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Doom Patrol

Doom Patrol season 4

Credits

Cast

Network

Reviewer

Paul Asay
Emily Tsiao

TV Series Review

All superhero teams are a little … odd.

We don’t think much about them these days. The heroes that make them up can feel almost as familiar as family. It’s not that you’d have Superman solder that pesky pipe with his heat-ray vision, or Captain America cut some firewood. Sure, X-Men’s Wolverine might not carve the Thanksgiving turkey with his adamantium claws. But we’ve gotten so used to their powers and quirks that, in the crossover between our pedantic worlds and their comic/movie/TV-based ones, they feel practically normal.

And indeed, compared to the Doom Patrol, they practically are.

The Why-Men

Cliff Steele is a former NASCAR driver who, following a devastating car crash, had his brain slapped in a metal body. Rita Farr was a famous movie star, but her body has gone all gelatinous. It’s only through some serious concentration that she can literally pull and keep herself together. Larry Trainor has a thing made of negative energy living inside him, and he wears a bevy of bandages to keep his own innate radioactivity from hurting others. Jane looks at Larry and his negative energy and says, “amateur.” See, she has 64 separate personalities living inside her—and they’ll all launch an internal coup unless she shapes up. And then there’s Cyborg and Madame Rouge, the most traditional heroes of the bunch. But even they have some crippling issues.

And we haven’t even mentioned the Doom Patrol’s youngest member—Dorothy Spinner, who’s both an 11-year-old girl and a century-old enigma with some facial deformities. Shunned and mocked by almost everyone when she was, um, “young,” Dorothy was forced to hang out with her imaginary friends. But in her case—when she gets sad or scared or angry—they prove to be not so imaginary after all.

Niles Caulder, otherwise known as The Chief, made this motley band of broken do-gooders. As in, he literally made them. He created daughter Dorothy in the usual way. But when he realized Dorothy’s peculiar talents, Chief both saved the rest of the band’s lives and created/twisted their abilities in a secret effort to protect his daughter.

As you might imagine, the Doom Patrol’s feelings for the Chief are … complex.

Still, you can’t choose your family, and this group is slowly becoming something akin to kin. And with evildoers like Mr. Nobody and Immortus to vanquish and talking cockroaches to listen to and magicians to bargain with and fourth walls to break, our heroes don’t have much time to nurse grudges.

In truth, they don’t always have much time to be heroes, either.

Guardians of the Gag-tasy

The Doom Patrol mostly hangs out in Caulder’s well-appointed mansion when in the appropriate dimension. But really, most members should spend more time sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Don’t let the superpowers fool you: These folks are seriously scarred—often by their very own powers. It’s an interesting dichotomy that might be an imaginative reflection on our typically more pedestrian psyches: Our strengths can become weaknesses. Our weaknesses can become strengths. Whatever doesn’t kill us can make us stronger—and still might kill us anyway.

That, in our anxious times, might be a fine message as far as it goes. And the fact that most of our fractured heroes learn to care for one another offers a nice sentiment, too.

But even though some members of this version of DC’s Doom Patrol have made cameos in CW’s YA-friendly Arrowverse, this show is as messy and problematic as the heroes that populate it.

Simultaneously airing on DC Universe and Max, Doom Patrol offers no fetters on violence. Blood flows. Limbs fly. Terrible things happen to, well, terrible and good people alike. Sex isn’t off limits, either, and we see more nudity than you’d expect from a superhero show. (The source material delved deeply into sexual issues, by the way, introducing all sorts of LGBT characters—including Jane and Larry—and one of comic-dom’s first transsexual superheroes.) At least one “hero” uses drugs. And as far as I can tell, f-words are far more common here than any, y’know, heroic deeds.

We also must contend with Doom Patrol’s spirituality. While most tales with superheroes are also populated (almost by definition) with the supernatural, this takes it to the next circle. The show has already introduced powerful magicians and villains who are so omniscient that they’re aware they’re in a TV show. And the original DC source material can drill into Judeo-Christian mysticism and the Kabbalah for its own narrative purposes.

Most critics, who’ve helped push Doom Patrol to a 96% “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, contend that the series is a welcome twist on superheroes. And I get that. But the show is also twisted in lots of other, less positive ways, too.

Episode Reviews

Oct. 19, 2023 – S4, Ep9: “Immortimas Patrol”

In their latest encounter with the all-powerful villain Immortus, the Doom Patrol finds themselves trapped in a Groundhog-like reality where none of them have powers (or the physical deformities that came with those powers), folks randomly break out into song and every day is “Immortimas Day.”

A flashback shows that Immortus got her powers after being shoved into a never-ending time stream. Besides placing the Doom Patrol into this reality-bending time loop, she has telekinetic powers, speaks with a demonic voice when angry and (we hear) has the ability to reduce her followers to dust. (Immortimas Day is a direct play on Christmas, and Immortus insists that the members of the Doom Patrol worship her, threatening harm if they refuse.)

The Doom Patrol manor plays home to several “sex ghosts,” (remnants of a previous episode where the team battled a sort of sex demon). Though the ghosts don’t fornicate in this episode, sex is mentioned, and these characters wear old-fashioned lingerie (nothing critical is revealed). A female character wears a crop top. Some lines and song lyrics discuss sex and male and female anatomy. There’s a reference to a camgirl.

Cliff, who’s temporarily been returned to his human form by Immortus, decides to masturbate since he has regained his sense of touch. He’s interrupted before anything happens, but we see him start a video and remove his belt—causing his pants to fall when he later stands, revealing his boxers. (The woman in the video dances and removes a sweater.) There are a few jokes about this later on and some characters make crude hand gestures referencing it.

One of the sex ghosts appears to be trans. Jane, who is a lesbian, holds hands with a woman she likes, but later turns her down because Jane’s multiple personalities make relationships too confusing. Larry and his boyfriend debate whether they should stay in Immortus’ fake reality since their powers make it too dangerous to be together in the real world. They kiss.

Immortus uses her powers to choke someone. A woman asks her friend to make a blood pact, but the friend declines. Cliff urinates over a garden wall. (We see the stream and it appears to splash another character.) Characters lie.

We hear more than 20 uses of the f-word and about 17 of the s-word. There are also several uses of “b–ch,” “b–locks,” “d–k,” “h—” and “p-ss.” God’s name is abused twice. We hear some crude terms for female anatomy. And someone is called a “schmuck.”

Jun. 25, 2020 – S2, Ep1: “Fun Size Patrol”

Most of the Doom Patrol enters Season 2 as itty-bitty versions of themselves, only inches high and living on a sizable playset stuck in the Chief’s sprawling mansion. Larry Trainor, the only member who’s still full size, cares for them all—cooking them tiny pancakes for breakfast and fashioning bits of furniture for them. But as Chief tries to figure out how to get them all back to normal, the rest of the team must deal with Dorothy, Chief’s apparently ageless 11-year-old daughter … and the terrifying creatures that live inside her mind.

In flashback to 1927, we see a couple of those creatures in action. Dorothy is imprisoned as part of a slimy sideshow. She weeps silently as her ape-like visage is unveiled to a horrified gallery. People throw things at her cage and one man directs a lewd comment at her. But when the ringmaster forces her to conjure up one of the monsters that lives inside her, something terrible happens and a new entity speaks to her—inviting her to make a wish and blow out a candle. She does so. When Dorothy steps outside her veiled cage, she sees the dead bodies of dozens of spectators—and the disembodied head of the ringmaster.

In that same flashback, we see a bald man having sex with a bearded woman. (The bald man’s naked buttocks are exposed to the camera.) In the present day, two members of the Doom Patrol speculate on who the Chief must’ve slept with to conceive Dorothy. Another flashback features a pre-robotized Cliff tell his father that he’s not welcome at the wedding, given that he had embarrassed the family by having sex with a waitress.

In the present day, Rita suggests to Chief that science might not hold the answers to returning to normal size. She suggests that magic holds the key. It’s an idea that Chief originally scoffs at, but he eventually cuts a deal with a magician. (He calls up the sorcerer by cutting his own hand, dripping the blood on a ukulele and singing a little ditty while twirling a parasol.) In return, he gives the magician the amulet around his neck—perhaps Chief’s own essence that has allowed him to stay alive to care for his troubled daughter. (“Only a fool would consider himself before his family,” Chief says.)

A rat eats one of its own babies (much to the horror of some members of the team). Cliff punches a rat, killing it. He later returns with a rat pelt. We learn that one of the heroes’ children died by suicide—in part because he felt rejected by his father. We see flashbacks to a bad, bloody car crash. Monsters appear. People lie. One member of the Patrol, multiple-personality person Jane, uses intravenous drugs as an escape (though she speaks with her other personalities through this conduit as well). She also lights up and smokes a marijuana joint. Cliff grabs and serves beer.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

Emily Tsiao

Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.

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