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Pitching woo at DOOM PATROL

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Doom Patrol got me through* the pandemic — along with all the other things that got me through the pandemic. Roll20. Pumpkin enzyme face masks. Ten years’ worth of whiskey. “Downtime” for iOS. But yeah. Doom Patrol.

*it’s not over

It is a curative for what ails. It is my go-to answer for the group chats, re: what to do when one is feeling unready. “Run a bath. Take two Dooms Patrol. Call me in the morning.”

It is not escapism. Er, not really. Whatever the fuck I was doing with the Arrowverse in Pandemic Year One — that was escapism. That was like eating Kraft Dinner every night. (Nothing wrong with that.) Doom Patrol, though, is all about vibing with some truly miserable superfolks in their truly miserable supermansion, and watching them make slow — and I mean incrementally, excruciatingly, nerve-janglingly slow — progress towards opening up to themselves, and (even more slowly) to each other. Like, I’m two episodes away from the end of Season 3 and I’d say barely half of the core cast is now timidly seeking relief from their only fixable problems (how they treat themselves), having given up entirely on their unfixable ones (everything else, like how one of them’s a robot, and one of them’s a mummy, and one of them’s a cyborg). Oh, and Jane hugged Cliff one time, and then regretted it.

It’s revelatory.

It’s the vibing that’s bringing me back over and over again. The sense of the thing. The weird level of emotional nuance on a show about a mummy and a cyborg and a robot. (There is also a clayface and an ape girl, and of course a woman with DID whose dozens of personalities each has a superpower.)

I’m not exactly sure how the fuck this show works. After I’d finished seasons 1 and 2 and while waiting for season 3, I re-read the Grant Morrison run of the comic — all three vols this time; I tend to think I’d never read vol. 3 before — to reorient myself in the adaptation. Crazy Jane’s on the show, and Dorothy Spinner, so I figured, sure, they’re probably doing a loose Morrison adaptation, right? (It had been a while since I’d read it.)

Nope. I honestly don’t know what the writing team at Doom Patrol would say their process is, but if they told me it was dreamwork based on reading a random Doom Patrol issue before bed every night for a year (the comic started in 1963, there’s a lot of them), I’d believe it. A lot of the pieces are there, but they turn up on the show in the same way that your unsconscious mind repurposes some trivial detail from your day into a big bad in your dreams, or vice versa. The gadzooks visual energy of the ’80s comics is almost entirely suppressed by (what I assume to be) a relatively modest budget, in favour of ground-level reworkings of Morrison’s sky-high conceptual premises in most episodes.

Except when it isn’t, like in the cartoon fantasyland with puppets that I watched last night (“Subconscious Patrol”), which also happened to contain, in my estimation, the actual most heartbreaking performance moment in Brendan Fraser’s entire career.

Hoss Patrol

This show made me fall in love with Brendan Fraser. Not “all over again” — I was never in love with him before. Now I am. I was a bit too old to see The Mummy as something other than a half-passable Raiders knockoff, and I never saw Encino Man. But I recall reading that GQ interview a few years ago — I read it again last night — and as I mentioned on twitter this week, I can’t stop thinking about this, which is not something Brendan Fraser has actually said or validated in any way, but feels like a big-G “Goals” to me.

Fuck, man. I turned 45 last year, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “the back half,” and a couple things have become clear to me:

1/ Yeah, it really is a goddamn shame you can’t put your mature brain in your young body, cuz being the person I am now with no real external physicality that reflects the joy within, sucks; and

2/ it almost doesn’t matter, because the sense of self-awareness and centredness of being, is actually better.

In a lot of ways Doom Patrol is about being in a state of dialogue with yourself, with your own shit and shittiness. Last night’s instalment, “Subconscious Patrol,” was a more-than-usually-explicit example of this, being the one where each character’s subconscious self manifested in the real world, and their real-world selves went down to their subconsciousnesses. And then because TV is TV — and TV is wonderful — those bifurcated selves ended up in a pillow fort together, and had some shit out with themselves.

Those dualities, those dialogues, were also made sound by the fact that three of the Doom Patrol principals are performed by multiple actors, and have substantially divergent “selves” from “bodies.” Jane is played nominally by Diane Guerrero with an assist from Skye Roberts as her child-self (and a dozen other actresses as unconscious personae within). Larry Trainor has the body of Matthew Zuk and the voice (sometimes face) of Matt Bomer; Larry also (usually) has an alien being living inside him. And our boy Brendan is the voice of Cliff Steele while Riley Shanahan plays his robot body, a rusty metal prison in which only the original Cliff Steele’s relatively tiny brain remains.

Except, body-Brendan turns up a lot throughout the series in various flashbacks, and in “Subconscious Patrol,” he also got to play full scenes against his robo-self (for which, again, he supplies the voice). This was, somehow, more wildly delightful than any number of split-screen performances, given that technically, Robot Man talking to Cliff is not actually very hard to do. I credit this largely to Fraser’s performance, which is first of all so complete as a voice piece that it never seems out of sync with Shanahan’s physicality; and, second, is so vulnerable — and utterly egoless — when he’s playing pre-robotic Cliff.

Cliff has a huge, toxic ego… but Fraser is bringing every fibre of his life as the man he is now to play him. This is a man who’s been in dialogue with himself. It’s aspirationally wonderful.

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