Doom Patrol “Dead Patrol”

So, the Deadboy Detectives…interesting choice for guest stars as they aren’t generally supporting characters in an iteration of Doom Patrol to the best of my knowledge, but more associated with The Sandman‘s universe.

Oh, I’m still glad to see them.  That means the team can stay together and we don’t need to change the name of the series to Larry Patrol.

That’s a really good thing because Larry doesn’t take the deaths of his friends very well.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact they were all just dumped on the porch in cheap shipping crates.  Cardboard boxes and packing peanuts are not cool, dude.  Granted, Larry’s idea on what to do with the bodies–wrap them in his own bandages and wait for the ground to thaw to bury them–isn’t a whole lot better.  And in sentences I never thought I would write for $200, it is fortunate Dorothy came home to be the voice of reason.

Mostly because Danny the Ambulance dropped her off, and he knows where to go to find the Deadboy Detectives, namely ghosts Charles and Edwin along with living medium (and lone girl) Crystal.  Since both Larry and Dorothy have dealt with death, they can see the ghosts.  But Larry already saw Rita’s face in some pancake batter, so things are already weird.

See, somewhere in the afterlife, Rita, Cliff, Vic, and Jane are going across a river in Charon’s boat.  Cliff’s idea is to bumrush the cloaked figure he calls a “Jawa,” but then he, Jane, and Vic all pass out for some reason.  Rita, blaming herself for everything that’s happening, decides to play along before the Watchers show up.  Those would be short pig/lizard dudes in cloaks who secure the group to chains suspended from the ceiling with lots of other dead folks.   That’s a rather depressing afterlife, but it turns out that’s just the waiting room for processing.

That’s what the ghosts say.  They even know the universal safe word to banish copulating ghosts, so these guys know their stuff.  Apparently, the dead Doom Patrol are just, uh, being processed so they can maybe come back if someone alive can go get them before the processing part is over.

That someone would be Larry.  Crystal knocks his soul out of his body by hitting him over the back of the head with a shovel.

I really love this show sometimes.

OK, so, Rita is awake down there, and some guy she doesn’t know rescues her.  The others are meeting dead loved ones.  That’s Kay’s grandma for Kay and Jane, Vic’s mom for him, and Cliff’s dad for the clunking robot with issues with authority figures.  It’s rewarding for two-thirds of them.  Cliff, no, he just mad when his dad shoots a pegasus and says something about his close connection to Cliff’s daughter Clara that happened after Cliff appeared to die the first time.  However, before these three can move on to whatever is next, they each find a personal object that Dorothy picked out to pull them back to the chain room.

Because if the four of them need to go back to the land of the living, it would make perfect sense for them all to have reasons, and it would very much be in-character for Cliff to go back out of spite to prove his old man wrong.

By then, Larry and the dead boys have found the others, and even though the Watchers are rather easy to deal with from the looks of things, the Night Nurse is something else entirely, someone who can shrug off any hits and may be a bit more vicious than she appears to be.  Timely intervention from the man Rita doesn’t recognize allows them to get away with only a shower of Night Nurse vomit to hit them.

Having characters cheer “It’s just vomit!” is another reason why I love this show.

So, everyone is alive again, Dorothy is joining the Deadboy Detectives for a period, and that mystery woman from the driller machine is apparently living in the house now with no idea who she is.  That makes two of us.

Yeah, I love this show.