Who says the Tinman lacks a heart?
Volume 1
- The ending of the original Arnold Drake run, where the Doom Patrol chooses to sacrifice themselves in an explosion to save a little fishing town, who name themselves after the four heroes that saved their lives. Doubles as a moment of awesome, which makes it all the more bittersweet.
Volume 2
- Dan, the fiancé of Eleanor Poole confronting Rebis, since the Negative Spirit absorbed her to give birth to them. The implication that Mercurius just absorbed her because she was the nearest black woman makes it all the more random and senseless:Dan: Really Eleanor, I can't handle this... I... It's... You come here covered in bandages? And you're half-man, half-woman and you just expect me to... just to... It's sick. This thing is so sick. [...] We were gonna get married. Two months time. You're taking me apart Eleanor...Rebis: Rebis, not Eleanor.Dan: Listen, just go, will you? Please... just... Oh God, Eleanor. I don't... What am I going to do?* Hugs Rebis *Rebis: Don't get blood on the coat. (For context, Dan had cut his hand with a glass)
- Dolores' death, and the fact she spent 20 years searching for Flex only to be brainwashed by the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. and used as bait to capture him. This causes Flex Mentallo to enter a brief Heroic BSoD.
- Issue #47 shows another example of Rebis' confused psyche. When Josh Clay informs hir of his mother's passing hir simply replies "Which one?", and rationalises it as her having been an old woman so it was pretty logical. Joshua is understandably taken back by hir coldness and leaves hir, but when he has gone Rebis muses to hirself in a string of voice this:Rebis: I wish I'd seen her.
- The Reveal that the Chief had organised the accidents that turned the OG team into freaks. To see a paternalistic figure and team mentor be revealed to be a Manipulative Bastard who never cared for them is probably the saddest, harshest moment in the entire series.
- This is preceeded by him killing Joshua, one of the nicest and most levelheaded members of the team. The Candlemaker later revives him just to kill him again.
- A brief one, but when we see Will Magnus again during the Grand Finale we are told he's been trying to rebuild the Metal Men, because he misses them that much.
- Grant Morrison ends their run with a classic one in "The Empire Of Chairs". Kay (Crazy Jane) Challis is subjected to electro-shock therapy which makes her just an ordinary person. She goes about an ordinary little life, getting more and more sad, until she leaves to - we think - kill herself. However, in a lovely pastiche of "It's A Wonderful Life", as she is apparently about to do so... Cliff Steele shows up at her side, and leads her - now smiling - off onto Danny The Street, who promptly dematerializes out of the series. Sad to happy tear-jerker in the blink of an eye!
- Pollack's run begins showing Dorothy being shunned by her whole neighbourhood and only relying on her imaginary friends as company. One of them is a fake Cliff Steele, one that will never leave her.
- The fake Cliff Steele in issue #74 is a huge Woobie. For context, a company called S.U.R.E. managed to get his hands on Robotman's cybernetic brain from the finale of the Morrison run, and created both a videogame with Cliff's memories and personal Robotman clones that believe themselves to be the real deal but who can be controlled with a remote. Some kids buy a Robotman who they then proceed to torture by making him believe he is going crazy. When he later learns he is just a copy of a copy of Cliff's brain he just loses it.
- When Robotman and Coagula share a body, Cliff briefly sees the bullying Kate suffered when she first began crossdressing when she was still biologically a boy, and her classmates laughed at her. It's enough for Cliff, who had been Innocently Insensitive towards her, to apologise.
- The truth behind why Dorothy Spinner's menstrual cycle affects her powers so much. Originally, Morrison implied it traumatized her because no one told her about puberty and she felt she had to kill her imaginary friends because she was too old for them. Rachel Pollack went back and revealed it was a lot worse than how Morrison put it. One day while Dorothy was still living in Kansas, she took a discarded dress out of the dumpster behind a dance school in her town and used it to make up a special dance in the woods (inspired by a book she read about tribal ceremonies in Africa). But some local boys saw what Dorothy was doing and started bullying her, throwing rocks at her until they saw blood was flowing down her legs. They started saying she was a "Monkey on the rag" and Dorothy ran home in tears, where her mother scolded her and said to Dorothy's face she should've aborted her. And then John Arcudi's run made this worse when it turned out Mrs. Spinner was Dorothy's adopted mother.
- The Bittersweet Ending of the second volume in which Niles and Charlie sacrifice themselves to close the Tree of Life. It's a pretty sad way to finish the book.
Volume 3
- Ava's suicide attempt, and how she survives by pure chance (The Eldritch Abomination inside her didn't want to die and jumped out of her as a self-preservation act, destroying everything around her and breaking the rope she was going to hang herself with).
- The revelation in John Arcudi's run that Dorothy Spinner became comatose and Kate Godwin died off-screen, with the conclusion of that run having Robotman request that Dorothy be Taken Off Life Support.
- In the flashback sequence explaining what became of Dorothy Spinner and Kate Godwin in the interim between Rachel Pollack and John Arcudi's respective runs, Dorothy shoots down the suggestion of reuniting with her birth mother on the grounds that she gave her away. The suggestion that Dorothy is convinced she was given up for adoption because her birth mother never wanted her is downright painful and adds another poignant layer to how troubled and dysphoric Dorothy feels about herself.
Other
- Robotman's story in DC's Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun is incredibly tragic. He's haunted by the ghosts of deceased Doom Patrol members, and while things are bad enough with Dorothy and Kate being among the first specters he sees, it's also shown that Ted Bruder has died since his coma during Keith Giffen's run, Nudge calls Cliff out for never going after Grunt when he ran off with her body and one of the ghosts is of Cliff himself, who has his death cited as occurring when the Candlemaker destroyed his original brain back near the end of Grant Morrison's run, which raises the question on whether Robotman is still Cliff Steele at this point. After his attempts at calling still-living teammates for assistance do little to help him, Cliff turns to John Constantine for help and asks how to get rid of the ghosts haunting him. Constantine is shown to have his own collection of ghosts haunting him and basically tells Cliff he has to live with being haunted.
