Dollhouse Season 2 Episode 10: The Attic
The Attic is revealed as the heart of the Dollhouse, where Echo, Priya and Anthony are all wiped clean of thought, encased in plastic sheeting, and placed in a glass tub filled with some form of viscous fluid, suspended in a permanent dream-state where they must relive their worst nightmares over and over on a continuous loop. When Echo understands that her fear is what is trapping her, she is able to overcome it…only to meet Laurence Dominic (special guest star Reed Diamond), who is also in control of himself within the Attic. They jump to different minds in an effort to stop a shadow-killer calling himself Arcane, and shortly free Anthony and Priya. Together they find Arcane’s true identity: one of the two founders of Rossum, whose partner turned on him and encased him in the Attic in 1993. The group discovers that the Attic is the horrifying heart of the Rossum conspiracy: everyone in the Attics in Dollhouses worldwide has been turned into a supercomputer that makes up the Rossum mainframe, kept in a permanent state of adrenaline in order to perform at peak efficiency. Echo makes the ultimate sacrifice to free herself, Priya and Anthony, though Dominic and Arcane (A.K.A. Clyde) volunteer to stay behind and try to free the rest of the lost souls trapped in the Attic. Meanwhile, Topher, Boyd and Ivy work to fight back from DeWitt’s seemingly tyrranical reign and make Paul Ballard into a doll himself in order to get his memory back, though in order to do this they had to take something from him (which hasn’t yet been revealed). It is then revealed that DeWitt sent Echo to the Attic in order to retrieve the information on how to stop Rossum, and that it was Caroline who had all of Rossum’s secrets in her brain. Determined to get Caroline back, DeWitt, Ballard, Echo/Caroline, Priya, Boyd, Topher, Ivy and Anthony all agree to work together to defeat Rossum, forever.