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2012’s Arrow started a flood of superhero shows on network television and streaming alike that brought us hits like Daredevil, long-running stories like The Flash, and ambitious experiments like Crisis on Infinite Earths. One of the weirdest and best shows from that time, though, was DC’s Doom Patrol. With the show having just wrapped its fourth and final season, we now say goodbye to Cliff, Larry, Rita, Jane, and the other weirdos they met along the way.
The premise of Doom Patrol bears a striking resemblance to that of the X-Men at the surface level: A wise old man in a wheelchair lives in a mansion with a bunch of frustrated but superpowered individuals who have to come together as a team–despite their trauma and drama–to rise to the call of heroism in a world that hates them. But the similarities end there. Where X-Men claims to be a story about people living with their differences in the real world, though, it’s ultimately about extremely hot people having interpersonal drama, mostly with sexy powers. Truly different characters like Beast were vastly outnumbered by those like Cyclops, Jean Grey, Gambit, and Rogue.
Doom Patrol didn’t ask its characters to be sexy or even to be heroes, but it still loved them and wanted the best for them. Despite venturing deeper into weirdness than most shows are willing to even tease, Doom Patrol loved its characters first and foremost.
The story began very much through the eyes of the Patrol’s newest member, Cliff Steele, or Robotman. After dying in a horrific car crash, Cliff wakes up in a robotic body that would make even RoboCop feel fortunate for how good he has it. Cliff is shaped like a person, but the truth is that he’s little more than a brain in a metal can, operating his prosthetic body without being able to feel what he’s doing. Doom Patrol isn’t terribly interested in what Cliff can do with that body; it’s far more curious about the difficulties, both physical and mental, that come with it. In early episodes, Cliff is written less like a superhero robot and more like a paraplegic in physical therapy. We endure his frustration along with him as he tries to get his foot to go up even a step. We struggle with him as he tries to remember his life, and to even say words.
Rita Farr might seem to have it better off. She was a movie star in the 1950s and still looks every bit the part 70 years later, having not aged a day since. In another story, Rita is like the Fantastic Four’s Mr. Fantastic or DC’s Plastic Man. Instead, though, she’s a bundle of anxiety and shame. The smallest embarrassment causes her to literally melt into a liquid puddle, and her shame essentially turns her into a shut-in, watching her own movies and eating entire (cooked) chickens. Doom Patrol’s members aren’t gifted–they’re cursed. Their powers are burdens to them that remind them daily of the pain and shame they live with.
But around every turn, Doom Patrol tells us that being weird is okay, and normalcy is the real curse. One of the organizations they fight is the Bureau of Normalcy, a sort of clandestine government organization with the goal of containing and eliminating weirdness from the world. If there’s anything that stands as a thesis, it’s this: Let the weirdos be weird. While many of the conflicts that the Patrol ends up in do have potentially dangerous consequences, at least as many of them are just about allowing and encouraging weirdos to be weird. Whether it’s a surrealist avant-garde art collective trying to get people to face their trauma or letting a little girl–half-human, half neanderthal–grow up, so many of the stories and character arcs are about letting people be true to themselves and not trying to protect them from it.
One of the most touching moments comes in the first season episode ‘Danny Patrol.’ The characters, in their search for the missing Dr. Niles Caulder, stumble across a small-town main street crowded with drag queens, street performers, body modders, and all kinds of other people. The street itself is a sentient, genderqueer being named Danny, who prides itself in being able to protect weird people from the weirdness-crushing cruelty everywhere else.
The very concept of it all is difficult for Larry Trainor. He received his gift-curse when he was an aeronautical test pilot, flying experimental vehicles into space for the government. Larry had a wife and kids at home, but he was also a gay man living in the 1960s, and society had drilled the idea that he was a monster so deeply into his soul that when the Negative Spirit entered his body during one of those flights–burning his skin and making him highly radioactive in the process–it felt to him like reality finally reflecting the feelings he held in his heart. To see all these people being so proudly weird is painful for him, but he tries hard to accept it. The musical number that caps off the episode, which has him singing Kelly Clarkson’s People Like Us with the Maura Lee Karupt (say it aloud!), is at first a joyful expression of self-love, but it turns heartbreaking when we find out that Larry never stood up and hopped on stage–that it was all a fantasy in his mind. Larry’s last scene in the show has him embracing his adopted son Keeg and his first romantic partner in over 70 years, Mr. 104.
Doom Patrol was full of joyful moments like these, of characters with painful trauma supporting and fighting for each other: of people who aren’t heroes realizing that their enemies aren’t enemies, either. There were enemies, to be sure, like the reality-twisting Mr. Nobody, who was as terrible as he was funny, but the show was always more interested in the idea that people of all kinds deserve to exist and be loved, and that a satisfying and happy ending doesn’t mean overcoming a villain. For Cliff, his battle was acceptance, first in accepting his new body and then later accepting his Parkinson’s diagnosis. When he did, he found happiness in meeting his grandson and peace in knowing his grandson would have a long, happy life.
There are too many weird moments for any list to capture. There’s a cockroach that wants to take over the world. A being known as The Shadowy Mr. Evans summons Sex Ghosts, and only the XXX-Men can stop them. The Patrol fights were-butts, zombie were-butts, and eventually singing-dancing zombie were-butts. And how can we forget Danny the Street, the sentient genderqueer street that popped up throughout the series? The show is weird and silly, but it’s the love for its characters that made it so much fun to watch over its four unlikely seasons.
