December 18, round 2. I'm not usually a fan of dream episodes. They're usually too self-serious and eager to convince the audience that wanton weirdness can somehow fit into the tone of the show. Some of the most egregious offenders were the few dream-centered episodes of The Sopranos. What was otherwise an excellent series ground to an inexplicable halt whenever Tony had surreal, symbolic experiences in his own head. Not coincidentally, the only dream episode I can think of that I genuinely enjoyed was from another Joss Whedon show, the excellent Buffy The Vampire Slayer closer to Season 4, "Restless". I don't necessarily think there's something inherent to Whedon's style that lends itself to depictions of dreams, merely that "Restless" and tonight's "The Attic" use their respective shows' standing atmospheres within the dreams as opposed to employing dreams as some sort of prophetic device. Dollhouse is already kind of a mindscrew, so dream logic isn't a huge leap.

For nearly two seasons now, Dollhouse has used the threat of The Attic as the worst possible thing that can happen to someone, so the expectation was pretty high for what this mysterious state of being actually entails. Needless to say, this episode did not disappoint on that front. I'd say that having needles jammed into your skull and being shrink-wrapped in a nearly lightless room with only a loop of your worst nightmare to keep you company is pretty damn terrifying. Echo, Victor and Sierra find themselves in just such an existential hell and spend the majority of the episode trying to get out.

Along the way they run into a jittery Brit named Clyde who moonlights as a nightmare monster and just happens to be one of the two founders of Rossum. He explains that imprinting technology started out as a grad school project between him and a now unknown partner who betrayed him and made him the very first victim of The Attic. Always the utilitarians, the evil folks at Rossum have been using their Attic-bound prisoners as human computer processors and now Clyde is running around shutting down as many brains as possible in attempt to impede the company.

What's most interesting about Clyde is that his personal nightmare is essentially the world we saw in "Epitaph One", an eventuality he assures us will come to pass in all but 3% of the scenarios he's processed for the past 17 years. This calls into the question the veracity of what we saw in that buried 13th episode of Season One. Were we looking at the real future, or just one of Clyde's nightmare scenarios?

Also, Topher applies some of that oft-touted genius of his to a scheme to bring Paul back from his persistent vegetative state. In so many words, he had to give him Active architecture and sacrifice some part of his personality to save the whole. What they got rid of we have yet to find out, but we've been assured that it's something rather big.

By the end of the episode we officially have a Team Good Guy. As I suspected, DeWitt isn't nearly as evil as she's seemed for the past few episodes. She sent Echo into The Attic so she could find out some of Rossum's deepest secrets. With our triumvirate of special Dolls rescued, a justifiably self-righteous Boyd, a renewed DeWitt, a lively Topher and the freshly minted Paul Ballard: Scowling (former) FBI Agent and Current Doll Version of Himself, the rogue L.A. Dollhouse is poised to bring the fight to Rossum. We'll have to wait a couple weeks before we see the first volley, though. The remaining episodes of the series will air in January but will shift to a new timeslot, Monday at 8:00 PM Eastern. The bitter fan in me recognizes that this should have been the show's original timeslot from the beginning instead of pairing it with the anemic ratings of Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles. So much for that.

Best Moment: The Japanese Rossum employee's nightmare. So much lingering dread, so artfully underplayed.

Notes: Hey, it's Reed Diamond! I'm glad they brought him over to the freedom fighters. Dominic wasn't evil, he just didn't know how deep things went.

Episode Rating: 5/5- This is definitely in the running for one of Dollhouse's best episodes. All of the show's many plot threads came together so nicely, the Sartre-level existential pressure was too smart for its network TV trappings and it even managed to maintain a sense of humor through some otherwise very heavy material.