Three years ago.

Caroline uses a horny middle management suit to get into an executive office.  She handcuffs him and rifles through the files.  She finds a file on herself (Caroline Farrell) and one for Bennett noted with “Full Scholarship.”  She hits a remote and opens a video cabinet and sees security feeds into the Dollhouse.

Back to present, the group plans on using Caroline to find Clyde’s partner and bring Rossum down.  They don’t know what putting Caroline back in will do to Echo.  They put her in the chair as Ivy gets the wedge but it’s gone.

Bennett Halverson is on a campus of Tuscon Institute of Technology trying to find a place to eat.  Caroline fake pukes her way to an occupied table and the two begin talking.  Bennett is studying neurology, Caroline is studying broadly.  They hit it off.  Adelle and Echo watch a Caroline video and chat about what happened to Caroline’s wedge.  Topher and Ivy set up a “ghost chair” linked to Bennett’s chair in Washington.  They’re imprinting a doll that wakes and grabs Bennett’s neck and unlocks the door.  Anthony and Paul show up and grab Bennett, but Paul sees Madeline and says they can’t leave yet.  Back at the LA Dollhouse, Bennett makes some comments and is then taken to Topher’s lab.  Topher gets all spastic about her, Adelle tells Boyd they’ll be going into full lock down mode.  Echo and Paul talk about Madeline/November and it’s obvious Paul’s missing something toward Echo.

Topher and Bennett get cute again when working on Caroline’s destroyed wedge.  Just before they kiss, Bennett asks who’s on the wedge and then sees Echo.  Flashback to Caroline and Bennett being all roommate-like, talking about her big job.  Bennett says no one’s ever taken an interest in her before as Echo spies her Rossum ID badge.  Boyd goes “home” where Whiskey is waiting with wine and candles.  He tells her it’s time for her to come in and they kiss.

Topher is in the clinic with a fat lip.  Echo asks what he did to Paul.  Topher tries to defend himself by saying in order to save him, he had to do major rewiring and it was either live as a vegetable or lose his love for Echo.

(What Tohper is talking about is something referenced in the last episode.  They can put an active architecture over Paul’s brain, but the only thing large enough to interpret the signals would be the motor cortex or the cingulate gyrus.   The cingulate gyrus is a small medial section of the brain, if you imagine the brain as a muffin, the CG is an area that lives between the base and the top.  The CG, among other things, controls emotion formation.  In this case, Paul’s love for Echo, though that’s a highly targeted emotion.  Considering the CG also controls learning, it’s doubtful Paul will really function properly ever again.  What’s odd is he still cares for Madeline, but not Echo.  It doesn’t add up.)

After his explanation, Doc Saunders/Whiskey says she’ll help him with his lip.  Echo makes a comment about Boyd being all tardy and sleepy when Adelle walks up and asks where Bennett is.  She does a double take to Saunders.

We flash back to Whiskey in the real Saunder’s office.  Adelle and Laurence discuss how the security guard let a woman in who took files, Caroline’s and Bennett’s.  He tells Adelle the two are rooming together.  Back at Tuscon Tech, Bennett confronts Caroline about the files she found in the closet.  Caroline comes clean about why she picked Bennett and who she is.  Bennett flips it by asking Caroline why she can’t help.

Boyd and Echo talk about who she is and who Caroline is, he’s very proud of her.  He has to put the house on lockdown, so she rushes off and kicks Anthony and Priya out so they can be with each other.  Just as she closes the door, a weakened Laurence in Attic attire comes to tell her Clyde’s dead and Rossum’s coming.

Given the information, Adelle decides to restore all dolls to their original personalities and then close the house down.  They’re going to Tuscon.  Back three years ago in Tuscon, Caroline and Bennett have sneaked into Rossum.  Bennett runs surveillance while Caroline plants charges.  During her task, she spies a lab that’s not on the map that has people in it.  Against Bennett’s judgement she goes into investigate.  There are subjects in tanks and as she shines a light on one it starts singing opera, another jumps up and grabs her.  They try to abort the mission but we hear and explosion as we fade to white.

Doc Saunders says Laurence needs to go to a hospital.  Adelle says his best chance is in The Attic, which he doesn’t quite like but there’s no time.  Adelle introduces Paul to Mellie and she finally meets Caroline.  Mr. Ambrose is in Adelle’s office with some muscle, he’s there to get rid of Adelle and take over.  Nobody comes out of The Attic.  There’s gun fire and Boyd takes Ambrose and his men out.  But he’s also been hit.  (Note:  There are four men:  Ambrose, Boyd, two bodyguards.  Boyd fires four times.  Two shots we see hitting the two guards, a third hitting Ambrose in the forehead.  The guards never get their guns drawn.  We see only three bullets impact a target.  Where does the fourth bullet go?  Remember that.)

Three years ago, the explosion at Rossum has brought the ceiling down on Bennett.  Caroline pins her badge back on her telling her to tell them she was working late when it happened.  If they’re going to nab anyone, it’d be better if it was just Caroline.  The she leaves.  In the present, Echo makes a deal with Bennett that she can have Caroline when she’s done.  Back in the lab, Topher and Ivy are cycling through dolls to get them out.  One is actually Rick Fox, Eliza Dushku’s real life boyfriend.  This is sort of like seeing Kilo who is played by Maurissa Tancharoen, a writer and story editor of the show.  The cute music plays while Bennett and Topher agree to work together on the wedge.

Boyd is packing to go on the run at Adelle’s orders.  Clair is sad and doesn’t want him to go.  They wish they had more time and he says he’ll come back for her.  Ivy leaves Topher and Bennett alone as they nerd out over technology.  He kisses her which hurts his lip, they kiss a lot and he goes to get another tool.  Claire/Whiskey comes in and talks to Bennett saying good things about her and Topher.  As Topher comes back in she shoots Bennett in the head, spraying blood and brains all over Topher.

Three years ago, Laurence and Adelle nab Caroline.  Adelle gets a call and they send Caroline upstairs to meet the head of the company.  Back in the present Adelle and the others try to comfort Topher and keep their war going.  The building power starts shutting down, Topher kicks Ivy out, wanting her to live and prosper.  Explosives rock the compound and agents repel in.  Paul goes to get more weapons, Topher sets up the wedge and Echo, Adelle makes her way out the back.  An attacker knocks Topher out but is subdued by Boyd.

Flashback to Caroline meeting the head of Rossum, Clyde Randolph.  He mentions “Rossum” is from a play and not his name or his partners, in fact the dolls aren’t really robots.  (This lead me to slap my forehead for forgetting about Rossum’s Universal Robots, a 1921 play by Karel Capek.  The term “robot” is a Czech language term that was coined by the playwright’s brother from the the word “robota.”)  He says Caroline is there to help them and she becomes agitated and rejects the idea.  That’s when Clyde’s partner appears.

Boyd Langton.

Which brings us back to the first episode.  (“Ghost” for those keeping tracking.  ”Echo” was the Pilot, which I never saw and was rewritten after reviews were apparently so bad that the entire show was reworked.)  The first episodes were all about Paul finding Caroline, but sneaked in to the fabric was Boyd Langton as something of a law enforcement misfit who ended up being Echo’s handler because he had no other options.  We never knew if he was police, FBI, Secret Service, Army, or what.  All we knew is during the course of the show, he didn’t hesitate to protect Echo with his life.  And now we know why.

Well not really.  He tells her at the end that she’s important and nothing will happen to her (LIES) and that she’ll trust him with her life.  We don’t know why she’s special, but now we see the strings being pulled together.

Caroline Farrel is an animal rights activist that was able to bloody the nose of one of the biggest abusers in the world, the Rossum corporation.  She used a brainy tech student to gain access to their headquarters but was apprehended in the process.  She’s taken up to meet the heads of the corporation and they in essence force her to become a doll.  But why?  Think of all that’s happened under Boyd’s watchful eye.

Clyde and Boyd (I’m assuming that’s his actual name) created the idea of The Dollhouse.  They tested the idea and imprinted a Clyde 2.0 who betrayed Clyde and hooked him up to a perpetual brain amping machine which would later become The Attic.  The Attic is now the target of Adelle’s little army.  The Dollhouse, this whole time, has been a cover for it.  Rossum’s been developing this brain altering technology to subject the entire world to its whims.  As we see in “The Attic” and “Epitaph One” something goes very wrong.

But this has all been under the watchful and close up eye of Boyd Langton.  He outranks Adelle, Clive Ambrose, Matthew Harding, all of them.  With Clyde out of the way in The Attic, Boyd is running the show.  But why?  What is he trying to do with this technology?  What is special about Caroline that he’s willing to subject her to years of active imprinting.  He never tried stopping her from her mission with Paul to bring the Dollhouse down.  Even when it was found that The Attic is Rossum’s mainframe, he didn’t stop her then either.  He’s using her to try to bring down his own company, but why?

It’s events like this in TV shows that make you want to watch from the beginning again and see what the reactions are.  Was this the plan all along or did Joss Whedon pull a Ronald D. Moore and bring Ellen Tigh back from the dead because he had no other option?

There were a lot of ends being tied up and the use of flashbacks running up to the events of two years ago really made “Getting Closer” work as an episode.  I feel truly sorry for Topher, but it wouldn’t be a Joss Whedon show without someone you like either dying or losing their object of affection.

Four and a half creepy dollheads.