The new episode of Doom Patrol mixes character development with hilarious high jinx with over-the-top ultraviolence.
Have I mentioned yet that I love how straightforwardly the episodes on this show are titled? Because I do.
Okay, “Dumb Patrol”: what happens? Vic, Roni, Larry, and now Miranda fight off little insects that literally feed off bad ideas, Rita goes beekeeping, Cliff walks home after being hurled through space and crash landing, and Niles reconnects with his past, again.
Scats are highly intelligent microscopic creatures that infect Larry, Vic and Roni, making them dumb, hilariously dumb. Vic gets all buddy-buddy with everyone, especially Roni, and Larry becomes so aloof you wonder if he’s still there under his wraps. It makes for some great scenes, including Larry and one of Jane’s personalities trying to sneak into a hospital dressed as doctors to see Larry’s grandson, and then Larry and Vic try to operate on Roni because they’re wearing lab coats; that makes them qualified, right? Only Miranda is unaffected. Seeing any of Jane’s personalities act as the voice of reason is an alarming change.
It all ends when they must kill the queen of the Scat colony by going into the painting where they trapped Mr. Nobody. There’s a reunion with the Beard Hunter, a subtle fourth wall break, and of course, unfettered violence, a Doom Patrol staple.
Rita, in preparation for her one-line monologue as a beekeeper in the local play, goes to shadow the real deal. The woman she meets is not what she’s expecting, and the two spend the day drinking beers and talking. The conversation moves to motherhood, and Rita talks about the trauma her mother inflicted on her. The beekeeper, a mother herself, gives another perspective: that Rita’s mother was just another person doing what she thought was right, and failing.
It’s hard enough to work through childhood trauma as an adult, but for Rita the difficulty is tenfold. It’s a solemn scene, and it’s clear the cuts run very deep. But when Rita encounters an attempted robbery on the way home, she springs into action and saves the day; there is a hero inside her after all.
Cliff lands in a random field somewhere, very angry with Niles. His walk home involves a lot of cursing the Chief and thinking through revenge plans.
Then his legs suddenly stop working. Stuck in the middle of a parking lot, a very stereotypical millennial stops to get a picture with the talking statue. Cliff asks to use the kid’s phone, which the kid will allow only if Cliff gives a shoutout to one of their friends. I hope the clip of Cliff making his little video finds its way onto the internet because it’s funny regardless of context. Anyway, he calls his daughter, and surprisingly she meets him back at the mansion when he arrives later that night.
Niles has always been weird. But things reach a new level when he returns to the woods where he met Dorothy’s mother. Here he enters the Spiritual Realm and has a full-blown conversation with The Candlemaker. He learns that her mothers’ ancestors cursed Dorothy with her power to bring him into existence. The Chief doesn’t know where to turn next, but summons Willoughby Kipling (Mark Sheppard) for an unknown, unsettling purpose.
The final scene has Jane trying to find a persona that hasn’t been seen in some time, only to find the Underground closed and the persona gone.
Grade: A-
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