"Dollhouse": "Gray Hour" Trivia Quiz

Answer: Midwife

The first shot is of an isolated mansion on a snowy mountainside. Inside, a woman is in labor, as her husband looks on and Echo guides her through some minor difficulties. It may seem odd to hire a Doll as a midwife, but anyone rich enough to hire a Doll in the first place is allowed to be eccentric.

Besides, they may have wanted to keep the birth a secret -- or maybe a Doll midwife can be programmed with more experience than any real local midwife has.

Answer: Blue skies!

For Echo/Taffy, "Blue skies!" seems to represent a certain confident optimism. She says it when she wakes up, when she's ready to go, when it's time for action, and when reassurance is needed. As we'll see, she'll need all the confidence she can get.

Answer: She tells the security manager that she's been attacked.

Echo/Taffy is not really there for a bachelor party, and neither are the young men. They stage a scene where she runs from the suite with torn clothing and a bloody lip. "I know who I am and what I do," she tells the security manager (Kevin Will) in his office, "but I didn't sign up for that." The security man seems sympathetic, but soon turns sleazy: apparently this kind of thing happens often enough that the hotel has a policy, which consists of discouraging the woman from leaving until she's sworn off any legal action in exchange for $10,000. Echo/Taffy declines the bribe, then overpowers the security manager.

She calls the young men on her cell phone: "I'm in."

Answer: The security system will be down for an upgrade.

We'll let Echo/Taffy explain: "Here's how this is gonna go. In sixty-four seconds, the high-security building ... is gonna be shutting down their motion detection sensors, infrared sensors, security cameras -- we'll be in a gray hour. In the one hour it takes them to revolutionize their security system and make it impenetrable, we penetrate." The others are nervous about the plan, but she's in charge -- blue skies all the way. "The guards aren't allowed on the vault floor during gray hour," so what could possibly go wrong?

Answer: An Elgin marble

A professor (Mark Ivanir) has been brought in as an antiquities expert, and he describes the piece so the others can help him find it. "The Elgin marbles are large sections of the Parthenon's marble friezes and statuary, stolen in the late 19th century." (Naturally, the UK, where they wound up, would choose a different word.) The thieves don't know the details of who hired them, but they surmise that it's Greece, wanting to get the marble back.

Answer: Protection

Ballard had approached Lubov -- a man he thought to be a minor associate of the Borodin crime family -- in the first episode, seeking information about the Dollhouse. Unbeknownst to him, Lubov is really a Doll (Victor) programmed to lead him astray. In the last episode ("Stage Fright"), Victor/Lubov's information nearly got Ballard killed -- and now Lubov is convinced he's next on the Borodins' hit list.

After hearing his impassioned plea, Ballard agrees to keep him safe at his place -- but only for as long as it takes to add him to the FBI watch list. Would he have acted differently if he knew this is part of a Dollhouse plan to give him "closure"?

Answer: The antiquities expert has betrayed them.

It seems there's no honor among thieves. When he finds the Elgin marble, the professor wraps it in cloth and dashes for the door, stabbing the conspirator who tries to stop him. The vault door closes behind him, and the remaining thieves are in trouble now. Echo/Taffy calls her handler, Boyd, to subdue the traitor on his way out of the building.

As one would expect, Boyd accomplishes the task with poise, with violence, and without any nonsense.

Answer: It wipes her personality blank.

Echo -- who is not Taffy anymore -- drops her phone, drops to the floor, and starts reciting from the script the Dollhouse uses after personality wipes. "Did I fall asleep? Shall I go now?" she asks, and when no one gives the prescribed responses, she panics and starts weeping.

Meanwhile, when Topher sees the waveform of this remote wipe, he has trouble believing it. "That's not -- uh uh. That didn't happen ... I've said [remote wipes] are untested. I've said they're a very bad, bad idea. I've said I can't do them ... Somebody out there figured out our frequency, hacked into the call, and that's not even the hard part..." Echo's in trouble, she can't be re-imprinted remotely, and her enemy has her cell phone number.

Answer: They imprint a second Doll -- Sierra -- as Taffy.

Time is short. Only Taffy knows how to get out of the vault, but Taffy is gone. So they make a new Taffy to give instructions over Echo's cell phone.

An amusing two-step follows, as the new Taffy scolds Adelle for having hired someone else. "Ten months of research ... the Parthenon job was supposed to be mine." The security chief, Mr. Dominic, offers "double [her] usual fee to extract the team," and Adelle offers the final incentive: "There is no balm for a bruised ego like saving the day." And Taffy almost gets to.

Answer: Alpha, a rogue Doll

Topher comes into Adelle's office, saying he thinks he's figured it out, and demanding to know more. "It was Alpha, wasn't it?" he asks. "Nobody else could have come even close to pulling off a remote wipe. He's alive. He's out there." In a previous episode ("The Target"), we learned that Alpha had escaped the Dollhouse after a killing spree -- but the staff had been told he'd been tracked down and killed. That, Adelle now says, was a lie: "We're not all powerful." Alpha, it seems, is a formidable adversary ... stay tuned!