After the last four episodes in two weeks, I don’t quite know what to say other than that Dollhouse is now an entirely different show than it was at the beginning of its first season. In a good way. I’m so thrilled they’ve thrown out the disturbing-prostitution-scheme-of-the-week format, because the show’s questions and themes were always going to be far too complicated to be adequately expressed in yet another creepy romantic engagement. In these last two weeks, Dollhouse has begun to feel like a headlong rush toward the apocalypse, which I’ve been waiting for since the fabulous “Epitaph One” and which Joss Whedon should really always include in his work. The guy’s just an apocalypse-building machine, and I wish it had been apparent that Dollhouse was heading toward the end of the world much, much sooner.

The other fabulous thing about these recent episodes is that finally (finally!) Echo is a character I’m actually interested in understanding. It took way too long to get here, but now that Echo is a sentient being capable of controlling all her alternate personalities and making decisions for herself, there are so many issues that become fascinating. Where did Echo come from? How does an identity leap into existence? What if, as Bennett remembers, Caroline’s not actually a great person? Does this body belong to Caroline or to Echo? It’s also lovely to watch her stride around the Dollhouse and actually wonder what her plans could be – Echo as a blank slate never provided enough resistance against the Rossum Corporation, and for a long time, Paul Ballard was too dopey and out of the loop to make it seem as though anyone was actually coming close to the problem. Now, though, we at last get to see that Echo is as special as everyone has been trying to tell us for a season and a half. This show actually gets a protagonist, one who can remember who she is from one day to the next.

The recent episodes have also been a great showcase for Adele, whose self-preservation instincts overpower her shaky, ambiguous morality in a way that managed to be both believable and evil. I’m still having a rough time with exactly what motivates Alpha, whose unpredictability and dangerousness are undercut by what appears to be a simple and non-scary love/jealousy issue. On the whole, though, Echo’s growing personhood has been nicely buoyed by an equally interesting supporting cast of characters, and Topher has to be the favorite. He’s managed to go from a complete jerk to a sympathetic and funny human being, and his trust in Adele, shown by handing over his freaky “Epitaph One” technology, was even more effective when she turns around and betrays him. It’s a relief to feel comfortable laughing at his joke lines and not wonder if I should actually be condemning him for his sociopathic actions. (Best line of this week was certainly: “I am obsolete. This must be what old people feel like. And Blockbuster.”)

The most recent episode, “A Love Supreme,” was also pleasantly self-aware, and managed to pull of a winking joke on itself while still being tense and suspenseful. The dolls have always been boring and empty, which has added to the difficulty of empathizing with them. When Alpha signals them all to become mindless killing machines, the subsequent zombie lines were both accurate descriptions of the dolls and also a pretty hilarious way of laughing about how dead they’ve always been. (Another Topher classic: “Did they eat my brains?!”) Dollhouse is now the thoughtful, funny, disturbing show it always deserved to be. Of course it is – it was cancelled a few weeks ago.