A woman’s voice says, “Welcome to The Attic.  We’re so glad to have you.  Echo, still suspended in the Saran Wrap nutrient bath is being attended to by a technician who puts needles in her head to monitor her brain and a tube down her throat to keep warm fluids running through her body.  If you look closely at the readout, the fluid system is tied to four stations/bodies.  Creepy.)

After a few moments, Echo starts twitching and convulsing and her brain vitals go flat.  The techs arrive to check it out.  They unwrap her and say what a shame it was.  Suddenly her brain kicks back on and she chokes one of the techs and stabs the other in the eye with her head electrodes.  She subdues another technician asking where Sierra and Victor are and then uses the terminal to find them and bring them out of their suspension.  They run through the halls, Echo beats up some guards, Victor and Sierra get their guns.  Echo runs on, stops near an exit and runs back but is blocked by a clear force field or window.  Victor tries to shoot it out but to no avail.  Guards come around the corner and shoot down Victor and Sierra…sorry, Tony and Priya.  Echo screams, then “wakes up” back in the nutrient bath.

Adelle tells Topher to fix Paul, he can’t without installing Active architecture.  Boyd’s in his office and the two talk about The Attic.  People in there have their brains kept at a high adrenaline state, like a problem you can’t solve.  Cut back to Echo’s scene of escape only this time she recognizes the repeat and calmly walks off while Tony and Priya are shot.  She makes her way to what looks like the inside of the Dollhouse where it’s snowing on a giant tree.

Topher and Ivy work out what to do about Paul when Adelle calls asking for Ivy.  Topher is suspicious but says, “Darth Vader kills Lieutenants, not Stormtroopers.”  (Funny considering Adelle’s all black outfit with menacing music in the last episode.)  Echo sees and relives images and events of her past lives including people talking cryptic nonsense.  She pieces together her final moments before The Attic and then gets punched by a dark shape.  She runs into Laurence Dominic who tells her he’s been chasing this shadowy menace called Arcane.  They figure they’re both in The Attic running through all the minds that sense fear, usually new comers.  She travels from a nightmare of Topher’s lab to a Japanese tea house where a man is eating.

Topher tells Ivy her Wildcat suggestion (football formation) would work on rewiring Paul.  The idea is rewiring an area not scarred by Alpha’s wipe and use it to reroute the needed architecture so he can walk and talk, but he has to give something up.  She’s reticent to talk to him so Topher goes to Adelle.  They go back and forth until she brings up Nolan Kinnard and his dismemberment.  In Attic Space, the Japanese businessman tells her his in Tokyo and Rossum is watching him.  Elsewhere, Priya and Anthony are making out but Anthony turns into a zombie Nolan and comes after her.  Anthony is reliving a scene of battle in Afghanistan in which he ends up fighting himself.   The Japanese man tells Echo he’s there because he had info on Rossum’s weak and vulnerable mainframe.  He still doesn’t believe he’s in The Attic.  A scream and some blood stirs echo and she tries to get him to leave but he has no legs.  She flees into the kitchen where we see the man’s legs are being cooked and fed to him.  Laurence and Echo sort out that all the attics must be linked.  The shadow figure slices his neck and his world starts disappearing.

Adelle gets on Boyd for being away and distracted.  They quibble over who was at fault for Echo being in The Attic.  Echo and Laurence have to eat some leg in order to escape and they show up in Anthony’s mind just in time to save him from Arcane who is poised over him like Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe.  They fill him in on what’s going on, Anthony says they set a trap and kill him.  Priya relives her Zombie Nolan scene until Arcane shows up.  Echo, Laurence and Anthony trap him and run him out a window.  When they recover they meet Clyde, who’s been acting as Arcane.  His world is the same we see in Epitaph: One – a dystopian future, shape of things to come.

Topher and Boyd talk about what it’ll take to bring him back and how Adelle is going to drag them all down.  Clyde tells the people he’s surprised to see as aware that he’s been trying to take down Rossum by eliminating the “mainframe.”  The central hub are all the Attics tied together, all the brains acting as CPUs, soaked in adrenaline, running problems they can’t fix.  He’s killing people to stop Rossum, he knows all this because he designed it.  They flee the crazed denizens.  Clyde is one of the original founders of Rossum, he and a friend from university.

Clyde tells the group he and his friend created the idea of the architecture and dumping things into it (personae imprints) and they used Clyde’s to start.  His friend betrayed him and Clyde 2.0 put Clyde into what became The Attic, in 1993.  His nightmare, 97% of his probability calculations show the end of civilization.  He can’t remember his friend’s name or face and it’s likely Clyde 2.0 has changed bodies by now.  But Clyde said they let someone in by accident and she saw them, they suss out that it’s Caroline.  There’s no way out of the computer world without dying, unless you’re Echo, who takes a bullet on purpose saying she knows a way out.

Paul is brought back from Vegetable City and it takes a few seconds of stumbling and talking gibberish for his brain to rewire.  He realizes he’s a Doll, but he’s a Doll of himself.  After Boyd tells him the game plan, grabs his gun and goes to Adelle’s office, she has a gun drawn.  Echo’s plan is to kill herself, but she has many brains to let flat line.  Priya and Anthony agree they all go together.  Laurence and Clyde stay behind to help free people.  In a music video montage, Echo dies, frees herself (in a mirror of her nightmare.)  Anthony stabs Priya then goes outside and waits to get murdered.  Echo doesn’t seem to be able to revive Priya.

Echo tells someone she understands it all, and the plan worked.  It’s Adelle.  We flash back to when Echo was “scrubbed.”  Adelle tells her The Attic is whatever hell fits your mind.  But then she leans in and says she’s sending Echo to get information because she thinks Rossum’s big secret is in there and she wants it.  She’s using Echo to get it and come back if she can.  Back to the present, Adelle’s army of Boyd, Topher, Paul, Anthony, Priya, Ivy and Echo are all ready.  Echo says it’s time to meet Caroline.

And yes, I had to go back to “Stop Loss” to see when exactly Adelle gave Echo the speech that completely changes her character.  In just a few sentences, she went from malevolent control freak to deceptive but clever rebel leader.  She’s not working for Rossum, she wants Rossum taken down.

The conversation with Clyde really pushed the idea that the person behind it all is a man OR a woman.  It’s the pronoun farce by which we write and speak in generic terms of people we don’t know as “he” or “him” (occasionally using they or them) until it’s obvious we’re trying to be clever and we say “or her.”  It felt like we were being set up to see Adelle as the founder of Rossum with all the “or her” additions they were throwing at each other.  But with these parting words, Adelle really cemented herself as the one with the plan.

If you’re curious, in the same scene in “Stop Loss” we cut during the part when she’d be telling Echo all this to a side bit with Topher and Ivy talking about much they want things to go back to the way they were.

This episode was really well written and well played out.  It was complex to the point where I was easily confused, but I’m a troglodyte.  I felt as though I was sifting through the Matrix all over again.  Echo is so confident she knows how the Attic works, how to move around, how to bring herself back from the dead, it was easy to get lost.  Whether that was the point or not is hard to say.  But we only have three episodes in which to fight this fight.  Will it be enough?

Four out of five creepy doll heads.