Doom Patrol “Cult Patrol”

My God…they adapted one of Grant Morrison’s stories…

I mean, like, they really did take one of the many, many crazy, bizarre, and weird stories Grant Morrison wrote, and made an episode of the show out of it.

Yes, it’s time for the Cult of the Unwritten Book, a group that is looking to summon the Decreator and cause the end of everything.  And the only thing that stands between the end of everything and, um, the continuation of everything is Willoughby Kipling, an eccentric magician that Morrison created when DC told him they didn’t want John Constantine mixing with their superhero universe even though the Doom Patrol was practically Vertigo at the time.  Kipling here is played by longtime TV scenery chewer Mark Sheppard, and I’m always glad to see that guy.

Anyway, Kipling knows the Unwritten Book is ready to be read, and that will summon the Decreator and see the paragraph above this one to see what that means.  He’ll need to go get help from Dr. Caulder!

He’s still missing!

He’ll have to get help from the moody freaks staying in Caulder’s house!  He has to.  There are nuns welding giant razor blades after him.  The only thing to do is find the book and kill him.

Yes, the book is a kid who just turned 18, and for his 18th birthday, his dad told him in a panic that young Elliot wasn’t there to save the world but to destroy it, and then his mom killed his dad with a slit to the throat.  Elliot figures he should make a run for it.  And, good news, it seems killing kids isn’t something that Cliff or Jane are down with, so there may be a second option of sewing up the portal to Nurnheim, a city of the dead or some such.  What is the portal?  It looks like stigmata on a priest in Spain, except it spews light instead of blood.  And yes, that priest is terrified.

Of course, there could be an endless stream of weird assassins, like guys made of dead skin and unsent letters (admittedly, that was rather cool), but the Patrol has a plan.  One of Jane’s personalities can knit, so she’ll seal the portal with Cliff as back-up despite the fact that at least one of Jane’s personalities thinks Cliff is a monster right now.  Larry will protect the kid, Vic and Willoughby will argue science over magic to defend Stately Caulder Manor, and Rita will…actually offer moral support to the kid when Larry goes night-night again.  Yeah, the Negative Spirit is trying to tell him something, like how the Chief talked to it before without Larry’s knowledge.

So, what goes wrong?  Something always goes wrong.  Vic and Willoughby use a sonic canon and a flaming sword on assassins for as long as they can before the occult detective shoves Vic into a nastier bunch to slow them down and maybe kill the kid.  Rita stops him, but those razor nuns get to the kid instead.

And over in Nurnheim, a place that looks like it came out of a 1920s German horror movie, Cliff and Jane are monkeyed around with by the rulers of the realm, Eliot’s parents…or his mom and his dad’s corpse.  It ain’t pretty.

Point is, a giant eyeball opens up in the sky because the Decreator is here.  And that’s just terrible.

For the characters on the show.  I was having a damn good time.