Doom Patrol, Season 1, Episode 6: Doom Patrol Patrol
Okay, this episode was a bit less apocalyptic cult-y, and a lot more concerned about the Doom Patrol's history. Or, rather, that in this show our main characters isn't even the first superhero group called the Doom Patrol. Apparently, as our heroes figure out, they were Superhero Team Number Two, and Caulder's first effort, the Doom Patrol, exists. And I do really like that, again, they explore the ambiguity of the truth that Caulder may have been telling his charges. There are a couple of neat jukes going around, and the audience (as well as the main characters) are kept guessing just what is going on. Is it some manipulation by Mr. Nobody? Is it part of an altered history due to Mr. Nobody's interference with the past last episode? Or is it, as the episode seems to present, that Caulder has created a far more nice-looking, viewer-friendly Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters X-Men style school for metahumans? Turns out that, as always in Doom Patrol, things are not quite what they seem.
I do really love the concept, though. Caulder hasn't been perfect as the Chief for our group (what do I even call them? New Doom Patrol? Doom Patrol II? Victor Stone's Attempt At Herding Cats?) and sure, their conditions hasn't been ideal... but it's the best they could possibly get in this world, right? Well, what if Chief is telling them that to fool them, to gaslight them into helping out? After all, this is a world with the Justice League running around. It's not too far-fetched to think that they would also have superhero Hogwarts as well. And Caulder has been known to hide a lot of things from his charges -- as this episode emphasizes, the fact that Cliff's daughter is alive or that Caulder's made a fair amount of headway communicating with Larry's Negative Man parasite-buddy. At that point, the fact that Chief apparently has another superhero facility -- a far more well-maintained one with superheroes that are far more mentally stable and traditionally human-looking -- isn't far fetched. Hell, our heroes even recover very quickly from the idea that Chief has a secret wife he hasn't told anyone against. It's Chief, he hides things. That's what he does.
And the original Doom Patrol? Led by the dashing Mento, and comprised of Lodestone and Celsius, they were... pretty marketable for the public. They were handsome, normal looking people who look good in red-and-white spandex, very Golden/Silver-Age classic superheroics appropriate, and pose around with hands on their hips like they're Superman and Wonder Woman. In contrast, 'our' Doom Patrol has a clanking robot, a scarred man wrapped up in bandages, a crazy schizophrenic girl and a pretty lady who's struggling to keep herself from dissolving into John Carpenter's The Thing.
Rita Farr, to my delight, gets to be the focus character of this episode. I keep forgetting how creepily ageless a lot of the characters are, and as the other members of New Doom Patrol try and figure out what this odd, C-list superhero team from the '50's are... turns out that Rita Farr knew its leader, Steve "Mento" Dayton, the fifth richest man in the world and Rita's one-time paramour. We get to see a bit more of their relationship in the past, where Mento helped Rita to essentially overcome her goop-flesh problem with his calming psychic powers after a particularly unfortunate (but not undeserved) incident where Rita goops out and kills a perverted movie director. As these things are wont to, it ended up in a romance... that fell apart because both Dayton and Rita are kind of horrible people. We don't quite see the extent of Dayton's horribleness in the past and it's mostly his present-day self that's causing the most problems, and we don't quite get the full story of what Dayton finds out about her (who is Mary-Beth, why did she commit suicide, and what's that baby crying?)... but we can infer.
Rita gets a particularly great monologue, too, and I don't think it would've worked quite as well if we didn't get her little 'defrosting apathetic bitch' routing in the past two or three episodes. She tries to wave this off with her charm, but Mento's Shining-parody house is one that brings up the past. And so Rita forces herself to confront the biggest part of her character -- after becoming a metahuman, she cannot ever return to being old Rita Farr, Hollywood starlet, and she's spent the past 50+ years trying to reignite a golden age of her life that'll never come back. It's well-acted, and Rita forcing Dayton to come to terms that, no, he's not a young, strapping lad with a psychic helmet but rather a sad, bitter old man in a wheelchair whose powers sometimes get overwhelmed when he feels emotional is an awakening call for herself as much as it is for her ex.
For the most part, the Shining parody is pretty neat even as it drops easter eggs left and right about the Doom Patrol's comic book counterparts, as well as what seems to be important lore. And then the background starts to glitch, our heroes start to slowly figure this out and we get a pretty creepy scene of Larry and Jane separately having to deal with their own personal demons. Jane's trickle (and later giant wave) of puzzle pieces is a great and appropriate visual for our poor multi-personality lady, and the haunting voice of her abusive dad is pretty damn creepy. Our heroes eventually learn that O.G. Doom Patrol fought Mr. Nobody and utterly lost, their minds broken and they're basically placed in what's essentially a retirement home where they can live the rest of their lives in some semblance of peace -- Arani and Rhea are trapped in their own personal hells, and Mento's psychic delusion, as fake as it is, ends up being basically the only solace of these old heroes. It's poignant and pretty sad... and, hey, sure, Niles Caulder doesn't keep a competent superhero team a secret from his current Doom Patrol. Sure, he doesn't like utterly discard them and makes sure that caretaker Joshua Clay keeps them comfortable and alive. But that doesn't change the fact that Caulder essentially abandoned this original team in favour for a new one -- with the heavy implication being that Caulder seems to be planning to do the same with Crazy Jane eventually. This made Mr. Nobody's subtle message to dr. Harrison to investigate this feel even more cruel, serving to discredit Chief in front of New Doom Patrol.
And then, of course, there's the sheer bizarre 'WTF, we had a serious scene just five minutes ago' of anything related to Mr. Nobody. The show, if nothing else, is the master of mood whiplash, going from the creepy Shining parody and the heavy Rita Farr stuff to the revelation that Mr. Nobody's grand plan that took out the OG Doom Patrol... involved a giant balloon shaped like a butt. And turning police officers into pinatas that get ripped apart by a crowd riled to madness -- it's kinda horrifying, but since the policemen were, y'know, pinatas and a silly ditty called 'Hot Diggity' is playing in the background, it becomes surreal and hilarious. Somehow, I feel like this wacky scene felt a lot more disturbing than the you-tried-too-hard look-at-this-exposed-viscera-and-blood scenes from Doom Patrol's sister show, Titans.
There's a B-plot, of course, with the team's two metal men hanging out at home. After Cliff forcibly pressed the button that put Victor in 'safe mode' and summoned his asshole dad Silas to the Doom-Mansion, Victor begged and pleaded for Cliff to keep an eye out for his dad. Silas Stone in this show is an enigma, but I really do love the idea of these sort of "well, child, I am only doing what's best for you, what do you mean I'm controlling?" Marvel's Jessica Jones did this wonderfully with Dorothy Walker, and Silas is basically a far more murky character. I don't trust him, and Vic clearly didn't. And there are a lot of shifty things Silas could've done while Victor was offline and being rebooted... but at the same time we're not entirely sure if Cliff's argument about being a good dad actually did get through to Silas, or if he's just being shifty and he's just pretending to give Victor a semblance of freedom to get him to drop his guard. Neat parallels to Chief, again.
Speaking of whom... yeah, Cliff's daughter being alive isn't the only betrayal Chief did to poor Cliff Steele. Sure, for the most part Cliff ends up spending the episode basically being a sitcom archnemesis to Cyborg, trying to figure out what a 'Facebook' is and trying to get Vic to hack into his daughter's Facebook (leading to a heartbreaking scene when he realizes that his daughter's new dad is Buck, who I assumed adopted her after the accident). But as loaded as Silas's statements were, I absolutely believe him when he tells Cliff that Caulder stubbornly used his outdated Robotman technology to build Cliff when he could've borrowed Silas's designs and get a far superior design comparable to Cyborg.
A pretty amazing episode, honestly. Doom Patrol might take a while to really get going, but when it does? I really like what we're getting here. Most of all I find myself truly invested in these characters. In Rita, in Cliff, in Victor, in Jane, in Chief, in Larry. That's the best part of this show, and that's what I hope the show will keep impressing me with as we continue through the season.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- The original Doom Patrol in the TV show are all, of course, based on members of the comic-books' version of the Doom Patrol. Out of the four, Mento is traditionally counted among the 'main' characters of the Patrol alongside Robotman, Elasti-Girl, Negative Man and Chief.
- Mento, a.k.a. Steve Dayton, is the world's 5th richest man and has mental capabilities that he enhances with his helmet. In the comics he joined the Doom Patrol mainly to impress Rita Farr, and would be Garfield "Beast Boy" Logan's estranged adoptive father. Later on, Mento would develop an addiction to his mental-enhancing helmet, something that's adapted loosely here.
- Lodestone, a.k.a. Rhea Jones, is a woman with powers over the electromagnetic spectrum after exposure to a nuclear explosion that activated her dormant meta-gene.
- Celsius, a.k.a. Arani Desai, was Niles Caulder's wife, injected with an immortality serum and left behind while Caulder fought the Brotherhood of Evil. That same serum would give her the ability to control temperature and project fire and ice.
- Tempest, a.k.a. Joshua Clay, is a mutant born with the ability to generate energy blasts from his hands, and is a soldier who went into hiding after killing a superior officer that slaughtered civilians during the Vietnamese war.
- The Brotherhood of Evil's nominal leader, the Brain, called by his other alias "Ultimax" by Mento, is seen. Well, mostly his mechanical carapace with a carved skull that housed him, at any rate.
- The Justice League of America is once again noted.
- Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, last seen three episodes ago, gets referred to by his comic-book cryptonym.
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