Doom Patrol season 3, episode 9 review: Evil Patrol

“It was a lie… all of it.” Spoilers for Doom Patrol season 3, episode 9 follow.

The Doom Patrol is back and the eternal flagellation is over and, in the aftermath, Laura de Mille once again makes contact with the Brotherhood of Evil in the present day.

As such, Rita begins to make a plan to take down Laura and the Brotherhood of Evil with her.

Here’s what went down in Doom Patrol season 3, episode 9.

The Brotherhood of Evil

As the world gets back to normal after the eternal flagellation (which I guess is just being moved on from incredibly quickly because the Sisterhood of Dada are barely even mentioned in this episode), Rita continues on her quest of revenge against Laura de Mille. But revenge simply doesn’t feel right for Rita and this episode does a quick, simple job of displaying that in the brief scene between her and Laura. Rita has ample opportunity to kill Laura, like she says that she wants to, but never actually takes the chance until Laura calls her out on it. This season has a lot of issues with its storytelling, but this scene is absolutely not one of them. It shows us something while telling us something in a way that is completely believable.

After Laura gets away though, she goes and tries to reconnect with the Brotherhood of Evil, aka The Brain and Monsieur Mallah, and they’re still up to their old, evil ways. Just kidding, they live in a retirement community in, of course, Florida, which is honestly pretty funny given what the characters are. Nevertheless, once Laura manages to make contact with them once again, they immediately go back to their evil ways and kidnap Cliff so that Brain can put his into Cliff’s body. It’s honestly pretty predictable, but still makes for a relatively entertaining final scene of the episode.

As for Rita trying to plan out how to get her revenge on Laura? Things keep falling apart. All of Jane’s personalities and powers are gone, leaving only Kaye and Jane left. Vic is no longer Cyborg. Larry is trying to be a father to an alien larva. And Cliff, well he’s got Parkinson’s. Nothing is going right for her and it’s probably the best character work of the episode seeing her just spiral as the episode continues on.

Senses

What is that reason for Larry trying to father an alien larva though? Yeah, there’s still no real explanation as to what it is, even though it’s probably an evolution of the negative spirit. Right now, it’s just weird for the sake of being weird and, again, that’s been a massive problem for most of the season. It’s simply being weird for no purpose rather than being weird to push the characters forward, story forward, or for humor’s sake. The larva is none of the above even though this episode is trying to desperately to make it seem like it’s giving Larry character development.

As for Vic, the beginning of this episode is basically rehashing every conversation he’s had with his father for the entire season. There’s absolutely nothing new in it. The performances by Jovian Wade and Phil Morris are excellent, but there is nothing new here and that is frustrating.

Cliff though, he gets a sudden visit from Clara, so that she can talk with him about his Parkinson’s medications. Unlike Vic and his dad, this is a nice change of pace by forcing Cliff to face his problems head-on with his daughter trying, at least one more time, to help him through them. However, the episode decides to throw that away by making Clara a way for Laura to infiltrate the manor (in a way that is definitely not how the episode sets it up) leading to a dumb fight scene. It’s disappointing.

Again, despite several good scenes and moments, Doom Patrol season 3 has yet another incredibly weak episode, which is all the more disappointing coming off the back of last week’s.

Doom Patrol season 3 releases new episodes on HBO Max on Thursdays.

What did you think of Doom Patrol season 3, episode 9? Have you been enjoying Doom Patrol‘s third season? Let us know in the comments below!