Doom Patrol, Season 1, Episode 7: Therapy Patrol
An interesting episode. One of the biggest comments of a cast of fucked-up people like the Doom Patrol is always 'man, they need to go to therapy', except... well, in most given fiction-worlds, they just never really have the time to do so. Except Doom Patrol just took an entire episode as Cliff tries (perhaps a bit too hard, although there's a reason for that) to get everyone to sit down and open up on their own personal problems. And the episode itself doesn't really have anything that progresses the 'main plot', except one could easily make the argument that the main plot is, in fact, the characters living in this weird mansino trying to make do with their unwanted superpowers and their bizarre life of buttocks-shaped balloons and extradimensional snowglobe cities.
And for the most part, this is kind of an episode where we basically devote most of our screen time dealing with the fallout of Cliff Steele finding out that his daughter's still alive, and also is adopted by Buck, and goes a bit crazy. Again, there's a reason for his over-the-top craziness, but it's hilariously easy to accept this honestly kind of out-of-character moment as Cliff Steele simply... snapping from the pressures of being Robotman or finding about his situation as a dad. Again, a great kudo to Brendan Fraser for really delivering something that, in retrospect, is a pretty clear sign that Cliff isn't in his right mind but also feels like it's either the product of the overwhelmed emotions Cliff is feeling or simple inconsistent writing.
And that said, Brendan Fraser gives some amazing voicework as he alternates between utter rage at Buck and just lashing out at the bookcases, the desperation of someone who just wants to find other people that can relate to him and realize how fucked-up they all are, and we even get him worrying about how shit of a father he is (Cliff's dad is also shit). And sure, the end of the episode gives us the huge revelation that Cliff's not completely himself in this episode, with a rat (more on that later) apparently fucking with Cliff's brain throughout the episode... but what's to say that all the pain, desperation and anger didn't come from someplace real? That screaming about how Cliff is angry about why the fuck he's the one that is alive and not his wife is amazingly delivered.
The things that our characters share towards each other is... interesting. Rita's story is perhaps not the most exciting revelation, but after the heavy Rita focus in the previous episode it's very much welcome to see more of this. We learn that Rita Farr has basically been groomed into becoming a superstar by her overbearing parents. And after the events and character development of the previous episode, Rita has been thinking a lot. It's basically kind of an existential crisis and my attempts at summarizing this will probably fall short from just telling you to boot up the episode itself. It's a very, very interesting question as Rita Farr's whole "I will not live in the past, the old Rita Farr is gone" leads to her realizing that... she has no fucking clue who she is without the Rita Farr superstar persona. How much of it is a mask, how much of it is just makeup? And for a woman who has to explicitly concentrate just to get herself into holding a humanoid shape and not turn into a blob of turd, it's a lot of interesting emotional baggage for Rita to sort through. And we haven't even gotten to whatever the hell that baby is.
Larry, meanwhile, continues to be tormented over and over by the Negative Man entity. And as a comic book reader, I do know that the Negative being isn't like secretly a villain or anything, but it sure does feel mean-spirited as it spends most of the episode forcing Larry to relive a memory of his long-lost boyfriend over and over again. Is it tormenting Larry? Reminding him of the self-loathing? Or is the Negative entity attempting what Cliff is attempting, albeit with the barrier of language -- a form of tough-love therapy? I don't think we get any real new developments about Larry and Negative Man's relationship that we didn't see before, but giving the audience (and Larry) the screentime to adequately process it is certainly one that's much welcome. Cliff's absolutely hilariously insensitive "you're gay, hooray!" remark when Larry is trying to give a serious sharing moment is kind of funny, not going to lie. And while it's kind of expected, it's still nice that literally no one in the room batted an eye at that.
That doesn't make any of Larry's heartbreak as he wrestles and gives that gigantic speech to the Negative entity about trying to come to terms with being gay in a world that despises them any less heartbreaking, though. We also briefly get to see young Larry hiding and listening to his parents arguing about how little child Larry 'playing doctor' with another boy would absolutely devastate their standing in society and church, something that certainly factors a lot into Larry's massive repression.
Cyborg's an interesting one. He tries his best to emulate the Chief, and to whip this into some semblance of a superhero team... but it's clear that all his own emotional baggage with his dad is weighing down on him. Vic confesses that he thinks he's responsible for his mother's death from some memories, but at the same time also distrusts his own memories due to the revelation from much earlier this season that Silas might've fucked with his memories. Victor's brief attempt at trying to embrace how cool being a superhero is and trying to use a dating app just to be a young man... yeah, sure, there are a lot of Cyborg fangirls out there, but thanks to a perhaps non-ethical hacking of real-time cameras by Grid, all it ended up happening is dealing a more severe blow to poor Vic's self-esteem.
Jane, by design, is the character that doesn't want to share at all, and doesn't want to play nice with others. We learn the pretty unfortunate revelation that Jane's fractured personality is born out of an abusive (and heavily implied to be pedophilic) father, something we can sort of infer from Jane's hallucinations last episode. When the angry Cliff ends up confronting Jane for just being more and more abrasive and insulting Vic by showing the picture of 'Cyborg kills his friends' from the second episode, we get a genuinely emotional moment between Jane and Cliff -- Jane telling Cliff that he'll never be a father cause he isn't even a man; and Cliff telling Jane that he only likes 1/64th of her.
And as Jane buggers off and Cliff fritzes and hallucinates fighting cultists or whatever, we get the absolutely out-of-nowhere and bizarre revelation that... all this while, there's another player. A rat that's been fucking with Cliff's mind and causing him to go utterly ballistic when he didn't entirely mean to. It's just a plotline that's so utterly random, and because Doom Patrol is Doom Patrol, we also learn that apparently 'Admiral Whiskers' was the son of a rat that Cliff Steele ran over randomly earlier in the season, swore vengeance Bruce Wayne style... and the narrating voice of Mr. Nobody is the one that manipulated Admiral Whiskers into setting off the interpersonal conflicts of this episode. That's such an utterly batshit-loony twist, and yet... it works. Somehow it works for the show.
And that's really one of the biggest appealing parts of this show, how you can have an episode filled with just our characters trying a terrible attempt at therapy, and a random mouse wandering into Cliff's brain being the cause of a lot of the grief our characters went through. That's actually a twist that somehow works well, and doubling down by making the mouse a goddamn agent of Mr. Nobody is just the icing on the cake. An amazing episode.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Cyborg apparently has "booyah" as his catchphrase in this universe as well. The 'booyah' catchphrase for Cyborg was originated in the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon.
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