Doom Patrol, one of the latest TV show additions to the DC Universe, is dark, witty, and surprisingly poignant. If you haven’t heard of it, I wouldn’t be surprised: it wasn’t on my radar either until someone I knew told me to drop everything and watch it immediately. Though it has an impressive 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8/10 on iMDB, Doom Patrol is still a relatively underrated show, and I hope it gets the traction it deserves. As a show that actively humanizes the concept of heroism, I personally think it’s one of the best superhero shows I’ve ever seen (and is astoundingly better than any of the other DC shows out there). Watch the extended trailer for Season 1 below.
Warning: this article contains spoilers for both seasons of Doom Patrol!
Right off the bat, it’s apparent that this is a show about misfits. This even seems to permeate to the cast, because though many of Doom Patrol’s stars are well-established actors, they are underdog choices in their own ways. For example, I never thought I’d see Brendan Fraser come back to the screen in this capacity, playing main character Cliff Steele/Robotman. What’s most impressive about Fraser’s performance is that he predominantly voices a robot – a robot who is in a rudimentary robot body, and therefore can’t physically emote the same way a human can. And yet, Cliff is one of the most expressive characters in the show. Matt Bomer, who is historically great at any role he’s in, shines as Larry Trainor/Negative Man. Larry is a pilot from the 1960s who grapples with his homosexuality, past mistakes, and the fact that his body is now covered in radiation burns and houses a force called the Negative Spirit.
Diane Guerrero plays her most dynamic role yet as Jane, a woman with multiple personalities (64 to be exact). Though I’ve always thought Guerrero had a lot of potential, she tends to be type cast as ditzy side characters. Not here, though – here, she effortlessly switches between personas with incredible acting chops. April Bowlby, best known for her role in Two and a Half Men, plays Rita Farr (or Elasti-Girl), a beautiful actress whose career met its height in the 50s. After an accident occurs while filming, Rita then deals with a power that causes her body to become a melting blob when she’s stressed or upset. Vic Stone, played by Joivan Wade, is often referred to as Cyborg and is the closest the group gets to a “real hero” on the team. However, Vic deals with his own trauma from a horrific accident that killed his mother and left him disfigured – the fix of which was mechanical body parts. (It’s worth noting that Wade is English but plays an American character, and he absolutely nails the accent.) Then there’s Niles Caulder, a character reminiscent of Professor X in the X-Men series, who is played by stage and screen actor Timothy Dalton. Dalton is best known for being James Bond in the 80s, but hasn’t done much mainstream work since. Lastly, Season 1’s main villain is played by the ever delightful yet criminally underrated Alan Tudyk, who plays the sinister yet bitingly entertaining Mr. Nobody.
One of the most subversive elements of the show—one that defies typical constructs of superheroism—is that all of the main characters have been hit with powers/abilities that they didn’t really want. In fact, much of the time, these abilities work against their favour. Not only that, but in addition to these unwanted powers, every single character is rife with deep-seated darkness and trauma. What I love about the show is that it’s the way these character tackle their traumas that inherently humanizes them; it’s never a linear journey. Instead, each character approaches their darkness with intense anxiety, denial, self-doubt, grief, and hesitation. For example, Larry is so soaked with guilt over the people he hurt before his accident that his mental state is perpetually stuck in the past. He tortures himself constantly, reliving the past because he is convinced he doesn’t deserve better. Larry is also conditioned to think about homosexuality in a negative way, making it even more heartbreaking to see that he thinks of himself as an aberration from the inside out. It’s not until he meets characters like the non-binary supernatural entity Danny the Street and drag queen Maura Lee Karupt that he begins to realize that he can let go, embrace who he is, and ultimately change for the better.
But viewers should be wary that these characters are not just misfits: they are irredeemable, deeply broken people.
Then there’s Cliff, who is so full of rage knowing that he was robbed of the chance to raise his daughter. At the same time, he knows in his heart that he wasn’t a good partner or father while he was still in his human body. Rita, who still grapples with intense self-loathing over the fact that her power mutilates her body, has to come to terms with her shallow notions of beauty, fame, and success. Jane has countless defense mechanisms and a fragmented idea of who she is, and embarks on an onerous journey of discovering her primary persona’s trauma. Vic grapples with the intense PTSD of causing the accident that killed his mother, and though he is nationally recognized as a small-time hero, he often doesn’t feel like one. Niles Caulder, we eventually find out, is much more selfish than we initially think, and viewers are made to question whether he really is a “good guy” or not. Even villains like Mr. Nobody are deeply complex, allowing us to come to the realization that there is no binary of good or evil in Doom Patrol. Even as these characters begin to embark on a journey of self-discovery, we are never made to believe that they will change overnight.
But viewers should be wary that these characters are not just misfits: they are irredeemable, deeply broken people. Throughout the course of the show, they discover their own humanity by examining the deep wounds they’ve left on other people, and then reflecting on themselves. Every single one of the main characters have had their lives irreparably altered by the bad elements within them, whether that’s poor upbringings, fame they weren’t accustomed to, internalized homophobia, etc. But they also left a wake of devastation to the people around them, and that becomes mirrored in their own traumas. And while they may be irredeemable, it is their respective journeys of self-discovery that ultimately makes them redeemable to us. We actively find ourselves cheering them on as Cliff, Rita, Larry, Jane, and Vic come to grips with their own permanent imperfections.
To go deeper into our main characters’ flaws, let’s examine them more closely. Cliff begins as a genuinely bad person who lived his life in a selfish way. When he wakes up in the body of a robot and realizes he has nothing left, he spends the rest of his days realizing what a terrible person he was, and tries to make amends to the people he wronged. But even in that process, he continues to make more mistakes – every time he reaches out to his daughter Clara, for example, he simultaneously makes it a bit worse before making it a bit better. And slowly but surely, he learns about himself and why he is the way he is. For Larry, it was his own fear and cowardice that devastated his family. Perhaps if he had been truer to himself, it could have made things better (in the long run) for his loved ones. For someone like Vic, he himself has made mistakes, and now he deals with that trauma and grapples with the question: what part of him is still human, and what part is manufactured? Are his relationships real? Have people misused his abilities? How can he determine truth from lies? Everyone thinks of Vic as a hero even though he often doesn’t feel like one – does he even deserve to be put on that pedestal and gain that recognition?
We actively find ourselves cheering them on as Cliff, Rita, Larry, Jane, and Vic come to grips with their own permanent imperfections.
Rita lived her life as an actress in an incredibly selfish and shallow way. She was accomplice to a Harvey Weinstein-style agenda of sex for advancement, by pimping out prospective actresses to the producer who hired her. We find out that it wasn’t until one of those girls got pregnant and then took her own life that Rita realizes the scope of wrongdoing she has done. But even still, though she always understood that what she did was a bad thing, she did it for the longest time anyway, simply because of her inability to leave behind fame. Viewers realize that you can’t simply hand wave away what Rita did, nor is it forgivable. But we can also recognize how Rita finds some level of catharsis and self-growth along the way. For Jane, she has lived her whole life trying to put the pieces of her personalities—and the history of her primary, Kay Challis—together. Through it, she has dealt with trauma after trauma, resulting in impenetrable emotional walls when it comes to trusting people. Though inexplicably terrible things have happened to Jane, her personalities (many of which have their own powers) are not averse to committing violence or murder, ultimately making Jane a flawed figure in her own right.
The show explores how each of these characters are regretful they couldn’t continue their lives, because they were disrupted by these powers/heightened abilities. They feel like nothing more than experiments. And yet, there is a simultaneous realization that if they had continued their lives as is, it would have been even worse, because they would have continued to be bad people. Though the events that occurred to them were unfortunate, these events and powers acted as avenues of rebirth, which is something these characters have to come to terms with. Because ultimately, the path they wanted was the wrong path, and the path that was forced upon them—awful as it may be—is their pathway to becoming better than they were. And honestly, maybe some of these characters deserved it – maybe it’s what karmically balanced them. At the end of the day, the humanizing aspect of Doom Patrol is that these characters can never get rid of their imperfections, nor of the mistakes they made in the past. But at the same time, they learn how to be introspective enough to understand why they exist and how they can work around them.
Doom Patrol is an intensely bizarre show, both in its subject matter and visual choices. But what makes it work is that it really commits to the bizarreness. Where shows like The Umbrella Academy use surrealistic aspects for shock and visual appeal, it doesn’t carry through with its weirdness quite well enough. With Doom Patrol, everything is weird, and nothing makes sense – until it does. With elements like talking cockroaches and donkeys that fart out alternate realities, Doom Patrol feels more reminiscent of a show like Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, another show that executes its surrealism perfectly due to excellent writing.
Both seasons of Doom Patrol are grounded by the human element of the complex, damaged people it focuses on. The show packs hard punches in its content matter, as themes like death, loss, homophobia, xenophobia, broken familial/romantic relationships, and sexual and emotional abuse are just the tip of the iceberg. By no means is it a lighthearted show, but it pulls it off because it takes all of these matters seriously. There are elements of magic, supernatural, action, and really dark and low moments that are inter-layered with intensely funny comedy and emotion and surprising lessons about humanity. Each character, though reprehensible at times, have their moments of light and relatability. And lastly, the show has one of the most epic opening sequences I’ve ever seen.
Doom Patrol frequently brings me to tears and pulls on my heartstrings. There is so much surprising emotional depth and representation in this show, and through its elements of the outlandish and bizarre, it offers a very grounded reflection of the world we live in. It acts as a sobering reminder that real-life heroes are human, and that should be celebrated, not shunned. That means that real heroes are often flawed, often contradictory. It also shows us that if the group of irredeemable misfits we see onscreen can both save the world and be redeemed, then we all have the potential to be heroes. We all have the potential to find hope and light in life, no matter how dire, dark, and full of despair it may be. Doom Patrol shows us that it’s never too late to open our minds and let go of the past, to grow from our mistakes no matter how long it may take us. We are not defined by our misgivings or shortcomings, so long as we don’t let them define us.
So, in closing, I thought that these words by The Verge sum it up best:
“In Doom Patrol, you can save the world no matter how broken you are.”
The Verge
~ Z ~
