Recap

After a brief introduction showing Langton, as the Rossum head, forcing Caroline to become an active, we see Victor and Sierra return to the Dollhouse to find the place in shambles. Near the Dollhouse imprinting chair, they find a note that says, "Press Enter." They don't know what it will do, but Victor decides to use it on himself, despite the potential danger of doing so, so that he can save his friends. He lies down, Sierra activates it, and Victor is imprinted with Topher. They watch some security camera footage and discover that Langton drugged Echo. Victor as Topher then re-imprints himself to become a super-soldier.

Meanwhile Ballard, DeWitt, and Madeline are set up outside the Dollhouse, armed and waiting for Rossum agents to arrive. Langton and Topher arrive with Echo imprinted with Caroline. Echo is yelling in pain, but no one understands why, not knowing that Langton drugged her so that she could not expose him. They sedate her and head to Rossum. At Rossum, they are confronted by Whiskey, who DeWitt explains is Clyde, the co-founder of Rossum whose original body is trapped in the Attic. DeWitt is taken to Whiskey-Clyde's office. The rest are trapped in a holding cell, which Langton pretends to break out of by rewiring a control panel, but he actually uses a security card to open it.

Langton and Topher head out to find a way to sabotage the corporation. Topher tells Langton that he thinks someone in the Dollhouse drugged Caroline and reveals his plan to hopefully get Victor to imprint himself with Topher (as happened).

Meanwhile, Echo regains consciousness with Caroline's imprint. After having a series of flashbacks, she sits up and says, "Boyd," revealing that she knows that (Boyd) Langton is the Rossum head.

Topher and Langton go into a Rossum lab and find that Topher's mobile Doll tech is being prepared for mass manufacturing. The devices are not functioning, but Langton convinces him to get one of them working so that they can use it to escape. While they're in the lab, Caroline breaks in and attacks Boyd. Almost immediately, however, Clyde enters with a gun (and DeWitt) and forces her to stop.

Ballard and Madeline find a weapons cache and arm themselves. They then find the facility's air conditioning unit and decide to sabotage it so that Rossum's mainframe will overheat.

Good ol' fashioned standoff.

When the core group gets back together, Echo exposes Langton for who he is. Langton says, "You guys are my family. I love you guys. ... We have to face the facts. The technology exists. It can't be uninvented. Once it is invented, it will be abused." He tells Echo that she is physiologically unique and that her spinal fluid can be used to create a vaccine against imprinting. The plan is apparently to use this vaccine on a privileged few. Echo threatens to kill him, and he incapacitates her with a Disruptor.

At this point, Ballard and Madeline destroy the cooling system. While they are waiting for security to arrive, Rossum plays over the facility's intercoms Madeline's command that turns her into a killer. Just before she kills him she begins regaining herself. (spoilers) Afraid that she can't fight it off for a prolonged period of time, she kills herself.

Langton takes Echo to a lab where a technician begins the painful process of extracting some of her spinal fluid. Sierra and Victor find her, take out the technician, and release Echo. They then find DeWitt and Topher, who are being held and gunpoint, and kill all security agents in the room.

Clyde finds Echo trying to escape. They fight, and Echo knocks her out. She finds herself in a room with supercomputers. Before she can do anything, Langton walks in with Ballard, who doesn't yet know the truth about Langton. Langton immediately puts him at gunpoint so that Echo won't destroy the mainframe. Echo shoots Ballard in the leg, and she and Langton scuffle. Then Topher and DeWitt walk in, and Topher shoots Langton with the portable mind-wipe device. Langton wakes up and utters the "Did I fall asleep?" script to Echo. They then strap Langton with explosives and give him a grenade. Echo instructs him to walk into the center of the mainframes and pull the grenade pin after she leaves the room. He does so, destroying the computers.

Echo runs out of the building to find Ballard and the others. Ballard asks her, "So, did we save the world?" She responds, "I guess we did."

Then the camera slowly points up at the Rossum building with a similar building in view nearby, perhaps implying that this other building also houses Rossum mainframes.

The episode ends with a brief glimpse of the apocalypse.

Review

This episode does a great job of flipping the world on its head multiple times. The first instance of this is the carry-over of the previous episode's revelation of Langton being the head of Rossum (a point that, embarrassingly, I had missed). Then Whiskey is revealed to be Clyde. This alone is pretty socially subversive -- two of the lower-ranking Dollhouse employees turning out to be two of the most powerful people in the world. Then we get the scene in which Langton is mind-wiped and becomes not only a Doll, but a Doll-servant of another Doll. Of course, the kicker is the main characters' belief that they have destroyed Rossum and ended the possibility of the apocalypse predicted by Attic-Clyde.

"The Hollow Men," and Dollhouse as a whole, is about the inability to know what is going on beneath the surface -- of anything. We can never know if anyone, even oneself, is who they claim or think they are. At the same time, it is about the nebulous and evolutionary nature of fundamental truths. The show presents the immutable fact that the status quo will always change and will sometimes change drastically, first to the point at which "identity" hardly has a meaning and then to the extent of a complete overturning of society (the apocalypse). Right now, what the characters believe to be the truth is that they were able to stop Rossum from effecting such a devastating change. As we already know, they are wrong. Joss Whedon has wrapped up the show's immediate plot perfectly, with the characters seeing success and the audience understanding the opposing truth beneath that belief. Now, we sit back and watch the inevitable cataclysm.