So yeah, still not caught up on Heroes
quite yet. Apparently my family members like to spend time with me. Crazy, right? Anyway, hope to get the now two episodes I am behind up soon. In the mean time, here’s Dollhouse
episode 2 which I am able to conveniently watch without going online. In a flashback, we learn who Alpha is. He’s a composite, apparently a doll whose memories have recombined. And he is someone out there ... perhaps sending messages to a certain FBI agent?
Echo is purchase, apparently as a perfect personal companion for Richard O’Connell, a very rich man on his vacation.
Ballard pays a visit to the site of the kidnapping from last week. He gets in to a fight with a less than friendly fellow agent. But Ballard does manage to find Echo’s glasses...
Echo kills a deer (without any pretentious “killing animals is bad” message!) and we immediately fall in to bed with her new friend. Then things get weird... Richard sends Echo out of the camp, and prepares to hunt her down!
We return to a flashback to Boyd Langdon’s arrival at the Dollhouse. Langdon meets the injured Dr. Saunders and checks out the corpse of his predecessor (both events that happened during Alpha’s escape).
Ballard receives the package from the end of last week with the picture of Echo... marked Caroline (her previous name). Not mailed in anyway, whoever left it had to have broke in to the FBI facility to do so.
As the hunt for Echo continues, Boyd and his fellow agent attract the attention of a local police officer. He checks out their credentials before pulling out a silenced weapon and killing the other agent. Boyd fights in attempt to free himself inside the van, but his attacker is at least a match for him. They destroy the inside of the vehicle in their struggle before Boyd gets him in a headlock. Boyd chokes the man out.
Echo runs for what appears to be a ranger station but finds no one around. She does hear the sound of a radio somewhere. Instead of finding the radio she finds the corpse of the park ranger killed by Boyd’s close new friend. She steals the radio and calls for help. The only answer comes from Richard.
We flashback yet again to view the handler imprint that makes Echo automatically trustworthy of Boyd.
Richard drugs Echo who in turn has visions of her pre-Echo life. She falls in to the water though and washes away. Meanwhile, Boyd takes a violent interrogation technique on his would-be killer.
Echo wakes up in the midst of the killings by Alpha, only to actually wake-up beside the river. Boyd finds her, but gets struck by an arrow from Richard. He helps Echo through a freak out over her hallucinations.
Best line of the show, when handed a gun, Echo gives us: “Four brothers, none of them Democrats.”
Echo starts to play mind games with Richard in return, grazing him with a bullet. Echo runs again and stops head long in her own face. She turns to find herself face to face with Richard the hunter. After a little bit of pointless CGI, Echo and Richard duke it out. Again Echo sees visions of her past lives as Richard chokes her. The visions lead her eyes to an arrow on the ground which she stabs in to Richard’s throat.
We learn in the aftermath that Richard’s entire identity and background was a lie. Langdon’s attacker turns up dead, and his wounds match those of the attacks by Alpha. And we end with Echo striking her own shoulder, the same sign for “Shoulder to the wheel” taught to her by Richard....
So, yeah, episode two and we have already entered hard in to the meta-plot of the series. Whoever Alpha is, he seems to be a mean bastard, and he seems to want to play games with everyone involved in our little storyline. That coupled with the fact that we seem to be on the way to Echo “compositing” much as he did leads me to believe that this show will only get bloodier...
and hopefully continue to be as good as what we’ve seen so far.
The three surviving X-Men, clearly Iceman, Henry McCoy, and Scott Summers, let Angel live. We learn what is made suspect in the first issue: that Chief of Detectives Eric Magnus is the true killer of Jean Grey.
I reviewed Spider-Man Noir a few weeks back, and I finally got a hold of a copy of X-Men Noir #1 to follow it up. Fred Van Lente, while often a strong writer, has the ambiance of the period down right, but he doesn’t quite have the strength of voice that the Spider-book’s David Hine possessed. Nonetheless we get an interesting saga that revolves around the murder of Jean Grey, washed up on the docks from a watery grave.
