The Beautiful Mess of DC's Doom Patrol

 I had watched the first three episodes of DC Universe HBO Max's Doom Patrol series on YouTube months ago--legally, I might add.  After watching some other stuff on HBO Max I finally got around to watching the rest of the show.  And I was kind of disappointed.  There are a lot of loose threads and in the end I don't think a lot of them came together.

The Doom Patrol was a minor superhero team back in the 60s but this TV series takes its cues from the Grant Morrison reboot of the 1980s.  Morrison made the team a bunch of freaks and the stories were often extremely weird, like one where a painting ate Paris.

In this TV version the Chief of the team is Niles Caulder, who has been around apparently since the 19th Century and is obsessed with living forever.  Like Professor X he's in a wheelchair but he has no superpowers; he's just kind of a mad scientist.

Rita Farr was an actress in the 40s and 50s but then she fell into a river in Africa and turned into a blob.  With the Chief's help she learned to pull herself together to look human, though her control of that can be shaky.

Larry Trainor was a test pilot in the early 60s who was married with two boys but also a closeted homosexual with a secret lover.  After a radioactive alien spirit collides with his plane, he's badly disfigured and wears bandages to cover himself up.  The bandages are special in that they keep his radiation at bay; without them the radiation would kill everyone and everything around him in time.  The "Negative Spirit" inside of him can launch out to fight or project things telepathically but in doing so Larry is weakened and will die after a short time of being separated from the spirit.

Cliff Steele was a washed-up redneck race car driver until a car accident not on the track killed him and his wife.  The Chief salvaged his brain to put it into a crude robot body.

Jane used to be a girl named Kay who was sexually abused.  She was a relatively harmless schizophrenic in a mental institution until the Chief gave her something that jacked her up so now her different personalities can sometimes manifest superpowers like teleportation or psychic control.

Cyborg is not supposed to be part of the Doom Patrol.  He started in the Teen Titans and then was moved to the Justice League.  The origin story here is mostly the same as in the Justice League movie:  football star Victor Stone is injured and his father Dr. Silas Stone of STAR Labs uses advanced cybernetics to make him into Cyborg.  Unlike Justice League and the comics there's nothing about an alien "mother box" being used to create him--at least not yet.

The gist of the first season is that a villain calling himself Mr. Nobody kidnaps the Chief and so the Doom Patrol tries to rescue him.  There are a lot of misadventures along the way, like when Mr. Nobody puts a whole town up a donkey's ass.  They have to join with a British guy (who's like a really low-rent Constantine) to stop the "De-Creator" (a giant eyeball) from destroying the world.  And they have to go into the white space of a comic book to find Mr. Nobody.

In the first season there are a lot of diversions to focus on the characters and their tragic pasts and stuff.  Which is all well and good--if it were in the service of something important.  But the last episode of the first season really failed to make the journey worthwhile.  

After failing to defeat Mr. Nobody in the white space, the team goes its separate ways when the Chief confesses how he basically created everyone in the team, causing or taking advantage of their accidents to try to learn the secrets of immortality.  But then he calls everyone back because his daughter has been kidnapped by Mr. Nobody, a Doomsday prophesizing cockroach, and a rat that got revenge on Cliff by actually climbing inside of him and messing with his brain.  The whole daughter thing is just thrown out there with almost no set up and everyone just accepts on faith that there really is a daughter and just by focusing they're able to jump into a painting to save her.

The problem from there is almost everyone is just a distraction.  The cockroach and rat are destroying everything in the painting after going rogue from Mr. Nobody.  Cliff gets eaten by the rat almost right away.  Jane and the Chief go to find his daughter.  Rita convinces Mr. Nobody to help them by narrating.  Cyborg and Larry really don't do much right away.  While Jane sings to the Chief's daughter to try to get her out, she only comes out when the Chief actually shows up, so what was the point of Jane being there?  

Then everyone is eaten by the cockroach except for Larry and thanks to Mr. Nobody's narration the rat and cockroach kiss so Cliff can get in the cockroach.  Then Larry and the Negative Spirit get them out of the painting.  The cockroach's shell keeps them safe from radiation apparently, but the problem when they come out is they're the size relative to the cockroach in the real world.

Anyway, after all the shit that happened, the final thing could really have been done with Larry, Chief, and Rita.  No one else really contributed anything.  They could have not gone and the result would have been the same.  It struck me as really sloppy storytelling.  After sixteen episodes of all this stuff, you really need there to be a payoff that actually utilizes everyone as a team.  Otherwise, what's the point if you only really needed half the team and the rest were extraneous?

And really, if Mr. Nobody's whole original plan was just to turn everybody against the Chief so he wouldn't have any friends left, couldn't he have just send email videos or something of the incriminating evidence to everyone?  This whole long, drawn-out thing could have been done in a couple of minutes on a laptop.  I guess it was more fun for him drawing it out this way, but 14 episodes?  Way too much hang time on that punt.

Another thing that bugged me in the end of that first season was they had two episodes where they found Flex Mentallo, the "hero of the beach" who literally flexes his muscles to make stuff happen and then the team helped him get his memory back after the government had brainwashed him.  (One of my early blog entries here was talking about the solo miniseries Grant Morrison wrote in the 80s or early 90s.)  And then all he does is flex to get them into the white space.  Later a newspaper in the painting says that he helped to get all the other people out.  Why didn't they find him to help fight the stuff in the painting?  Or get them in and out of it?  He would have been way more useful than pretty much everyone else who actually did go.

Or in the second season when everyone except Larry is shrunk to tiny size, why don't they get Flex to help them?  He probably could have if the writers had wanted him to.  Instead after months of failed science experiments the Chief has to give the British magic guy some stuff to magic them out of there.

Honestly the second season isn't really any better in regards to the storytelling.  There's really no "big bad" for the season. Ostensibly the main story is the Chief's Planet of the Apes-looking daughter Dorothy could destroy the world and he has to stop her from growing up.  And everyone else really has nothing to do with this.

In the nine episodes everyone else has their own stuff going on.  Larry finds out his son killed himself and tries to make amends.  Rita finds out her mom fucked some guy to get her a role that launched her career; she becomes obsessed with acting in some community theater play and becoming a proper superhero, though she sucks at both.  Cliff finally tells his daughter the truth and finds out she's pregnant and marrying another woman.  Vic meets a young woman in Detroit who was a black ops agent and had some implants sort of like his.  And of course there's a lot of whiny, annoying Jane bullshit too.  She gets replaced by "Miranda" who is awesome.  Sure she's secretly evil, but she's not always whining and screaming and throwing tantrums like a bitch either so I was rooting for her.

And then there's stuff that really has nothing much to do with anything else.  After Dorothy drops the brick that used to be Danny the Street (who is literally a sentient, teleporting street), Flex Mentallo and the "Dannyzens" (people who lived on Danny Street) come to the mansion to throw a big party to revive him.  During the party some kind of sexual Ghostbusters show up to stop some entity from turning Earth into a hedonistic paradise.  A spaceship the Chief sent out in 1955 finally returns with an astronaut who has a Negative Spirit like Larry, only she's learned to control hers so she doesn't need to wear bandages.  Jack the Ripper abducts the Chief, Larry, and Rita and after failing to get the Chief to become his apprentice goes all torture porn on him and Larry.  And there are some kind of spores that make people have terrible ideas that are then harvested to make some chemical the queen of the spores uses like royal jelly.

None of this stuff in the last two paragraphs really has to do with the main problem, which is Dorothy destroying the world.  And yet that's like 75% of the second season.  That's what annoys me:  there's so much that doesn't really matter.  If they were just doing a wacky episodic series that would be fine but when you're doing serial TV it helps if at some point you actually bring all this stuff together somehow.  I mean the last episode is 50% about Miranda's "tragic" history where she fell in love with some folk singer guy in 1969 but then after they moved in together he decided to invite a bunch of people over for an orgy and she essentially killed herself, which gave rise to whiny, annoying Jane.  Did this have anything to do with what else was going on?  No.  Will it?  Probably not.  Meanwhile with a little help from the Chief, Dorothy is basically saving herself while the rest of our "heroes" got frozen in wax in like no time at all.

The show itself is weird and fun, especially Alan Tudyk as the fourth-wall-breaking, scene-chewing Mr. Nobody in season one.  The problem for me is the stories just don't come together in a meaningful way.  All the whiny obnoxious Jane crap and she doesn't do anything important.  All the flashbacks of fat Brendan Fraser and he doesn't do anything important.  All Vic's whining about his implants and his dad and he doesn't do anything important.  It's really annoying to me.  I mean they probably could have done everything that mattered in the first season in 4 episodes and everything that mattered in the second season in 3 episodes.

About a month ago I talked about season 5 of The Expanse on Amazon.  In that the main characters were scattered around the Solar System through most of the season.  But in the end everyone's stories brought them back together.  All of the separate threads were brought together fairly neatly.  It wasn't just a bunch of crazy shit that happened.  And that unfortunately is most of Doom Patrol:  a bunch of crazy shit that happens and doesn't matter.

Fun Fact:  Recently I watched the first season of Titans on HBO Max and the 4th episode is somewhat of a pilot for Doom Patrol.  Beast Boy takes Raven to the Chief's house to hide her from bad guys.  He has a room in the house with a bunch of video games and stuff.  Then we meet the other housemates.  Jane and Cyborg aren't there yet.  Cliff and April look more or less like they do in the series, but Larry doesn't look the same.  His bandages are different--there's actually a mouth hole visible--his sunglasses don't go all the way around, his jacket is slightly different, and the actor playing him looks bulkier.  That's nothing compared to the Chief, who is a completely different actor with a completely different accent.  They also say the house is on Danny Street when in the series Danny Street is somewhere else.  It's kind of funny then that Beast Boy was on Doom Patrol and went to the Titans while Cyborg was supposed to be on the Titans and went to the Doom Patrol--though in the comics both were on the Titans for a while.