Warner Bros. Television
This week’s episode of Doom Patrol was almost a ‘bottle episode’, one of those budget-saving episodes that take place almost entirely in one location. It didn’t quite get to that point but it did little to move the main ‘find the Chief’ plot forward. Instead, we got a lot of introspection with the ‘team’ who are still dealing with the fallout of Mr. Nobody’s mind games, but unaware that what’s happening in this moment is still one big mind game.
Vic is still attempting to make the group coalesce as a team but there is a fear hanging over those who saw what happened to the last iteration of the Doom Patrol. Poor Rita can’t control her blobbing after seeing Steve again, not to mention the secrets of her past that we still know very little about. Jane seems to be stuck in Hammerhead mode, and Larry is attempting to make peace with the spirit inside of him. Meanwhile Cliff is fixated on the fact that his daughter has been raised by the man who had an affair with his wife, someone he trusted as a friend. It’s all a bit too much for him as he begins to exhibit signs of a total mental breakdown. Before he loses his mind completely, he suggests that since everyone has secrets they’re dealing with, now is the time to discuss them out in the open. Rita concurs that unless they actually start talking to each other, they’ll never be able to move forward.
For Rita, she’s basically having an identity crisis because Rita Farr doesn’t exist. She’s a creation of her parents’ desire to get their little girl into pictures, as we see in a flashback to 1930 when the young ‘Rita’ meets her Hollywood idol. But with no career now, there is no Rita Farr and if there is no Rita Farr then who is this woman who can’t control her own body, oozing through a heating grate in the floor and ending up crawling out of the furnace in the basement because no one can hear her cries for help?
Larry is still trying to make peace with the spirit inside of him, now at a point to finally being open to ‘listening’ to what it’s trying to tell him. And now the spirit keeps showing him a moment in time, the last time Larry was with John but the details aren’t right — the pickup truck is the wrong color, the song on the radio is wrong, there’s no train. So they try again, but Larry keeps fighting against the artificiality of the situation. Third time’s the charm though because Larry finally lets down his walls and admits that he screwed everything up with John. The burden of keeping his sexuality a secret from his military buddies, putting up the facade of being a loving husband and doting father, was torture and he pushed John away because of that instead of just allowing himself to be who he is. Mr. Nobody was using that self-torture to his advantage by keeping Larry in a perpetual state of guilt by watching the man he loved burn up in that jet, even though he knows it didn’t happen that way in reality. Now that Larry has finally released himself from that guilt, can Nobody still have a hold on him?
Vic’s biggest issue is his own guilt over the death of his mother, blaming himself for the accident that killed her and maimed him in the lab, an argument that distracted them from the dangerous mix of chemicals that was about to explode. But he still has issues with his father as well. Now that his privacy mode has been enabled, Vic has access to other files only his father could see, like a dating profile he forgot about from when he was 16. Accessing all of the responses, Vic was saddened to see that almost every one was only interested in him because he is Cyborg. He filters out all the responses that mention his alter ego and finally finds one who seems interested in Vic Stone. A conversation is started, and Vic’s system allows him to tap into a security camera on a bus where he can see the woman he’s talking to. He explains he has changed a bit since that profile pic was posted and when he sends her a new one of his current self, the look of revulsion on the woman’s face is all Vic needs to see, ordering his inner computer system to completely delete his dating profile. Vic still has a long way to go in dealing with his demons.
Warner Bros. Television
Jane is still a mystery, and it’s difficult to pin down just who she is as her parts keep emerging. She does manage to keep Hammerhead at bay long enough for us to get a glimpse of a baby in a crib, circa 1950, wailing away while a man — her father? — just looks at her and walks away. We can assume this is baby Jane and the start of the neglect/abuse she suffered that led to the creation of her 63 parts. Jane is having serious daddy issues and that includes her relationship with Niles. After Nobody planted in her mind that Niles sees her as ‘broken’, Hammerhead destroyed all of the tapes of the interviews with Niles even though Jane was begging her to stop. Back at the group, one of her parts vanishes and returns with a painting by The Hangman’s Daughter — who never lies — depicting the group dead at the feet of Cyborg who is holding a body, perhaps that of his mother, apparently yelling out in pain or rage. She says this is what Mr. Nobody has shown her and it sets the rest of the group on edge.
But it all comes full circle back to Cliff who is now totally short circuiting. Cliff jumps into the team’s bus and drives off in a screaming rage, arriving at the home of Bump Weathers to confront him about ‘stealing’ his daughter. Bump has no problem telling Cliff exactly how he feels and at one point picks up a rifle and shoots Cliff. But instead of a bullet, the rifle emits a red blast which confuses Cliff. It also sends him through a wall into a room that looks suspiciously like the library at the manor. He also sees his daughter looking at him in disgust and that sends him into a full psychotic breakdown, seeing multiple Bumps when in reality he’s seeing Vic, Rita and Larry. But thinking it’s Bump, Cliff makes a threatening move towards them and Vic is forced to take him down. As Cliff vibrates madly on the floor, suddenly a rat emerges from his mouth and scurries off. That was unexpected.
Warner Bros. Television
The episode has used flashbacks to tell everyone’s stories and here it goes totally bonkers, flashing back six episodes ago (according to the on screen text), when the team hopped on that bus to go find the Chief. What they didn’t know was that they ran over a mama rat trying to show her baby when it was safe to cross the road, so the baby had to witness the death of its mother, crying out in anguish (and it was a surprisingly emotional moment hearing that squeal … kudos to the CGI folks for really giving that baby rat a personality). But Mr. Nobody was also watching, and is apparently able to communicate with mammals other than humans. Now he’s manipulated the rat to seek revenge on the one who killed its mother, finding its way inside the hole in Cliff’s arm from Vic’s earlier arm cannon explosion. Admiral Whiskers is born, but now the question is what kind of damage has he done to Cliff, and will the team be able to find Niles to make the repairs … or perhaps Dr. Silas Stone will be the one to fix Cliff and make the changes he had originally suggested to Niles.
Doom Patrol streams new episodes each Friday on DC Universe.
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