The end is here. Dollhouse goes back to the apocalypse for its final episode, “Epitaph Two.” This one starts with Felicia Day’s character, Mag, her counterpart Zone, and “little girl” Caroline in a desolate part of Arizona as they suddenly come under attack 28 Days Later-style by a horde of people whose minds were altered by the mass imprinting that was referred to in “Epitaph One.” They get away but are captured soon enough by a group of what few survivors are left. They’re taken to what's left of Rossum, where Echo and Ballard happen to be breaking in for their own reasons. Echo and Ballard end up rescuing them as well as Topher, who was being held captive. They all make it back to a secret farm hideaway, where DeWitt, Sierra, Sierra’s son (by Victor), and a few others are living. Victor and a group of Mad Max-like thugs show up, too, and they set out for DeWitt’s Dollhouse because Topher (who has gone quite mad) thinks he can save the world if they get there.

Joss Whedon continues still to demonstrate more things that would be possible in a Dollhouse world. The head Rossum exec lives his days gorging himself with a woman on his shoulder and no care for his personal health. Why? Because once he gets too fat, all he has to do is have his men round up some healthy “dumb shows” (people whose minds have been wiped but who have become mindless rather than homicidal) so that he can pick the body he wants and have his mind imprinted into it. Then there’s Victor’s group of apocalypse soldiers, who each have portable imprinting devices and wear chains with a dozen or so flash drives containing various skill sets. You need to become a supersoldier for a minute? Just plug the supersoldier flash drive into the imprinter, put it up to your ear, wait for the sting, and you’re a supersoldier! Brilliant.

These aspects of the show alone expand upon Dollhouse’s questions of life and identity (and the soul, if you wanna tread in that water too). If someone dies but has his/her conscious backed up and thereafter imprinted into a new body, is the resulting individual a new person or the same person who was originally backed up? What gives us identity in the first place if at any second we can change who we are? The answer seems to lie in something Bennett says in a recording Topher watches to try to figure out how to start a mass de-imprinting blast. While explaining the functionality of the parts of the brain that determine our personality, she states that any given person’s identity is determined neither by what they have done in the past nor what they are going to do in the future; we are identified by what we are doing now -- no more, no less. And that is what the answer has to be. Who you are at any given instant is who you are. Using the hypothetical situation of Dollhouse’s technology as the test of extremes, there is no other way of defining who a person is because a body may consist of many minds, and a mind may come or go in an instant.

The apocalypse is here, and it ain't pretty.

One very welcome treat was what the Dollhouse gang unexpectedly (unexpectedly, that is, unless you were reading the opening credits) encountered upon returning to the Dollhouse: dozens of actives wandering aimlessly, cared for by none other than Alpha. He’s not super-psycho killer Alpha, though; at some point along the way he lost his many battling personalities and became just plain Alpha. However, he doesn’t do a lot in the episode. He helps DeWitt, Echo, Topher, and Victor out, and he gets them out of a sticky situation at one point, but then he just sorta leaves. I guess you can never predict what a guy like that is gonna do.

(Warning: Major spoilers for the rest of this recap)

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The shock of this episode was the death of Ballard. When the group first gets back to L.A., they have to fight through a crowd of “crazies” (as Zone so accurately calls them, possibly referring to the George Romero film) to get to the Dollhouse entrance. During the skirmish, Mag gets shot in the legs, and Ballard runs to the rescue. After killing the guy who shot her, he tells her that everything will be okay, and he’s instantly shot in the head. It is so sudden and unexpected that it evokes the closest possible approximation of the sadness felt by the characters. Someone had to be killed in this episode for it to remain believable. Whedon made a bold decision in choosing Ballard, and the event was executed perfectly.

There is another death, but it is the result of a sacrifice rather than a killing, and it was probably necessary, too: Topher. Topher spends the entire episode trying to figure out a way to save the world with a single imprint-reverting pulse sent through the atmosphere. He has reached the level of mad genius as he nods to himself and mutters childishly at the same time that he works out the science of perhaps the most genius device ever built (at least the most genius device built by one man). As it turns out, the device itself explodes upon activation, and it has to be activated manually. So, Topher accepts the task. It’s your classic redemption loop, and more specifically, it’s your classic mad scientist redemption loop: man creates something far too big too handle, that thing gets out of hand and causes mass sadness and destruction, man tries reining it in unsuccessfully, man makes a sacrifice (of some sort) to redeem himself and fix the problem.

But it’s not all sad. In the end, Echo prepares to dismantle all the Dollhouse technology so that it can’t be rebuilt (the idea is that it’s too advanced for anyone to piece back together not knowing how it originally worked). But Topher has left something for her: a cartridge with Ballard’s conscious. Before destroying the chair, she imprints herself one last time, adding Ballard to the many personalities inside her body. We get a brief, sweet visualization of the two personalities meeting each other inside her head, preparing to live together forever, finally. She then lies down to sleep, and not even Fox’s too-quick commercial cut-in is able to ruin the moment.

And thus is the end of Dollhouse, one of the better sci-fi TV series of the past couple years. Once it got rolling on the fourth or fifth episode, Whedon demonstrated unrelenting persistence in pushing the boundaries of the show’s ideas, taking them far beyond what most viewers could have anticipated. He’s one of the few television writers today who can keep things simultaneously fun, witty, exciting, harrowing, and smart. It’s a shame we won’t get more of it, but this was nothing if not a satisfying conclusion.