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Let’s Talk About ‘Dada Patrol’:
- Kay wants new shoes, but the others in the Underground aren’t sure they want Jane taking charge.
- Victor is trying to help Cliff take his Parkinson’s meds, but Cliff is dismayed they could take three months to work so … he takes half the bottle to speed up the process which makes him completely stoned.
- Silas goes over the heads of STAR Labs and secretly reactivates Cyborg, apologizing for everything he’s done up to this point.
- Larry’s weird bulge is now mobile, moving all the way to the top of his head.
- Laura DeMille calls a team meeting even though she isn’t, as Rita points out, a team leader, and they aren’t a team. She reveals that the ‘team’ inadvertently released the Sisterhood of Dada from The Ant Farm. But she has no idea what her connection is to the ‘terrorist’ group.
- Larry, Victor, Jane and Cliff go on a road trip to try to track down the Sisterhood, with disastrous results.
- Rita and Laura bond over cocktails, and Rita reveals it was she who sabotaged the time machine so they set about to fix it.
The big reveal in this week’s episode of Doom Patrol is the Sisterhood of Dada. In the comics, the group is known as the Brotherhood of Dada, a counterpart to the Brotherhood of Evil, which was formed by Eric Morden (aka Mr. Nobody). The Dada part of the name comes from the avant-garde art movement from early-20th century Europe, which rejected logic and reason as a response the incomprehensible atrocities of World War I. With that in mind, the renamed Sisterhood (the Brotherhood had both male and female members, and they seem to all be represented on the show) may be a formidable foe for the not-a-team.
Haunted by the imagery of the film Niles had hidden away, Laura’s memory is triggered — slightly — and calls a team meeting, a demand to which Rita reminds that Laura is not a team leader and they aren’t a team. But they all gather around the table while Laura sits silently, prompting Jane to call her Doctor Who (a cute little wink to Michelle Gomez’s role as Missy on the BBC series) and ask if they’re all just going to sit there and watch her do her kegels. It is then that Laura asks them if they remember The Ant Farm. Of course they do because Larry was a prisoner there, and that is from where they released the were-butts into the world. Apparently they also released what Laura calls the ‘cutthroat terrorists’ known as the Sisterhood of Dada, and … she wants ‘the team’ to kill them. They object saying they aren’t people who just go around killing people … well, Nazis are okay. And were-butts.
Laura shows them some photographs including one with graffiti on a wall which Cliff reads as ‘The Eternal Flatulation’. It’s ‘Flagellation’ and it’s coming and needs to be stopped. And if the group won’t kill the Sisterhood then they need to observe and report. The Sisterhood has sent out a call to join them, so they should join and infiltrate. Janes asks that if they do this will Laura go away forever? She pauses for a second then says yes, and the team jumps up from the table to join and infiltrate.
Laura asks Rita to stay behind and she shows her the movie, pointing out the woman who looks like Rita. Rita is thrilled, believing this proves that she is the ‘world-renowned time traveler Rita Farr’. Laura isn’t so sure. She also shows Rita the letter written by Niles, and admits she has no idea what information the team will get from the Sisterhood because nothing she’s found thus far has helped jog her memory. Rita tries to cheer her up with the old ‘fake it till you make it’ adage. Look at her, she’s a time traveler and has a friend in the afterlife, but she doesn’t feel worthy of those ‘honors’. She also admits it was she who broke Laura’s time machine, and it is she who will fix it and prove to Larry she was right all along.
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On their road trip to find the Sisterhood, Cliff is completely stoned and he notices the bulge on Larry’s neck. Thinking it’s a big neck zit, he attempts to pop it, but Larry is driving the bus so that’s not a great idea. Especially as they drive into a weird fog bank and run off the road. Cliff hops out of the bus and takes off, Victor goes after him, and Jane figures she has to run after the both of them. But she gently suggests to Larry that someone needs to stay with the bus, which he correctly interprets as ‘without your Negative Spirit, you’re pretty much useless’. Larry bristles at the implication but he sort of agrees and stays behind.
In the foggy forest, Cliff comes upon a bicycle encased in a sort of watery membrane. And it speaks: ‘Toad bonnet bee, Thatcher’s blue bum.’ Then a weird object floats around him, repeating everything he says, then laughs and flies away. And then there’s an ice cream truck. Cliff opens the door on the back and a spiral portal opens up and sucks him in. He finds himself in a room with an Asian woman inside of a glass box. She speaks but he doesn’t understand, but she is able to create English text on the wall of her box which reads ‘what are you?’ and this somehow triggers cliff to speak Japanese (I think). He tells her he’s a robot … and a little high. He snaps back into English and says he isn’t technically a robot because he has a human brain, and that he’s never been afraid of death — he’s been dead twice now, and undead once — but now he fears it because he doesn’t want to miss out on his time with his grandson. If he could cry, he’d cry a lot. The girl tells him one day she will be empty and useless, and Cliff says he wants to hug her. Which isn’t a great idea when that hug involves a glass box.
In the forest while looking for Cliff, Victor encounters a man with bicycle wheels growing from his back, sculpting a face out of clay. The man asks ‘why are you?’ and Victor gives his rehearsed spiel about being the superhero Cyborg, blah blah blah, and the man calls him out for falling back on that obviously scripted response. Vic doesn’t quite grasp what the man is asking, and frustrated the man tells him that he may tell him more about the Eternal Flagellation, but the man keeps asking Vic his question. Vic, rather defensively, tells him to answer his own question. The man says he is because he loved … something, someone? And because he laughed his father’s laugh, and he sang the songs his grandmother sang, because he’s bled and suffered, and found joy from between the feted trees. And in barbershops! But those things are of no importance to the great Cyborg. When the man says that, we can see the face his’s sculpting is Victor’s. The man says Victor doesn’t know himself, he’s only a raised hand, and all you get when you raise your hand is a walk down the street, a drive through town, to lay asleep in your bed. Vic thinks the man is implying he doesn’t know how to suffer, and the man asks how can he know suffering or joy without knowing who he is. Vic fires back that the man is free because of him, and the man says that is the language of the oppressor, that he sat in a cage for nearly a century, an emerged Lazarus and beheld a world the same. This is why the Eternal Flagellation is so important.
While looking for Cliff and Vic, Jane hears someone call her name, and she comes upon a sweets shop in the middle of the foggy forest. She enters, and inside is a woman who tells her that the others, from the Underground, can’t hurt her in here and, in fact, Jane is inside her head and Kay is there too (and in the shop as well). The woman introduces herself as Shelley Byron (in the comics the character is male, named Byron Shelley taken from poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley). She says she’s also known as The Fog — which suggests it is she who is responsible for the fog in which the others are lost. (Unknown to Jane, she is also the woman doing the odd dance with Laura in the film.) Jane immediately calls her out as a member of the Sisterhood, and says she wants to join. Shelley asks, ‘Who are you, Jane?’
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Jane is not one to play games, so Shelley tells her the Flagellation is like a vulture cleaning the carcass of an overfed sow. She also tells Jane she’ll never be free until she truly knows herself. Shelley says Jane is scared, prone to leaning back into old habits, looking opportunity in the face and missing the promise of it, and that what she believes isn’t true. But Shelly also claims she doesn’t remember why she built the sweets shop. She says she used to be a dragon, destroying people and towns all in her head. Perhaps they have more in common than Jane knows. And then out of nowhere, Hammerhead shows up, banging on the window. Jane tries to take Kay, saying the others are afraid for her. Shelley asks if they’re afraid for or of Kay, telling Jane she is denying herself. She asks wounldn’t it be nice to express herself, to get lost in her own thoughts, wants and desires? Kay says she’d like that. And Hammerhead cracks the window.
At the bus, someone runs past Larry, and then his son Paul appears out of the fog. Larry chases him and when he catches up, Paul pulls a gun on Larry but nothing happens when he pulls the trigger. He drops the gun and a lobster crawls out of the barrel. Paul says, ‘Bang bang bagels, pink and blue’, and falls to the ground.
Simultaneously, Cliff cracks the glass box. He tells the panicked woman inside that he should be with Rory, being the best grandpa, trying new things and not being on some bullshit mission because of Laura DeMille. The woman is surprised to hear that name. Hammerhead breaks the sweets shop window. Vic is told by the man he’s with that he was sent by Laura DeMille. A woman in the ice cream truck who had been asleep in the driver’s seat wakes up and says ‘Laura fucking DeMille’ and stars playing ‘Copacabana’ on her Walkman. The man tells Vic he can’t stop the Flagellation. He needs it, the world needs it. The lady from the ice cream truck shows up and punches Cliff right through the glass box, at the same time Hammerhead smashes the window and the others appear to take Kay. Shelley tells Jane she’ll see her on the other side … and to give Laura DeMille her best as she turns into fog and disappears. Jane and the other wake up, back on the bus and Paul is there as well.
They return to the manor and Rita is eager to learn what they found. Vic tells her nothing, and she says then they must go back and give the Sisterhood a what for because she’s been giving Laura pep talks that they were going to help her. Vic stops her before she can say anything else and angrily tells her ‘fuck the time machine, fuck the Sisterhood of Dada, and fuck Laura DeMille.’ In his room, Vic removes his jacket and inside is the clay mask of his face, adorned with patches to resemble Cyborg. On the inside of the mask it’s written ‘Approximate Man’. He smashes it against the wall. Cliff takes the rest of his medication, and Larry tells a catatonic Paul that he’s sorry they dragged him into this, but nothing will come between them. And then his neck bulge gets that familiar glow.
Jane is confronted by Kay’s therapist, Hammerhead and Pretty Polly, telling her they are keeping Kay away from her. Jane says Kay is just having a tantrum because she wants new shoes, so she’ll get them and everything will be fine. The therapist says she can handle Kay’s yearnings, but she doesn’t know what to do with Jane. Jane wakes up in her bed, and in her pocket she finds a peppermint candy from the sweets shop, covered in fuzz. She pops it in her mouth and savors the flavor.
Rita assures a very tipsy Laura that she will take care of things for her because she is a world-renowned time traveler. Laura says she’s known Rita for all of 48 hours and that’s not who Rita is and it’s never gonna be who she is. And then she passes out. A slightly indignant Rita takes the keys to the time machine … and fires it up.
New episodes of Doom Patrol drop Thursdays on HBO Max.
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