There are a few issues Dollhouse dances around from week to week. Our moral touchstone Boyd Langdon seems to be the only person bringing them up. The Dollhouse is trafficking in human beings. It’s a whore house in which peoples’ identities are boxed for the length of their contract. The Dollhouse is also pushing several mental and philosophical envelopes, one of which happens in “Haunted;” the promise of eternal life.

However it’s another romp through the world of the wealthy and insanely privileged and, much like “Stage Fright,” I had a hard time identifying with the sickly rich.

A friend of Adelle’s has died. Margaret Bashford is a well to do lady in her late 40′s/early 50′s. (Useless trivia, Margaret was played by Brenda Bakke. If you’ve never seen American Gothic then you may recognize her as the shapely, curly-headed blonde leader of the Edo from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode was “Justice” and in it, Wil Wheaton as Ensign Crusher falls into a bed of flowers and is sentenced to death. All this for a bit in which she’s seen on screen riding a horse, then laying in a coffin. Moving on.) She loves horses and fell in love with a younger man. However, she was also a client of the Dollhouse and had gone through yearly brain scans once she suspected her wealth might be in danger. If she were to come to an untold end, she could be placed in an active to tidy up her life as she’d wanted. She’d act as her own friend and had even dropped this friend’s name into conversation for the past few years.

Echo is the active used and Margaret is at first quite happy that she’s able to live on for a bit, in a young and attractive body, see her own funeral and then solve her murder. At first everyone thinks it’s a heart attack, but Margaret suspects someone. And thus we are dragged into a relatively clumsy whodunit as Echo/Margaret realizes that her family did not like her. From the initial funeral on, Margaret (acting as new friend Julia) finds out that her son, daughter and brother did not hold her in much high regard. It would appear that only her younger husband Jack had any affection for her. Her will left most everything to her family, and even some to this Julia, but Jack ended up with the horses. She tried explaining to him that she loved the horses more than anything else and to give them to him was a sign of how much she loved him. He took it as a reminder of her and was distraught at the idea.

So the search went on as Julia/Echo/Margaret searched her giant estate for clues to her murder. Actually, it wasn’t even as impressive as that; she basically gave the trademark Echo blank stare as the suspects spilled their guts to this complete stranger. The high point was probably Margaret’s son Nicholas trying to kiss her as Julia. It all culminates in finding out that her drunk brother was not there for the money but for sibling reparations, her husband was indeed true to her despite an outburst that almost got her and her son killed and her daughter was a hard worker who only wanted her mother’s respect. The killer was in fact her likable son Nicholas. He was in debt from gambling and created an elaborate plan to kill his mother and make it look like an accident so he could inherit the horses and race them to raise the money he needed.

Only the stupidly rich would come up with a plan like that. Acting as Julia, Margaret wrote a note (which would have been in her own hand) and dated it prior to her death. In it she cited knowledge of Nicholas’s actions and in turn gave everything to her daughter instead. She also gave Jack a note, something mushy.

This time around, the B stories were much more entertaining. They kept me from completely hating the pomp of watching a rich lady solve her own murder by one of many spoiled family members.

Paul Ballard, still on suspension from the FBI, has a nice dinner with Melie/November even with the elephant in the room. He clears the table and puts her wine glass in a plastic bag. He’ll later take this wine glass to his friend Loomis at the FBI to check prints. She enters her code and a name comes up on the screen with November’s face. Then other, with a different name, then another. Then they all flash and disappear and the computer says there were no results found. Later he comes home to Mellie having put out wine and candles. She says she has to talk to him and she says something to him that triggers something. She says she’ll give and she’s ok with that, and she’s ok with him taking. If he wants to give back, great, but it doesn’t have to mean anything. The camera shift gives us the indication something clicks in Paul’s brain and he starts aggressively making out with her. The next day we find out there was some rough play and she asks him if he’s going to hunt for more Dollhouse clients; he says he found one.

Topher asks Boyd early on for a subject for his annual anterior insular cortex diagnostic. (Remember that.) Boyd says Sierra has been down the longest (Adelle has kept the Dollhouse idle since Dominic) so he can use her. He imprints Sierra and she basically becomes a play buddy for Topher. They spend the day and night playing X-Box, laser tag and throwing a football while discussing classic sci-fi movie errors. It’s cute and at the end she gives him a birthday Twinkie with candles while Adelle watches from a security feed. Boyd isn’t happy about it, but Adelle recognizes that loneliness is a detrimental quality and something Topher does once a year isn’t a problem.

The anterior insular cortex, or insula, is a limbic system portion of the brain. What that means is it’s in charge of emotional response to visceral input, or how you react emotionally to outside stimulation. It’s also the center of study for addiction. So, what Topher said about his testing could have technically been correct, but maybe it wasn’t the active he was working on, but himself.

Sierra as the Topher doppelganger was extremely sweet, however. She called the inactive dolls “sleepies” and her imprint became an instant desire for all geek boys watching the show.

While “Haunted” wasn’t a filler episode, its main story did remove us from the most recent problems faced by Dominic being an NSA mole. Ballard’s discovery was confusing, though, and warrants further inspection. Did something Mellie say trigger something in him or was he acting out some pent up aggression toward his inability to find the Dollhouse? He said he’d found a Dollhouse CLIENT, not another Doll. Does that mean HE’S the client? That doesn’t makes sense any more than it would if he were a Doll. Why would Adelle create an imprint of a FBI agent that’s going to hunt down the Dollhouse, then use more Dolls as resources to mislead or antagonize him? The Dollhouse has so far spent Victor, Echo and November on trying to keep Paul away. Someone is still trying to send him messages through the Dolls. It would seem a waste if he was either paying for it as a client or was another Doll.

Wasn’t really happy with this rich girl walk down memory lane. It was another show of excess. The idea of living forever in consecutive bodies is interesting, but again it’s only afforded to those who have race horses and palatial estates.

Three out of five creepy doll heads.