So, because Dollhouse will be running in two-hour "event" format for the rest of the series, I'm going to divide coverage of each week's episodes into two parts, one for Friday night and one over the weekend. A lot happens on this show and I don't want to shortchange individual episodes just because Fox swept their low performer under the rug for all of November. That said, let's dive into the first of this week's episodes, "Meet Jane Doe".

Watching tonight's episodes, especially "Meet Jane Doe", made it apparent that Joss Whedon and his production staff had no illusions of Dollhouse getting a third season. The action jumps ahead three months and they weren't an inconsequential three months, either. A more secure program would happily spend the better part of a season following Echo, Paul and the rest of the principle cast during that tumultuous period during which it's plain that everything has changed. I don't doubt that it would have been riveting TV to watch these characters evolve over time, but it's also commendable to the actors, writers and directors of Dollhouse how well all of this change was conveyed in the extremely limited space of a single episode.

Echo starts out a confused street urchin who doesn't even understand the concept of money, but as soon as her composite identities start kicking in (literally and figuratively) she starts to put together a new life. Helping her along is, naturally, Paul Ballard: Scowling (former) FBI Agent. The two of them have been shacking up in an ugly apartment trying to figure out how to utilize Echo's composite situation to bring down the Dollhouse. Keeping them safe being found out is Boyd Langton, winner of this season's Playing It Close To The Chest award.

Meanwhile, DeWitt's many screw-ups have landed her in a glorified secretary's role while Rossum and the ever-expanding Dollhouse program chug along in a frightening new direction. Topher seems to have perfected the remote wipe technology he played with last week and he puts on a convincing celebrity scientist act so he can investigate the dirty and potentially world-ending deeds of his counterparts in other Dollhouses around the world. I was happy to see that all of the character development Topher has gone through these past two seasons wasn't actually wasted. It put an extra tragic spin on the moment he inadvertently revealed all of the horrible secrets of remote imprinting. Even when he tries to do good, it's a disaster.

Sure, things seem to have escalated quickly but the script does a nice job of making it all feel like this stuff has been brewing for a lot longer than we've been aware of it. There's a futility to all of the fighting that sets this show apart from anything else in TV history, even other Whedon outfits. Dollhouse is like the inverse Buffy. There's a very localized evil and a bunch of people with the means to stop it, but everything they do is doomed to fail. It's all as earnest and pointless as rescuing one mistreated woman from a prison. It doesn't matter if Echo's heart is in the right place because she's effectively fighting her own nature. In simple terms, she revealed in this episode that she doesn't actually want to rescue Caroline. For better or worse, she's Echo now and she wants to keep on being whatever she is. If Dollhouse is about anything, it's about how the past is lost forever, even if what you're trying to recover is yourself.

Best Moment: I dug the jailbreak, if only because it introduced Echo's on-the-fly personality change mechanic which I'm sure we'll be seeing for the remainder of the series. At the very least it looks like Eliza Dushku is having fun with it.

Notes: It sure doesn't take Joss Whedon to get self-referential. I love how Victor and Sierra's "grouping" behavior has become something of a running gag, as demonstrated in Topher's remote wipe demonstration.

Episode Rating: 4/5- To be fair, all the pieces up in the air in this episode don't really fall into place until the next episode, and even then there are bits that haven't quite landed. When a story this complex has to be rushed as much as "Meet Jane Doe" demonstrates it's never going to be, ahem, its best, but it was still an entertaining hour of television wrought with all the doom that has been the hallmark of this season. I could have done without the stereotypical hick cops, though. I think that particular device has been played out by now.