Doom Patrol S01E03 Review: Welcome to Fucktopia

Doom Patrol, Season 1, Episode 3: Puppet Patrol

.,..and finally, I'm back, sort of! Well, I rewatched the first two episodes of Doom Patrol, which I did like all the way back in 2019, and I guess I just got really intimidated by reviewing the show? Turns out that it's nowhere as heavy or as dark as the first two episodes are, which are more... mood-setters in a way, and end up being a bit more heavy on exposition. And compared to "Pilot" and "Donkey Patrol", the third episode, "Puppet Patrol" is... a bit lighter on exposition. And, sure, the show does exposition very, very well, integrating them into relevant flashbacks and dialogue well... but exposition is still exposition and new information. Still, it's at around this episode (and the next) that the show finally settles in.

With all members of our Doom Patrol gathered, the mystery of Chief's disappearance set up and a bunch of strange, wacky powers also all set up, this episode of Doom Patrol finally gives us something that's more.... I don't want to say mundane, because "Puppet Patrol" is certainly not mundane, but it certainly feels a lot more episodic. The episode has our heroes go chase a lead on Chief, go and fight a lesser villain and deal with him, and there are some characterization done on our heroes' part. It's pretty standard as far as superhero TV shows go... but, of course, this is Doom Patrol, so everything is significantly more wacky and runs on absurdism.

The A-plot involves our heroes going off to investigate one of the leads they find by digging around the Chief's office. One donkey photo and a bunch of files later, and they head off on a funky van road trip to Paraguay because, well, Vic gets basically shut out by his dad throwing an emotionally manipulative tantrum. He can't take the jet! And while the road trip bit is just more or less just scene-setting and there to have a bunch of gags (ha ha, Rita drives like a grandma! Oh no, Crazy Jane is jumping out of the window! Ha ha, the Doom Patrol share a motel room!), the scripting is well-done enough and the gags -- particularly the world's constant attempts to make Justice League gags at the expense of Cyborg -- is fun enough to make this part not drag on. Again, I really do like the comedy in this episode, which I feel is significantly a step up from the first two episodes.

A lot of this episode's first act, I feel, is just devoted to this, because just as irreverently, Jane turns into her Flit personality and teleports herself (themselves?), Cliff and Larry to their destination... which turns to be Fuchtopia, some bizarre, wacky resort made by Cliff's old rival Heinrich von Fuchs. The show immediately makes the Fucktopia joke and I approve of it, and between the overly-excited tourist dude Steve that they meet on the way, and a hilariously over-the-top puppet show... that also ends up being an info-dump to both us and the characters about the origin story of their villain, Mr. Nobody. Chief apparently shot Fuchs and Eric Morden when they were doing crazy Nazi science superpower experiments, stealing their data in that oh-so-anti-heroic streak while also allowing Fuchs to explain Mr. Nobody's origin story and... his powers? Which is to access alternate dimensions or whatever?

Oh, and also, Fuchtopia is basically a place for people to sign up, show up and sign up for superpower-granting experiments, from mundane ones to full-out a replication of Morden's experiment. Fans of the Doom Patrol comics will especially get a kick out of the final scene. And it's run by a bunch of creepy Nazi secretaries dressed in... spa attendant outfits, I guess? And they're all, as we learn, controlled by Heinrich von Fuchs via a hive-mind mentality. The reversal of superpower concepts between Crazy Jane (one body, multiple minds) and Fuchs (one mind, multiple bodies) is neat... but the execution is hilarious considering just how goofy looking the extra Fuchs bodies are dressed, and how the real body is stuck in a weird, wacky iron lung that has to be manually cranked by one of his extra bodies.

Oh, and of course, the whole ridiculousness of the situation is contrasted with Robotman, at one point, absolutely losing control, flipping out and ripping people apart in the show's obligatory gore-fest segments. Unlike its sister show Titans, however, Doom Patrol's whole tone and how the gore is more comedic than an attempt to shock or scare audiences makes it work. The fact that this plays into Cliff's absolute shock and horror and the whole "oh man, I'm a fucking monster" theme of the episode works wonders, too. Cliff ends up throwing away his daughter's phone number at the end of the episode, and while Jane seems to have a better handle on her trauma than Cliff, Fuchs' talk about how none of Jane's achievements belong to her but rather to her alters clearly shook up the poor girl a fair bit.

But of course, Doom Patrol is a show that jumps back and forth between absurd superhero nonsense and depressing drama. And I feel that the show does it a lot better than the comparable Legends of Tomorrow because... the drama is actually a lot darker and the plotting is a lot tighter. I think we're also getting one major flashback per episode, too. We've gotten Cliff as the first episode, and both Rita and Vic end up sharing last episode. And, sure, Larry got his share of short flashbacks in the previous episodes too, but this episode is all about Larry. Throughout the funnier, wackier road trips and Nazi superpower-spa-resorts, we get an insight into Larry's mind.

Larry's flashbacks are certainly very interesting. We sort of already got the basics of Larry's backstory, but actually seeing it play out -- his arguments both with his boyfriend and his wife -- as well as how Larry basically devolved into a shambling monster after his accident and ends up having his wife and children leave him... and turns out that the Negative Man entity's first appearance was to drive away his boyfriend John. It's honestly pretty sad. There's also some kind of parallel, too, between how Larry once led a double life and now ends up as a man in bandages playing host to a mysterious energy being within him. The conversation with his wife also tells us that his wife clearly knows what's going on about those 'late beer nights', and that they apparently moved from town to town to deal with something that's not socially acceptable at that time.

And the episode starts off by making Larry's little Negative Man problems kind of funny. Ha ha, the boundaries conversation ends up with Negative Man bringing their shared body on the rafters of the building. And then it gets just a bit less ha-ha-funny when the Negative Man entity zaps their bus, or when Larry asks Jane how she keeps 'her guys' in control. And then, of course, as we continue on with Larry's pretty sad flashback and while Cliff and Jane rampage around Fuchtopia, Larry puts himself in the power-granting machine and gets a bit of a mental mind-world where he gets turned back from his scarred, radioactive body back into handsome ace pilot Larry Trainor again... only for the Negative Man entity to cackle, appear and block the way out. I'm not sure what the Negative Man entity wants from Larry, if it's trying to do something for its own agenda or if it's actually malicious... but it's going to be interesting to see.

Larry's whole story is that he's not in control -- not of his Negative Man entity, not of the choice to leave it behind, and most certainly not of his lovers back in the day. John threatens to leave the military and him behind; his wife wasn't happy with him going around behind her back and eventually leaves him; he's torn between the care he has for his family and his own nature as a gay man; he's trapped in a military facility; and even his relationship with John was ended seemingly by the Negative Man entity. Losing control, it seems, is something that the episode makes into its theme. Jane certainly admits that she doesn't have control over any of her alters, and Cliff straight-up goes into a berserker murder-robot mode at one point. And Rita has been struggling with control of her flesh-goop powers since day one.

Victor and Rita sit the episode out for the most part. Rita mostly does a repeat of her previous scenes (which I'm not complaining, April Bowlby is great to see ham it up), although also ends up being a nice person to bounce Vic off of. Victor Stone, meanwhile, gets a bit of a backseat... but also gets a fair bit of interesting characterization. Sure, Cliff and that one random dude harassing Victor about Justice League and butt-printers and toners and stuff are all funny and all, and having Silas be kind of a tit who refuses to lend Vic his jet to try and gaslight him into obeying his 'career superhero' wishes is interesting. But Victor is clearly having a whole lot of doubts. That whole maybe-real-maybe-fake brutal-Silas flashback from the previous episode is clearly not helping matters either. It's nothing particularly meaty (especially compared to what Larry and to a lesser extent Cliff and Jane went through) but it was pretty nice to see the two of them fight a bit and make up and bond over their respective insecurities.

Pretty solid episode nonetheless, and while it's not made super-explicit, I do really like that over the whole nonsense with Nazis in iron lungs, butt-printer toners and the always-cool visualization of Jane's Silver Tongue powers, there's the neat overarching tone of all members of the Doom Patrol losing control.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Doom Patrol's traditional archenemy, the Brotherhood of Evil, is mentioned early on when discussing Mr. Nobody. 
• Cyborg's association with the Justice League is mentioned a couple of times, and both Batman and Aquaman are name-dropped. "I bet Aquaman never loses his keys!"
• Whether it's an intentional name-drop to the DC supervillain or not, Jane calls Robotman "Cheetah" at one point when talking to Steve. 
• Steve Larson becomes this show's take on the Animal Vegetable Mineral Man (a.k.a. Dr. Sven Larson in the comics), who first appeared in Doom Patrol's first run, and often agreed to be the Patrol's most silly and dumb-looking enemy. He actually looks doofier here, changing the 'vegetable' part from wooden branches into actual vegetables. In the comics, Sven Larson was a former assistant of Caulder who, after a fight with Niles, ends up being mutated after falling into a vat of amino acid.