Need more stories about the crew of Joss Whedon's Serenity? Check out these upcoming comics from Dark Horse: The Shepherd's Tale and Serenity: Float Out.

Instead of continuing where “Omega” left off, “Epitaph One” (episode 1.13, available only on DVD or Blu-Ray) takes us ten years into the future, where combat-garbed refugees, including a young girl and her apparently blank-slate father, are attempting to escape the surface and get deep enough underground to avoid the signals.  Sound confusing?  It is at first – until the small group inadvertently stumbles upon the abandoned Dollhouse.

A friend of mine said of Dollhouse last year, “I love the show, but just when I think I have it all figured out, it all turns on its head and I realize I didn’t know anything after all.”

Never has this been more true than in Episode 2.11, “Getting Closer”, which aired on Fox on Friday, January 8, 2010.

Back in biblical times, if someone contracted leprosy, they had to live outside the walls of their city, and if someone else approached, they had to warn them away by shouting: Unclean! Unclean!  I kind of feel that way after watching an episode of Dollhouse.  But I think that's kind of the point.

I was kind of lukewarm about last week’s review.  But my only defense is that episodes like this week’s are the standard that I’m judging it against.

The episode was tightly plotted, with flash-flashbacks, flash-forwards,  (and I think at one point, a flash sideways), and payoff galore as the players in The Dollhouse work together to find the mole in their midst.   Through all this, episode writer Adnrew Chambliss weaves the theme of trust.

In an episode with a title like Needs you might think that there is going to be another assignment where Echo is playing naughty nurse to another well-paying client of The Dollhouse.  You’d think wrong.

Forget episode six, this was the episode that I’ve waited on.
 
Oh I know, Six was hyped.  Six was the episode where the plot thickened.  But episode Seven is where we get a return to the characteristic Jossian humor.  I need that humor.  I need that part of Joss that gave us the musical episode of Buffy, turned Angel into a puppet and put Mal in a pretty floral bonnet.  

For a while now, Dollhouse episode six, Man on the Street, has been hyped as the episode where the show comes into its own.  If fans would just hold out through the first five episodes  they would be rewarded with a big payoff.  This proved to be the case.

When I was eight, my grandma convinced me that I should take piano.   It sounded like fun in theory, but in practice I had to sit at an old upright for an hour every day, practicing her favorite old southern gospel hymns.  So when the first scene of Dollhouse episode 1.5, True Believer showed a church bus filled with people singing nothing but Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, I freaked.

Echo joins a cult and discovers an easy cure for blindness. Victor learns the joys of thorough personal hygiene.