Mellie has taken to the streets, dejectedly snorfling and looking out at a highway from an overpass above. Before she can reenact the pivotal scene in Prayers For Bobby, though, her handler appears and shepherds her into a van. Inside, she cries that she tried so hard and did everything she could think of, but it didn't work. Poor dear, but we certainly know she's had worse. Anyway, the interesting thing is that Ballard has followed the van and sees it pull into the underground garage. He looks up at the building above it, and after we see some barbed wire, the scene turns into the illustration of the castle in the book of fairy tales, which would be a lot cooler if I were a fan of what they're going for here. Credits.

Echo sits with Susan, and this subplot is reasonably well-acted, but if they're going to keep drawing this parallel between Echo's situation with the Dollhouse and the fairy tale, I'm going to keep opining that it's strained at best. I mean, I know Alpha "rescues" Echo at the end of the episode, but... whoever the imprint he puts in her is, it's doesn't seem to me that she's Caroline, or anyone we've met before, so it's like they're trying to reenact Briar Rose without us ever having met Briar Rose or knowing anything about her story, which doesn't really work for me, dramatically. I could be wrong about her identity, and if so I'll recant next week, but on top of that, if anyone's going around looking for poisoned spindles, it's Ballard, not Echo, and I hope he's not going to sleep for a hundred years, because dumb as he is, he sure is nice to look at. The point is, I'm going to keep this short: Susan's feelings of contempt for Briar Rose for not saving herself from her fate are a thin veil covering her self-loathing over same, so Echo tells her she toyed with running away when she was her age, too, but was never able to go through with it. She goes into a lot more detail about her thought processes at the time, which obviously echo (sorry) Susan's own complex feelings about the situation, and this all builds to a silent, grudging acknowledgement from Susan that Echo "gets her," and somewhere Topher and Ivy cuddle and are all "Awwww" about the whole thing. I should say, though, hard as I may be coming off here, the episode had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through on first viewing, and even this stuff I'm complaining about is really only bothering me when I go through it at a recapping pace. Anyway...