​"Ezekiel Patrol" – Doom Patrol S01E15 Review

And so we come to "Ezekiel Patrol", the finale of the first season of Doom Patrol. And if you were expecting a knockdown battle... too bad. This is Doom Patrol, not Avengers. Instead we get to see our heroes eaten by a giant cockroach and/or rat.

And if that sounds weird, then welcome to Doom Patrol. The show is an odd combination of Grant Morrison's weirdness, both watered down a bit for TV and yet the weirdness they could get away with hyped up even higher. It's like the creative team trimmed away all of Morrison's eccentricities and side trips, ran it through the serialized TV machine, and came out the other end with Doom Patrol. The creative team also added characters like Rita and Vic, neither of who were members of the Morrison-era Doom Patrol, and turned Niles into a sympathetic character even though they kept the big reveal about Niles intact from the Morrison run.

Hey, I think I mentioned Grant Morrison in every one of my reviews!

And we got to hear a giant rat (via subtitles) say, "I wanna spread you like the plague, Daddy." And said rat and a giant cockroach swap spit while Alan Tudyk talks about "Rattatushy.". You won't find that on Titans or the upcoming Swamp Thing.

So how does all of this happen? First we get Niles revealing to the team they were originally just lab experiments in his quest to gain immortality to outlive his daughter and keep her safe. After that, we get a mix of flashbacks showing Niles assembling his "lab rats", and what the team is doing six months after his revelation.

There's nothing particularly shocking in the flashbacks. Rita isn't even covered, so I'm not clear if Niles engineered her transformation. We do find out Niles worked at the Ant Farm with Clay (Alimi Ballard) and set up Larry's merging with the Negative Spirit. And he worked with Silas (Phil Morris) to save Vic. As with Rita, I'm not sure if Vic was actually one of Niles' immortality experiments. Was Niles planning on using nanites to grant himself immortality? Did Niles set up Vic to get hurt (and Elinore to die) in the lab explosion? The latter seems pretty harsh, even for Niles. In an earlier scene he laments Cliff's wife Kate being killed in the accident that decapitated the race car driver. Then Niles set up the lab explosion that killed Elinore, a student and friend? That seems unlikely.

I don't think we're supposed to take it that way. The flashbacks would be shocking if Niles went ahead and deliberately killed Elinore after accidentally killing Kate. But it doesn't seem to play that way.

I'm also not sure what the Doom Patrol from "Doom Patrol Patrol" were supposed to be? Are they Niles' failed attempts at creating immortality lab rats? They don't seem to be immortal or have immortality generating powers. What's their deal?

In the present, Rita is teaching high school drama. Larry is living in her house and practicing staying conscious while he releases the Negative Spirit. Jane gets an experimental drug from Clay that lets her quiet all of the voices in her head at the cost of "dampening" herself as well. Cliff isn't doing much of anything other than providing Jane with food. How she wakes up enough to eat it, or what he does the other 23 hours a day, isn't shown. Vic is having nightmares about being operated on, and fighting cyber-crime instead of street crime.

During all of this, we also see Nobody in the White Space, celebrating his triumph but soon getting depressed that he has nowhere to go but down. Ezekiel the Cockroach (voice of Curtis Armstrong) and Admiral Whiskers the rat show up and convince Nobody to ally with them and destroy the world!

A mysterious voice singing a song brings the team back to Doom Manor. I guess the voice is Danny the Street, and Niles says Nobody & Co. have trapped Danny inside of a painting. It seems Danny was taking care of Niles' daughter who we'll eventually find out is named Dorothy. The team enter the painting and discover Ezekiel and Whiskers have usurped Nobody's doomsday plans and are running around Danny, both villains grown to giant size. A helpful newspaper reveals Flex evacuated the "Dannyzens".

Ernest, aka Beard Hunter, is singing karaoke at the Perpetual Cabaret while Nobody drinks. When the team finds them, Nobody explains he lost his powers. Whiskers swallows Cliff, Vic lures away the giant rat, Rita convinces Nobody to start using his narrative powers, Jane searches for Dorothy in what turns out to be the Escherian basement where we saw Ernest get attacked at in the end of "Hair Patrol". I still don't know how that ties into anything that has happened since. Niles' beard led Beard Hunter to Dorothy, and then a monster attacked him, so… he reformed and became a Dannyzen. But then betrayed Danny to Nobody?

Things get (more) weird and unexplained here. Larry figures he can destroy the dimensional barrier trapping Danny in the painting. Why Danny is in a painting, I don't know. The Negative Spirit flies along the dimensional barrier, weakening it (I think), and then Larry sticks his unbandaged hands in it. This after everyone convinces Ezekiel to eat them because cockroaches can survive radiation. Nobody narrates that Ezekiel and Whiskers fall in love and kiss, giving Cliff the chance to get from Whiskers' stomach, up his throat, and across their tongues to Ezekiel stomach.

In the end, everything goes boom and Danny is reduced to a brick. That last part also happened in the comics. The team tears itself out of Ezekiel when he returns to the real world, apparently killing him. Nobody and Ernest are trapped in the painting. And Niles introduces Dorothy to the team. Larry takes them into Doom Manor, and... the end.

Like I said, Doom Patrol is a wild ride. We got Willoughby Kipling, the Decreator, Mr. Nobody, Danny the Street, Jane and the Underground, the Beard Hunter, and Flex Mentallo. Which are all Morrison creations. But we also got Jeremy Carver and his own menagerie of the strange and unusual. A flatulating donkey that acts as a gateway between dimensions, a superpower-gifting Nazi named Fuchs (say it with a short "u'), a villainous rat, and a very large crocodile. Not to mention the sexual politics as Larry is rewritten as a closeted homosexual from the 60s.

The MVPs are April Bowlby as Rita, who was a character a lot more nuanced then her teammates: specifically the typically hot-tempered and cursing Cliff and Jane. And the combination of Matthew Zuk and Matt Bomer as Larry. And Alan Tudyk, who went all Joker-ish with Mr. Nobody. And Timothy Dalton as Niles, who was a lot more sympathetic than the Morrison-era Niles was.

Credit also to Diane Guerrero, Joivan Wade, and the Brendan Fraser/Riley Shanahan combination on Cliff. Guerrero had plenty to do: I just wish they had given her a lot more. We never got the "Jane" of the comics who switched between dozens of personalities. Instead we got a Crazy Jane who was Hammerhead roughly 80% of the time.

Crazy Jane being not too crazy may have been part of the creative team's attempts to make the show less weird. Ditto for characters like Willoughby Kipling (Mark Sheppard), who was a lot... less than his comic book version. Imagine a cowardly John Constantine who is even more obnoxious than either the comic book or TV versions of Constantine. That's Kipling.

There are a number of open-ended mysteries that will hopefully be answered if/when Doom Patrol is renewed for season 2. Presumably we get to find out more about Dorothy, Niles' daughter (and who is Dorothy Spinner in the comics). We never find out why Nobody hates Niles so much: hopefully that will be explained. More appearances by Danny and Willoughby would be greatly appreciated, and the creative team could explain how they know Danny. Danny is kind of immortal as long as the Perpetual Cabaret is perpetual. But what has Willoughby got to do with Niles' quest for immortality? What happened to Niles' wife, Slava, and how did they have a daughter in (presumably) 1913 who is still a teenager 106 years later?

And what did Beast Boy from Titans have to do with Niles' quest for immortality? Why did Niles take him in? Granted, the overall coordinator probably hadn't determined what Niles' big scheme was at the time. But what's the point of having a shared universe if you don't resolve these questions?

(And as an aside, aren't most of us glad we got Timothy Dalton rather than Bruno Bichir from the Titans backdoor pilot? Birchir may be a great actor, but he would have been wrong for the more "human" Niles of Doom Patrol. And probably couldn't have pulled off wearing a party hat.)

And where did Ezekiel come from, and how did he become sentient?

Finally, we never did see the team officially become the "Doom Patrol". They don't have to don costumes and fight crime. That's not what they did in the Morrison era. But we never saw them fight as a team, or even do much of anything as a team until the very end.

Overall, I look forward to a second season of Doom Patrol. As I've noted many times, I'm a fan of the Morrison era, and Jeremy Carver did well by it. What we got was a series that stands out from Titans and what we've seen in the previews of Swamp Thing. Doom Patrol is distinctive in a way that DC's Legends of Tomorrow can only dream of standing out from the other CW superhero stuff.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?