Doom Patrol, Season 1, Episode 14: Penultimate Patrol
So... kind of an interesting penultimate episode, huh? In both the previous episode and this one, Alan Tudyk's Mr. Nobody promises a more 'conventional' superhero show. An epic battle between good and evil, a group of misfits who banded together and overcame their internal trauma to become superheroes. Behold, the Justice League! The Teen Titans, the Justice Society, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four!
Hell, this episode even opens up (after Mr. Nobody hijacking the recap, of course) with what you'd associate with a lot of these superhero shows, a last-minute supervillain flashback to explain their Freudian excuse for what Mr. Nobody is doing. If it works for The Flash, right? And we get to see piss-poor loser Eric Morden be rejected, not just by the Brotherhood of Evil (he got passed over for Monsieur Mallah!) but also by his girlfriend, who keeps calling him a 'nobody'. It's patently ridiculous, but just like Flex Mentallo's dramatic power showcase last episode, it's also something that works in the context of the show because it's played straight.
With Flex's help, our heroes return to the very welcome Danny the Street, and we sort of... tie a bunch of loose ends together? Sort of? There is Flex and Danny, of course, but also Beard Hunter, who apparently wasn't killed by the mysterious maybe-wendigo creature. Turns out that Danny knows where Mr. Nobody and Chief have been all this time, and it's in 'White Space', the space between the panels of the comic. Which... while theoretically I enjoy the idea, it's also something that's utterly abstract since the medium of this show is a TV show and considering how gleeful Mr. Nobody has been in actually painting the medium with acknowledging things like streaming services and whatnot... I dunno. I follow the storyline, sure, but I kinda feel like it ends up with sort of a shrug from me.
And then, of course, Flex flexes the wrong muscle and causes everyone on Danny (including Danny himself) to come. That's a hilariously long sequence, including some of the expected gags from Danny's own funny balloons and fire hydrants, and Cliff faking an orgasm just to not feel left out is hilarious. Honestly, probably one of the most juvenile gags in the show and also one of its funniest.
Whatever the case, when Flex succeeds in sending the Doom Patrol into White Space, they all end up in the past. Or, well, at least in scenes that resemble the past. Again, the show never really has any sort of hard rules with Mr. Nobody's powers, but he's placed Rita, Larry, Cliff and Jane and places them in periods in their lives before they meet Niles Caulder. Before the crazy accidents that turned them into Elasti-Girl, Robotman, Negative Man and Crazy Jane. The psychological warfare is obvious, and even our characters find it obvious, but seeing just how fucked up their lives have been throughout the series, and with Mr. Nobody's narration really hammering it home just how much they could've avoided all the emotional trauma? Okay, that's actually very well written.
I honestly already see myself not really liking how Mr. Nobody is handled... but, again, selecting an actor as fun and likable as Alan Tudyk does make it a lot easier to... well, handwave some of the plotting inconsistencies here. After all, Mr. Nobody is a emotionally-manipulative reality warper.
And, just like what you expect, all four of our heroes decide to not take the deal. Larry, Cliff and Rita have realized that they've evolved and developed way more than to simply accept their old life. Throughout some very great scenes (particularly Rita realizing what an asshole she was in her life and Cliff fucking the babysitter) we get a great showcase of the three older members recognizing not only their character growth, closure and their self-acceptance, but also acknowledging that they've already ruined their lives before their respective tragedies anyway. Jane, on the other hand, gets a pretty great moment where some of the personalities actually consider staying in the padded asylum. One of the personalities (I'm not sure who? Is it Penny?) says it's better for them to not ever become Crazy Jane since it'd save the rest of the world from the volatile superpowered girl, but Hammerhead takes over and with a very emotional delivery, roars that she doesn't give a fuck about regular people since they're supposed to 'protect the girl', meaning Kay, meaning Jane, meaning themselves/herself. Good show.
Early in the episode we also get Victor apologizing to Silas and getting a pep talk from him, but I honestly felt that it would probably feel a bit more poignant if we don't jump back and forth between Vic and Silas's scenes to a massive orgasm scene that also includes a sentient street. Eventually, as the rest of the Patrol goes through their huge character developments, we get Silas and Vic's talk. And the revelation that Silas did sort of alter Vic's memory, but only because he doesn't want his son to grow up with the guilt knowing that Silas sacrificed his wife to save his son -- not entirely out of parental love, but because he knew that that's the only choice Elinore would ever allow him to make. 100% would've worked better shunted into the previous episode, really.
Again, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Mr. Nobody's weird power. My guess is that, again, it'd work a lot better in the comic medium where we have these narration boxes where the impact would feel more poignant than Rita just narrating. But apparently you can just narrate things like a story in White Space and you can reunite the heroes? We then get Jane, as Dr. Harrison, psycho-analyzing what an utter tryhard Mr. Nobody's 'nobody' moniker and his spooky fragmented shadow-self is and Larry quickly noting how 'basic' and 'sad' Mr. Nobody is... it all kind of seems to build up to a case of the heroes breaking Mr. Nobody by pointing out how his backstory's, well, kind of basic and pitiable, and he can learn and grow just like the rest of the Doom Patrol.
And then Cyborg seems to show up, blow up Mr. Nobody, and then they get trapped in what seemed to be an ideal epilogue where the Doom Patrol is now a good ol' Avengers-style superhero team, living in a mansion and fighting giant robots... only to realize that this is Chief's personal hell, trapped in a Groundhog Day loop... only for that entire bit to be an illusion, and the arrival of the real Cyborg dispels it? Okay? Turns out Mr. Nobody's completely unbeatable, he can warp reality and he isn't affected by psychoanalysis? I guess that's where they are going, that all the 'oh no, stop, you are realizing my true intentions' bit is just an act and Mr. Nobody's just a huge ham? Do I even care, since Alan Tudyk's performance is so fun to watch?
And then, of course, after the groundhog day loop, we get our heroes back in White Space, where Mr. Nobody tells the team of his real REAL plan... which is to get Chief to admit the truth. All our heroes, of course, think they're ready for whatever mind games that Mr. Nobody is going to tell them. I mean, sure, Chief keeps secrets, hides weird things and old superhero teams from the Doom Patrol, and is manipulative all along, but the Doom Patrol learned to trust each other and deal with their personal, emotional problems throughout the season, right? Well, the revelation Chief has is one big whopper, and one that is definitely from the comics.... that Niles Caulder, the Chief, was responsible for engineering all of their origin stories, that none of the accidents that befell them were accidents.
And... scene! How's that for a cliffhanger? That's the exact sort of thing that would certainly break the character development our heroes have been through, or, if nothing else, in their faith of Niles. And while the motivations of Mr. Nobody and the actual limitations of his powers remain murky as ever, this episode really did give us a huge bomb of a cliffhanger, and a real subversion of what seems to be 'we've been through a lot, we can take whatever illusions you throw at us' moment... not that the Cliff/Rita/Larry/Jane moment in the middle part of the episode isn't powerful in and of itself.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Chief actually causing the accidents and being revealed to actually have a very selfish and manipulative reason for doing so is one of the most famous twists from the Grant Morrison run and one that I'm acutely aware of thanks to a lot of the newer Doom Patrol comic material.
- The Brain gets name-dropped as the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil by Mr. Nobody. Apparently, Mr. Nobody's been replaced by a French talking gorilla. It might sound kind of weird, but Monsieur Mallah is an actual comic book supervillain, and has even made appearances in animated media like Young Justice and Brave and the Bold.
- Mr. Nobody's robot is called Rog, who was also a giant robot piloted by Eric Morden in the comics.
- The 'White Space' stuff doesn't come from Doom Patrol, surprisingly... but rather from a different Grant Morrison penned DC superhero storyline, namely Animal Man.
- Hawkman gets name-dropped among the other more common, more adapted-into-movies JLA members.
- While it's not a one-for-one resemblance, Rita does get her comic-book counterpart's Elasti-Girl costume.
- Flex teleports our heroes into Mystery in Space #30, which is a DC comics title active during the Silver Age and had, as the title promises, wacky space mysteries.
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