HBO Max
Let’s Talk About ‘Doom Patrol’ :
- Vic seems to be the only person left in The Future.
- Jane is still ‘on vacation’ in The Underground so Dr. Harrison is psychoanalyzing the team.
- Shelley, aka The Fog, takes Jane, Vic and Larry to the forest where they make some surprising discoveries.
- Rita has named herself the leader of the team and insists on giving everyone nicknames.
- Madame Rouge’s time machine is coming in handy as they can hop quickly to the past to stop a crime before it happens.
- Vic and his dad are bonding over a project that is sure to make Cliff a happy robot.
- Why did the woman who played Rita in Cloverton’s production of ‘Our Town’ end up in the time stream, crashing into the time machine?
- The crash knocked the time machine off course and they find themselves in a terrible future of their making.
- Future Vic has been attempting to find a way to fix the past and a time machine has just landed in his front yard.
- Jane was able to see the future and has decided that it’s time she returns up top, even if she still doesn’t know where Kay is.
- The team needs a plan to deal with the Butt-pocalypse, but they may have more to worry about than that.
The Doom Patrol is back for a fourth season and it’s just grand seeing the dysfunctional superheroes once again, thankfully not falling prey — yet — to the supervillain now running their parent company. The two episode season premiere wastes no time in setting up what the team will face this season, bookended by two major crises (although they aren’t aware of the second one yet). The episode kicks off in The Future, how far we don’t know but the ‘Omega Man’ Vic is a bit older, showing some gray in his hair (we do know it’s long after a cataclysmic event in 2019). But what happened to leave him a sole survivor is not yet known.
In the present, Jane is still ‘taking a break’ in The Underground so Dr. Harrison is stuck with what is unofficially, yet officially, the Doom Patrol with Rita taking the reins as team leader … because no one else wanted the job. And they’ve had seven successful missions despite the utter lack of respect she gets from her teammates to whom she’s blessed with the nicknames we’ve always known them by (even though no one wants a nickname). Rita is ElastiGirl, Jane is Crazy Jane, Cliff is Robotman, Larry is Negative Man. Since Vic has ridded himself of his Cyborg tech … he’s just a glorified assistant now. And because of the ire between Rita and Rouge, Rita has bestowed upon her the nickname Dog Shit McGiven. Rita has also managed to connect the giant robot brain (from the Season 3 finale) to the time machine so they can control where they want to go. She’s also solved the time travel memory loss issue with … jellyfish placed on top of their heads while traveling, except Rouge always refuses to use it so she can briefly forget who these people are. She does have a note written on her hand telling her to ‘Do whatever the shrill ginger says’.
Dr. Harrison has also diagnosed the team with various conditions. Rita is a textbook perfectionist/narcissist with survivor’s guilt and PTSD, because she fears to lose another loved one. Cliff is a grade-A simpleton due to poor breeding, the Florida education system and race car fumes. Vic is diagnosed with personality dysmorphia and social cowardice. She believes Larry is the first person to experience Stockholm Syndrome as a host to a parasite. His diagnosis is good old self-loathing with a healthy dash of co-dependency. Rouge’s issues go deep as she has to live with the fact that she betrayed her friends Malcolm and Rita in the past, and relegated hundreds of people to obsolescence. Her pain is quiet, but always there. Diagnosis — self-loathing doormat with sociopathic tendencies. And while the team battles one bad guy after another, it’s usually Dr. Harrison who saves the days, reasoning with the bad guy who can’t possibly be mad at her since they don’t even know her. Works every time. In the end she calls the team the Doomed Patrol, the El Dorado of psychological dysfunctions.
As Rita tries to keep them together as a team, unaware that she’s being just a tad overbearing with the way she orders everyone about (believing her tactics are what have made their missions a success), they are still dealing with their own issues. Jane is just hanging out in The Underground at Kay’s grandmother’s house being berated by Dr. Harrison for not going out there with everyone else to find Kay. Jane’s take is that Kay constructed the place and if she doesn’t want to be found, she isn’t going to be. She’s just trying to figure out what the girl needs. H thinks Jane is just on vacation and avoiding her responsibilities … or maybe it’s sour grapes because Kay disappeared under her watch.
Vic and his dad are bonding over a project, but some of Silas’ comments get under Vic’s skin, thinking his dad is trying to upset him as a revenge tactic for removing his tech. Silas assures him that is not what he’s doing. They finish their project and reveal to the team … Cliff’s new arm. Cliff thinks it looks like the same shitty arm he had but Vic tells him this one has a bonus: the sense of touch. In one finger, but over time the nanobot should grow and give him feeling in the entire hand. Wanting to test it out with various items, Cliff refuses because he wants the first thing he touches to be his grandson Rory so he put an oven mitt on his hand … which he is technically touching. Damn it! But it’s so soft. Before he can touch anything else, he wants to take the time machine to Florida so he can touch Rory, which Rita resists but bows to pressure. Rouge also tells her that once they return it would perhaps be best if she leaves since the two can’t get along. Rita insists she wear the jellyfish this one time so she doesn’t forget that promise. And that’s when things go awry. Planning to arrive in Florida five minutes into the future, the woman who plays Rita in the Cloverton Players’ production of Our Town is in the time stream and no one knows why. Well, Rouge does because when she first arrived in Cloverton the woman was watching her have a massive wazz (Google it) and she fell into the time hole. Her collision with the craft has had the not great effect of knocking them way off course into the future we saw at the top of the episode. They are stuck because Shipley is overheated but they have no idea where they are or why it looks like a post-apocalypse town. That sign Rita spies may have a clue with its ‘Cloverton’s 2019 Decimation’ header. Some loud roars make them seek shelter in their old, familiar home.
They are trapped by Future Vic because Cliff couldn’t keep his hands off of a dish of Vienna sausages and Skittles, but he releases them and tells them it all started 20 years ago, Cloverton was the epicenter and it just spread — The Butt-pocalypse, zombie butts that they inadvertently created, but they thought they had killed all of them. They ask Vic where the rest of the team is and he says they just hang out in their rooms, so they all go to see if they can talk to themselves and learn more about the Butt-pocalypse. But the only thing they find are their ghosts. Rita’s tells her she wasn’t such a great leader after all, Harrison’s tells her that her arrogance got Kay killed and she should have taken the girl away when she got control of Jane’s body, but instead she was focused on her little lab rats. Cliff wants to know if his ghost gets to fuck with the sex ghosts, but he just mostly watches and comments. He does tell Cliff that his daughter and grandson took a boat and are safe in the Atlantic … not really. They’re dead, but he insists that Cliff doesn’t want to know how they or he died. Sadly, Cliff learns he never gets to touch Rory. Larry finds his ghost hiding in the greenhouse and learns that Keeg is no longer in him. But Keeg shows up, all grown up, and his baby Keeg releases to communicate with his grown self. There are a lot of electrical flashes and Future Keeg is gone while Baby Keeg returns to Larry, who still doesn’t know what’s going on. Rouge has no ghost since she wasn’t there when everything went down, but she does find some paperwork and plans. Future Vic is trying to build his own time machine. He tied up Vic but he managed to find Rouge to tell her Future Vic is going to steal the time machine. Future Vic had earlier chatted with the ghosts and told them to keep themselves occupied, but Dr. Harrison says that maybe they can talk to themselves to avert this future … which cracks up all of them. As if!
Vic makes his way outside to confront Future Vic, but as the others arrive so do the zombie butts. Cliff says they kicked their asses before and they can do it again, but Future Vic tells him that’s what he said last time and one of them cracked open his head and ate him like an egg. Finally, someone tells him how he died! Everyone decides the best thing they can do is leave and try to stop this from happening but Vic wants to stay and fight. Suddenly Silas appears but it was Rouge who had transformed long enough to distract Vic so ElastiGirl could do her thing and drag him back to Shipley. Future Vic comes to the window and points to his left before a zombie butt kills him. When they return to their present, Vic sees his future self had carved ‘You can’t have it all’ onto the side of Shipley. In The Underground, Jane was able to watch everything that happened in the future, and she told Harrison that she was right, Jane just needed a break because being the primary is hard but if H tries to stop her from going back up she’ll chuck her face first into the well. Jane is surprised when Harrison begins to turn to dust, revealing it was Kay all the time. She seems upset and tells Jane not to follow her, and the next thing Jane knows she’s in her bedroom with a bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces.
Rouge asks Rita if she thinks it was just totally random that they saw that woman in the time stream, but Rita has no idea. Rouge suggests they try to find out and Rita comes to the horrible realization that this means Rouge is not leaving as promised, which makes her face melt. Vic has decided he’s going to live his life and hang out with some old friends, and Cliff promises he will touch Rory after he stops the Butt-pocalypse, but until then he won’t touch anything else. Fuck you, the future! Meanwhile, Willoughby Kipling is summoned to convene with the Knights Templar as guinea pig Bumbray has a message. The Flora and Fauna have made an urgent discovery. A sheet of paper appears before Willoughby and he says what’s on it is a hoax. Bumbray says the Flora and Fauna don’t make mistakes, like he does. Willoughby counters that the prophecy only mentioned the butts, but if this is real it can mean only one thing … we’re all well and truly fucked. Then we see it’s a photograph showing a large grassy area with ‘Immortus Will Rise’ mown into it.
HBO Max
Let’s Talk About ‘Butt Patrol’:
- There’s something odd going on at the Ant Farm in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
- Rita’s plan to stop the Butt-pocalypse is to return to the scene of the crime where it all started but no one is on board.
- The group decides that maybe they need a new leader.
- Dr. Yu arrives at the Ant Farm in 2017 to try to establish communication with the butts.
- Rouge and Cliff go off on a secret mission to stop the future from happening, while Vic and Jane go off on their own mission, leaving Rita and Larry behind to deal with their own issues.
Another fun episode that time hops around to see how things progressed to the point of a Butt-pocalypse. At the Ant Farm in 2016, they seem to have the butts contained but as one of the workers enters the room where they are allowed to congregate while they are in another area, he sees a hole in the wall and is unable to get out before they kill him. In 2017, a Doctor Yu arrives, a linguist who is contracted to establish communication with the butts. It seems like no time at all passes before she has them calm and performing showtunes, in particular ‘Shipoopie’ from The Music Man. She believes the butts aren’t killing machines but when a general knocks on the window it completely riles up the butts. Yu is told she’s done some good work but the government is still going to weaponize the butts. Yu insists that she can change their minds. Time passes and in 2019 the butts are rampaging through the Ant Farm. Yu calmly sits in the lunch room eating, and through the door window we can see Cliff running around in a panic. Yu is told to get above ground before the exterminators arrive. She goes to a cabinet and finds the butt she names Nicholas hiding in a cabinet (he’s one of the conjoined twins butts that had been separated at some point, and she knows that he and his brother butt do feel a familial connection). In the present, Yu arrives home and makes herself a huge bowl of cereal … but it’s for Nicholas, whom no one knows exists.
The Doom Patrol are still trying to find a way to save the future. Rita wants to add more color to Jane’s outfits and she really wants Cliff to cut down on the cursing. And anything they created, they can just as easily destroy but no one wants to go back in the past to the Ant Farm to make that happen. In fact, Vic thinks it’s time for new leadership. Rita says they should put it to a vote and … no one votes for her. She thinks Vic wants the job but reminds him again that he has no tech so he’s basically useless. Jane doesn’t want it, Larry and Cliff are unqualified so who … Rouge? Vic is adamant that he can handle the job, but Cliff says they don’t need a former superhero to guide them they need a former supervillain, and Rouge is the only one qualified since she wasn’t there so she’s not responsible for the future. Rita believes that Darren Jones is responsible for spreading the zombism since Jane bit him … or Rita bit him, doesn’t matter, but the team is settled on Rouge as leader, so Rita refuses to participate since she’s not wanted. Rouge suggests they all take a breath before they go to work, just to regroup and get their thoughts together. Vic agrees to one hour, but when they all go to their rooms, Rouge calls Cliff over and asks him to go on a secret mission with her to kill Darren Jones. She doesn’t need the others because Cliff is indestructible. Cliff is totally on board. Why they are riding bicycles to find Darren is unknown but the visual is humorous, and it gives them a reason to be wearing bike helmets spritzed with some scent to keep zombie Darren from smelling their brains. But Cliff is distracted by an old rusty car on the side of the road, Rouge seeing it as sort of a metaphor for their lives, but Cliff just sees a car. While they argue, Darren Jones rides by on a tractor.
Meanwhile Vic has located a target that he believes is the start of the Butt-pocalypse, and learning that Rouge and Cliff left on their mission, he invites Jane to join him on his. If she doesn’t have to listen to Rita and Larry arguing, she’s in. Plus it means she doesn’t have to work on that puzzle with all gray pieces that have no edges or corners. Rita is pissed at Larry for stabbing her in the back, but he says she was a shitty leader, giving orders, handing out gold stars, it was all a misguided vanity play. He reminds her that when she returned from the past, she treated them all like strangers and he still feels that way. Plus he’s trying to keep Keeg from separating from him because that’s all he has left. That cuts Rita deeply, telling him that being team leader was all she had left and now thanks to him she has nothing.
When Jane and Vic get to their destination to meet his contact, Jane asks him why he’s so hot to do this. To be team leader? Everyone made it quite clear how they felt about that, several times. So is he going to save the world and what, go backpacking in Europe? Vic keeps saying he’s going to leave them but he always finds a reason to stay. Vic asks her how Kay is doing and tells her they all met her a few months ago and she asked him to record an inteview like the ones Niles used to do. Jane needs to see it.
Cliff and Rouge follow zombie Darren to .. his farm? Cliff is surprised he can still understand zombie-speak (luckily we get subtitles), and Darren grunts that he knew when he became a zombie he would have to eat human brains, but as an Agent of Normalcy he couldn’t allow himself to do that so he revoked his zombi-ism. Can he do that, Rouge ponders. Now he works the land, tending the farm, far from tempting brains. But he knew this day would come and he asks Cliff to kill him. Cliff says he came to fight, not perform some weird mercy killing. Darren asks him to please tend to the heirloom tomatoes when he’s gone. Cliff has no idea what to do so Rouge pulls off his helmet and Darren immediately smells Cliff’s brain, turning ravenous and attacking Cliff, forcing him to do what he came to do — kill the zombie. And as his hand smashes into Darren’s skull he realizes he can feel the cold blood. He lost his oven mitt as they tussled, but the mission is complete and they can go home. Butt-pocalypse averted. Right?
Vic and Jane finally meet their contact, the Butthunter who a year earlier rounded up all of the escaped butts. And he finally got the last one, which was difficult because it didn’t seem like the others, like it was sick or dead, but not quite. He turns over the large cooler to Vic and Jane, thinking they are undercover agents from the Ant Farm. When they get back to the manor, Cliff and Rouge return and announce they have stopped the Butt-pocalypse by killing Darren, and Vic and Jane say they have stopped the Butt-pocalypse because they have the zombie butt on ice. Rogue is pleased, saying that her style of leadership is working since everyone has the freedom to do what they want. (She doesn’t really mean that.) She asks Cliff to dispose of the zombie butt but when he opens the cooler and sees the butt face, it makes him a little sad. He also feels bad about feeling Darren’s cold blood but … his eyes were warm. Rogue watches Cliff from the stairs, but she seems just as conflicted as he is. Jane watches the video of Kay, talking about how the others in The Underground were supposed to protect her, but maybe they need a new purpose now. Vic asks her what Jane’s purpose is, and Kay says that if anyone can put the pieces together, it’s Jane.
New episodes of Doom Patrol premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.
What did you think of the season premiere? Sound off in the comments below!
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