Dollhouse: When Hair Goes Bad

Hey Gasmi, this week on Dollhouse we find out all evil in the world comes from bad haircuts. See what I’m talking about after the jump.

Okay, as soon as our episode starts this week we are in the poop. For starters we are in some creepy warehouse type place dealing with a very creepy guy. How do we know he’s creepy, let me count the ways. He talks a lot like Kenneth from 30 Rock minus the endearing Southern accent. He’s way, way into posing some mannequins, and I’m sorry while there is nothing wrong with a small boy playing with dolls, there is something very ungood about a grown man playing with life sized dolls (yeah, I’m looking at you Charlie Sheen). Oh and just to make sure everyone knows he’s creepy, he’s sporting a Crispin Glover haircut, which we all know only serious whackjobs ask for at their local Super Cuts. What? What’s my proof? Do I really need any more then Crispin Glover?

We pretty much jump clean off the creepy scale when we see one of the mannequins starts to sweat. Yep, he’s posing real living women. We’re not two minutes into the show and we are deep in Silence of the Lambs territory, and it quickly goes from bad to worse. He’s drugging these women with stuff in these big assed hypos and one of the women manages to jab him with an aforementioned bigass hypo. This leads to Creepy Crispin Glover Hair Dude wailing on her melon with a croquet mallet, which leads to him hitting the streets in search of another life sized Bratz doll.

He hits the streets of LA and he’s feeling pretty groggy from getting jabbed with that bigassed hypo, because when he sees the next woman he wants to snatch he walks directly out into traffic. Well don’t worry because drivers are always aware of pedestrians right? Just kidding, it’s LA so he gets pancaked within three steps and we cut to the opening credits.

We come back to the Dollhouse where Agent Pucker Face (Paul Ballard) is looking for Echo down in the showers. Echo’s in her full on Special Ed wiped mode so she doesn’t have a problem with being buck neeked in front of Agent Pucker Face. Agent Pucker Face gets all flustered like these are the first set of boobies he’s ever seen and gets Echo into a towel so the network censor won’t have a conniption fit. Then once she’s decent, he herds her over to the chair so we can see who Eliza Dushku-bibble gets to be this week.

Meanwhile DeWitt and Boyd are taking a little walk though the Dollhouse and talking about everyone’s favorite runaway brainwashed pretend doctor, Whiskey Sour. It turns out she didn’t just go out for a ride two episodes ago, no she left, beat it, scrammed, vamoosed, isn’t getting paid because she isn’t on the show this week. Errr, I mean she’s gone.

DeWitt is a little steamed because they can’t seem to find her, and Boyd is suffering from a severe case of WHOGAS (WHO-Gives-A-Sh#T) and says Claire decided to leave. Dewitt pounces with an “Oooooooh, Claire” and tells Boyd to start working on getting Whiskey Sour back on my TV.

This vaguely interesting plot point gets interrupted when Victor (hey remember him?) comes up and says there is someone in Doctor Saunder’s office “who is not their best.” Dewitt and Boyd go in and see it’s Crispin Glover Hair Dude with a bunch of tubes stuck in him and I beg to differ with Victor, because seeing as they’ve covered up his hair with a bunch of electrodes, I’m saying this is as good as he looks tonight.

CGHD (Crispin Glover Hair Dude) is in a coma and Topher is working like Santa’s little elves to get him uncoma-ed, which DeWitt wants because it turns out CGHD’s uncle is a bigass shareholder in their evil corporation. Hmmmm, sounds like somebody is angling for employee of the month. Cheer up DeWitt, unlike certain people on The Letterman show, or Jimmy Kimmel Late Night, you won’t have to take a long blistering hot shower afterwards to win this particular plaque. Boyd thinks it’s a bad idea because he’s aware of some of the shenanigans CGHD has gotten into in the past. If he knew about the women in that warehouse or what is under that hairnet he’d be smothering CGHD with a pillow right then and there.

Dewitt asks Topher if he can get Crispin Glover Hair Dude to wakey wakey, and Topher says if he can sneak up on the dude’s brain he should be able to get his cerebral cortex up and running, or give the guy a boner (which thanks to the FCC is referred to here as a “man reaction”). Dewitt wins a special place in my heart for immediately coming back at that last news flash with a crisp “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” She exits stage left and Topher tries to get Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s EKG to start bouncing again.

Agent Pucker Face is over with Ivy giving Echo her personality for the night. Pucker Face is reading the work order and wants to know what the R stands for. Ivy tells him it stands for whoRing, romance. Oh goody, we’re 25% of the way into the season, looks like this is our hooker episode. Echo gets zapped and now she’s Kiki who likes to dance and is very notso hotso in the thinking department, which is a real switch from regular Echo because of the, you know, dancing part.

We cut to Topher and Boyd and Topher tells Boyd they have a problem. They end up in DeWitt’s office showing her a picture of Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s brain which Topher explains is Exhibit A that CGHD is a serial killer. Am I the only person who noticed this guy’s hair? Topher says he’s got an ethical problem reanimating a probable mass murderer, so Dewitt has to put her thinking cap on to figure out what they are going to do next.

While this is going on Agent Pucker Face takes Echo to get her whore duds for her upcoming gig. Did you ever wonder just what goes into getting the dolls into their outfits? Yeah, me neither, but too bad because we are about to learn. It turns out the guy who runs this part of the Dollhouse thinks he smarter then everyone else and fires off a quip about every three seconds. Yep, he’s just like Topher, oh and he’s Fabbbbbbbulous!

Well he thinks he is, anyway I hereby christen him Gay Topher. Gay Topher tells Agent Pucker Face to park it because it takes serious amounts of time to work his magic.

While Agent Pucker Face is reading a magazine DeWitt meets with the company big wig they are trying to butter up. Only DeWitt isn’t in the buttering mood right now and wants to know why she wasn’t told Crispin Glover Hair Dude is a shoe in for the role of Buffalo Bill in the road cast of Silence of the Lambs, and come to think of it, why should she wake the guy up at all now? Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s uncle says when his nephew acts up this way he starts snatching women off the street, so they need to find out where the women are at before they turn from kidnapping victims into murder victims. This is actually a good reason to keep the plot going and DeWitt tells Creepy Uncle fine, but they are going to do it her way.

Echo gets her hooker uni and Agent Pucker Face gets all flustered because I think his crush for Echo is kicking into overdrive. Well either that or he’s thinking about passing a world class kidney stone. Look, I’m sure Tamoh Penikett, the guy who plays Paul Ballard, is a hellva nice guy in real life, but he doesn’t have the most expressive face as an actor.

Anyway, Boyd shows up and tells APF there is going to be a change of plan. Boyd is going to take Echo to her gig and Agent Pucker Face is going to do a little of that crack FBI serial killer profiling, that we never knew he did before just now, on Crispin Glover Hair Dude. It sounds like a plan, and this will be better because after last season Boyd is used to Echo wandering around in come hump me pumps, knee socks, and a mini-skirt. (Stop me if I’m wrong, but didn’t she wear this same outfit when she went undercover as the blind girl with the religious wingnuts?)

They dump Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s personality straight into Victor and strap him into a chair. This is good because Enver Gjokaj, the guy who plays Victor hasn’t gotten to do anything yet this season and now he gets to play an affected serial killer. Do you smell an Emmy nomination too? Wait, scratch that. I had a microwave burrito for dinner, my bad.

Agent Pucker Face comes in and gets his interrogation groove on. For awhile all he can get out of Victor Crispin Glover Hair Dude, is “my rich family is going to have your job,” so APF brings out his big gun, freak-out-wise. He shows Victor Crispin Glover Hair Dude a video shot of his real body strapped down in the ICU. VCGHD plotzes and spills the beans about using that poor unsung extra’s melon as a croquet ball, oh and that all women are dirty whores and Agent Pucker Face exits stage right.

What’s that? Why doesn’t he ask where the rest of the women are at? Well he wants to talk to DeWitt about it and besides, there is no such thing as a 32½ minute hour long drama, even on Fox.

Anyway he goes into DeWitt’s office to actually doing something right for a change, which is when he and DeWitt almost poop themselves when a whole mess of bells and whistles go off on Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s hospital bed. They book down there and find out everything is fine, well aside from some of the wires being yanked out. The prime suspect is Creepy Uncle who didn’t like Agent Pucker Face getting snippy with his nephew, or in this case his nephew’s personality that was put in a body with a decent haircut and an active gym membership.

DeWitt and Agent Pucker Face haul butt over to the interrogation room, but Creepy Uncle and Victor Crispin Glover Hair Dude are long gone. You know watching this show is kind of comforting on a week to week basis, because it’s nice to see a top secret evil corporate lair being run with the same level of competence as Dunder Mifflin over on The Office.

Well with Creepy Uncle and Victor Crispin Glover Hair Dude in the breeze, what are our favorite bad guys going to do? Angela DeWitt makes the big bucks so she calls Creepy Uncle, and get this, he answers the phone. Someone on this show is committed to the plot that’s for dang sure.

DeWitt wants to know just what the hell is going on, and Creepy Uncle tells her to relax, because he’s got it all under control. He’s going to sit down with Victor Crispin Glover Hair Dude and have a creepy uncle to creepy nephew talk and get everything worked out. That sounds like a plan, and it seems to work, for about another three seconds. You see that’s when Victor Crispin Glover Hair Dude smacks Creepy Uncle’s noggin into the steering wheel of the car, knocking him out, and after their car crashes, VCGHD wanders away as free as a bird.

Back at the Dollhouse everyone is in full poop your pants mode. DeWitt wants to track Victor by the GPS strip they have in all the dolls’ noggins. Topher tells her the only problem is that they took the GPS doohickey out of Victor when they fixed his face for getting cut up by Alpha last season and Whiskey Sour wasn’t around to tell anyone to put it back in after the surgeries were done. All right Topher, way to blame the person out sick, if everyone goes to the break room to fight over the last bagel this will be just like where I work.

Agent Pucker Face has his first good idea of the season, show and heads out to check on the GPS for the car Creepy Uncle and Victor drove off in and he exits stage left. DeWitt tells Topher to do something, and he types extra hard at his keyboard.

Meanwhile all of Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s hostages/mannequins wake up from the animal tranquilizers he had them doped to the eyeballs with. One of the women promptly goes into the “we’re all doomed, doomed I tell you” bit that was perfected by Doctor Smith on Lost in Space probably before she was born, but the oldest women gets everyone to pull together by reminding them they are people with names. It’s a pretty good pep talk because they all start looking for a way to break out of their cage.

Agent Pucker Face goes down to where Victor abandoned his car (and his uncle come to think of it), and notices it was pretty close to where CGHD got froggered by that car at the beginning of the show. Agent Pucker Face deduces that this is where CGHD was cruising for a new hostage and then notices the Metrolinks station nearby and tells DeWitt he thinks Victor is using it and he could be anywhere in LA by now. APF decides to follow Victor by train because; well maybe he didn’t bring a car with him?

Topher thinks it’s funny that their one man manhunt is now on public transportation. DeWitt tells him she wants a little less chuckling at co-workers and a lot more solvey solvey out of him. When Topher asks what he’s supposed to do, DeWitt says she wants a remote wipe on Victor.

Topher poops himself and says it can’t be done. DeWitt reminds him that Alpha did it to Echo in Season 1. Topher gets defensive, but DeWitt doesn’t care and tells Topher gets that big Wiley Coyote brain of his to work on the problem.

Hey, are you wondering were Victor wandered off to? No? Well fake it, the screenwriter’s mom spent a lot of money to get him into film school so let’s see what he comes up with next. Anyway Victor goes to Hollywood, because even though he’s on the lamb from his family, the cops, and an evil secret corporation, he’s going to play with his dollies tonight one way or the other. He ends up cruising for hostages at a dance club, and where are the authorities when this crime is happening? I mean the dude is wearing a tan windbreaker, a blue plaid oxford shirt, and tan Dockers. All he needs are red shoes for it to be official that his stylist is Long Duc Dong from Sixteen Candles. Where are the doormen in this situation? I blame our once proud schools for this.

Anyway, while this fashion crime is taking place, Topher has figured out the mystery of the remote wipe in a solid 3½ minutes. He calls up Boyd and gives Big Daddy and us some much needed exposition on this situation. Topher is going to shut down all the other dolls so he can do the remote wipe through the bio-whatjamacallits they have in all the dolls. He calls Boyd because he doesn’t want him to freak out when all the gadgets in his creepy spy van go black. Boyd says he’ll be fine and seeing as he seems a lot more interested in his paperback then anything else tonight, I believe him.

Topher flips a switch and we see Victor grab his head and hear a loud buzzing sound. Did it work? It’s hard to say because they lose their power at the Dollhouse.

I’m going with it kind of works because Echo stabs her john, date, client, professor over at the University of Love. Yeah that makes no sense right now, so let me back up and take you through the Echo plot line that was going on while the Quest for Creepy Hair was taking center stage tonight.

You see Echo got hired by some fairly creepy in his own way medieval literature professor who wanted to have a hot student want to trade sex for a grade in his class. Of course to stretch it out Professor Horny and Echo go back to his office to discuss her F, he gives a three minute lecture on how Chaucer shows us women are in control when it comes to sex, and he’s still able to have a young girl have to perform a sex act with an older man in a position of authority. In case I haven’t mentioned it, Prof Horny is a grade A asshat.

He thinks he’s about to seal the deal with Echo while they are slow dancing in the dark when he tells her she’s a woman in control. Seeing as this is when Crispin Glover Hair Dude gets dumped into her and we know his feelings on the fairer sex, Professor Horny getting a knife in the neck isn’t that surprising. Well to him it’s very surprising, but not to us. We’re a little puzzled where the knife came from, but the hole in the guy’s neck kind of makes sense.

DeWitt calls up Boyd to fill him in on the situation which is why he gets out of his creepy spy van and can see Echo Crispin Glover Hair Dude go driving off into the night. Boyd goes upstairs and finds our boy Horny lying on the floor and tells him he’s going to be all right. No offense Boyd, but the big hole in the guy’s neck, and that wasted Viagra tablet are calling bullshit on you right now. Boyd calls up DeWitt and fills her in on the new situation and I guess calls an ambulance for Professor Horny.

DeWitt and Topher are piecing these puzzle pieces together when they come to the big question; if Crispin Glover Hair Dude is in Echo, where did Kiki go to?

We cut immediately to that dance club in Hollywood where Victor, who is now Kiki, is seriously shaking what momma gave him. He channels his inner Flygirl for about two minutes and then totally comes on to some frat guy, who the last we see is going to take a swing at Victor/Kiki.

It’s right then that Agent Pucker Face who has managed to track Victor down to this one particular dance club in Hollywood (you have to love a good script in these situations) and is on the phone with DeWitt getting caught up to speed hears the big hullabaloo and comes running. He shows up right after Victor/Kiki has laid out the frat guy for taking a swing at a girl. Victor gives Agent Pucker Face a big hug which gets a lot of strange looks because when the last time one man was hugged another one in Hollywood?

Back at the creepatorium, the hostagequins have pried open a hole in their cage and are just about to escape when Echo Crispin Glover Hair Dude shows up with the croquet mallet of death. Echo is full on ranting crazy man gibberish at this point and whacks one of the hostages for trying to escape and then right when it so looks like we’re not getting a happy ending tonight, something happens.

Echo’s personality goes all wonky and Wiped Echo shows up. Yep, in other words the same exact thing that has happened to Echo every episode this season. As a matter of fact seeing as it’s happened so often, I’m giving it a new name; from now on we’re going to call this the “48 Minute Mark.”

Back at the Dollhouse the power comes back on and Topher gets a fix on Echo and sends out the bad guys. Well this week they’re kind of the good guys even though they’re not doing this out of altruism, aw screw it, they send out their SWAT Team.

Back at the evil croquet lair, Wiped Echo is telling the Hostagequins they need to kill her. That’s the only way they can be safe from Crispin Glover Hair Dude because he is going to come back and he won’t rest until he drives all their heads through wickets. The oldest hostagequin thinks this sounds a little nutso, but the younger blonde chick doesn’t have a problem with it and gives Echo a smack with that dreaded croquet mallet.

Oldest Hostagequin gets the mallet from the younger girl and says this doesn’t make any sense. Maybe so, but it’s this or The Mentalist so I say just go with it. Echo tells Oldest that making sense doesn’t matter and then tells her the reason Crispin Glover Hair Dude took her in the first place is because he saw her with her child. This is right when Oldest gets all set to go piñata on on Echo’s well sculpted butt, and this is right when the SWAT Team shows up to save the day, or in this case Echo.

We go back to the Dollhouse and everything is settled down. Agent Pucker Face and DeWitt are looking at Crispin Glover Hair Dude’s body and Agent Pucker Face asks DeWitt if the guy is ever going to wake up. DeWitt says wouldn’t it be nice if he didn’t and then she exits stage left.

Wiped Echo wanders in and tells Agent Pucker Face that Crispin Glover Dude still dreams. He tells Echo not for long and walks out right when all those code blue whistles go off. We see Echo talk like Crispin Glover Hair Dude, and then The End.

Okay, this wasn’t my favorite episode of the season, but still any episode of Dollhouse is worth watching in my book. Even though the plot had holes in it this week you could drive a tractor trailer through, there were some cool things.

The whole way they show the flat out obvious creepiness of Crispin Glover Hair Dude with his hostagequins against the run of the mill creepiness of Professor Horny, and the way they just dumped another person’s complete personality into Victor show that when you get right down to it, what the Dollhouse is doing is evil no matter what the people doing it are telling themselves.

This episode is a great time to bring up that if you haven’t checked out the season 1 DVDS, you really should, if for no other reason then it has a 13th episode they filmed last year but didn’t show on TV. If you see that episode, things like remote wipes and people telling each other their names go from creepy to down right chilling and that’s all I’m going to say about it because it’s too cool to spoil.

Boyd: Topher has ethical problems. Can you believe it? Topher!
Topher: Way to land it.
My favorite bit of the night.

Oh, and some good news on the geeky ratings front. If you didn’t know so far, the ratings for this season have been terrible, about two million people less an episode from last season when the ratings were kind of crappy. The Good news we got this week is the DVR ratings came out and Dollhouse was the highest rated show, so judging by what I’ve been reading on the web Fox is pretty firm on showing a complete second season. So we got that going for us, which is nice.

Anyway, there won’t be a post for next week because of the baseball playoffs, but I’ll see you all the week after that. Thanks for stopping by.