Doom Patrol “Hope Patrol”

Wait, the season’s halfway point is here already? And there’s a hiatus? And I don’t know when this delightfully weird show is coming back?

Bummer. Also, not surprising.

Yeah, I would love to know when Doom Patrol is coming back to finish off the season and the series. For all I know, they’re doing some last-minute sort of work to give the show a proper ending. I’m largely fine with that. Quite frankly, I’m a bit surprised this weird and wonderful show lasted as long as it did. It’s not every show where I can say, with total honesty, that I have no idea when and where the series is going at any given moment and how that’s a good thing.

Oh, I don’t know when Titans is coming back either, but, yeah. Nothing I said up there really applies to Titans anyway.

Besides, if this episode isn’t basically a prime example of what Doom Patrol does best, I don’t know what is. Larry was kidnapped by the Scissormen, and there are some characters I never thought I’d see in live action, and he finally finds out what Keeg’s whole problem is: basically, Keeg saw from Future Keeg that he might have to kill Larry to save the universe. That means Larry might voluntarily give up his longevity.

Still not sure why Cliff has longevity himself, but here I am. I would think the fact that Cliff has Parkinson’s would mean his longevity is kind of a moot point. Heck, he even talks to the now middle-aged Jane about how the idea that you’re gonna die kinda sucks. I mean, Cliff was the one member of the group who didn’t need a mystical plot device to keep himself from aging since he’s just a brain in a robot. And he’s not a very good hero either. When he’s not talking to his oven-mitted hand that he was saving to use his newfound sense of touch on his grandson, he’s leaving the freezer door open and letting the frozen zombie were-butt thaw out and get loose.

The fact that the were-butts were more than just a single one-off joke is yet another sign of why this show works as well as it does.

It also means that well-made plans meant to set-up massive superhero battles never work as Vic and his friend Derek manage to create a killer robot to fight the Scissormen, but it literally flies apart before anything can happen because Vic and Derek got themselves captured. And since Cliff and Jane don’t seem like the types to fight alone, well…I guess that’s that!

And since the Doom Patrol can never stop being their own worst enemy, it turns out that the head of the Immortus cult is one Wally Sage, a guy Rouge once condemned to being a living weapon for the Ant Farm, and he didn’t take it very well. It was upsetting enough to get Rita to blob out, and she hasn’t done that in a while. But it also wouldn’t be Doom Patrol if it didn’t have Rita and Rouge sneaking into the Ant Farm to look around in the first place now that they’ve both made personal growth to be better people and better friends.

But that’s where things stand now. The Immortus cult has most of the Doom Patrol’s longevity, and something tells me Cliff won’t be able to hold off on all that for very long. I mean, he did leave that freeze door open. No wonder Willoughby is so depressed.

Man, I am gonna miss this show even as I think it’s not a completely terrible thing that it’s coming to a close.

But now I need something for Fridays, and Netflix did bring back Vikings: Vahalla.