroline, but Alpha has regained consciousness and
shoots the girl instead. He then puts the gun to Caroline’s imprint
wedge and tells Echo, “Now do what I say or I will blow your brain
out.” Echo, however, refuses to play the game.
Paul Ballard
and Boyd Langton, meanwhile, have figured out that Alpha has taken Echo
to the same abandoned power plant he took his original victim and arrive
as Echo chases Alpha outside. To facilitate his escape, Alpha drops
the Caroline imprint onto a steel beam high above the ground. Echo crawls
out to get it, but it slips through her fingers; fortunately Ballard
is waiting below to catch it. “You saved her,” Echo tells
him in an ironic twist to Ballard’s obsessive season-long goal.
Although
Alpha escapes, Adelle DeWitt remains confident that the Dollhouse’s
new “contractor” will be able to eventually capture him.
The former FBI agent has apparently decided that the best way to bring
down the Dollhouse is from within the belly of the beast, but there
is more to it than that. In exchange for his services, DeWitt has agreed
to release one of the actives from their contract: Ballard’s next
door neighbor, Mellie.
The episode
ends with Echo entering her sleeping pod. As she curls up on her side
and the glass door above closes, she whispers one work—Caroline.
Although Echo may not have evolved in the way that Alpha had hoped,
the active has again proven that she is indeed “special”
and different than the other actives. Including Alpha.
Anthony
Letizia (March 8, 2010)
