Salvation Patrol: How ‘Doom Patrol’ Is Saving Superhero Shows

What does it mean to be human?

Is it our bodies? Our brains? Our tools? Or is it merely our comprehension of the concept of mortality and the fact that every single one of us will one day return to dust, our bones decaying in the ground while a cold and uncaring cosmos just kind of rides things out until the inevitable heat death of the universe?

This ponderance of humanity – alongside a persistent reflection on the notions of self-acceptance and redemption – starkly underpins the first season of Doom Patrol, a story that centres on a team of five super-science rejects, long shielded from the outside world, trying to find their missing mentor as they learn to love themselves, and each other, on the road to becoming a team.

If this sounds like fairly standard origin-story stuff, don’t be fooled: like the series it’s based on, Doom Patrol is anything but a cookie-cutter superhero series. Notably, it is also weird. Super weird. Gloriously, unrepentantly, why-the-fuck-not, ‘let’s have a farting donkey create a portal that swallows an entire town by the end of episode one’ WEIRD.

And, oh, yeah: it is easily the best superhero show of the 21st century to date.

I know, I know; admittedly, I have a history of being pretty forgiving or otherwise overly ebullient about comic book-based TV and film because of my excessively lenient, arguably unhinged fandom. I’ll own that. But, please, believe me when I say that Doom Patrol, regardless of its genesis, is simply phenomenal prestige viewing in every regard, right down to the opening credits. Within, there’s action, there’s humour, there’s pathos, there’s Brendan Fraser. What more do you want? A sentient, non-binary street? Because good news, bucko: you better believe there’s a sentient, non-binary street in this series (their name is Danny, and they are wonderful).

There’s also a talking, evangelical cockroach. And a vengeful rat living out their own miniature Shakespearean tragedy. Neither of these things is ever really explained, and I don’t want them to be. Even friggin’ Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man shows up. And that doesn’t even come close to covering the full scope of glorious insanity crammed into these first 15 episodes.

But let’s get back to the humans (or… well, close enough) of Doom Patrol, and the terrible, disfiguring accidents that brought them here.

Fraser, a most welcome onscreen sight after an all-too-long-and-tragic derailing of his career, stars as Cliff Steele, a fast-living, fast-driving asshole of a NASCAR champion partying and philandering his way through the 1980s. His days of excess are brought to a mangled halt by an ostensibly fatal crash. His brain being the only part of him able to be salvaged, Steele awakens to find himself – or his consciousness, at any rate – trapped in an archaic metal body, no longer Cliff but now the abomination known as Robotman.

He comes to in a dilapidated, once-grand manor belonging to kindly(?) old super-scientist Dr Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton), affectionately known as the Chief. Evidently, the Chief is a man of mystery and complexity, but has developed something of a habit of taking in lost and broken souls over the years, as Cliff quickly discovers, with a group of fellow outcasts using the house to hide from the world. Joining Steele in the recuperative purgatory of the mansion are:

• Rita Farr (April Bowlby), aka Elasti-Woman, a long-forgotten star from the golden age of Hollywood, who has hidden from society since being exposed to a mystery substance that turned her true visage into an amorphous, oozing blob;
• Larry Trainor (Matt Bomer), aka Negative Man, a mid-century Air Force pilot with a dark past, whose career-making test flight goes tragically wrong when his plane collides with an unidentified energy entity, fusing the two and leaving Trainor a radioactive, reclusive mess, inside and out; and
• Jane (Diane Guerrero), aka Crazy Jane, a runaway with 64 distinct personalities, each one possessing their own superpower, from electricity manipulation to super-strength and even the ability to turn her spoken words into literal weapons.

Rounding out the core outfit is ring-in/de facto leader Vic Stone (Joivan Wade), aka Cyborg, the sole member of the team with whom viewers will likely already be familiar, whether through various Teen Titans properties or Ray Fisher’s seemingly ill-fated turn as the character in the DCEU.

Stone enters the picture initially seeking Caulder’s help with separating – emotionally, professionally and technologically – from his overbearing father, Silas (Phil Morris). The elder Stone, an old acquaintance of the Chief’s and an acclaimed super-scientist in his own right, saved Vic’s life following a horrific lab explosion that also killed the boy’s mother – and turned him into Detroit’s premier crime-fighting man-machine in the process (eat me, RoboCop) – but is, unfortunately, also a giant piece of shit.

When he arrives where the town of Cloverton, Ohio, used to be (see: aforementioned interdimensional flatulent ass) to investigate the town’s disappearance, he discovers the Chief has vanished into a vortex – along with the local populace and infrastructure – and allies himself with the reluctant residents of Doom Manor to track down the missing doctor.

Thus begins a season-long arc of discovery, both of the self and of secrets that threaten to derail the fledgling team before they ever remotely get it together. In addition to uncovering the mystery of what happened to the Chief, and the Nazi-science origins of fourth wall-breaking, nigh-omnipotent villain/narrator Mr Nobody (Alan Tudyk, as scene-stealing as ever), the season is primarily invested in following the heroes as they come to terms with what they are – who they are – in ways that are both heartening and utterly devastating, often in quick succession.

The emotional whiplash this show is capable of inflicting cannot be understated. There is a particular sequence in episode eight, Danny Patrol, that rope-a-dopes so hard I felt like I’d physically been punched in the gut when my brain allowed me to clock what had just happened (side note: that entire episode is outstanding, in a field of exceptionally high-quality episodes). But there is similar unexpected depth strewn across this show, from Rita’s persistent guilt over, well, everything she did during her time in the spotlight, and Cliff’s clumsy-but-kind-hearted attempts to befriend the (understandably) standoffish Jane, to Larry’s internal war with himself and the entity that lives inside him, and Cyborg’s questions over how much of himself is even left and whether he can even trust his own “memories”.

Still, in the same given hour that Doom Patrol will, for example, make you watch a robotic man try feebly to make a sandwich, which he cannot eat, with heavy, metal hands that were clearly never intended for such delicate work, for someone who will only ever return his friendship one sixty-fourth of the time (if that)… in the same hour, it will also introduce you to absurdity of the highest order, whether in the form of the Bureau of Normalcy (a shifty government outfit devoted to eradicating the weird and abnormal), the metahuman mercenary known as the Beard Hunter (whose strange attraction to, and appetite for, facial hair gives him a heightened tracking ability), or the beloved ‘Hero of the Beach’, Flex Mentallo (whose muscle-manipulation powers enable him to impact the world and people around him just by, well, flexing). None of which even begins to mention the literary doomsday cult based in a hidden city only accessible through a Spanish priest’s stigmata. That’s just the kind of show that Doom Patrol is. To paraphrase Rita Farr herself: it’s beautiful; it’s horrible; it’s spectacular.

Thankfully, the series has already been renewed for a second run past the post – so you can settle in for the ride, secure in the knowledge that your investment won’t be for nought – but, even if it hadn’t, I’d be here telling you the exact same thing I’m telling you now: watch Doom Patrol. Revel in its unabashed weirdness. Just freakin’ go with it. I all but guarantee you will not regret it.

Doom Patrol airs on Foxtel at 8.30pm Thursdays, and is available to stream via Foxtel Now.