Doom Patrol “Nostalgia Patrol”

Alright, we have a bad guy.

Sort of.

See, Rita has been in a deep funk since the others rejected her as team leader, but that’s beside the point.  She may get cheered up by a career retrospective at the arthouse theater in Cloverton.  No one else is around when the flier appears on Doom Manor’s doorstep, so she’ll go alone.

By the by, nice reminders this episode that Rita has an incredibly fast metabolism by showing the sheer volume of the food she eats even when she is completely alone.  A normal show might show a woman in a funk eating one pint of ice cream.  Rita eats whole turkeys and multiple bags of popcorn.

Oh, but the career retrospective is a trap!  Maybe if Rita remembered that the people of Cloverton hate the Doom Patrol–especially Rita–she might not have fallen for Dr. Janus’s viscous trap.  Apparently, Dr. Janus can put Rita into her old movies, and while the romantic melodrama doesn’t seem too bad, the horror movie and the sci-fi flick are a different story, even if Cliff thinks Rita was in Star Trek.

Oh, yeah, the others got sucked in too.  Everyone except for Vic, who was learning you can’t always go home again, and Laura, since she managed to escape the gas that maybe smelled like Nutella.  Laura tries to do some research using the Chief’s old files.  There is one on Dr. Janus!  Good!  The section on how to defeat her is completely redacted!  Bad!

Anyway, a trip into Rita’s movies is an interesting turn of events.  Larry is a fan and knows all of her old work, but he’s separated from the others, only hanging out with a Mister 104, named for the 104th element.  Which element is that?  Beats me, and I am far too lazy to look it up.  Cliff and Jane end up hiding from a creepy kid and discuss the possibilities of Jane having something like a romantic life in the most Cliff-ish way possible.

Then they all find Rita in the sci-fi movie that is most assuredly not Star Trek, only for the others to be captured while Dr. Janus makes her pitch:  she wants Rita to emote so she can collect her feelings or something for the mysterious Immortus.  And Mister 104 is working with Dr. Janus.

Boo!

Now, normally you would think the Doom Patrol could just bust out of the cell Janus stuck them in in the middle of a lava lake, but it looks like they don’t have their powers.  Keeg, Larry’s Negative Baby, does show up and does…something.  It may be helping.  It looks like it might.  Keeg does enter Mister 104, but by then, Rita has done enough emoting and Janus left, pledging loyalty to Immortus or something.  It may not matter.  The Doom Patrol is out of that weird hallucination.

Except Rita is in a coma.

That’s probably not good.