Many have grown weary of the meandering pacing of DC Universe’s Doom Patrol and you can add the show’s villain/narrator Mr. Nobody to the list of dissatisfied viewers. The god who was Eric Morden broke the fourth wall in episode 13, “Flex Patrol,” to voice his annoyance with how long it was taking the series to get to the inevitable showdown between himself and the show’s protagonists.
Based on the classic DC Comics series about a group of misfit superfolk who use their powers to protect a world that loathes them, the Doom Patrol show has perfectly captured the weird horror of its source material. Previous episodes have recreated such strange ideas from the comics as a gender-queer, world-traveling sentient street and an assassin devoted to ridding the world of facial hair. Yet all of these tributes to the comics have distracted away from the series main story - rescuing Dr. Niles Caulder from the clutches of the reality-warping Mr. Nobody.
One subplot of episode 13, “Flex Patrol” is a prime example of the show’s slow-boiling storylines, finally revealing the dark secret of Rita “Elasti-Woman” Farr. In previous episodes, Rita has been seen visibly freezing up whenever she sees a baby carriage or a mother with a baby. This prompted speculation that Rita may have abandoned her own child. The mystery of Rita’s secret was built upon in the episode “Doom Patrol Patrol,” where Rita was tormented with a psychically-induced nightmare of a woman named Mary slitting her wrists while crying that she was “too scared to say no.”
“Flex Patrol” finally explains all of this, after Rita pours her heart out to an old man, who related how he abandoned his family years earlier to Rita, while they are in a hospital waiting room. Rita, in turn, reveals that while she had too much self-respect in her prime to sleep with producers for acting roles, she was not above setting up “dates” with other young aspiring actresses she knew in order to score brownie points with prospective employers. One of these “dates” ended with a young actress named Mary being impregnated and Mary’s apparent suicide shortly after she begged Rita for help just after giving birth. Rita never knew what happened to the baby and the guilt she felt over the whole thing prompted her belief that the incident that turned her into an amorphous, shape-shifting blob was a punishment for her greed and callousness.
Relieving herself of her burden seems to give Rita the resolve she needs to go on with her life and to embrace the hero’s role that has been offered to her. As she leaves the hospital, the old man is revealed to be a disguised Mr. Nobody, who cheers that Rita’s storyline has finally been resolved after weeks of teasing. He then curses as the show transitions back to Doom Manor, muttering “Oh God! There’s more? Ugh!”
Mr. Nobody shows up again at the proper ending of the “Flex Patrol,” just as the rest of the residents of Doom Manor have agreed with Rita that they are ready to fight back against Mr. Nobody. Bedecked in Doom Patrol merchandise (including a mug and blanket), Mr. Nobody voices his relief that “…after 13 pointless, meandering episodes of character-driven shlock, we can finally get to the show that everyone wanted to see in the first place. A superhero show!” Given Mr. Nobody’s powers and the series so far, however, it seems unlikely that the final two episodes of Doom Patrol will be anything at all like a typical superhero show.
