Last week I got my episode titles mixed up and erroneously referred to "Meet Jane Doe, Part 2" as "Stop-Loss", the title of the first of this week's episodes. The good news is that Fox is finished airing two episodes of Dollhouse in a row, the bad news being that we'll have to wait until January to see another episode. If there was one way to go out of 2009, though, tonight's two incredibly awesome hours were definitely it.

The first of the December 18 episodes was "Stop-Loss", a nice pieces-of-the-puzzle story that centered around two of the show's best characters, Victor/Tony and Sierra/Priya. These two have come to represent one of the better high-concept ideas of love in TV history. Specifically, that there's something inexplicable about intense human emotions that transcends whatever we imagine to be ourselves. If Dollhouse is an existential drama, then Joss Whedon and his writers have officially aligned themselves against nihilism in favor of a more romantic point of view.

See, Victor and Sierra have been pairing for a long time now, long enough for their emotions to start bleeding over into their imprints. When DeWitt engages Victor for one last romp as her British gent lover, he actually breaks up with her because he remembers being in love with another woman. This and a number of other recent psychological bruises drives DeWitt to excessive drinking (and some excellent comedy as a result).

But all this romantic business doesn't seem to matter because it's Victor's last day in his five-year contract. Not a day after his release, he gets kidnapped by some of his old war buddies, who we later find out also used to be Dolls. Rossum is building their own private army with some pretty scary technology, including a neural link that creates a hive mind between all the soldiers. Enter Echo on a rescue mission made possible by Boyd and Topher while DeWitt lay passed out (and drooling) on her desk.

I have to commend the folks on Dollhouse for taking some premises that should be ridiculous, like using the power of love to overcome military group-think, and making them work. It's also pretty awesome that relatively new developments in the story have already become a sort of shorthand. Everything from Echo's quick personality shifts to the remote wiping technology are now matter-of-fact and the script doesn't make any attempt to over-explain them. That's how it ought to be, especially considering that anyone still watching Dollhouse at this point has almost certainly been along for the entire series.

By the end of tonight's second episode the unrelenting bleakness of this second and final season of the show finally breaks, but "Stop-Loss" is still firmly within that hope-crushing aesthetic. In its final minutes, Paul Ballard is still a vegetable, Tony and Priya get their budding romance cut short by Dollhouse operatives and get sent along with Echo to the Attic while DeWitt stands in the corner looking menacing.

Best Moment: DeWitt's drunken escapades. In an interview conducted late in the first season, Joss Whedon described Olivia Williams as being extremely funny. Tonight we finally got to see some of that.

Notes: Call me a squealing fanboy, but I dig call-backs like Echo kicking ass with a bag over her head and punctuating the moment with the line "Don't piss off a blind girl".

Episode Rating: 5/5- Dollhouse has always done well as an action show, but it also manages to inject some depth and meaning to romantic plots that would be welcome on other shows. This episode was great for those reasons and also because it gave a lot of the actors a chance to play their characters in unexpected ways.