Bennett Halverson turns full psycho as Topher Brink shows her his nerd crush.

We find out that Bennett is actually not the DC Dollhouse admin, just the techie.  The actual  house runner is (Howard) Lipman.  (I say this in fun parentheses because Adelle calls him Stuart but IMDB calls him Howard.  When you’re Ray Wise I think people may call you different things.)  Bennett is not only a genius, as proclaimed by Topher, but she’s also a bit of a loose canon.  She has a major grudge against Caroline from an apparent accident that left her without the use of her left arm.  She implants Caroline with the memory of being pinned beneath a wall of concrete and left behind.

Topher and Adelle arrive in DC to try and get Echo back, but Lipman isn’t having any of it.  It’s all policy and protocol until Ms. DeWitt crushes his huevos and demands her active back.  Topher goes to Bennett’s lab where the two banter in that adorable hesitant geek way.  He calls home and talks to himself but in Victor’s body.  They work out a way to get Daniel Perrin back.

Speaking of Perrin, he and Echo have escaped.  Bennett let them go and then smashed her own head into a monitor to make it look like Echo attacked her.  (Nerd Girl is hardcore.  Word up!)  They flee but the BrainTrust^2 comes up with a way to adapt the Disrupter to target a specific brain.  Bennett changes the package at the last minute to assassin and Senator Perrin starts attacking Echo.  They fight for a while until Topher punches Bennett and turns him off.  It’s too late, he’s choked the life out of his handler/wife.

The Senator goes before the committee, where Madeline is set to testify, and pulls a complete 180.  He’s no longer hunting Rossum because he believes Rossum is being attacked by rival pharmaceutical companies and they’ve killed his wife in a car wreck to prove their point.  He apparently also has documentation that Madeline spent the last three years in a Canadian mental ward, not the Dollhouse.  He says the Dollhouse is a fantasy used to distract us from the truth.  He leaves, Madeline is sent to Bennett for reprogramming.  (Poor Millie)

Echo and Perrin removed their GPS tracking chips earlier and the last we see of Echo is of her walking the DC streets.

Of note, we have not seen Whiskey in some time.  We didn’t see Ballard this time around at all.  No Sierra and no mention of Alpha (who is apparently still at large.)  The Bennett/DC Dollhouse will likely completely take over the remainder of the show.

I feel like a Torchwood apologist for Dollhouse now.  These last three episodes were really top notch and it’s hard to tell if it’s because the show finally started working well within its own design or a combination of writers and directors finally were able to bring the show up the level the fans wanted in the first place.  There are still some directorial issues I have, even in this episode.  There are a lot of stiff deliveries, and I don’t mean things Echo does on her assignments.  Daniel Perrin is a good character, but Alexis Denisof (which sounds like name cheating) is either really horrible or they editors and sound mixers are giving him the shaft.  His delivery is what I’d expect from my Night of One Acts in high school.  Dushku’s the same way, has always been that way.  The two of them together is Soap-tastic.  But, he was in Buffy and Angel so Joss must like him.

And it’s likely not just their delivery.  Here’s an example of the writing in “The Left Hand” that made me rewind just to make sure I could lap up every drop of inanity.

“If you let them make you forget then you killed her.  Can you live with that or can you trust me?”

It’s one of the logic word problems where you have to suss it out in bits to make sense of the whole, but Echo slings it at you so fast that it sounds like emo, MySpace poetry gibberish.

But I’m dogging on an episode I really enjoyed.  Envar Gjokaj continues to impress and with his impression of Topher, he earned the high rating for them this time.

Four out of five creepy dollheads.