Previously on Dollhouse: Nothing from the ep I missed last week. (DVR issues. I was going to Hulu it if it seemed critical to the arc, but apparently not.)

Damn them, I've gone and gotten all intrigued. And having thinky-thoughts about identity and illusion, which are probably not going to sound terribly coherent when I try to make words out of them, but oh, well.

I expected the November bomb to drop on Ballard about now. I did not expect it to happen in a way that immediately precluded his having any visible reaction. That's evil. Just please don't make it All About His Manpain as he hides it from her. 'Cause, y'know, plenty of that on other shows, etc. etc. Although I am interested in whether/how he will examine what it says about him. Does he know what Mellie (ostensibly) does for a living? Does he know anything about her life outside of making him "leftover" lasagna and being his sounding board? Has he ever wondered whether visiting her mother was a respite or an obligation? If the answer to any of those is yes, and we just haven't seen it, then he's somewhat off the hook for believing she was the "something real" alternative to the spiraling obsession with the Dollhouse. If it's not, then he's just blindly embraced the fantasy they tailored for him. Confronting him with that is...not gonna be pretty.

Echo's burgeoning autonomy has officially shifted from "elephant in the room" to "ace in the hole." Whether that's an improvement or not really depends on DeWitt's motivations. Which are still really damn murky at this point, mostly due to too many of the players being in shadow. It helps to know now that Dominic is/was an NSA plant, and that they seem to be in opposition to Rossum. But whether DeWitt is loyal to Rossum, or simply to what she thinks she can accomplish from within their organization, is still an unknown.

One of the first things we heard her say, to Caroline, was "Actions have consequences." Yet the very function of the Dollhouse -- as pointed up by some of the interviewees in the ep with the "documentary" footage -- is to facilitate the playing out of fantasies without consequences. Somewhere in that dichotomy lies the key to what DeWitt is about, I think.

Putting Boyd in charge of security says a lot too. She's too keen with people to not understand that he has an ethical code that will, if pressed, supersede "what's good for the Dollhouse/Rossum," and she gave him the job at least in part because of that. The subterfuge with "Roger" was... sad, and an odd sort of parallel to the Ballard/Mellie situation. DeWitt has faced up to it and decided it needs to stop; Ballard has been made aware of it and has no viable choice but to continue.

I wonder, will his obsession shift to include whoever November used to be, as well as Caroline? And what will he find out about her? I suspect not everyone signs up under quite the same duress...