"Therapy Patrol" – Doom Patrol S01E07

Admiral Whiskers for the win!

What starts as a relatively "normal" TV episode goes into deeply weird territory by the end. And by "deeply weird", I mean Grant Morrison-style weird. If you haven't read Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, find it online or in trade paperback. Without it, it's difficult to understand just how deeply strange Morrison is, and how much the TV show manages to capture that. That's why I now have faith in the creative team to pull off Danny the Street: a sentient teleporting cross-dressing street. Tune in next week to see how they manage that.

"Therapy Patrol" starts off relatively normal. We get overlapping back-and-forth narratives mixing up time and space, and overlaying the two. So we see Vic knocking on Rita's door. Then her exploits. Then Larry hearing Vic knock on Rita's door before knocking on Larry's door. Then Larry's exploits. Then the episode from Vic's point of view, and a few glimpses of Jane. And then Jane, and a few glimpses of Vic. And so on.

The Rita stuff mostly features Rita in the present, as she struggles with retaining her human form. Which involves a blob-trip to the furnace room when she falls through a duct. Congratulations to April Bowlby, who during a lot of this plays a human head attached to a giant blob of protoplasm.

The Larry stuff is the Negative Spirit putting him through memory-flashbacks, mostly of his time with his lover, John, back in the 50s.

Vic discovers removing the restrictions Silas put on him last episode lets him access his dating app. He discovers most of the people that want to talk to him are superhero groupies. The one relatively "normal" person is disgusted when Vic sends her a photo. There's also a cute bit where Grid, Vic's processor, informs him how many times he uses the phrase "Booya!" and that it's enough to become a catchphrase.

Jane doesn't do a whole lot of anything. We get a brief bit with her as a baby and her creepy daddy watching her. Then it's mostly Hammer Head, Jane's "anger" personality, having a lot of anger issues. I'm a bit tired of Hammer Head. She's 1/64th of Jane's personae. Yes, Jane has a lot of anger so Hammer Head manifests a lot. It's now seven episodes in and we get it.

Cliff is dealing with the revelation his old pit crew chief Bump is raising his daughter Clara since Cliff "died". After hopping in the school bus, Cliff drives to Florida to confront Bump. Just as we're wondering how Cliff got from Ohio to Florida in ten seconds of screen time, we find out Cliff is hallucinating the whole thing. He's actually imagining Vic as Bump, Jane as Clara, and Doom Manor as Bump's trailer/home.

Then the humor really starts. First everyone shows up for a team meeting that turns into group therapy. Cliff reveals what he's been going through, and then Rita, Larry, and Vic speak up. Jane isn't interested in speaking up, and Cliff gets increasingly antsy and chatty. When Jane walks out, Cliff loses it, sees everyone as Bump, attacks them, goes into convulsions, collapses, and a mouse climbs out of his mouth.

Then, in the weirdest flashback of all, we go back six episodes and see Cliff accidentally drive over a mother mouse. Its child, Admiral Whiskers, sees his mother die. Nobody (Alan Tudyk) narratively contacts the mouse and informs it, it has to turn sorrow into vengeance. Admiral Whiskers eventually crawls into Cliff's body and sabotages it so he hallucinates, gets antsy, and collapses. The end.

Basically we get a flashback/personality-development episode. But framed in a story of a mouse seeking vengeance for the death of its mother, thanks to Nobody's machinations. As such, "Therapy Patrol" has its cake and eats it, too. It does flashbacks and personality development, but it ends up mocking much of the format by dismissing some of it at the end as the machinations of a mouse. That, and having the sabotaged Cliff going on and on about the benefits of group therapy, and how they have to share.

"Therapy Patrol" is a bit slow in the middle as we get the personality development bits. The parts with Rita as "Woman/Blob Hear Me Roar" are funny. The Larry and Jane parts are a bit slow. The Vic part is... okay. The flashback to Vic dislocating his shoulder and his mother hiding it from Silas doesn't seem to do anything. The parts where he tries his hand at dating are more informative: the character is definitely more interesting in the present than the past.

Then we get Brendan Fraser as Cliff, and things go into overdrive. Mostly because of Fraser: his performance as the constantly swearing Cliff works to undermine superhero TV shows in general. You don't hear Arrow or Daredevil or Nightwing cursing constantly. Heck, you don't hear Cliff's fellow teammates cursing constantly. So Fraser's voicework as Cliff sets him apart from anyone else I can think of, at least in the TV shows I watch and hear.

Riley Shanahan as Cliff's robot body is also excellent. He gets a lot to do this episode, attacking people and having convulsions, and doing a weird parody of a group therapist as he applauds and motions and gestures.

Finally we get Admiral Whiskers and Nobody. Tudyk does his usually sinister narrator voice with a bit of humor tossed in as he has a one-way conversation with a mouse. The mouse is no Ezekiel the Cockroach, mostly because it doesn't get any voice much less Curtis Armstrong's. But the concept of a mouse seeking vengeance and manipulated into becoming a supervillain of sorts is just so... Morrison-ish it's hard to adequately describe. Although I don't recall Morrison ever using a mouse supervillain in the comics. But I haven't read everything he's done. I can safely say it's like no superhero live-action TV show I've ever seen. Not even The Tick.

While the mouse supervillain is more a creative team creation like the farting donkey universe (as opposed to Willoughby and Danny the Street, which are Morrison creations), it deserves to be a Morrison creation. Now if the creative team would bring in the Brotherhood of Dada--particularly The Quiz, who has every power you've never thought of--I'll be a happy camper.

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