Teen Titans S05E01-02 Review: The Doom Patrol & A Change of Tone

Teen Titans, Season 5, Episodes 1-2: Homecoming

Season Five is one of the most contested seasons of Teen Titans for being the one that's the most... different. It tries to shake up the formula by actually being more serious, in a way, but also by suddenly introducing so much DC lore. It's nowhere as overloading as Justice League Unlimited or Young Justice is, and it still retains its insane fun attitude towards most of everything, but a lot of people dislike it for, well, trying out so many different things at the same time. We'll see about the five main Titans being out of focus in future episodes, but right now let's just take a moment to note how bizarre (and awesome) it is to suddenly have origin stories, real names, and adult mentor figures!

It's a bit of a soft origin story for Beast Boy. We don't exactly learn how he got his powers, but we do know that Beast Boy had a stint when he was younger as a member of this superhero group, the Doom Patrol, which we meet here. The Doom Patrol sends a distress call that Beast Boy and the Titans respond to... only for Beast Boy to find that the team's leader, Mento, is still cold-hearted and still treats Beast Boy (and by association the Titans) as children. There's a nice moment of nine superheroes letting loose with their powers as they fight the Brotherhood of Evil, led by the Brain and his French gorilla butler buddy Monsieur Mallah (comic book villains are awesome).

While one doomsday weapon was destroyed, Beast Boy is forced between a decision of stopping Brain and Mallah (and probably fail, considering how Brain took out several of the others on his own) or rescue his teammates. While Robin is supportive of Beast Boy's decision and notes how the two groups are now able to hunt down the Brotherhood, Mento is angry at Beast Boy for unable to make the hard decisions. In cartoon-land, I mean, Beast Boy's actions might be justified, but in real world what's to say that the delay that they had didn't cause Brain to unleash his Armageddon weapon on a city? It's something that's a bit deep than your normal Teen Titans fare, but it's one that I welcome wholeheartedly.

The first part ends up there as a pretty great introduction to the Doom Patrol, with its core four members given decent screentime, even if Mento and Robot-Man do get the bulk of the interactions. It's very, very interesting how the Doom Patrol and Beast Boy just alternate between calling them by their code names and their real names on the drop of a hat when literally no one else in the entire series has been called by their real name for four whole seasons, unless you count Cyborg masquerading as 'Stone' and the brief background 'Dick Grayson' cameo.

But the second part was... a bit more irritating. The fight scenes in the second part were absolutely amazing, of course, but the storytelling leaves something to be desired after the strong first part. We get Mento's jerkassiness ramped up to eleven. While in the first part he just felt like a harder yet ultimately logical leader, here he's just a bit of an idiot, and more than that he's a huge jackass. The rest of the Patrol devolve from being somewhat interesting in their limited screentime last episode to being generic yes-men in the second one, and honestly it just sucks out a lot of the joy from the Doom Patrol scenes... which lasted, like, the entire episode. None of the 'we're victims to our powers' bit from the comics surfaced, and Elasti-Girl, Robotman and Negative Man can all be lumped together as a single sentence: "we follow Mento, but we think he's too hard, but we follow him anyway."

Was it really necessary to spend nearly the entirety of the twenty-minute episode runtime to show the Doom Patrol being taken out one by one and apparently-left-for-dead-except-we-know-it-isn't-the-case? And even so, there's really no reason for Mento to refuse the Teen Titans' help. I mean, yeah, he doesn't want to risk any more than he has to, maybe, but Starfire and Raven alone are big enough guns that they might not even lose a single one. Of course near the end of the episode, Beast Boy gets Mento to realize that he's a huge dick, but fortunately the Titans have apparently rescued the other three Doom Patrol members. They fight Brain and Brain gets away -- identical to the first part, honestly, except the Brotherhood has two new villains in their ranks (General Immortus and Madame Rogue). It's honestly very boring and repetitive, especially coming off the first part.

It really feels a bit redundant, to be honest, since all of these could've been condensed into one episode, or honestly just cut out entirely. Both episodes end with the Brain's superweapon being somewhat disabled and him getting away, and the main catalyst of both shows Beast Boy and Mento disagreeing... only the second part has Mento be an unreasonable jackass. The second part really felt like an unfinished draft of the first episode.

There was a great moment at the end where the Brain looms over several monitor screens showing the Titans and their allies as he monologues to a huge assembly of past Teen Titans villains... which is awesome. But the rest of the second part is quite disappointing.

Still, I quite like the fifth season for its own merits, so don't write it off just yet, eh?


DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Beast Boy's first name is revealed to be Garfield at the end of the episode, and apparently none of the Teen Titans know this fact. Huh.
• In the comics, before joining the Teen Titans, Beast Boy was indeed part of the Doom Patrol. In fact for a good chunk of the New Teen Titans comic that this cartoon is based on, Beast Boy actually wore a white/red costume and is known as Changeling, while the black-purple suit (and mask) and the Beast Boy name was Garfield's look during his tenure in the Doom Patrol. It's not until the cartoon made the 'Beast Boy' name popular that he re-adapted the name once more in the comics.
• The Doom Patrol was an old DC superhero team that was pretty popular in the 60's and later the 80's for simply taking the weirdness of superheroing and ramping it up, but has been sorely under-represented in modern DC comics, with a few minor roles here and there in the big titles, and brief appearances in Batman: the Brave and the Bold. In fact, most adaptations prefer to focus on Beast Boy and the Brotherhood of Evil, the former being more associated with the Teen Titans group and the latter having fought other superhero teams as well. The roster here is more or less identical to the very first team, sans Chief (Niles Caulder), who's basically Professor X.
• Mento: Steve Dayton is a rich man with a helmet that enhances his telepathic powers, and is one of the main fighters of the Doom Patrol. His personality in the cartoon kind of crosses over a bit with Chief as the unreasonable, rather dickish leader.
• Robotman: Cliff Steele is the only member to have served in every incarnation of the Doom Patrol. After an accident with a race car destroyed his human body, his brain was placed inside a robot by Chief and thus after some soul-searching he joined the Doom Patrol.
• Elasti-Girl: No connection to the Incredibles character, who was created more than 5 decades after DC's Elasti-Girl. Rita Farr is an actress that was exposed to certain strange gases that allow her to shrink or enlarge her body at will. Both in the cartoon and the comics, Rita became Beast Boy's surrogate mother. 
• Negative Man: Larry Trainor was exposed to space radiation while flying a plane, and this caused him to have to be wrapped in bandages almost permanently. He can send out a radioactive projection of himself out of his body, but not for an extended period of time.
• The Brotherhood of Evil was first introduced as the Doom Patrol's enemies, but have fought various other superheroes later on. The lineup here features the four founding members of the Brotherhood, sans Garguax.
• Brain: An until-now-still-nameless scientist was caught in an accident, and he placed his brain in a robotic jar. Can't get more supervillainy than that! The Brain leads the Brotherhood of Evil and has faced off against the Doom Patrol, Justice League and Teen Titans several times. In the comics he became gay lovers with his gorilla butler Mallah, in undoubtedly the weirdest comic book couplings ever and understandably doesn't exist in any of the Brotherhood's adaptations into the various DC cartroons.
• Monsieur Mallah: Mallah is a gorilla who's experimented on by Brain to have heightened intelligence and skill with firearms. He's an intelligent gorilla that speaks in French! How awesome is he? Quite a fair bit.
• Madame Rogue: Laura DeMille was an actress that was disfigured in an accident. The Brain experimented on her and gave her the power to transform her face, and later on augmented with limb-stretchy powers. Basically a less-muddy version of Clayface. 
• General Immortus: A very long-lived man that's a genius at tactical warfare, General Immortus prolonged his life with alchemical potions. He's just an old dude, really. 
• Among the monitors that the Brain observes at the end of the episode, in addition to the five core Teen Titans and the Doom Patrol, we get cameos by:
• Titans we've seen before: Speedy, Aqualad, Bumblebee, Mas y Menos, Hot Spot, Wildebeest, Tramm, Thunder and Lightning.
• Characters that we haven't seen and will see this season: Kid Flash, Red Star, Jericho, Bushido, Kilowatt, Pantha, Argent, Jericho and Wonder Girl.
• The group of villains assembled by Brain, likewise, feature villains that we've both seen before and new ones... including all the students at HIVE academy, some of which aren't named yet.
• Returning villains: Billy Numerous, Dr. Light, Mammoth, Gizmo, Jinx, Cinderblock, Red X, Adonis, Trident, Puppet King, Johnny Rancid, Mumbo Jumbo, Professor Chang, Plasmus, Kyd Wykkyd, Angel, Warp, Punk Rocket, Killer Moth, Kardiak, XL Terrestrial, Atlas, Katarou, Control Freak, Wintergreen, HIVE Headmistress, INSTIGATOR, "Wrestling Star", Kitten, Fang, Mad Mod, Steamroller, Mother Mae-Eye, the Witch, Malchior, Master of Games, Overload, the Source, See-More, Private HIVE
• New villains: Psimon, Phobia, Andre LeBlanc, Chesire, Ding-Dong Daddy
• Of course, among the returning villains there are some that simply doesn't make sense. Warp was last seen turned into a baby, Malchior was sealed in Raven's book, the Witch was from thousands of years in the past, Puppet King's soul was damned to hell or something. Among the villains that the Titans have faced in the past only the major arc villains (Slade, Brother Blood, Trigon) and Blackfire are absent.