The Attic is a creepy place.

Echo (Eliza Dushku) is shrink-wrapped and an Evil Dr. Beverly Crusher sticks needles into her skull without drilling first, so those must really damned sharp. Echo then convulses for a second and is “Disengaged,” which I think means brain-dead.

Evil Crusher and an assistant arrive to, “tsk-tsk what a shame it is, we thought she’d be around awhile, blah-blah,” and of course-Echo Re-engages and makes with the ass-kicking. She chokes out Creepy Wesley, pulls the needles out of her own skull, and stabs Evil Crusher with them.

Ever notice how we never see anyone go anywhere in this show? They always cut to “out in a hallway of similar design as the vaguely imagined room we just left.” Out in this particular hallway, Echo puts a half nelson on an Attic worker and asks where Victor/Ciccoli and Sierra/Priya are. He tells her they don’t use active codes in the Attic, they use their real names. Echo smashes him into the floor and sneers “my real name’s Echo.”  In the place where they put them in a meat locker, of course they use the real names.

Echo gets the lovers Ciccoli and Priya out of their respective goo-trays, and they get ready to roll out. Three goons show up and Echo makes short work of them with a little back up from Ciccoli. They grab the goons’ sub-machine guns (Oh happy day, everybody’s learning to grab the gun!) and put a couple of rounds in each of them.

Ciccoli keeps his weapon and they move on to some intense drum-heavy music until they get separated by some mysterious invisible barrier-with the lovers one side, and Echo on the other. Ciccoli attempts to shoot through it, and it behaves like a force field. Two guards roll up behind the pair and dump a clip into each, while Echo’s screams…well, echo.

Now we know this is a dream, because this is network T.V.

Evil Crusher shows up again, looking over Echo sleeping in her nightmare world, and gives her little “welcome to the attic” speech again.

No opening credits this week.

Topher (Fran Kranz) is fretting at Helo’s (Tahmoh Penikett) bedside-as Olivia Williams looks on,  large and in-charge now that Echo is in the clink.

TOPHER: I’ve tried Homotopic and hetertopic stimulation.

WILLIAMS: Haven’t we all?

Topher informs her that he may have figured out a way to circumvent the Helo’s brain damage, but it’ll require installing the active architecture. He can then map his original scan over the empty dead space…or something. Williams tells to go ahead with the install, but no need for the reboot, adding that the House is in the market for a strapping new Victor. Topher shakes his head at her cartoonish villainy and heads to his office, where Harry J. Lennix is sleeping on the couch. They chit-chat a little before Lennix gets down to brass-tacks: What do we know about the attic?

Topher says that in the attic the brain is kept in a constant fear state, and the brain is pushed to it’s very limits. What’s the point of that exactly?

Echo is living that same dream sequence from the opening again, except she’s getting wise. She watches the guards ventilate Ciccoli and Priya again, and shrugs it off, exiting the dream Attic calmly as she finds herself on the set of Legend, plastic snow and all.

Meanwhile, Topher is looking at Helo’s brain and trying to do what Williams told him to. He and his assistant (Ivy) jargon back and forth about what to do.

TOPHER: It’s like his brain is a football team, and I’ve this whole new set of brilliant plays, but it doesn’t matter because the quarterback’s in jail for dogfighting.

Ivy makes a crack about how it’s not like his brain can run the Wildcat formation . Those of you who know your football and your neuroscience figure out three seconds before Topher does that his assistant just had a brilliant idea (those of you who know your college ball now realize Ivy is probably from Kansas). Topher gets excited but is interrupted by a phone call: Williams wants to see Ivy. He tells her not to worry, because Darth Vader only ever kills officers.

Cut to Echo’s Dreamscape, where she’s watching the serial killer’s croquet game from earlier in the season, some old folks watching TV, and little girl petting a dead horse, all filmed in glorious Creepy-Vision. This is where the recap will get a little weird:

Echo is a 12-year-old girl, sees Dr. Whiskey through some glass, and is back to Dushku again. But when Whiskey turns around, her face is missing. Echo jumps back into her spirit animal, who turns out to be Lennix. Thank God! No, wait he’s evil too! Telling Echo she has no friends, he’s replaced by some gay-porn-looking-dude who says he’s going to find something to stuff in her mouth. Then she’s in and elevator with White-Eye Ghost-Helo.

Then a guy in a black body stocking shows up and punches Echo really hard.

After all that wackiness, Mr. Dominic (Reed Diamond) shows up and, after Echo beats him like he’s full of candy, he tells her it’s the shadow man she should worry about. They scare the shadow off and argue about whose dream they’re in-both believing the other to be their nightmare. He calls the shadow “Arcane”, and I call it a little sillier now that I know he calls it that.

Eventually they figure out that he somehow ended up in her head, which means that they can probably figure a way out and find the others in their respective nightmare worlds, the exit of course being having to face your worst fear. Wandering into Evil Topher’s lab-where he’s mashing brains into a hot-and-sour soup-Echo sits in the mind-wipe chair and disappears, while Dominic looks on, irritated that she went without a plan.

Echo finds herself in a nice Japanese tea house with biwa music playing. The dude across from her offers polite greetings, and Echo is all confused.

Back in the real world, Topher is trying to fix Helo, and Ivy wants nothing to do with him anymore.  Topher goes into Dewitt’s office and asks what’s up, and Dewitt tells him she just told Ivy she might have to replace him. Now, Ivy was all like “Don’t touch me, creep,” to Topher, so we know there was more-and so does he. So Williams let’s him know that she knows that he hacked up Priya’s big-bad-serial-raping-douchebag, intimating that’s what she told Ivy, too. Williams then warns him that surely Rossum’s onto him as well.

Cut to the Dreamworld, where Echo is still confused by the polite Japanese man. Elswhere in the brainscape, Priya and Ciccoli are getting it on, while we wait for it to get creepy, which it does right quick when-When Ciccoli turns into The Nefarious (serial-raping) Dr. Nolan…as a zombie! Meanwhile, the real Ciccoli relives Afghanistan, only with the added twist that he’s fighting himself.

Back in the tea house, Echo discovers that the Japanese guy she was talking to discovered weaknesses in Rossum’s mainframe, which is why he sent to the Attic. Someone screams, and Echo decides it’s time to book. She notices the man has no legs as she leaves, and when she finds her way into the kitchen, she sees that all the cuisine he has been eating is in fact cut from a pair of legs, probably his.

Ew.

Dominic shows up again, scaring the crap out of her. Arcane slits the Japanese guys throat, and before he dies he complains that the meat won’t be fresh. Ewwww. His brainscape begins to shut down, threatening to trap Dominic and Echo inside.

Cut to Williams office, where she’s telling Lennix that, guess what? No one leaves the Dollhouse, and the future is not for weak.

Dominic and Echo realize they’re going to have to eat the Japanese man’s legs to get out of his mind.

Ewwwwwww.

DOMINIC: Good times.

Ciccoli’s Afghan hallucination: he’s reliving a pretty well-filmed fight sequence, when he’s suddenly confronted by Arcane. But Echo and Dominic burst through a wall a moment later, and Arcane disappears.  Skip a head a few moments, and Ciccoli is definitely wearing a Marine Corps. uniform. He says the need to trap Arcane, and what better place to do that than Priya’s mind? So they do just that, and this is where it gets kinda convoluted.

Eventually they smash through a wall into Arcane’s nightmare, which looks a heck of a lot like the future from Epitaph One. So much so, they start playing the music from the episode. Arcane,  who is actually a British nebbish named Clyde (Adam Godley), looks sort of like a younger, dorkier Ian McCellan, tells the Scooby Gang that the people in the Attic are the mainframe. Oh, okay then. So running the brain at high levels of fear makes sense now, because you’re using it as a processor.

By the way, I typed that before Clyde actually said it, so props to me. It makes a great deal more sense than fear for fear’s sake.

Back at the DHPPHQNC, Lennix and Topher ruminate on how Williams is destroying everything fun.

In the dreamscape, the gang find a secure place and Clyde explains the origin of the Dollhouse. He and a friend made the technology, his friend betrayed him, and thus Clyde was the first in the Attic in 1993. His personal hell is running probability scenarios (I mean, that’s my idea of hell, too) of where the dollhouse technology leads humanity. In all but 3% of them, it leads to the end of the world. What to do?

Clyde tells them there was an infiltrator sometime ago, a girl whose sole purpose was to bring down the Dollhouse, who had seen all the key players and was capable of bringing the whole system crashing down. Her name? Caroline.

Dun. Dun. DUNNNNN.

Now they really have to get out of the Attic.

Outside, their hideout, a doll-zombie finds one of their dropped weapons, and starts shooting into their little bunker. Echo has a plan…and stands in the line of fire.

Cut to Topher’s lab. They reload Helo and he talks scrambled for a spell, before eventually rebooting. He comes to his senses slowly, and then goes for Topher’s throat. They tell him that Dollhouse tech was the only way to save him. Helo relieves Lennix of his revolver and storms into Williams office, where they commence with a Mexican stand-off. He says he’s ok with goin’ down as long as the Dollhouse goes with him, she says she doesn’t want to die.

HELO: Well then. One of us is going to be disappointed.

Inside the brain-scape, Echo’s genius plan is to die/disengage and basically do what we saw her do in the intro…only more successfully. You see, her probability scenario was to escape the attic (smart move, evil overlords), and she’s figured it out.  Ciccoli and Priya make with the “we’re a team now,” forcing Echo to get them out too. Dominic and Clyde are going to stay behind and attempt to undermine the mainframe by teaching people to face their fears.

Hey, worth a shot.

Echo gets them out for real this time.

Time Cut! Turns out, this was Williams’ plan all along, that she and Echo were all-together-now, and… uh, yeah. I think more of her plans should involve getting completely trashed and letting people bring down Rossum piece-meal, but that’s just me.

Roll Credits!

SUMMARY

• One more step towards the apocalypse.
• So Helo is a doll now. Interesting.
• The overall creppiness of this episode was well beyond any of the queasy teenage girl fetish of previous episodes.
• If Ciccoli was with the Rangers and in a Ranger unit, why in the hell was he wearing Marine Corps desert pattern instead of ACU grey?