5 ‘Doom Patrol’ Burning Questions Answered Ahead of Season 2
Crazy. Bonkers. Insane. There truly aren’t enough adjectives to describe the off-the-wall Doom Patrol finale, which featured a giant talking cockroach named Ezekiel, karaoke to Chumbawamba’s ’90s hit “Tubthumping” and an epic showdown to save Danny the Street, an actual thinking and feeling boulevard.
The World’s Strangest Heroes, formerly fractured, reunited at the behest of their imperfect leader, Dr. Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton), and jumped into a mystical painting to save both Danny and Niles’s daughter Dorothy (whom he had never mentioned before) from the diabolical Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk). Our heads are still spinning from all of the action, so we asked executive producer Jeremy Carver to help us understand what we just saw — and tease what could happen in Season 2.
The Doom Patrol did help Niles — but have they forgiven him for his betrayal?
Jeremy Carver: Mr. Nobody forced Niles to confess to the Doom Patrol that he’d secretly orchestrated each of their respective tragedies that made them superhuman in order to further his research into immortality. They were understandably outraged (to put it mildly), and their anger won’t assuage any time soon. “It’s raw and unresolved right now,” Carver explains. “They all have to come to grips with [those feelings] in Season 2.” And because Dorothy was the reason Niles experimented with immortality in the first place, Carver says the girl plays an “integral” role in moving forward.
Speaking of Dorothy, how does she fit in with the team?
Not seamlessly, for sure. The members of the Doom Patrol all have parental baggage or “issues with children they have or had,” says Carver. “Now they have a child in their midst who is very demanding because of superpowers that she has that are somewhat uncontrollable.” The girl — her role had yet to be cast at press time — “is both lovable and a deadly force,” continues Carver. “They and Niles are going to have to figure out a way to keep the world safe from Dorothy.”
Will the Doom Patrol return to their normal sizes?
In the finale, most of the team — with the exception of Negative Man (Matthew Zuk) — shrunk themselves in order to fit in the painting and defeat Mr. Nobody. But once they returned to our world (by going inside Ezekiel the cockroach), they didn’t return to their normal statures. So will their diminutive size be an issue in Season 2? In short, yes. “It’s a Doom Patrol pickle that feels very Doom Patrol to us,” Carver laughs.
Have we seen the last of Mr. Nobody and mercenary, the Beard Hunter (Tommy Snider)?
Mr. Nobody was a huge threat in the series’ first 15 episodes, and as we saw in the last moments of the finale, he and his henchman aren’t vanquished. “Mr. Nobody was hoisted by his own petard and he remains trapped in this painting with the Beard Hunter,” says Carver, who hints that viewers may see them again: “I would assume that we could.”
Did Danny the Street make it out of the painting?
Yep! And “sharp-eyed viewers” can spot him in the last moments of the episode, according to Carver. “If they look extremely close, they’ll see in just what form he’s made it out.”
Doom Patrol, Season 2, 2020, DC Universe
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