Warning! SPOILERS for Doom Patrol season 3 episode 5
In Doom Patrol season 3 episode 5, “Dada Patrol,” the series showed the present-day Sisterhood of Dada and paired each character with a Doom Patrol member that they served as a mirror to. These pairs are likely to be important to the Doom Patrol’s upcoming character arcs, as each hero is opposite a member from whom they are not as different as they may initially appear. The Sisterhood of Dada is an adaptation of the original comic antagonists, the Brotherhood of Dada, originally formed by Mr. Nobody, the Doom Patrol season 1 villain.
When Larry Trainor (Matthew Zuk, Matt Bomer), Robotman (Riley Shanahan, Brendan Fraser), Cyborg (Jovian Wade), and Jane (Diane Guerrero) go in search of the Sisterhood of Dada, they find themselves trapped inside Shelley Byron’s (Wynn Everett) mind. While Larry and Sleepwalk (Anita Kalathara) are left to their own devices, the other three Doom Patrol members each find themselves in one-on-one conversations with a member of the Sisterhood of Dada. Those conversations can be infuriating or confusing to the Doom Patrol. However, they are amicable until Laura De Mille (Michelle Gomez) is mentioned.
Rather than attacking any of the Doom Patrol, the Sisterhood of Dada seem intrigued by the team. Their questions seek to understand and to help the team to progress. While each member of the Sisterhood of Dada shares important traits with their counterparts, they are significantly at peace with their own identities in a way that the heroes are not. This means that Doom Patrol has set up an intriguing opportunity for the Sisterhood of Dada to drive the character’s storytelling while occupying a strange anti-hero space. All of this is emphasized by the questions that the Sisterhood of Dada ask their Doom Patrol opposites.
Jane and Shelley Byron (The Fog)
In the comics, The Fog is a man named Byron Shelley who can turn into a deadly mist and absorb the minds of anyone he touches. Those minds are trapped forever but stay conscious and have a negative effect on his mental health with their voices often interrupting him when he tries to speak. When Byron absorbs Jane, the number of new voices suddenly introduced by her many alters is too much for him as she fights with the other minds he has already absorbed, causing him to vomit her back out.
In Doom Patrol, the show has taken The Fog and made them a woman named Shelley Byron instead. Her powers remain much the same, but she has developed new ways to control and understand them. She reflects on a time when she had too many minds vying for control within her own and how she was able to silence them by creating a new mental space, the sweet shop, where she can exist away from them and maintain her sanity.
This issue draws obvious comparisons to Jane’s current Doom Patrol dilemma as she struggles against the other alters’ desires to keep Kay subdued to avoid becoming obsolete. Shelley Byron appears to offer Jane help with taking control of her body and shutting out the other alters. While Shelley has been set up as a villain, her apparent drive to see Jane fulfilled and the similarity of her powers allows her to open up whole new opportunities for how Jane’s story can progress. While Jane is still struggling with her growing desires to live independently of the others, Shelley Byron has had decades more to master her powers and come to terms with who she is as a person. Shelley drives all of this messaging home during Doom Patrol with her repeated questioning of Jane about her identity asking, “Who are you?” -- and making her confront herself as an individual being, rather than part of a multitude.
Cyborg and Frenzy
The comics version of Frenzy (Miles Mussenden), like most of the first iteration of the Brotherhood of Dada, only appears in a few comics. Little of Lloyd Jefferson’s origin is made clear, but it appears that he was born with bicycle parts attached to him and was abandoned by his mother at an early age. After his powers manifested to show he could create disastrous cyclones and weaponize his mechanical parts, Mr. Nobody invited him to join the Brotherhood of Dada.
While Frenzy’s question to Cyborg of “why are you?” might seem obtuse at first, it strikes to the heart of Cyborg’s current character arc. By showing each of the answers that the characters give, Doom Patrol is able to highlight Frenzy’s comfort with his own identity and purpose in the world, while Cyborg is likely to recite the intentions that drove his father to create him. By combining the two characters who are both part machine and both face being black in America from very different perspectives, the show is able to highlight that Cyborg struggles with his own wants and desires and is fundamentally a tool of oppression in many instances. Going forward, the challenge that Frenzy offers to Cyborg’s sense of his own sense of purpose promises to make him reevaluate how he sees himself serving a similar, yet deeper purpose to the conversation with his mother in Doom Patrol season 3 episode 3, “Dead Patrol.”
Robotman and The Quiz
Without providing the backstory to the powers of The Quiz (Gina Hiraizumi), the similarities between her and Robotman might be less obvious. In the Doom Patrol comics, The Quiz has any superpower she can think of that has not already been thought of by somebody else. This means that she becomes decreasingly powerful over time as more powers are thought of, causing her to fear that she will one day become entirely powerless. This, contrasted with Robotman’s struggles with a possible health problem related to his human brain, makes the two make a natural pairing.
All of the Doom Patrol are struggling through their own traumas and issues of identity and purpose, and they have made only incremental progress in those struggles throughout the first two seasons of the show. Laura De Mille is already providing new character progression for Rita Farr (April Bowlby) and the reappearance of Paul Trainor promises to push Larry’s story further. By setting up three characters who mimic the issues of the rest of the team while accepting themselves for who they are, Doom Patrol season 3 promises to see fresh resolutions for the team’s long-standing character arcs.
Doom Patrol releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO Max.
