Doom Patrol Ep. #9 "Jane Patrol" Discussion Thread: Spoiler Zone! 🚨

[Neopoleon]

I’m seeing a lot of confusion here regarding the abuse. Makes sense. It’s a difficult topic.

I’m a 40 year old male. I was abused in childhood from as early as I can remember. I have Major Depressive Disorder, anxiety disorders, and PTSD (literally a nightmare of its own).

The suggestion that Jane’s origin is a melodramatic tool to “get us to care about her” is… uninformed.

Depending on whom you believe, roughly 1/3rd to 1/5th of women (in the U.S.) have been sexually abused. Think about that. Your chances of meeting a woman who survived childhood sexual abuse in the U.S. might be as many as 1 in 3. That could mean your grandmothers, mother, sisters, aunts, cousins, friends, and so many more. It’s not a joke, and most of these women won’t come forward for help because the system fails them.

I was curious about this. I don’t trust anecdotal evidence, and I don’t mean to suggest what I’m saying here is absolutely correct. Social issues tend to be complex, and there’s also a lot of subjective reporting. That said, when I was in my mid-20s, I began asking many of the women I knew, from different age groups, whether they’d been abused.

Your jaw will hit the floor. You won’t blink for an hour after hearing someone’s story. It’s hard to square the world around us with the reality that it’s nothing like it appears.

I was at a party where I asked this question of a couple women. It attracted others. Before long, I was surrounded by people who had either been abused or knew someone who had.

Doom Patrol, on the other hand, didn’t fail these women. I wish everybody could see this episode. I, like others here, was worried the show would take the imagery of abuse too far. Instead, by using the storytelling tools at their disposal, the brilliant people behind this show communicated the horror. Through lighting, acting, the right effects, and the right dialogue, we knew what godawful events would follow.

This episode wasn’t just a brilliant way to explore the Underground (YOU try to imagine how you’d portray multiple personalities in a concrete way); it also brought attention to pandemic abuse NOBODY wants to talk about.

I say well done.

Oh, and I like all the episodes Doom Patrol is easily one of the best shows/things/creative endeavors ever.

[Neopoleon]

Regarding the seemingly antagonistic-but-loving relationship between Cliff and Jane: their love is familial. The notion that it was ever going to be a romance seems strange, though it’s been mentioned here.

The paternal link is obvious. So, then, why is Jane so “angry” all the time?

Jane learned at a very early age that the people closest to you are capable of anything. That creates trust issues.

Jane’s father also taught her that love, affection, compliments, etc. are things men use to get what they want. No matter how terrible.

So what happens when she meets someone who makes for a good paternal figure (I’m obviously talking about Cliff)? She accepts him. And she rejects him. She can’t trust him.

Love and friendship and so on are all threats to Jane. Typically, when someone loves you, you feel loved. When Jane recognizes someone is trying to show her love, she fights it because she doesn’t want to be abused. Her childhood wired her that way.

These are all obviously assumptions. I’m pulling from my own pool of memories. In my house, the words “I love you” weren’t spoken in loving situations.

[LPCustom76]

I mentioned the romantic feelings mainly based on the Karen personality telling Cliff multiple times he doesn’t get it plus Karen is the love spell/Rom com personality. I also said I might be reading to much into it as I very well could be worrying to much about who was telling Cliff you don’t get it than I am about everything we’ve been presented.

[Milla_D_Mac]

Honestly who is to say she only has to like cliff one way or the other. Remember she shares a body with 63 other personalities. Maybe that is also why jane is confused she feels two different emotions with cliff. Her trust in men hasbeen shattered but look at karen and doug it is clear many personalities can converge in emotional gridlock. It does feel like at this stage though the only clear thing between jane and cliff is that they care for each other whatever that overall may be.

Plus remember in cult Patrol cliff constantly denies that he thinks jane is his daughter but that he just wants them to be two freaks happy with each other.

[dc2]

It was a bit scary and dark. It was OK but not my favorite. Maybe this series isn’t for us. It’s just that every episode presents some kind of moral directive serious undertone, some kind of social statement. Kind of like Star Trek but more twisted.

[iwjgamer25.96581]

I liked some parts of this episode more than the rest. It was super cool seeing so many personalities in person (even though they missed Sylvia and Katy), but the rest of the episode felt way too dark and depressing.
On a lighter note, did anyone else notice that someone must’ve gotten rid of Cliff’s robot junk in between now and episode one? When Black Annis is checking to see if Cliff is a robot, she taps his crotch and there’s nothing there even though Hammerhead clearly grabbed something on Cliff’s crotch which he confirmed was his junk in episode one. I dunno, it was just weird to me.

[biff_pow]

Great comments, @Neopoleon. Thank you for sharing your insights.

[joshnjericho]

Jane didn’t even know why she was so angry and lost to begin with. Her mind repressed the traumatic event that she was unable to cope with as a child and it split in order to protect her from the pain. The personas all guard her from the repressed space within. I mean, Jane isn’t even her core persona and we see that she rediscovers for herself the trauma that she was built to conceal. Her remembering her trauma and facing up what happened to her is important but likewise dangerous if done rashly, because now you have nowhere to hide. No “safe space”. The difference now is that Jane isn’t alone, and the real support system of a loving family, adopted even, is always stronger than than the false one that wounded her to begin with. It’s a real mental journey people go through, though exaggerated by the show. The kind of irony of it all is her inability to see that she is a hero in her own story, whether she sees it or not.

[Neopoleon]

@LPCustom76
And
@iwjgamer25.96581

One of my favorite things in any discussion is when someone changes my mind right around. A couple of you just did that.

I read your comments shorty after you guys wrote them, but was too busy to reply. I’ve been going nuts with anticipation because your comments combined make for a very strong argument.

You got me thinking about The Underground more in terms of the personalities that don’t come to the surface. The ones who have to rely on rumors and conversations to learn about… The Outerground (The Upperground? (The Merry-Go-Round?)).

I’m not good at naming things. We need a Cisco in here!

Anyway.

I’ve tried to summarize what I gleaned from your posts, and this is where I’m at now (including a summary of things we’ve already talked about, just to provide context):

• Only one personality at a time can manifest
• Jane’s “true” personality is Kay
• “Jane” is the personality that surfaces to act as a proxy/buffer for Kay
• Some personalities are chained to Jane (Jane -> Hammerhead -> Flit -> Penny -> Etc.)
• Some personalities are “free range” - they roam The Underground
• The Underground has a social scene
• The social scene is where the Surface Personalities can share info (conversations, rumors… lies)
• These conversations, rumors, and lies are part of the process of voting a personality off the island (deciding whom to send to the surface)
• The personality least afraid of a given situation is the one the others will likely try to push to the surface (or made to go by some other mechanism)

Moving from those generics and on to the episode specifically, your observations regarding how disconnected the personalities can be makes total sense. You helped me understand that, if Karen has no idea who Cliff is, then other personalities can be just as in the dark. That can lead to the occasional awkward grabbed-yer-junk moment.

For Cliff:

• He’s a simple guy going through complex psychological wackery
• He seems to have had a paternal attitude toward Jane from the start
• The moment he made a plate of sammiches with the crusts cut off, romance was out of the picture
• Before Admiral Whiskers exits Cliff’s robo-mouth, Cliff hallucinates and sees his daughter in the place of Jane

As of this episode, we can conclude that Cliff has feelings for Jane, whatever their nature. We can also conclude that those feelings are strong. And, being a simple guy (what could be more “guy”-ish than powering around an oval in the mid-80s?), Cliff understands what’s happening… but he also doesn’t. Hence the “Huh?” we hear from Cliff every so often when he gets a non-sequitur from an unexpected personality.

To put it together:

• Cliff the Simple wants a daughter
• Jane (Kay) wants a father who isn’t an offense to our entire species
• Jane is too fragmented to be able to provide Cliff or herself what she wants/needs
• Some of Jane’s personalities are okay with the non-man Cliff
• Because Jane can only be one person at a time, her range of emotional expression is limited to what the current personality can handle
• As far as we’ve seen, there might not be a single personality that could accept Cliff

From there, we have to move on to straight speculation about Jane. As is normal, the transition to TV brought with it some changes. We can only assume so much based on earlier incarnations of the DP in comic form.

My thinking, after scrambling my brain, is this:

To arrive at a true father/daughter type relationship, Kay has to find a way back to the surface. She’s the only one with the full emotional and psychological capacity to have a “normal” relationship. When it comes to her (Kay’s) thoughts and feelings as she is now, they’re fragmented through The Underground. Kay is a master of compartmentalization.

That’s a good skill if you have nowhere to go and if nobody will help. Unfortunately, in every day life, that compartmentalization results in personalities that are very one-dimensional. Like Hammerhead. Hammerhead is an enforcer. Period. She won’t show mercy or listen to your sob story. She’s the bouncer, and if she wants you gone… you’re gone.

This is gonna sound weird, but Kay is like the rug in The Big Lebowski. She’s been walked all over, violated, but also “ties the room together.” She’s the one human housing The Underground. She’s the vessel/matrix/matryoshka doll that holds her many selves.

I hope that, around the 7th season (please never take DP off the air!), Kay will find her way to the surface with Cliff’s help. I hope the two of them will bond and finally get to experience a father/daughter relationship the right way.

(Stopping to take a breath.)

In conclusion, I’d like to thank the Academy and my family and everybody who stood by me while I wrote this way-too-long reply.

Like I said, when my head gets turned around by other people’s better ideas and clearer observations, I get excited. I’ve also had too much coffee.

But…

God, I love this show.

[forevercloud3000]

An overall brilliant episode. I love the psychology embedded in this show. They are such an interesting ragtag team of emotionally disturbed people…who can’t effectively save others until they find means to understand themselves. Its such a unique perspective for a Hero drama.

Jane’s Underground is well thought out. The symbology of how memories coalesce into each other was great. I will say I just want the writing to be a tad sharper and more consistent. Same issue with TITANS. This episode had insightful moments like when cliff explains “I’m not a man” or the subtlety of sweet baby Kay revealing her dark origin…yet then undermined by weak dialogue by Jane and Cliff’s “F*** You” exchange. We get that she has a potty mouth, but at times it comes off as one dimensional and unimaginative.

Nevertheless, I am in love with the themes of this show.

[SnoutMasterD]

“JANE PATROL”…I mean, come onnnnnnnn…!! It’s like a Bergmannesque psychic teardown, baby… this episode really goes down to the well of being like nobody’s business …about sacrifice and interdependence …brilliant stuff… I have never seen a more poignant examination of the after-effects of childhood trauma…of incestual child abuse …one of those things that are really at the bottom of the bottomless pit that is hell and as a man watching , a 65 year old man with no children but a couple (unbelievably) of relationships with women who had been molested. As children, by their fathers…!!! ( what I mean is, the “no man must pass” scene and the lines of cliffie, “ I was a man. I was a different person then. A lesser person.” Just made me think of how different the impulses are and how much self-control is required when you are being driven by Normal testosteronian BS (which I’m assuming [perhaps incorrectly] mine was) and how it was at various times and places very difficult not to be run by one’s dick…how questions of personal ethics and morality came into play with disturbing regularity… now, add to that , a mind deeply disturbed by some childhood trauma of its own and have that creature grow up in a culture driven by commercial images of youth, sex and violence (the stuff that sells ) and bingo…!!! Recipe for a nightmare so devastatingly common, that I, a regular Joe Blow…have known (intimately) TWO victims of this bullshit (that one would hope only happens in the vivid imagination of a grant morrison, et.al…and that MUST BE incredibly rare in reality, right…?) Wrong…!! Holy ■■■■…!! as Robotman would say …remembering a time when he was a man with functioning genitalia…, with such conviction, “I was a lesser person” One hopes it doesn’t take complete castration to arrive at the enlightened state of our dear Cliffie (and thank you, Mr. Fraser, for making the peregrinations of this monolithic, expressionless bot so riveting and deeply human, amazing work… !). And Jane is such an extraordinarily interesting character, so masterfully portrayed by Ms. Guerrero (a favorite character from Human Target, by the way) who has made this eminently unlikeable schizophrenic, absolutely lovable…! fabulous stuff…! And Lastly (But always Firstly[sic]) to The Writer Patrol…another brilliant episode, you bastids [sick] Bravíssima…!! bravíssimo…!!! Thank You, ALL…!

[dc2]

She’s a beautiful actress, as a character a bit mean. Must be fun to get to play all the different roles. As a whole show, sometimes a bit deep for me. I just want to watch live action comics, fun and escapism, that’s it.

[Vroom]

An Ingmar Bergmann DC movie or TV show, now that’d be something to see!

[Neopoleon]

Believe it or not, there’s nothing uncommon about your having had relationships with abused women.

I wish there were, but with as many as 1/3rd of women experiencing sexual abuse at some point in their lives (primarily abuse at the hands of family), you won’t just date abused women; you’ll meet them every time you venture out to grab a coffee, get groceries, visit a restaurant, etc.

It isn’t literally one out of three, so we can’t look at a group of three women and conclude one of the must be an abuse victim. However, regardless of the distribution of the women affected, it’s still (depending on your source) as high as one in three.

Doom Patrol is amazing. You referred to the way Kay’s abuse was handled. I don’t know if they could’ve done it any better. Total agreement with you there.

I’m so, so glad they faced the issue of child abuse. And did it brilliantly, getting the horror across without our having to see it.

What I want to know now is… with that many women being abused, who are the men doing the abusing? I mean, how many are there? They must be all over the place. The nice guy selling coffee; the polite waiter; the pleasant grocer… could all be monsters.

I keep thinking this episode should be required viewing for the human race.

Great thought-provoking post!

[DC-LUCID]

Each episode of this series is written so well…beyond well. This one could have been heavy handed. Instead it was like a sledge hammer. In the best way possible. A lot of layers here. Wow. This series makes me say WTF so often. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Thanks

[msgtv]

This episode oozes with the pain Jane has had to endure. The freedom of a weird show like Doom Patrol is that it can pull off something as touching as this and still keep an edge of humor.

[SnoutMasterD]

Thanks new Bonaparte…(if only, He’d been like You…) we grokked on this one…! all the best to you and yours, Snoutma…etc…

P.S. I’ve been away for a while but just started new year with a blitzspiel of DP and was taken aback, yet again, by its brilliant conception and execution. The handling of vitally important subject matter, as in Jane Patrol and Danny Patrol, still gets me all weepy. (How is it, that I never feel more “human” than when I’m crying…? Something unavoidable, that springs from the juxtaposition of sentience and mortality…?)

Yep, this sh*t is The Real “must see TV”… hope it gets “out there”, at some point.

[SnoutMasterD]

That, and, of course…laffing…! (I bark out loud a lot, watching this show…)