Welcome to part 2 of this week's Dollhouse coverage, and boy what an episode it was. Bad guys got badder, a main character got deader and plans generally fell apart. What's ended up being most impressive about this show is how it can so easily contain both elements of standard TV action/suspense and heady, dramatic contemplations of major philosophical ideas. Dollhouse is a show about existential crisis and moral relativism, but also explosions and kicks to the face. "Stop-Loss" had plenty of all these things and more.

Ever since Alpha, played by the incredible Alan Tudyk, got away at the end of Season One it was only a matter of time before he showed up again to bring all kinds of colorful ruin to the world. This episode opens with him expertly slicing a guy's throat open while wearing a rather nice suit. While the folks at the L.A. Dollhouse have been putting Echo through hell and generally losing sight of everything that's important about their world-changing technology, Alpha has been tracking down all of Echo's old romantic engagements and killing them. We don't find out why until toward the end of the episode.

When DeWitt decides to send Echo out on an engagement with a repeat client (without a wipe, no less), Boyd and Ballard find the client in considerably more dead state than they expected, leading them to a classic detective-like hunt for Alpha. They eventually find him on the roof of a building in L.A. with yet another one of Echo's past rental lovers decked out in an explosive vest.

Now would be a good time to contemplate Alpha as the borderline-passe ranting super villain. There are so many layers to this character that I feel like it's a bit premature to label him a cliche just yet, especially in a show where everyone is deeper than they seemed at the outset. Alpha may come off as a comic book variety of mad genius psychopath, but maybe that's the point. Nothing about Alpha is real. For all his composite personalities, they're all just manufactured fantasies. That's what Dolls are all about. Just like the scene early in this episode when Sierra comes into the chair room decked out in body and mind as a Noir femme fatale, Alpha is playing the part of a super villain in a world where that sort of thing doesn't exist outside of fantasy. That's the true tragic arc of this show. The fantasies, however enticing, just don't fit in the long term because they're too flimsy to sustain.

This point is contrasted nicely with the return of Patton Oswalt's character Joel, the client from Season One's "Man on the Street". He's doing his best to move beyond the fantasy and when it tries to come back into his life (in a roundabout way) it just doesn't hit him like it used to. He barely escapes with his life, but I think he comes away from the experience a better man for it.

That's why I don't entirely buy DeWitt's sudden shift toward self-interested evil. She's trying her best to be the cold, mean boss but just like all the Dolls she's attempting to inhabit a fantasy concept. I think we'll see her empathy and remorse reassert itself soon, especially considering what we saw of her in "Epitaph One".

Another fantasy that got cut short in this episode was Paul Ballard: Now Comatose (former) FBI Agent and his dream of being the white knight who saves Echo. It seems that Alpha went on his serial killing spree because he wants to find out how to access the love in Echo so he can have it for himself. Disappointed with the results he gets from her romantic clients, he aims for Paul instead. He plays a bit too rough, though, and ends up frying Paul's brain. The twist is that Paul's personality is now another among the rest of Alpha's while the original Paul is a vegetable in the Dollhouse. The number of potential twists in this setup is astronomical and most of them are pretty thrilling.

Best Moment: Alpha unleashing his "everybody fight now" mass imprint. It's nice to have an instant ass-kick button on this show, but it also has terrifying implications for the impending doom of the story.

Notes: Topher on Alpha's remote imprint technology- "I'm obsolete. This must be what it's like for old people. And Blockbuster."

Episode Rating: 4.5/5- Alpha's super villain routine, however layered, was still a bit much, but everything else was incredible, especially the chaos of the final act. Things are really getting messy, which makes for some good TV.