Doom Patrol, Season 2 [2020]
The thing is, Doom Patrol is a pretty hard series for me to review. So much happens in any given episode, and yet so little. There's a lot of foreshadowing going on, so much subtle character development, but that same character development also takes a fair bit of time to pay off. And it's annoying, because I really did enjoy this shorter season.
This season is only 9 episodes long, although it's admittedly 9 fifty-minute episodes so there's a fair amount of screentime going on here. And it's mostly a lot less funny and a lot more gloomy compared to the first season. The thing is, at least at first, it does really feel like we're doing a retread, although with a lot of the mystery surrounding the origins of these characters already told through season one and without a proper primary antagonist (at least in theory) like the ever-entertaining Mr. Nobody, it really did feel like the first couple of episodes of the season are just... kind of there. Don't get me wrong, though. Every episode is shot well, and every episode tends to have a pretty fun and wacky main plot and a more character-centric B-plot. I care about the adventures of Chief, Robotman, Crazy Jane, Negative Man, Elasti-Girl and Cyborg because of what season one gave us. And the early episodes are most certainly fun because of the pretty clever scripting, the great acting (Guerrero, Fraser and Fraser are the stand-outs but every main actor gets good scenes throughout the series) and... well, let's just say the darker comedy, surprise bloody violence and seeing these superheroes curse like sailors do appeal to me a lot.
As with Legion's third season, I'm going to briefly talk about my opinions of every episode briefly. But really, a lot of what appeals for Doom Patrol, as with the previous season, is how much the growth for these characters are more or less gradual. Perhaps my favourite is the dynamic between the very angry and vocal Cliff with Jane and Niles. Cliff tries his best to be supportive to Jane in a 'surrogate parent/child but we won't admit it' deal, and he is very rightfully pissed the fuck off at Niles for engineering the accident that broke his family. But Rita's gradual growth as she fumbles about trying to find her role in the world is pretty damn fun to watch, too, and Crazy Jane's attempt to stay as the 'primary' while struggling her alter-egos is entertaining if nothing else.
The pilot episode of this season, "Fun Size Patrol", sets up a lot of the huge themes of this season. A lot of the major character goals are set up here (Rita and Vic's discussion about superheroics, Jane's internal conflict with the rest of the alters, Cliff really fucking hating Niles), though the main encompassing story is the story of Chief and his daughter Dorothy. Dorothy is not only immortal and forever trapped in the psyche and body of a young teenager, she's also host to four magical monsters. It's basically a combination of Jane and Larry's conditions, in a way. And we basically explore the fact that Niles basically gathered a bunch of metahumans with powers that grant them immortality. And made one, in the case of Cliff. This episode ends up with Niles giving up his immortality talisman in order to return the Doom Patrol back to their original sizes after what happened during the climax of the first season... but ultimately, I think, this episode is probably one of the weaker ones.
here are a couple fun and dramatic moments, as with always, but ultimately this was mostly setup. Dorothy's backstory was most certainly sad, and the actress they got to play her does a good job. There's an interesting bit where some of her alters/imaginary friends/magic guardians seem to just be as childish as she is, but there's one that keeps asking her to 'make a wish'. And... she's an all right character, I suppose, she just didn't really feel like part of the cast (and more of a plot device) until around halfway through the season.
It's then followed up with "Tyme Patrol", which... is weird. A lot of the early episodes of season two fall into an interesting 'villain of the week' style episodes, except Doom Patrol doesn't really do villains. It's more like 'wacky concept of the week'? In this case, this one is Cliff, Jane and Rita arriving into the temporal realm of the Terrible Doctor Tyme (spelled with a 'y' and relentlessly mocked by the cast), where it's the realm of a time-controlling clock-headed man in perpetual disco party. It's kinda goofy, but it's also the sort of goofy that works in this show and I'm kinda happy they recognize that it would really only work for a one-off. I liked the resolution of this episode where we're not really sure if Niles is playing the emotional manipulation game (like Cliff insists, and Rita assumes) or if he's genuinely trying to be a decent person for once.
This episode also has two separately-running B-plots. Vic joins a therapy group and connects with Roni Evans, a military veteran, and... I dunno, it's a good story and there's a neat discussion about forgiveness versus punishment, but it also feels like something that would come out of a more serious superhero show. The Larry storyline, though, has the right amount of grief and sadness that I would expect from Doom Patrol, with him finally reconnecting with his family a bit too late, realizing that his now-dead son has been waiting for him to come home quite literally his entire life. A bit of a mood whiplash since the rest of the episode deals with Rita accidentally ripping Dr. Tyme's brain out of his clock head, but I did really like the story.
Episode three is "Pain Patrol", where we get another weirdo one-off antagonist and concept. Niles, Rita and Larry get captured by Red Jack, who is an interdimensional creature that feeds on pain and suffering. The setup for this plot is even more abrupt than Dr. Tyme in the previous episode, while Red Jack himself is played up more seriously, as oddly ambiguous as he is. It's just 'extradimensional torture realm' and weird things like the butterfly swarms that can abduct people or Jack's ability to cause people's spines to erupt into butterfly wings is... interesting? Red Jack met a young Niles and saw his lack of empathy, and wants to mould Niles into his successor because he's convinced Niles is as hungry for violence as he is. We do get some really good acting from Timothy Dalton, and for the first time in this season we get a flashback (this time to Rita and Larry's first meeting and their bonding as a family) but it's, again, a pretty self-contained episode. A bit messy, perhaps, but maybe that's just because I really didn't quite care for the Red Jack story? As always the main cast shine pretty well, though.
This episode does have a pretty obvious theme of mistakes, though. The sight of Niles in despair, regretting his decision to fuck up Cliff's life, is pretty sobering. There are some pretty pointed explanations to young Dorothy about mistakes. And the B-plots for Cliff, Jane, Victor and Dorothy all revolve around mistakes as well. Vic gets a bit too clone with Roni, and that attempt at forging a more romantic relationship may or may not be a mistake. Jane gets called into an intervention by the rest of her alters, who view her continued association with Niles as a mistake. Cliff gets into a very stupid but very believable impulsive bit of confronting his daughter, leading to a nasty public meltdown -- it's extremely sad to watch, but it's also something you believe Cliff Steele would do. And Dorothy, who's being told new things about how mistakes work, accidentally breaks Danny the Brick during a game of hide-and-seek, and both she and Niles basically learn that sometimes you can't just apologize for making a mistake, and must try to fix them.
Episode four, "Sex Patrol", is... an interesting one? What's sort-of the main plot of the episode is something that I think I can quote Cliff in this episode. "I have no fucking idea what's going on." or "You're offering me ecstacy?" In an effort to bring Danny the Broken Brick back, Flex Mentallo and the Dannyzens show up and throw up a huge party, because of course you do. It starts off wacky and crazy, then goes sad when we see how Dorothy is conflicted at being treated as a child... or, worse, a prisoner. Then it goes wacky again as Flex Mentallo helps Rita orgasm (it's less horny than it sounds) in order to help her get past her mental block. Said orgasm is so powerful that it randomly summons a monk-looking sex demon with a periscope on his head. Okay, WTF. Also, Cliff takes drugs. And the sex demon summons the arrival of The Sex Men, which are a Ghostbusters parody, who arrives because of the sheer power of Rita's orgasm. In all this ridiculousness that happens in the background, though, we get the super-serious revelation that Rita's trauma is seeing her mother fuck a director to get her a child actor role, while Dorothy in her child-like mind contemplates murdering Danny when they confess to acting as Dorothy's prisoner. Yeah, it alternates between being heavy and being wildly off-the-rails.
Ultimately, it's self contained, but I think this is the episode that really helped build Dorothy as a character. We start peeling away the layers behind this girl's sad story, where she's spend more than a hundred years treated as a kid who can't stay past her bedtime. And in-between Danny's guilty admission that she's a prisoner, and the mysterious evil voices in her head, she's changing in ways that could be cataclysmic for everyone. Everyone gets some great moment here and there in-between LSD-fueled insanity. The Dannyzens talk about the importance of love and freedom to Cyborg, and I think that's what Danny feels too when they point-blank refuse to allow Niles to use them as a prison for Dorothy anymore -- something that Niles shows with every interaction she has with Dorothy, even including the simple fact that Rita put a bit of lipstick on her. Oh, and all in the background we get some Crazy Jane drama, though like Rita's traumatic childhood flashback it's something we're building up for a subsequent episode. But then all of it is done in-between the frankly utterly batshit crazy plot of this episode.
Episode five, "Finger Patrol", starts off as what feels like a bit of a breather episode. Everyone is off doing their own thing, and we don't quite have the focus or insanity of the previous three episodes' focus. It's like all the B-plots are given time to breathe. And, of course, in the final act of the episode, all hell breaks loose. Everything starts off pretty simply. Niles gets Crazy Jane to convert into her 'Baby Doll' persona to give Dorothy a playmate. Cliff and Victor go off to try and figure out whether Silas could help Cliff get his sensation back, leading to the only plotline in this episode that didn't end up shockingly depressing -- Cliff gives the best tips to apologize to a girl, Victor and Roni make up, but we also learn that Roni used to be a cyborg of some sort. Cliff tries to be a superhero, and ends up slicing off the titular finger. Rita tries to audition for a role, and accompany Larry as he goes off to help clean his dead son's house.
And it escalated pretty quickly. Some of our characters really didn't do much, although I really laughed at that random montage of "Steele and Stone" in the middle of the episode. But then in the midst of some heart-to-heart airing of past grievances -- and my god is that scene between Larry and Paul amazingly acted, with the grief and pain everyone's feeling present -- we get the revelation that Paul bears more than a fair amount of resentment towards his father, and called in the government. In the Negative Spirit superhero moment, Paul's son gets shot by a stray bullet. What initially seemed like a great, heartwarming reconciliation ended up in tragedy.
But perhaps the biggest moment of 'things get fucked up' is Baby Doll and Dorothy. They're both children that haven't had the best upbringing, and are host to powers far, far beyond their maturity. And as children are wont to, they fight at one point. After an argument between the two, they start being kind of mean, and Baby Doll tells Dorothy that her father is a 'bad man', leading to a scare in the boiler room. Said scare leads to Baby Doll using her telekinetic powers to toss Dorothy into a goddamn furnace (!!!!), and when Manny the wendigo manifests to protect Dorothy, Baby Doll manifests fire powers to burn the poor creature to death. This is what leads to Dorothy snapping, and making a wish to the Candlemaker. The giant candle demon arrives into the Underground, and brutally murders Flaming Katy and Baby Doll, and the episode ends. Suddenly, everything is let loose -- the trigger is pulled on Dorothy's wish and her powers, and the sheer brutality at the attack in the Underground is most certainly unexpected.
Episode six, "Space Patrol", is... a weird one. Because after two child-like entities with god-like powers murder parts of each other, of course the next logical step is to go to space. As you do. There are many things to like about this show, but I absolutely love the rapid-fire moment of the reveal that a spaceship arrived, Larry meeting the weirdos who pilot the spaceship, Dorothy stealing said spaceship, Chief casually revealing that he has a second spaceship powered by a severed demon head. And off to space everyone goes, to get Dorothy back. Death (or imaginary/partial/mental death, anyway) is involved, and like Cliff, I'm mostly on Team Jane... but on the other hand, Dorothy is a child. She's a damaged child raised by a damaged man trying to do his best, and now, as the Candlemaker tells Dorothy, 'big girl decisions have big girl consequences'. The space stuff mostly ends in a very wholesome thing as Cliff manages to convince Dorothy to return to the spaceship. For now, things seem to be right again... up until Niles blows Cliff out of an airlock, that is.
Meanwhile, the Earth-stuff is... interesting. Vic and Rita both have their B-plots which I admittedly really don't care about compared to everything else. Rita gets accidentally psychoanalyzed by an actress that plays 'the Blob Lady' in the community drama, while Vic tries to investigate into the government conspiracy behind Roni's leaking cyborg implants. The Rita stuff is at least fun, but Victor and Roni's storyline feels bizarrely too mundane for this show. Larry ends up meeting the astronauts -- mostly, Valentina "Negative Woman" Vostok, a cosmonaut who's bonded to a negative spirit of her own. Their conversation is... unique? Larry's situation is so sad and having some new perspective, even from someone as bizarrely alien as the entity that Valentina and her spirit has merged into, is liberating to him. And, of course, we get the random gut-punch that Zip and Specs are actually bodies reanimated by alien fungi, and Valentina is just bringing them to Earth to lay them to rest. That's honestly quite poignant for how bizarre it is. And 'quite poignant for how bizarre it is' is basically this entire show.
Speaking of funerals, we have the fragments of Kay Challis's mind dealing with the aftermath of Flaming Katy and Baby Doll's deaths. It mostly revolves around a funeral, and it's definitely the background plot of this episode, but every scene definitely counts. When Jane meets up with Kay, and later on when the reborn spirit of Miranda takes over as the 'primary'... all very well-acted, and we get some really good acting from Hammerhead and Secretary's actresses as well.
Episode seven, "Dumb Patrol", isn't an episode I liked as much as the previous couple of episodes. But admittedly it's mostly because it's a bit of a lull in terms of heavy drama as well as craziness. The main plot of the story is a majority of our team going to the weird paper dimension where Mr. Nobody was once trapped in (and Beard Hunter is still there), in order to fight the Scants, bizarre pink humanoids who steal bad ideas from people. But not, of course, before some of our heroes has had the chance to do some stupid decisions because of the Scant influence. Vic and Roni has some rom-com nonsense together; Larry and Jane (or, well, Flit) try to visit Larry's grandson only to constantly be met by the Bureau of Normalcy in a fun gag... and that's about it, really. Kipling shows up to help this team against the Scants. Beyond showing Miranda in the 'primary' role as literally the only sane person in the cast, it's kind of just there.
The rest of the cast all do some rather... alone stuff. Cliff spends the entire episode walking from where he crash-landed back to the Doom Mansion, cursing vengeance and letting Fraser ham shit up... only to find out that Niles actually told his daughter everything. Rita goes off on her rather bland storyline to embody the 'beekeeper' in her low-budget production, only to get some wonderful catharsis yelling at bees. And Niles also yells a lot, realizing that he might have to do something terrible to protect the world from Dorothy... especially when we get some ominous hints about the true nature of Candlemaker. Oh, and Kipling gets a cameo in both the Scant and the Niles parts of the episode; while the real Crazy Jane realize that there are more things happening in the Underground after Miranda takes over. It's a bit of a breather from the very emotional (and weirdness) driven previous couple of chapters, and a bit of a low-key moment, but still a fun one -- particularly strong showings from actors Fraser, Bowlby and Dalton.
Episode eight, "Dad Patrol", is... it's really interesting talking about this episode, because when I watched the season, I didn't know how big of a cliffhanger this season would be. The two main plotlines I was the most invested in are the Jane/Underground storyline and the 'main' Dorothy plot, but this episode also more or less made progress with almost everything else. Cliff gets to spend a whole day with Clara and while there were moments where Clara was undoubtedly a bit confused by what's going on, things looked fine. Rita has her epiphany after the previous episode of wanting to be a superhero in 'the Beekeeper' and that was fun as she tries to hold on to that while she played sidekick to Cyborg. Larry gets a bit of self-introspection about how he thinks he's ruining his family, yells at the Negative Spirit to demand what it wants... before he also becomes sidekick to Jane.
And finally, after spending a fair amount of time with Dorothy and actually allowing us to really know her a bit, this episode spends a significant amount of our scrceentime with her and Niles. The fun day at the fair is a bit of a downer since we know that Niles and Kipling plan to 'end' Dorothy and this is her last chance to be happy, but throughout the fair we see a surprising amount of humanity from Niles, who is clearly broken up about it. Meanwhile Dorothy herself is going through a lot of shit herself -- she has her first period and ends up getting some nice talk with a random convenience store lady about what to do. Her fun day at the amusement fair is plagued by constant horrific visions from the Candlemaker and the spirits of her ancestors. And of course it leads to the big cliffhanger as everything gets drenched in blood. The 'main plot' story is obviously intriguing, but I really did like a lot of Abi Monterey's actor, who really exemplifies everything about Dorothy's complex character very well. Someone who was a shut-in and is just trying to experience the wide world for the first time and tries to not make any more temper-tantrum mistakes... but it might just be too late, because the very maturity that she is experiencing is actually the herald for the changes that the Candlemaker is waiting for.
Meanwhile, tying in with the other dad/daughter pairs is Jane/Kay's childhood, where we get the true context of the well, where little Kay (and later Miranda-as-primary) would be forced on a bucket in the well to spend the night. Jane tries to prove her worth to the other personas in the Underground by retrieving the doll that was lost in the real-life well, and she is desperate to try to prove her worth since she's close to being replaced by Miranda as the primary. Jane is easily my favourite character in the show, and everything revolving around the Underground is just so fascinating to me. This sequence ends with Jane finding the letter that Miranda wrote when they escaped from their father, leading to Jane respecting Miranda and 'falling in line'... only for Miranda to toss both the doll and Jane into the well. And the revelation that the two personas that have been MIA over this episode and the previous one are now corpses in the well, and that the Miranda running around in the present day is not so well-intentioned as before.
Perhaps the storyline that I'm invested in the list is Victor's story with Roni. And it's not so much that I don't care about Victor, because he was most certainly fun with his Silas storyline in the first season. But I don't know. I guess the storyline with Roni -- that she's actually not as harmless as she seems and she just uses the Uma-jelly to get revenge and kill her tormentors -- is just so mundane and honestly pretty telegraphed. It's not a bad storyline, it just kind of pales compared to everything else going on here. It's a plotline that perhaps would be great in another show, but here it actually feels like a distraction.
And we get the final episode, "Wax Patrol", ends in a huge cliffhanger! I don't know if this was meant from the beginning, or if Doom Patrol's second season is another of the endless string of shows whose production got fucked over by the global pandemic. Google tells me that one episode But both this episode and the previous ones really hammered home the parallel between Dorothy and Jane/Kay's stories as young girls trying to grow up, trying to figure out their place and become fighters in a world that keeps screwing them over.
So yeah, the candle apocalypse happens in the fair when the Candlemaker got unleashed. We still don't really know the specifics, but the most sensible theory seems to be that Slava, Dorothy's mom, is trying to prepare Dorothy to fight against the giant candle demon that gets unleashed when she comes of age. The Candlemaker starts turning everyone into wax after tormenting them with their imaginary friends, something that happens to the Doom Patrol and their buddy Kipling. Some plot threads did get kind of handwaved aside -- most importantly Cliff's potential for a happy ending. Admittedly, saving the world from being consumed by an ancient imaginary wax demon is a huge priority in the grand scheme of things, but man after all the good feelings from the Cliff storyline in the previous episode, it's kind of heartbreaking to see him basically emotionally blackmailed to help the others and miss his daughter's wedding.
We also kind of get to see the conclusion of most of the other characters' story arcs in a way? Again, this season is missing its final episode, so all we're getting is mostly the depression before the big uplifting final episode. Larry doesn't have an imaginary friend as a kid, so I think his character arc mostly ended with his strong affirmation that, no, fuck his biological family -- the Doom Patrol is his real family. He takes charge when Dorothy's creepy spider friend shows up, and he's also the first to browbeat Cliff into joining the superhero team. But the others? Victor Stone's imaginary friend is a cowboy in the shape of his dad, and he's an extreme yes-man who admits it when Vic asks advice about Roni. Rita Farr's imaginary friend is a patchwork model who she opens up about her mother and how all her career is built on her mother fucking a producer. (Cliff's imaginary friend is a crass-mouthed Jesus, which is funnier than it has any right to be) It's all moments where these characters are pretty much at their lowest after so much shit has been piled upon them in the past couple of episodes, but everyone gets turned into wax statues by the Candlemaker.
Dorothy herself also gets a huge character moment -- she finally walks out of her shell, sees all her Doom Patrol friends waxed up, her dad on the floor helpless and crying, and she finally accepts her mother's ghost's task and she creates a huge imaginary weapon to fight the Candlemaker, leading to the huge cliffhanger.
So that leaves the Jane/Kay part of the episode, which was the biggest emotional moment and revelation. All throughout the two seasons we know that Miranda was the previous 'primary' between Kay's mental breakdown and Jane taking over and becoming the multi-persona superhero. But Miranda threw herself down the well for a reason. And we see that reason. We see Miranda, post-escape, working at a diner and eventually developing a relationship with a young man. A happy relationship that turned out terrible when turns out that her boyfriend arranged a swinger orgy without telling her -- and even without her traumatic past, you can't blame Miranda for essentially breaking down because she doesn't want to 'fuck up' the good thing that she has going on with her boyfriend. (Said boyfriend was also pretty gaslight-y in the sex party, let's be honest). Miranda sees the damage that happened in the Underground until Hammerhead takes over, and sees that she has traumatized Kay even further, leading to her throwing herself down the well and eventually the creation of the Crazy Jane persona. Which, of course, leads to the dual reveal of the other 'big bad' of the season... the reveal that the first Miranda did die, and the Miranda we've been following this season is actually 'dad', who... we actually see exists in that well in season one. On the other hand, with Jane floating down the well, it's Kay, the scared little girl original persona, who has to confront with Miranda-dad. It draws a parallel with Dorothy, who is also stripped of her most powerful guardians and has to confront a giant scary monster on her own.
Whew, that's all the episodes! It's a rollercoaster of a season and... and I feel like it's not as good as the first one. But that's not very fair because the season remains, for now, incomplete. Granted, I did feel like Rita and Vic's stories in particular aren't as engaging as they were in the first season? But the Cliff, Niles/Dorothy and Larry storylines have been really fun, and I am especially a huge fan of Jane's story all throughout the series. So yeah. Doom Patrol is a fucking weird show and this season cranks up the weirdness, but I, for one, am pretty happy to have witness the craziness.
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