Posted in: Max, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: dc comics, doom patrol, max, michelle gomez, superhero fatigue

Doom Patrol Musical Ep: Dark Comedic Heartbreaker Clears "Buffy" Bar

The final season's musical episode of Doom Patrol gleefully uses the happy-clappy nature of the genre to make our heroes even more miserable.

Max's Doom Patrol is the most subversive superhero show now, more than The Boys, which it beat to the screen by over a year. It's the show that defies "superhero fatigue" by constantly being surprising and unpredictable and dives deep into the "superheroes as screwups" trope that overturns the notion that superheroes should be good and noble all the time. Members of the Doom Patrol are all "walking wounded" individuals with deep trauma and dysfunctions. The series treats superheroes as a metaphor for physical and mental handicaps. These folks are a mess and deeply unhappy and may never be happy. So, of course, it has to have a musical episode!

Not everyone likes musicals. Some people hate them. You could say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has introduced a scourge on genre television because every show just has to have a musical episode now. It's like living in the Worst Timeline or the Fifth Ring of Hell, which might be the same thing. Is it the showrunners' way of torturing temperamental actors? Anyway, at least Doom Patrol might have the best musical episode of any show now because it expertly weaves the musical into the overall arc of the series better than most of the other shows' musical episodes since Buffy.

Doom Patrol's Musical Only Makes The Heroes More Miserable

"Immortimas Patrol" sees the Doom Patrol wake up to a world controlled by the season's Big Bad Immortus, who has taken the form of a narcissistic amateur musical theatre actress named Isabel Feathers. She has transformed the world into a happy-clappy, saccharine musical where everyone sings about how happy their lives are under Immortus. The Doom Patrol are all happy! They no longer have the powers that afflict or cripple their lives, and their issues are all resolved… except the Doom Patrol aren't meant to be happy. It doesn't take long for Madame Mirage (Michelle Gomez) to sense instinctively that this is a remade reality by their new archenemy, and she proceeds to show them the truth of who they were, making them miserable again. So they have to confront Immortus, or Isabel, even though they have no idea how they could possibly fight, let alone defeat her. Basically, they're screwed.

In other shows, solving the musical and restoring the world usually resolves the plot, but in this episode of Doom Patrol, it makes things worse. A whole lot worse. The ongoing theme of the series has always been the heroes (if you can call them that) making the worst decisions for the most selfish reasons and then being forced to make the right decisions because there are no other choices left and saving the day by the skin of their teeth, and still having to live with their own issues. Being a superhero doesn't make them better people; it only makes them more themselves as they continue to mess up themselves and their world in search of something "better." And somehow, Michelle Gomez saying – and singing – "fuck" a lot is very funny.

Doom Patrol is streaming on MAX.

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