Series / Doom Patrol (2019)

We come into this world unknown, but know that we are not alone. They try and knock us down, but change is coming, it's our time now.

"Ready for a story about superheroes? Ugh. More TV superheroes, just what the world needs. Be honest, have you hung yourself yet? Or, what if I told you this was actually a story about super-zeroes? Losers, achingly pathetic meta-human goose eggs. How about it? Ready to feel better about your own miserable lives for the next hour or so? Follow me."

— Mister Nobody

Doom Patrol was a 2019 superhero series based off the classic DC Comics series Doom Patrol. It was originally created on the DC Universe streaming service and then had a Channel Hop to HBO Max.

Each member suffered horrible accidents that gave them superhuman abilities but also left them scarred and disfigured. Traumatized and downtrodden, the team found purpose through The Chief, who brought them together to investigate the weirdest phenomena in existence — and to protect Earth from what they find. Doom Patrol finds these reluctant heroes in a place they never expected to be, called to action by none other than Cyborg, who comes to them with a mission hard to refuse, but with a warning that is hard to ignore: their lives will never, ever be the same.

Doom Patrol featured the likes of Negative Man (Matt Bomer), Elasti-Woman (April Bowlby), Robotman (Brendan Fraser), Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero), and Cyborg (Joivan Wade) under the guidance of Dr. Niles Caulder, aka “The Chief” (Timothy Dalton). The team battles strange and bizarre villains, including the sinister Mister Nobody (Alan Tudyk).

While some members of the Doom Patrol appeared in Episode 4 of Titans with the same actors, to set up this show, there was some Flip-Flop of God as to whether Doom Patrol was actually in the same universe as Titans. The question was answered in the Arrowverse's Crisis on Infinite Earths, where Titans was set in Earth-9, and Doom Patrol was in Earth-21.

It premiered on February 15, 2019. The second season was streamed simultaneously on DC Universe and HBO Max in 2020, with the third season following in 2021 as an HBO Max exclusive. A fourth and final season began on December 8, 2022, and the series ended on November 9, 2023 after four seasons and 46 episodes.

A spin-off featuring characters from this series and The Sandman, Dead Boy Detectives, premiered on Netflix in 2024.

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Doom Patrol contains examples of:

A-B

• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Maura Lee Karupt in "Casey Patrol" gets the Candlemaker and Torminox's names wrong, calling the former "Candleman" and misnaming Torminox as things like "Turbotax" and "Tampax".
  • In "Fame Patrol", the Mayor of Clovertone misnames the team as the Dune Patrol before she is corrected.
• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • Larry Trainor has black hair instead of blond hair in this continuity.
  • Valentina Vostok has brown hair in this continuity when she was a blonde in the comics.
• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: The circumstances of Dorothy's first period, while also having her undergo First Period Panic as she did in the source material, are more pleasant for her here than in the comics. Rachel Pollack's run established that Dorothy was made fun of by other children for menstrually bleeding in front of them and was told to her face by her mother that she should have been aborted (which was made worse in hindsight when John Arcudi's run later revealed that Mrs. Spinner was Dorothy's adoptive mother), plus Dorothy frequently expressed self-loathing over how her menstrual cycle made it difficult to control her powers. This continuity has Dorothy experience her first period in the bathroom of a convenience store in "Dad Patrol", where the clerk is there to guide her through it and assure her that what she's experiencing is normal and a sign she's entering adulthood, in addition to no indication given that her powers are affected by menstruation.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Played With for several characters throughout:
  • Rita is subverted. When composed and in control, she is quite attractive like her original character, but when her "abilities" kick in, instead of only shrinking or growing, she visibly blobs-out into a terrifying mess.
  • Mr. Nobody is Downplayed. While still abstract and almost formless, here, he at least keeps part of a human looking face.
  • Averted with Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. In the comics, his dinosaur head is partially fused to his normal head, which is just as freakish as it sounds, but here, both heads are distinct, making him far less uncomfortable to look at.
  • Mr. 104 in this continuity is considerably better-looking than his comic book counterpart.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: Although most of their origins are intact, some things are changed:
  • Cliff Steele is still a race car driver, but now he has a wife (whom he was cheating on with the nanny) and a daughter. And the accident that turned him into Robotman happened with them in the car, crashing through a semi-truck, decapitating his wife Kate and damaged Cliff’s body beyond repair, leaving him and his daughter Clara as the only survivors of the crash.
  • Larry Trainor is still a test pilot who merged with the Negative Spirit in the upper atmosphere, but here, he also had a wife and two children...and he was cheating on his wife with another man.
  • Crazy Jane still has 64 different personalities and each personality has their own superpower, but since there was no gene bomb in this universe, her powers instead came from a drug she was injected with by the Bedlam House style mental hospital staff. The cause of her Dissociative Identity Disorder is still the same, however.
  • Rita Farr's origin is almost completely intact, except instead of being able to grow and shrink at will, Rita found that her body began to distort and melt like a blob.
  • Cyborg's accident was much more mundane than usual. Instead of being injured by an extradimensional being or invasion, he was in a lab accident after he got angry and threw volatile chemicals, which exploded.
  • Dorothy is the daughter of Nile Caulder and a cave woman, and her powers are inherited from her mother, whereas in the comics she was just a metahuman who got involved with the Doom Patrol because she witnessed them and Power Girl fighting a malevolent entity named Pythia outside her house and felt compelled to pitch in and assist them in the battle.
  • Each of their origins also happened in different decades: Rita's in The '50s, Larry's in The '60s, Jane's in The '70s, Cliff's in The '80s, and Cyborg's in the 2010s.
  • Niles Caulder in the comics was crippled by General Immortus, while this continuity reveals in the episode "Portal Patrol" that Cliff caused him to become a paraplegic through a Stable Time Loop.
• Adaptational Diversity:
  • Crazy Jane, who is white in the comics, is played by Latina actress Diane Guerrero. Season 3 also implies that the "Jane" persona is a lesbian.
  • The series makes Larry Trainor a gay man, played by Matt Bomer.
  • Torture of the SeX Men is reinterpreted as a black woman, when all members of the trio were blue-skinned men in the source material.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • Crazy Jane is included as part of the main cast from the start, when in the comics she didn't come along until Grant Morrison's run.
  • It's established that the first roster of the Doom Patrol in this continuity consisted of Mento, Celsius and Lodestone. In the comics, Mento was a Sixth Ranger of sorts who showed up sometime after Rita, Larry and Cliff were brought together as a team by the Chief, Celsius founded the second roster after the original team seemingly died and Lodestone joined the second roster shortly after the Paul Kupperberg iteration of the team got their own ongoing title.
  • Valentina Vostok is established to have been involved with the Chief and bonded with a negative spirit before Larry Trainor's accident, when in the comics she was a Distaff Counterpart to Negative Man who debuted in the second roster of the Doom Patrol that was formed by Celsius after the original team's apparent death.
  • The Sisterhood of Dada, this continuity's take on the Brotherhood of Dada, are shown to have predated the Brotherhood of Evil as well as Eric Morden's transformation into Mr. Nobody, when in the comics Mr. Nobody was the founder and leader of both rosters of the Brotherhood of Dada, and neither roster existed until long after the Brotherhood of Evil was established.
  • The Scants are encountered and defeated a good while before this continuity's version of Casey Brinke is introduced, when Gerard Way's run began with Casey Brinke being brought into the Doom Patrol and did not have the Scants show up until six issues later.
• Adaptational Friendship: The show draws heavily from Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack's runs on Doom Patrol, but uses the original core Doom Patrol lineup, with Cyborg and Crazy Jane added for Adaptational Diversity. Consequently, Rita, who in the comics was dead for several decades and didn't meet anyone from the Morrison era until John Byrne's run that infamously ignored prior continuity to start over from scratch brought her back and Infinite Crisis caused a Cosmic Retcon where the events of the previous Doom Patrol comics were restored to continuity (albeit with the implication that John Byrne's run was still canon in some form), has ties to Jane, who was introduced after her death, plus has a backstory as a former member of the Brotherhood of Dada, which again was introduced long after her death. The show also gives her a We Used to Be Friends background with Madame Rouge, who in the comics was her bitter enemy. The show also has Dorothy Spinner having close friendships with Jane and Casey Brinke, the former of whom barely interacted with her in the comics and the latter of whom wasn't introduced until Gerard Way's run, which started publication years after Dorothy was rendered comatose and subsequently killed off in John Arcudi's run as part of the comic's tradition of cleaning house for every new roster of the team.
• Adaptational Gender Identity: Danny the Street is non-binary in this continuity and uses they/them pronouns, when comics published prior to the show's production had the character addressed with male pronouns.
• Adaptational Hairstyle Change:
  • The show's interpretation of the Unwritten Book, given the name Elliott Patterson, is depicted with a full head of hair when his comic counterpart had a shaved head.
  • Joshua Clay is depicted as bald and bearded, when his comic counterpart had a full head of hair and was clean-shaven.
  • This continuity's Mr. 104 is clean-shaven, when in the comics he had a beard.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Madame Rouge in this continuity joins the Doom Patrol due to genuinely wanting to make amends for her wrongful actions, while her comic counterpart joined the team only to betray them by helping Captain Zahl kill them and remained a cold-hearted fiend right until her death in New Teen Titans.
  • This continuity's interpretation of Mr. 104 is only assisting Immortus out of desperation to get a cure for his condition and subsequently becomes a willing ally to the Doom Patrol, when his comic counterpart was little more than a Card-Carrying Villain.
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • Cliff in the comics was a hot-headed but otherwise Nice Guy Gentle Giant, and while he's still mostly this, he's a lot more prone to swearing and yelling, and his Jerk with a Heart of Gold nature is played up. Notably, he's given a backstory that makes him far more of a Byronic Hero, as he was cheating on his wife with their nanny (and got pissed when he thought she was cheating on him with his best friend), and this adultery is directly what caused the accident (and also lead to his wife's death).
  • Jane is a lot more standoffish and aggressive than she was in the comics, to the point where regular Jane and Hammerhead are sometimes hard to differentiate. Most of her personalities are a lot more prone to violent outbursts, to the point where she's almost the Token Evil Teammate.
• Adaptational Late Appearance:
  • Larry Trainor and Cliff Steele were founding members of the Doom Patrol in the comics, but here the former doesn't become Negative Man until shortly after the formation of the original Doom Patrol (who here consists of Mento, Celsius and Lodestone, all later additions to the team in the source material) and the latter didn't meet Larry or Rita until decades after their accidents. In Larry's case, his accident also happened several years after Valentina Vostok was involved with the Chief and became bonded to her own negative spirit, when Vostok in the comics was introduced as Negative Man's female successor in the team's second roster.
  • The Brotherhood of Evil and Mr. Nobody in this continuity were both predated by the Sisterhood of Dada, whose comic equivalent the Brotherhood of Dada were founded by Mr. Morden after he became Mr. Nobody, which occurred long after he was kicked out of the Brotherhood of Evil.
  • Immortus first appears in the fourth and final season, with her true identity debuting in the second season, when her comics counterpart General Immortus was notably the very first villain the Doom Patrol ever fought.
  • Immortus' underling Dr. Janus debuts in the fourth season, when her comic counterpart was also an early enemy of the Doom Patrol in the source material, being faced five issues before the team's debut comic My Greatest Adventure was rebranded as Doom Patrol volume one.
  • While Casey Brinke was already a late addition to the team in the source material due to being introduced in Gerard Way's run, this version introduces her long after the team's encounter with the Scants, when Casey's comic counterpart made her debut at the start of the Gerard Way series and the Scants didn't appear until six issues later.
  • Mr. 104 debuts in the final season when his comics counterpart was first encountered by the Doom Patrol during the original Arnold Drake run.
• Adaptational Modesty:
  • Celsius' costume in her days as a member of the original Doom Patrol covers as much as those worn by her teammates Mento and Lodestone, when in the comics her costume left her legs bare.
  • The SeX Men are depicted wearing fully concealing jumpsuits, when their comic counterparts walked around bare-chested in open jackets.
  • Valentina Vostok wears a fully-concealing spacesuit, when in the comics her uniform had a Navel-Deep Neckline even when she wasn't bandaged.
• Adaptational Mundanity: Ironically enough for an adaptation of a DC comic that's most well-known for its tendency to be bizarre and surreal, the SeX Men are depicted here as an ordinary group of people using hi-tech equipment to deal with sex ghosts, when their comic incarnations (who were minor characters in Grant Morrison's run) were bizarre-looking, blue-skinned men with lipstick marks on their foreheads, pyramid-shaped appendages on their scalps and had one member shown to survive decapitation.
• Adaptational Nationality:
  • Dorothy Spinner in the comics was American (specifically growing up in rural Kansas), while this continuity's interpretation of her is British-Canadian.
  • The Brain is traditionally French, but here speaks with a distinct American accent.
  • This continuity's Madame Rouge is Scottish instead of French.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Niles Caulder is portrayed initially as the beloved fatherly figure of the team, with hints of a more ruthless, pragmatic persona underneath, whereas his comic self was a far colder man who turned out to have been a complete sociopath. When it's revealed he was the cause of everyone's 'accidents', as in the comics, his motivation for doing so is far less selfish (motivated by a desire to protect his metahuman daughter) and he genuinely felt remorse for what he was doing.
  • Silas Stone, similarly, while still an Insufferable Genius (and in fact, is treated as if he's the darker foil to Niles), is far more aware of his son's feelings and tries to encourage and support him, while treating him less like an experiment.
  • Garguax is considerably more pleasant than the ruthless galactic conqueror he was in the comics, having no interest in doing anything evil in the present day. Even when he finally has the chance to complete his mission of killing Rita Farr, he chooses not to due to sympathizing with her trauma and seeing no reason to bother assassinating her.
• Adaptational Sexuality:
  • Larry Trainor is now gay and was cheating on his wife with another man. Larry was straight in the original comics, as he and Cliff fought each other for Rita's affections before she met and eventually fell in love with Steve Dayton, plus the beginning of Grant Morrison's run had him flirt with a female nurse shortly before he, the Negative Spirit and Eleanor Poole were merged into Rebis.
  • Edwin Paine of The Dead Boy Detectives is established to be gay and harboring an unrequited crush on his partner Charles Rowland, when in the comics Edwin was indicated to like girls in the crossover with The Books of Magic featured in issue three of Vertigo: Winter's Edge as well as the 2014 series by Toby Litt.
  • Casey Brinke and Jane are indicated to be lesbians in this continuity and even become a couple by the series finale. In the comics, Casey was bisexual (sleeping with both the male Lotion the Cat and Mr. Nobody's daughter Terry None) and Jane had romantic feelings for Cliff instead of just being his platonic friend.
• Adaptational Skimpiness:
  • Downplayed with Doctor Tyme, whose costume leaves his arms bare when it included sleeves in the source material.
  • Shadowy Mister Evans wears little aside from a bathrobe, when his comics counterpart visibly had a dress shirt, a necktie, pants and shoes underneath.
• Adaptational Ugliness:
  • Both Kipling and the Beard Hunter are more heavy-set and unkempt than their comics counterparts.
  • Zigzagged with Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, who is less buff than usual, but at least his face isn't half-melted into the side of a dinosaur's neck.
  • Red Jack in the comics had a featureless, white mask that didn't appear to have a head beneath it as his face, while in this version he wears a partial mask over an actual face that's fanged, sickly and ashen.
• Adaptational Upbringing Change: In the comics, Dorothy Spinner and Crazy Jane came from different families and were recruited independently of one another (Dorothy was recruited directly by the Doom Patrol, whereas Jane was brought to the Doom Patrol by Cliff.) In the series, Dorothy is the biological daughter of the Patrol's founder, Niles Caulder, and Jane is more or less Niles' adopted daughter, who is also unaware that he groomed her to be a replacement for Dorothy while the latter was confined. This creates a complicated relationship between Dorothy and Jane in season 2, where Dorothy is delighted at the idea of having a big sister, while Jane is torn between wanting put distance between herself and Niles but also feeling obligated to stay and protect Dorothy from him.
• Adaptation Distillation: This series is Darker and Edgier similar to Grant Morrison's iconic run on the team, yet the team itself is mostly based on the classic original roster from the '60s with the sole exception of Crazy Jane in the place of Mento as a main cast member.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Downplayed, as the name has thus far only been used in marketing, but Elasti-Girl is now Elasti-Woman, to avoid confusion with Disney-Pixar's Elastigirl. Played somewhat more straight in that this version of Rita Farr's real name is revealed to be Gertrude Cramp, with Rita Farr being her stage name.
  • Heinrich von Fuchs' comic book counterpart is Dr. Bruckner, his name being different in this continuity presumably specifically so they could call his Paraguayan theme park Fuchtopia.
  • Morris Wilson/Maura Lee Karupt is loosely based on Sergeant Washington, a minor character in Grant Morrison's run on the comic who initially appeared as a government agent in the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. arc before embracing a new life as a drag performer under the name Lovely Louisa Washington at Danny the Street's cabaret club Peeping Tom's.
  • Casey Brinke's father Richard Brinke has his surname changed to Frank, possibly implying that her mother kept her maiden name after marrying him in this continuity.
  • Mr. 104's real name in this continuity is Rama instead of John Dubrovny.
• Adaptation Origin Connection:
  • Cyborg joins the Doom Patrol on their first mission as a proper team. He had a previous connection to Niles Caulder through him being a friend of his father. In the comics, Cyborg has never had any such connection to them.
  • In this version, Dorothy Spinner is Niles Caulder's daughter, whereas in the comics, she has no familial connections to him.
  • This continuity's take on Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man got his powers using the same technology Heinrich Von Fuchs used to turn Eric Morden into Mr. Nobody, when in the comics neither Mr. Nobody nor Dr. Brucker had anything to do with Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man's origins.
• Adaptation Species Change: Dorothy was a standard metahuman in the comics; here, she's half some-kind-of-caveperson on her mother's side.
• Adapted Out:
  • Beast Boy, who was a member of the team proper in the comics. Although he was part of the team in their Titans continuity, no reference is made to him in this continuity.
  • Several other members of the Doom Patrol from the comics besides Beast Boy are completely omitted in this continuity, with Karma and Scott Fischer the only members of the Paul Kupperberg era to be left out, Larry Trainor never going through his period as Rebis from Grant Morrison's run, Lotion the Cat and Lucius Reynolds being scrapped with Casey Brinke as the sole member from Gerard Way's run to appear and no one who was added to the team during Rachel Pollack^note The Bandage People George and Marion, Charlie the Doll and Kate Godwin/Coagula, John Arcudi^note Fever, Freak, Kid Slick and Fast Forward and John Byrne's ^note Faith, Nudge, Grunt and Vortex runs even being acknowledged.
  • The Sisterhood of Dada, this continuity's interpretation of the Brotherhood of Evil, combines members from both rosters of their comic book counterpart while having no ties to Mr. Nobody in an inversion of Team Member in the Adaptation, but does not include Love Glove, Alias the Blur, The Toy or Number None.
  • There is no indication that this continuity's version of the Brotherhood of Evil ever had Warp, Plasmus, Houngan, Phobia and Trinity as members.
  • Many of Dorothy Spinner's imaginary friends from the comics are omitted, to the extent that the only ones to appear in the series that aren't created for the show are the Candlemaker and Darling Come Home.
  • Mr. and Mrs. Spinner (who were retroactively revealed to be Dorothy's adoptive parents in John Arcudi's run) are left out due to the change of Niles Caulder being Dorothy's father and Dorothy's mother being an immortal cavewoman named Slava when Dorothy's birth mother in the comics remained unidentified, plus Power Girl and Pythia are omitted in spite of the roles they played in Dorothy Spinner becoming associated with the Doom Patrol in the first place.
• The Ageless: This is explicitly a side-effect of Metahuman abilities in this setting; while some of the Doom Patrol have explicit handwaves relating to their powers (Cliff is in a robot body now, and Rita is a shapeshifter), most of them have no other explanation besides it just being a minor secondary ability they all possess. Niles discovered Slava, a still-alive cavewoman living in the mountains in the 1910s; he realized from tribal drawings that she had been around for centuries, and shortly after discovered she had metahuman powers (low-level Reality Warper able to bring to life 'imaginary' monsters) which likely led to it. He fathered a child with her that inherited her mother's abilities, and as a result is physically still a young girl, prompting him to start creating Metahumans for 'Project Immortus' in an attempt to gain similar immortality so he could protect her/the world from her.
  • The only exceptions are Mento and the original Doom Patrol, though it's implied this may be a result of the trauma Mr Nobody inflicted on their psyche causing their bodies to decay, indicating their physical health is linked to their mental state.
  • The members of the Sisterhood of Dada look physically the same between 1947 and the present day. Sachiko has "every power that no one has thought of", which means she presumably has every form of immortality that nobody has thought of.
• Age Lift:
  • Due to the fact that Comic-Book Time doesn't exist (and many of the characters' origins here occurred in different decades), all the characters are much older than their comic book counterparts, especially Rita, who was in her twenties during the 1950s.
  • This continuity's interpretation of Darren Jones is decades older than his comic counterpart, who appeared to be in his 30s at most.
  • Dorothy Spinner is established to be over 100 years old while looking physically like an 11-year-old girl before puberty eventually caught up with her after she got her first period near the end of the second season. In the comics, her age was initially unclear (with some artists drawing her in a way that she looked like an adult woman, particularly Erik Larsen in her debut during Paul Kupperberg's run and her depiction on the cover of the Vertigo Jam one-shot by Glenn Fabry), but was implied by Cliff to be a minor during Rachel Pollack's run in the 68th issue before she was subsequently confirmed to be 14 years old when the recap page of the 70th issue said so^note said recap page being omitted in the Omnibus collection of Rachel Pollack's run, plus she was most likely at least 18 when she was Taken Off Life Support at the end of John Arcudi's run, as that series indicated that the incident that led to Dorothy becoming comatose occurred four years ago.
• Alternate Continuity: It's a separate continuity from Titans, confirmed via Word of God in this article from February 2019. It and Titans are part of separate alternate universes, as per the Arrowverse crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019) giving them different Earth numbers.invoked
• Ambiguously Evil: The Chief is someone that is believed to be the Big Good of the setting as well as the beloved mentor for the team. However, the Chief has made many morally questionable decisions like lying to Cliff about his daughter being dead, allying with Mr. Nobody, and establishing an asylum that kept his former teammates in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Despite this, he usually has a justification for all of his actions.
• Apocalypse Cult: The Cult of the Unwritten Book seek the unmaking of the world, much like their comic origin.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Despite the team being made up of a brain in a robot, a woman who melts when distressed, a bandaged man with an energy being living inside of his body, and a woman with dozens of superpowered alternate personalities, the team is very skeptical of Kipling's (well-founded) doomsday assertions. Cyborg, the most normal member of the team, is ironically also the least skeptical of the group (which makes sense, since as a 'real' superhero, he's probably at least loosely acquainted with magic-using heroes).
• Argentina Is Nazi-Land: In this case, neighboring Paraguay is where Doctor Fuchs fled to after WW2.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Rita's list of examples for why the world is 'garbage': "People lie, and they hurt each other, and they wear these things on their feet called crocs."
• Ascended Extra:
  • Willoughby Kipling in this continuity is a more frequently appearing ally, to the extent that he shows up to assist the Doom Patrol in episodes outside of the series' adaptations of the Cult of the Unwritten Book and Candlemaker arcs and is featured in at least two episodes in every season. Kipling in the comics barely made any appearances aside from the two aforementioned arcs of Grant Morrison's run and never resurfaced until the Unstoppable Doom Patrol miniseries, which started publication during the live-action show's final season.
  • The Beard Hunter is used as a recurring character, when his comic counterpart was a one-shot villain in Grant Morrison's run who was killed off at the end of his only appearance.
  • Recurring character Maura Lee Karupt is loosely based on Sergeant Washington, a minor character who appeared in Grant Morrison's run near the end of the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E. arc.
• Baffled by Own Biology: In "Hope Patrol", Jane wakes up to discover that she's suddenly aged twenty years as a result of losing her longevity. As she complains to Cliff about the sudden pain in her chest, Cliff suggests that her usual diet of junk food and weed has probably given her a bad case of acid reflux.
• Big Fancy House: The Chief's house is huge, old-fashioned, and well-furnished.
• Bigger on the Inside: The albino donkey is actually a door to another dimension controlled by Mr. Nobody.
• Bilingual Dialogue: Any conversation involving Sachiko is bilingual, as her powers include subtitling her Japanese for the English speakers she converses with. (Though at one point in her initial appearance, the conversation becomes monolingually Japanese as she uses her powers to switch Cliff's language.)
• Bird-Poop Gag:
  • Cliff gets hit by bird droppings during his long walk back home in "Dumb Patrol".
  • Jane gets pooped on by one of the bird creatures unleashed at the end of "Bird Patrol".
• Bittersweet Ending: The series finale. Immortus and the Butts neutralize each other, allowing Isabel to pursue her theatrical dreams. Rita dies, and while the rest of the team initially want to travel to the afterlife to save her, she appears as a ghost and convinces them to disband the Doom Patrol and give her a proper funeral, after which her spirit is reunited with Malcolm's. Everyone else moves out of Doom Manor to pursue their own lives: Larry and Keeg find Rama and the three of them safely merge together into a sun out in space. Vic helps Deric run the robotics club as "Cyborg 2.0," living as a mentor on his own terms. Laura heads off to torch the Ant Farm and seems to be happy doing it. Kaleidoscope/K. (Jane's new, merged personality) moves into Casey's spaceship with her and the two of them finally kiss. And Cliff dies, but he does so after reuniting with his family and getting a vision of their future, thanks to a gift from Isabel.
• Bloodier and Gorier: While the comic book run it's primarily based off of could get quite gruesome, here the gore is boosted by the fact that Doom Patrol is allowed to take on (and murder) flesh and blood opponents in live action.
• Body Horror: All of the Doom Patrol in various ways: Rita can turn into a blob, Larry is horribly burned, and Cliff is a brain in a jar.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Mr. Nobody's narration does this, saying things like "The critics are going to hate this show." Borders on Deadpool territory when he directly calls out the audience in episode 2 after the Chief asks him who he's talking to:
  Mr. Nobody: Grant Morrison fans, Reddit trolls with DC Universe subscriptions, and the three new fans who stuck around after the donkey fart.
• Breather Episode: This series has a few episodes that are lighthearted compared to the show's general tone.
  • "Therapy Patrol", coming in the wake of the team finding out the horrible fates that befell the last team to try and fight Mr. Nobody, is a comparatively lighthearted episode where Cliff convinces the rest of the team to do some impromptu group therapy so that they don't have any secrets for Mr. Nobody to exploit.
  • In "Dumb Patrol", which comes in the wake of the much harder episodes "Finger Patrol" and "Space Patrol", Larry, Vic and Roni fall under the influence of a stupidity virus and Miranda tries in vain to keep them from doing anything too stupid. Meanwhile, Cliff tries to hitch-hike back to the mansion after being dumped out in space.
  • In "Casey Patrol", the series turns away from the larger subplot of a mysterious cult draining the team's life-force to catch up with what Dorothy, Danny, and the Dannyzens have been up to since we last saw them.
  • "Fame Patrol" has the team take a day off to attend a parade in their honor after the people of Cloverton mistakenly believe that they rescued missing local girl Isabel Feathers.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Mento adored Rita and was falling in love with her when he read her mind and turned away from her in disgust due to something in her past.
  • Part of Mr. Nobody's plan to torment Niles appears to be to lead the Doom Patrol to discover the skeletons in his past to drive a wedge between them.
    • Cliff lost a lot of his respect for the Chief when he discovered he was lying about his daughter being dead.
    • Crazy Jane suffers this when she finds out the Chief's contingency plan if she had proven too dangerous: to lock her in a room at the same manor as the original Doom Patrol, so that Mento would keep her under his mental control in an illusory school for the metahuman youth.
    • Ultimately, the whole Doom Patrol loses faith in Niles when they discover he was behind the accidents that made them who they are now.
• By the Power of Grayskull!: After Larry becomes able to control when the Negative Spirit is released, he does that by saying "Negative Spirit, release!".

C-D

• Canon Character All Along:
  • The tourist in "Puppet Patrol" emerges from Von Fuchs' machine in a transformed state where he has a broccoli hand, a dinosaur head and his left arm and leg being composed of rocks, revealing him to be this continuity's version of the Doom Patrol's iconic foe Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man.
  • "Cyborg Patrol" shows a long-haired, bearded prisoner of the Bureau of Normalcy who refers to himself by his cell number. It's revealed in the next episode that he's this continuity's interpretation of Flex Mentallo.
  • In "Dead Patrol", Rita meets a disfigured man in the afterlife who appears to know her, but she doesn't recognize. It's later revealed that Rita was once a member of the Sisterhood of Dada, this continuity's take on the Brotherhood of Dada, by virtue of being an amnesiac time-traveler, with the man she met in the afterlife identified as this continuity's version of Agent !, who was once her lover and had his disfigured appearance explained by establishing in "Bird Patrol" that he died while wearing a mask modeled after Rita's appearance when she partially melts while under stress.
  • The second season introduces an actress named Isabel Feathers, with season four revealing she's the live-action show's interpretation of General Immortus.
• Canon Foreigner:
  • Both Cliff and Larry are given wives and children they did not have in the comics. Larry's lover, John Bowers, as well as Cliff's daughter-in-law Mel and grandson Rory are also examples.
  • Most significant is the character of Slava, the Chief's Neanderthal lover and the mother of Dorothy, as Dorothy Spinner was not the Chief's daughter in the comics and very little information was given about her parentage aside from the John Arcudi run establishing that Mr. and Mrs. Spinner were her adoptive parents and that her biological mother was still alive, but unable to reunite with her daughter for unexplained reasons.
  • Among Dorothy's imaginary friends in the series are a giant talking spider named Herschel and a wolf/bear hybrid with antlers named Manny, both of whom were created for the TV show and do not exist in the comic books.
• Casting Gag:
  • Michelle Gomez plays another eccentric time traveler with ambiguous morality
  • Diane Guerrero is in another show with a Lemony Narrator and dramatic plot twists—though this time, it’s her character that’s named Jane.
• Clownification: Sachiko from the Sisterhood of Dada can use any power conceivable once. At one point, when the Sisterhood staged a riot, she used the power of clownification to transform an entire roomful of people into clowns.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The F-bomb gets used give or take 20 times an episode, not counting other swear words.
• Coax Them Out of the Closet:
  • Before the accident that disfigured him, Larry Trainor was a closeted test pilot whose lover John kept trying to get him to come out of the closet and leave his wife. After the accident, Larry just retreated further into the closet, only coming out decades later.
  • In "Dead Patrol", Larry twigs that Edwin Paine, one of the Dead Boy Detectives, harbors feelings for his best friend Charles Rowland, and encourages him to talk to Charles about it. Edwin is reluctant, as that simply wasn't done back when he was still alive, and since he and Charles are ghosts, it seems like a moot point.
  • In "Dada Patrol", the subtext of Shelley's interrogation of Jane about her identity is that Shelley suspects that Jane is a lesbian like her, and is encouraging her to admit that to herself.
• Coconut Superpowers:
  • Rita Farr's powers are mainly limited to stretching her limbs or partially melting. The only time she becomes gigantic like her comic counterpart is in the third season finale.
  • Cyborg spends a lot of screentime wearing a tracksuit to save money on the special effects and costuming required to bring his bionic prosthetics to life. This gets taken further in the fourth season, where Cyborg undergoes a surgical procedure to restore his humanity, providing a convenient excuse for his actor to not bother with costuming or special effects for the majority of the show's final season.
  • The episode "Vacay Patrol" has Rita melt into a blob for most of the episode, but only shows two shots of her amorphous blob form (one of which is clearly reused footage) and she is afterwards kept inside a bag the other characters carry around before she finally regains her human form.
• Coming of Age Story:
  • Season 2's Myth Arc involves Dorothy Spinner's long-delayed exit from adolescence, expressed through neatly (and sometimes blatantly) metaphorical episodes involving changing body shapes, the passage of time, menstrual pain, and sexual awakenings.
  • Season 4's "Casey Patrol" takes things a step further, with Dorothy hitting her angry teenager phase and having to learn how to deal with her new feelings in a healthy way.
• Composite Character:
  • Heinrich Von Fuchs is a mash-up of the comics' interpretation of General Immortus (being an aged man who has artificially prolonged his lifespan and is affiliated with the Brotherhood of Evil, with Immortus existing as a separate character who is female) and Dr. Bruckner (being a Nazi scientist who is responsible for Morden becoming Mr. Nobody).
  • The show's interpretation of Dorothy Spinner's imaginary friend Darling Come Home has a personality closer to Dorothy's more benign imaginary friend Pretty Miss Dot, being a kindly big sister figure to Dorothy rather than the representation of Dorothy's abusive mother her comic counterpart was.
  • The Chief takes Rhea Jones/Lodestone's role in defeating Red Jack. This is another rare example that overlaps with Decomposite Character, considering that Lodestone was previously indicated to exist in this continuity as a founding member of the original Doom Patrol.
  • In yet another example that overlaps with Decomposite Character, while Isabel Feathers/Immortus is this show's interpretation of General Immortus, the episode "Portal Patrol" has Robotman take General Immortus' role in crippling Niles Caulder by revealing him to be responsible for making the Chief a paraplegic through a Stable Time Loop.
• Concepts Are Cheap: The Bureau of Normalcy seeks to ensure that everything is normal. Exactly why they think that's necessary, and precisely who decides what is and isn't normal, is never made clear. They explicitly do include both metahumans and LGBTQIA+ individuals as valid targets, for example.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: An agent from the Bureau of Normalcy tries to torture Jane in the style of the Mr. Blonde scene from Reservoir Dogs but he never gets past the dancing.
• Crime of Passion: In "Finger Patrol", Dorothy is tasked by her father with entertaining Baby Doll, one of Jane's less mature alters. While at first, Dorothy is happy to have a sister to play with, eventually The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry kicks in, as both Dorothy and Baby Doll become convinced that Niles favors the other, and when Baby Doll traps Dorothy in a furnace and kills Manny when Dorothy summons him for protection, Dorothy snaps and summons Candlemaker, who kills Baby Doll (as well as another alter, Flaming Katy.) Afterwards, Dorothy is horrified by what she's done and flees Doom Manor, afraid that she'll hurt someone else.
• Cross-Cast Role: The Chief is played by Abi Monterey as a young boy. This can be seen as a Casting Gag because Monterey also portrays Dorothy, the Chief's daughter.
• Cursed with Awesome: Almost all the main characters are functionally immortal. They don't age, are hard to hurt/kill, and have other powers on top of that, like Super-Strength, energy blasts, or stretchy powers. Unfortunately, their powers are also the source of tremendous physical and mental pain. Rita has to constantly hold herself together or be reduced into a gelatinous blob. Larry's negative spirit disfigured him beyond recognition and actively torments him. Cliff's robot body can't feel anything, which means he doesn't even have a physical outlet (which he could escape to before his transformation) for all the emotional turmoil he's undergoing. And while they may have powers, they can barely use them properly, much less fight against the bizarre threats that are thrown their way.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: On his way back to Doom Manor in "Dumb Patrol", Cliff rants on how he intends to get even with the Chief for ejecting him from his spacecraft in the previous episode. He comes up with a plan to shoot Niles Caulder into space, find his body, rip his head off and then crap down his neckhole. When he remembers that he's a brain in a robotic body and it's therefore impossible for him to defecate, he adjusts the plan to include finding a Great Dane with giardia and have the dog accomplish the task of defecating in Caulder's neckhole.
• Darker and Edgier: Downplayed, Doom Patrol is a very dark series with swearing, sex and other mature themes being prominent throughout. There's brutal death, black comedy, and the cast is a Dysfunction Junction ensemble. It is, however, much weirder and more humorous than Titans, with a strong vein of hilariously bizarre randomness running throughout, particularly when Mr. Nobody is around.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "Jane Patrol" adapts the "Going Underground" story and follows Cliff's journey into Jane's subconscious, giving her more background.
  • "Casey Patrol" focuses on Danny, Dorothy, and Maura Lee meeting Space Case.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • The Decreator is defeated by trapping it in a staring contest with its restorative counterpart the Recreator, causing the two entities to cease existing. In the comics, the best the Doom Patrol could do was make it so that the Decreator's efforts to unmake the universe occurred at such an extremely slow pace that it was no longer an immediate threat to all existence.
  • Shadowy Mr. Evans gets killed by Jane, when his comic counterpart was merely banished after Cliff tricked him into saying the words "lottery", "sheet music", "singlehanded" and "kneecap".
  • Darren Jones gets killed by Cliff after becoming a zombie, when the worst that happened to his comics counterpart was getting fired after he was caught by his boss in drag.
• Decomposite Character:
  • Rhea Jones is shown to exist in this continuity, but has Niles Caulder take her role in defeating Red Jack by stabbing the villain with his own knife.
  • General Immortus has aspects of himself split among three characters, with the show's interpretation of the Nazi scientist who turned Mr. Morden into Mr. Nobody (named Heinrich Von Fuchs instead of Dr. Bruckner) being an extremely aged man who artificially prolonged his lifespan in addition to having ties to the Brotherhood of Evil, the show's interpretation of Immortus proper being a case of Canon Character All Along by introducing her as an actress named Isabel Feathers in the second season and having her resurface in the fourth season as an ageless Time Master after being stuck in the void between time and the fourth season establishing a Stable Time Loop where Robotman takes General Immortus' role in crippling the Chief.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Both played straight and subverted. Each character's backstory includes behavior that was anachronistic and behavior that isn't at all.
  • Rita Farr has a one-armed cameraman fired because his appearance disgusts her, although it's not clear whether it's because he's black, disabled, or both. (She ends up frighteningly disfigured herself shortly afterwards). Her Hollywood backstory includes the casting couch (this show was released during the #MeToo movement, which called attention to how little show business has changed).
  • Larry's Gayngst is considerable and he considers himself a monster akin to a murderer or paedophile. This is not an unbelievable character trait for a military man of the 1960s who has been living in isolation since then but may surprise viewers who grew up in a more accepting time period. At the same time, a large part of Larry thinking he was a monster was the misery his double-life was causing his wife and his lover, which is a common result of infidelity regardless of the genders and orientations of the parties involved.
  • Cliff's brief appearance shows him as a cheating, drunk, self-aggrandizing Manchild. It's all but stated this was lauded behavior in The '80s (though hardly uncommon in any decade).
  • In one of Jane's memories from when Kay Challis was going to school in the 60s, her (apparently Southern) school teacher portrays Abraham Lincoln as an authoritarian trying to take away farmers' rights and the Confederates as a group of heroic rebels uniting for the common good, while being oblivious to the fact she just described them rebelling against the union by forming a union and seemingly considering slavery a 'farmer's right'. It's also apparent Kay was singled out in class by the teacher while her (all-white) classmates were encouraged by the teacher to laugh at her. Tragically, a parent sexually abusing their child while the other parent turns a blind eye is as much of a problem in any time in history.
  • A flashback to Dorothy's time in a freak show before Niles found her includes one of the adult patrons telling her that he's got something long and sweet for her in his pants. Note that this was in 1927, so Dorothy would have been maybe 11 years old.
• Denser and Wackier: In comparison to Titans and Swamp Thing being entirely Earth-based, it's said their mission will take them to the weirdest and most unexpected corners of the DC Universe. The show proper bears this out, and it might be the single weirdest DC Comics show ever, with talking cockroaches, farting donkeys, and Mr. Nobody constantly Breaking the Fourth Wall to insult the show and the audience with equal abandon. And that's just from the first few episodes!
• Died in Ignorance: Niles Caulder spends the first two seasons of the show doing increasingly unethical things to try and prevent a fated battle between his young daughter Dorothy and the monstrous Candlemaker, who has vowed to battle her to determine the fate of all reality. Eventually, Niles' bad acts catch up with him and he dies just after Dorothy experiences her first period, triggering the start of the battle. Dorothy faces the Candlemaker alone... and wins, because she manages to out-think the Candlemaker and force him to surrender without violence. Niles destroyed the lives of multiple people to protect Dorothy because it never occurred to him that Dorothy might be able to protect herself.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation:
  • Heinrich Von Fuchs gets killed by Crazy Jane's Silver Tongue persona, when his comics counterpart Dr. Brucker was killed by Mr. Nobody shortly after creating the latter.
  • Red Jack still gets stabbed with his own knife, but the deed is done by the Chief instead of Rhea Jones.
  • Garguax gets killed by his servant Samuelson. In the comics, the villain died at the end of Paul Kupperberg's run after the events of Invasion! (DC Comics) when the Chief called the President for a favor and had a laser satellite obliterate Garguax's ship.
  • Charles Rowland of The Dead Boy Detectives is established to have died of hypothermia as his schoolmates stoned him while he was standing in the water, when his cause of death in the comics was being murdered by the ghosts of his school's most notorious bullies Barrow, Cheeseman and Skinner.
  • Malcolm DuPont gets killed by agents of the Bureau of Normalcy, when his comic counterpart Agent ! was shot down by government snipers.
• Disabled in the Adaptation:
  • This continuity's interpretations of Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and Joshua Clay wear glasses when they didn't in the comics.
  • Mento is presently shown to be confined to a wheelchair, when his comics counterpart was always able-bodied.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Each of the characters represents some form of severe mental illness or trauma.
  • Rita needing to constantly focus and control her mind in order to not literally melt into a pile of goo is akin to people suffering from anxiety disorders. Her previous need for constant validation and attention also implies some form of narcissism or deep-seated inferiority complex.
  • Larry and the negative being in his body are pretty much a metaphor for his image as a 'normal' straight man, and his secret, other, true self of being a gay man.
  • Cliff's wild swings from rage to depression to cheerfulness to guilt implies some sort of manic or bipolar disorder.
  • Crazy Jane has dissociative identity disorder, implied to have stemmed from sexual abuse by her father as a child.
  • Victor's relationship with his father implies some sort of mental or emotional abuse.
  • Dorothy's unusual face, lack of tact, and overly-trusting nature suggests some sort of developmental disorder.
    • Her first words in season 2 are "I know you don't like it, but it will be over quickly if you behave." While in context, she's trying to summon her beast Manny, when she later steps out of her cage after everyone else at the freak show has been slaughtered, she holds her hands protectively over her crotch...
• Dramatic Spine Injury: In the penultimate episode, Cliff is sent back in time to the 1940's, when Niles Caulder was still able to walk, in order to intercept a pendant that Niles stole so that it doesn't end up in the hands of a cult years later. Unfortunately, Niles and Cliff end up in a fight over the pendant, and in the process, the much-stronger Cliff throws Niles against a bar, causing a dramatic snapping sound. Cliff is horrified to discover that he's the reason Niles spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
• The Dreaded: The Department of Normalcy's is very obviously the Butts. When they escape, one of their generals outright kills himself.

E-L

• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Stated to be Willoughby Kipling's specialty. What appears to be clocks, cigarettes, and rosary beads covered in hot sauce are actually very specific charms, enchantments, and defenses.
• Epic Fail: The team has repeatedly shown that they are incredibly incompetent at just about everything they do as a Running Gag and Dramatic Irony for a superhero show. Victor even tells them bluntly that in an ideal situation they would not be qualified at all to be the ones to rescue Niles.
  • In the first episode, going into town nearly ends with them destroying it.
  • In the second episode, they utterly fail to prevent the town from being sucked into a Pocket Dimension (via donkey).
  • In the third episode, they can't get to Paraguay until Jane just teleports them there and even then she only takes Cliff and Larry.
• Expy:
  • Willoughby Kipling is one of John Constantine. This stems from his character's creation in the original comic book series as the writers were unable to secure permission to use Constantine and had to create a Suspiciously Similar Substitute.
  • The Pioneers of the Uncharted in "Space Patrol" seem to be expies of the Challengers of the Unknown, especially given the similarities between the groups' names.
• Face on a Milk Carton: "Dada Patrol" at one point shows a milk carton depicting the picture of Isabel Feathers, an actress Laura DeMille caused to fall down a pit earlier in the season.
• Famed In-Story: With the exception of Jane, all the main cast were quite famous before their accidents. In Cyborg's case, even more famous after.
  • Rita Farr was a beloved actress of the 50s, whose movies are still looked at quite fondly today.
  • Cliff Steele was a famous racecar driver who brought enough fame and fortune to afford a nice mansion and a high class life for his wife and kids. He was famous enough to get cameos in soaps playing himself.
  • Larry Trainor was a famed, decorated fighter pilot and considered an American hero. He was potentially going to be one of the first men in space.
  • Though Victor Stone was already an up and coming student athlete before his accident, after becoming Cyborg he became a solid B-lister among the superhero community, and is regularly recognized and applauded. He's not quite A-list material yet, however, as he's said he's still five years away from joining the Justice League. His comparative modern-day fame is actually a problem for the Department of Normalcy when they capture him, as they're aware of the potential minefield they step into by targeting a superhero with his fame.
  • Even the main villain, Mr. Nobody, has now become the defining example of successfully buying your metahuman abilities, to the point that other would-be villains discuss the price of the full "Morden" treatment (with Morden being his deadname from before he bought the treatment and became Mr. Nobody).
• Forced Orgasm: Played for Laughs. Thanks to Flex Mentallo flexing the wrong muscle, everyone on Danny the street has an spontaneous orgasm. Including Danny. They range from modest, loud, grunting, and fake (Cliff, having lost his genitalia along with the rest of his physical body, decides to fake it so that he doesn't feel left out). Afterward some of the people even collapse or have a smoke.
• Foul First Drink:
  • Dorothy tries a martini in "Sex Patrol" when she tries to join the party past her bedtime, but finds the drink disgusting.
  • In the third season, Kay Challis is briefly separated from her alternate personalities for the first time in decades, and having never experienced being a grown-up before, she asks Cliff for a beer. She takes one swig and immediately spits it out.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: Initially, Cliff is the Optimist, Jane is the Cynic, Cyborg is the Realist, Rita is the Apathetic, and Larry is the Conflicted. Of course, given the type of characters they are, expect to see them veer wildly between the other philosophies on a whim.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • Invoked with Mr. Nobody. He believed he was being written off by everyone as “a nobody” which led him to undergo a process to become an insanely powerful supervillain.
  • Early in the third season, Isabel Feathers was just a small-town aspiring actress who got knocked into the time stream by Madame Rouge. She returns in season 4, having gone completely mad from eons trapped between time periods, and has become the mad god Immortus.
• Good Shapeshifting, Evil Shapeshifting: Played with in the case of Rita Farr and Laura de Mille, where the mostly-good Rita lacks the self-confidence to control her transformations and thus often turns into a freakish, blob-like form, whereas Laura has nearly-perfect control of her transformations but consistently acts in her own interests, even if it screws everyone else over.
• Grand Finale: "Done Patrol" marks the end of the series, having the team disband to move on with their lives as well as Rita die of old age and Cliff succumb to Parkinson's after visiting his family during his grandson's first birthday and viewing his grandson's future in an enchanted crystal given to him by Immortus, the last vision depicting Rory Steele becoming a grandfather himself.
• Hotter and Sexier: Doom Patrol features full-on nudity, and makes the sex scenes in Titans look rather tame in comparison.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The episodes are titled "X Patrol".
• Innocent Awkward Question: At the start of season 2, Jane has been secretly shooting up drugs to stifle her powers. Most of the others are unaware, because she stays in her tent and they don't want to risk her Hair-Trigger Temper by checking on her, but Dorothy has No Sense of Personal Space and not only walks into Jane's tent, but then pulls the syringe out of Jane's arm, thinking that it's hurting her. When Jane comes to, Dorothy apologetically asks if pulling the needle out hurt her. Jane avoids the question by demanding to know why Dorothy is in her tent.
• Ironic Hell:
  • Cliff Steele was The Hedonist who lived for sex and drugs, and is now trapped in a robotic body that cannot feel, taste, or smell.
  • Larry Trainor was a gay man cheating on his wife with another man who suffered with the duality of his personas, and is now bound to another being whom he hates and can't connect with, but cannot survive without if separated.
  • Rita Farr was a bigoted actress who now transforms into an amorphous Blob Monster if she loses her composure.
• It Makes Sense in Context: The whole show could count as this, but especially the next episode promos. Pretty much every single one highlights some of the most strange, goofy and seemingly random sequences in the episode that don't feature heavy profanity, gore or sexual content (which is, naturally, about enough to fill a 30 second promo).
• Joke of the Butt: One of the ways the live-action series makes its own contribution to the Doom Patrol's reputation as the World's Strangest Heroes is by featuring carnivorous butt monsters as occasional enemies. It's clear they were going for surreal and puerile humor in this decision, with lines such as "We mustn't upset the Butts" and "The Butts are loose!"
• Joker Immunity: The concept of villains continuing to come back and menace the heroes even after death is addressed by Dorothy in "Casey Patrol", stating that Casey's battles with her father Torminox in the Space Case comic book always had Torminox killed, only to resurface alive and well every time. When first fighting her father in the real world, Casey hesitates finishing Torminox off due to learning from Dorothy that death is permanent in the real world and fearing the consequences of her dad having his life ended for good.
• Killer Finale: The final episode kills off Rita and Cliff.
• Lampshade Hanging: When the team are captured by the Bureau of Normalcy, they lampshade the redundancy of having two cyborg characters by declaring that humans being kept alive via machinery is extremely common to the point they don't consider it anything special.
• Last-Second Joke Problem: The first season ends with the team managing to get their act together, rescue the Chief and his daughter, and outwit Mr. Nobody... and then they discover that, thanks to the complicated plan that they hatched to defeat Mr. Nobody, they've all become miniaturized. The last scene ends with the camera pulling out while an enraged Cliff drops a Cluster F-Bomb.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The episode "Fame Patrol" has the heroes participate in a parade being held in their honor and Larry Trainor remarking that only a small group of people cares about them, which can be read as acknowledging the source material's relative obscurity in the general scope of the DCU.
• Lemony Narrator: Alan Tudyk doesn't pull any punches with Mr. Nobody's narration of the first episode.
• Lotus-Eater Machine:
  • What Mr. Nobody initially shows Rita and Larry. It's their glory days that only gradually turns into an image of horrifying despair.
  • The school that the original Doom Patrol teaches at is one of these. Only the Doom Patrol and their doctor are present with the school being a rundown ruin. Mento's powers make them think that they are teachers of an X-Men-like school for gifted youngsters.
  • In "Immortimas Day", Immortus traps everyone in an idyllic world where every day plays out like a cheerful family musical, all in the hopes that people will worship her out of joy for their condition.

M-R

• May–December Romance: Exaggerated by Slava, who is potentially more than 200,000 years old, and the Chief, who is somewhere around middle-aged when they hook up in 1913. Avoids being a Mayfly–December Romance because Niles was able to prolong his own life beyond that of a normal human.
• Memory-Restoring Melody: Playing "They Don't Know" by Tracey Ullman is a guaranteed way to summon Karen, one of Jane's most dangerous alter-egos.
• The "Mom" Voice: whenever Rita wants to assert control over the other "Doomies", she takes on a very lecturing tone, as if she's Joan Crawford narrating a cookbook. The others are... not always appreciative of this.
  Dorothy: Am I beautiful?
  Rita: Darling, please. You have plenty of other talents. Focus on those.
• Mr. Fanservice:
  • Matt Bomer is an incredibly handsome man, and his flashback sequences illustrate this to audiences. This is a Downplayed Trope example as he usually is portrayed as in a varying degree of tortured given his unhappy pre-negative-spirit life after the crash and the merging, well, he's not much happier now, either).
  • Flex Mentallo wears nothing but trunks to show off his chiseled physique, which is also the source of his powers.
• Ms. Fanservice: Rita Farr is often shown in a way that highlights her actress-glam good looks and fashion sense. As the series has progressed, the camera has also been more willing to show Crazy Jane's legs (often with stockings). Both are Downplayed Trope examples compared to how female comic book heroines often are.
• Musical Episode: "Immortimas Patrol" takes place in Immortus' musical world, where everyone breaks into song at the slightest provocation.
• Mythology Gag: Has its own page.
• Named by the Adaptation:
  • Mr. Nobody never had his first name revealed in the comics (he had previously been known as just "Mr. Morden"); here, his given name is Eric, making his full name Eric Morden.
  • The Unwritten Book is given the name Elliot Patterson, when his counterpart in the Cult of the Unwritten Book arc of Grant Morrison's run remained nameless.
• Never Grew Up: Dorothy Spinner in this continuity is over 100 years old but still looks like a young girl. Near the end of the second season, she gets her first period and accepts that she can't be a child forever, appearances after that point showing her to be visibly maturing.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The advertisements paint the series as a joyously gonzo adventure by a team of oddball superheroes. In reality, while undeniably strange, it's a pretty bad trip loaded with mental agony and dysfunctional group dynamics.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Cyborg Patrol, the heroes unleash the entirety of the Bureau of Normalcy's prisoners onto the world. This included the Butts and season 3 reveals that this also included The Sisterhood of Dada.
• Non-Human Non-Binary: Zigzagged by Danny the street is a sentient, teleporting section of urban geography who uses the pronouns they/them, working with the cisgender metahumans of the main cast. On the one hand, Danny the street is nonbinary and very much the most nonhuman main protagonist, which seems to match the trope. On the other hand, the mostly cisgendered main cast are also nonhuman, being a family of metahumans. Also, the Dannyzens who live in Danny the street include many LGBTQIA+ representatives including Maura Lee Karupt, providing some human nonbinary characters. Also, when told that "no man may pass", by Black Aliss in the Underground, Cliff Steele says that he's not a man anymore, and has apparently come to identify more as a nonbinary "brain in a robot body" in terms of gender.
• Noodle Incident: The battle against the Testicle Monster. Doubles as an Offscreen Moment of Awesome, since the Doom Patrol generally view it as their most successful mission between the events of season 3 and season 4.
• Not Wearing Tights: With the exceptions of Casey Brinke, flashbacks to the heyday of the team's original roster and some fantasy sequences, no one in the Doom Patrol ever wears a costume.
• Note to Self: When Rita travels back in time (and thus wipes her memory in the process), she brings a reminder note reading “Laura De Mille” and “Sisterhood of Dada.”
• Now Allowed to Hug: Jane really, really hates being touched due to her history of being sexually abused, and for much of the first two seasons, reacts violently when anyone tries to touch her. As she becomes more integrated with her original persona, Kay, she allows for more affection from those she knows, like Cliff (her surrogate big brother/father figure) and Dorothy (her surrogate little sister). After being fully integrated as "Kaleidoscope" in the penultimate episode, she not only initiates a hug with Cliff, but also initiates a kiss with her new girlfriend Casey.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Rita and Larry are closer to each other than they are with the others (though that's not to say they have no connection with the others). This is probably because of the fact that they were the first two that Niles saved. In the final episode of season 1, after the group splits apart upon learning what Niles did, Larry and Rita live together in a new house.
  • Therapy-loving optimist Cliff, who tends to avoid violence, is a very close friend of Jane's therapy-hating primary personality. According to one of her other personalities, she felt hope for the first time in a long time after meeting him for the first time.
  • In season 2, sweet-natured Dorothy shows a clear fondness for Jane, despite Jane being notoriously foul-mouthed and harsh. By season 4, Jane seems to have grown fond of her, too, as she gives Dorothy a hug when the latter suddenly returns to try and save the team from Orqwith.
• Older Than They Look: Applies to almost every main cast member. Justified in regards to the main cast, as their accidents were engineered in an attempt to grant immortality and are sustained by pieces of Immortus' longevity.
  • Niles Caulder, while still appearing visibly older, looks to be the same age during Jane's flashbacks to the seventies. It's later confirmed that he actually hasn't aged since some time in 1913. It's later clarified that he does age, albeit very slowly, and is granted increased longevity by a magical necklace.
  • Rita Farr still appears youthful despite being a young woman in the 1950s.
  • Jane still looks just as young as she did in the seventies.
  • Cliff can't exactly "look the part," being in a robotic body and all, but his mental capabilities don't seem to be any worse for the wear despite what his age should be. If one assumes that Cliff was about 40 before his accident, an elder statesman for an active NASCAR driver, he'd be in his 70s or 80s during the show's present day storyline.
  • Larry's burned body has not degraded at all since his accident in the '60s. It's stated that he's 95 during the present day of the first season.
  • Mr. Nobody's face (or what's still there of it) is the same age as before the experiment. Of course, since he was literally transformed into a metaphysical (and metafictional) super-being, this is really to be expected.
  • Flex Mentallo looks exactly the same (after a haircut) coming out of the Ant Farm as he did going in. During that time, his youthful wife became an elderly woman.
  • Dorothy is over a century old, but looks and acts like an unusually-mature teenage girl.
  • Played with in the case the (original) Doom Patrol. After several episodes with the main cast, seeing Mento and his team still looking as young in the present as they did in the past seems normal, as non-aging just comes with having meta-human powers. Later, the team appear in their real forms and seem to have aged a lot. The youthful versions seen are simply psychic projections he creates after a traumatic battle, fighting against Mr. Nobody. However, it is then explained that the apparent age is actually the physical result of the same traumatic battle that caused the psychological issues.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Cult of the Unwritten Book. They believe that the entirety of creation should not exist, and are actively being about the end of the universe.
• Outcast Refuge: Danny the Street is a sentient street that can teleport around the world to provide safe haven for societal misfits.
• Politically Correct History: Downplayed; The main cast is from a variety of eras and backgrounds, and with the exception of Rita's behavior towards a disabled black cameraman in her backstory,^note And even she is shown fairly early on to have no problem with black people by the present day, and it's likely she wanted him gone because he was one-armed seem to lack much of the bigotry endemic to their original times. Somewhat Justified in that the cast has been marginalized over the years, for decades on end, and that some of the cast are Twofer Token Minority ^note Larry/Negative Man is a disfigured gay man, and Crazy Jane is a mentally ill, Hispanic lesbian, per Word of Saint Paul. Even still, Cliff is remarkably okay with the concept of nonbinary people, and Larry's sexuality for a southern white man who grew up in the 1950s-1960s, per his age at the time of his accident in the late 1980s. Even more so, Flex Mentallo, who was pointedly not marginalized in his time or in the present, sprang fully formed from comic pages in the 1960s, and despite having nothing but decades-old reruns of a low-budget Soap Opera for almost 60 years, seems to adjust to everyone on Danny the Street, along with Danny themself with no trouble.
• Poor Communication Kills: Much of the chaos of season 4 could have been avoided if someone had just told Dorothy that her father died of old age and that he didn't want to come back. Her misguided quest to resurrect him results in the Cult of Immortus getting its hands on a pendant containing the essence of their god. Worse, she actually did figure out that bringing her dad back didn't justify her actions, but because nobody told her what the pendant actually did, she handed it over to the cult willingly, thinking that she was doing the right thing by placating an army that was imperiling the Dannizens.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: "Dead Patrol", which involves Dorothy summoning the assistance of The Dead Boy Detectives and subsequently leaving with them, is clearly intended to serve as a pitch for a Dead Boy Detectives television series. While a series has been announced, it's now eschewed its ties to the Doom Patrol series and will instead be a spinoff of The Sandman (2022) (much like how this show was initially planned as a spinoff to Titans (2018) before being reworked as its own thing).
• Precision F-Strike: In "Casey Patrol", Dorothy, who up till that point had never cursed, delivers one after the villain of the week forces her to hand over her most valued possession in order to save her friends, telling him to go fuck himself.
• Previously on…: In spite of the show being produced for streaming rather than airing on network television (and therefore ensuring those who hadn't caught up on the show yet would have access to every episode that had been released at the time they chose to start watching the series), the series initially had every episode following the premiere start with a recap of what happened in the previous episode. This practice ceased by the third season, presumably because the production company realized the redundancy of bothering with recaps for every individual episode of a streaming series when most viewers binge-watching such shows would start from the beginning rather than begin by watching a random episode.
• Pseudo-Santa: In "Immortimas Patrol", the mad goddess Immortus has forced the entire world to celebrate a holiday for her, Immortimas, in which people are encouraged to leave offerings of ham to entice her to join their festivities.
• The Pursuing Nightmare: Ghostly detective Edwin Paine has a recurring nightmare of being chased down an endless hallway by an unseen pursuer, a grim reminder of the fact that he spent several decades in Hell after being murdered by some Satan-worshipping classmates at boarding school.
• Race Lift:
  • Crazy Jane is white in the source material but played by Colombian-American actress Diane Guerrero.
  • Kind of done with The Chief. On Titans, he was played by Mexican actor Bruno Bichir, complete with Latino accent, but on this show, he's back to being white and played by the very British Timothy Dalton. Both are in separate continuities.
  • In the comics Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man was Swedish. Here he's played by Flipino-American actor Alec Mapa.
  • In the comics, Holly is a white American woman. Here, she's a British woman of presumably Indian-Muslim descent, played by a Pakistani-American actress.
  • In the comics, Mr. 104 is a white American. In the show, he's played by Indian-American actor Sendhil Ramamurthy, and has an Indian-British background.
• Reality Warper: Flex Mentallo can control reality with his muscles. The limits of this ability are unclear but all appear to be relatively small scale.
  • Slava can create artificial beings from her imagination, primarily using this to create a creature that combines wolf, bear, deer and humanoid features to ward off intruders. Her daughter, Dorothy Spinner, inherited the same ability.
• Refusal of the Call:
  • Rita and Larry. Rita goes back to Doom Manor and waits for the Chief to come back, while Larry tries to skip town as quickly as possible (but the Negative Spirit won't let him).
  • In season 4, it's revealed that Dorothy has been dragging her feet about returning to Doom Manor since her father's death, both because she dreads being around her friends, who all remind her of her dad, and because she just knows that once she goes back, she'll end up in the Doom Patrol, and will never be able to quit.
• Related in the Adaptation: A major plot point here: Dorothy Spinner is the daughter of Niles Caulder, something that has never been the case in the comics.
• Required Secondary Powers: Apparently, being The Ageless is this for all Metahumans. They need some degree of immortality to survive the accidents and events that grant them their powers in the first place, as well as to survive living with the negative side effects of their powers. This is a plot point, as the Chief's reason for forming the team was to understand how to gain and maintain immortality to protect his daughter, and went so far as to arrange the accidents that would cause their powers to develop in the first place.
• Resurrection/Death Loop: In the penultimate episode of season one, Mr. Nobody traps the Doom Patrol in a loop where they keep fighting (and losing) the same battle over and over, getting killed every time.
• Ret-Canon:
  • Unstoppable Doom Patrol has Larry Trainor go through a therapy session where it is heavily implied he's a closeted gay man like his counterpart here.
  • The 2022 The Dead Boy Detectives miniseries that is part of The Sandman Universe adapts this continuity's element of Edwin Paine secretly being in love with his partner Charles Rowland.

S-W

• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Certain storylines end up being mostly irrelevant. For instance, the search for Doctor Tyme ends with Rita accidentally killing Dr. Tyme by knocking him down, but manages to turn back time which brings him back to life, but also annoys him enough that he ejects her, Cliff and Jane from his realm, with nothing to show for their trip.
• Sleep Cute:
  • At the start of "Cult Patrol", Jane, as Baby Doll, falls asleep on Cliff's lap. When they wake up, Hammerhead takes over, pissed off.
  • In "Possibilities Patrol", Dorothy falls asleep while cuddled up to Jane, who's been comatose since the end of "Wax Patrol", and is thus there when Daddy takes over Jane's body.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Without really trying, planning, or thinking things through, the Doom Patrol tends to ruin a lot of people's plans, both good and bad. Willoughby Kipling phrased it rather colorfully...
    Kipling: I did have a plan. A bloody good one. But as per usual, your dumbfuckery jammed a spanner up my ass, and now you’re zombies. Is it too much to ask for you twats not to fuck yourselves up so spectacularly?
  • Season 4 gives us a Spinner in the works, as Dorothy accidentally sets the rise of Immortus in motion when she gives away the Pendant of Immortus in order to head off an attack on Danny the Street.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Arani Desai/Celsius never dies and is last seen alive, albeit aged and delusional while kept placated in a fantasy where the original Doom Patrol works at a school for young metahumans and she is married to the Chief.
  • Joshua Clay still lives in this continuity, when his comic counterpart was killed off in Grant Morrison's run when the Chief shot him.
  • The Beard Hunter is still alive by the last episode featuring him, when his single appearance in Grant Morrison's run ended with him being fatally electrocuted by the Chief.
  • Dorothy forces the Candlemaker to become good rather than destroy him as she did at the end of Grant Morrison's run.
  • Dorothy Spinner is still alive by her final appearance, when John Arcudi's run on the comic established that she was rendered comatose at some point after the events of Rachel Pollack's run and ended with Cliff choosing to unplug her life support.
  • The series ends with Madame Rouge still alive, when in the comics she was killed off for good in Marv Wolfman and George Perez' New Teen Titans.
• Spin-Off:
  • Subverted. Although the Doom Patrol previously appeared on Titans in a backdoor pilot episode, this show wound up disregarding the Titans continuity in favor of starting from the beginning.
  • The show almost resulted in a spin-off based around the Dead Boy Detectives, but that show ended up being retooled to take place in The Sandman's continuity instead.
• Split-Personality Makeover: Jane undergoes subtle physical changes whenever one of her personas emerge, which helps clue the audience in as to the identity of that persona. For example, Hammerhead has a large chest tattoo and a scar on her lip, the Hangman's Daughter has a Frida Kahlo-esque monobrow, and Dr. Harrison gains Creepy Blue Eyes and a grey streak in her hair.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • Every cryptic event in the first half of Season 3 is given reason and explanation through later (earlier?) time travel actions.
  • Season 4 reveals that the team's entire existence is one. Laura's journey to the present, which was only possible due to Rita traveling to the past and thus providing the Brotherhood of Evil with the knowhow to build the time machine in the first place (part of the aforementioned Season 3 loop), also accidentally trapped Isabel Feathers in the time stream. As a result of centuries outside of normal space and time, she was transformed into Immortus, an immortal being with godlike Reality Warping powers, whose essence was captured by Niles Caulder and the Bureau of Normalcy in the past; Niles then used it on the team, Rita included, to provide them with the longevity that allowed them to live up to the present day, giving her the opportunity to travel back in time... confused yet?
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Prof. Von Fuchs is a former Nazi scientist capable of giving superpowers to people who can pay for them.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • The Doom Patrol's lack of training, teamwork, and control over their powers mean their earliest battles are complete failures.
  • The attempt to save the Morality Pet Elliot from his destiny despite it endangering the world... results in the world nearly being destroyed.
  • Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man's first attempt at a robbery ends with his dinosaur head attacking his normal head. Turns out having an independent raptor brain in a high-stress scenario might cause an outlash.
  • Holding a therapy group between several individuals with deep-seated traumas, all without a trained therapist to mediate, is not going to end well. Made worse because Cliff has a mouse messing around in his head, leading him to act out far more than usual.
  • A much lighter example comes up in Danny Patrol. Larry gives an amazing musical number in his Imagine Spot but when he actually attempts to sing, the lack of training and practice is very apparent.
  • In "Finger Patrol", Niles pushes Dorothy to entertain the increasingly-unstable Baby Doll for an afternoon. Being only a child herself, Dorothy does not have the training or stamina to deal with Baby Doll's tantrums, and Baby Doll herself does not have the maturity to put up with being told "no", and the situation soon deteriorates to Baby Doll trying to burn Dorothy alive, and Dorothy resorting to summoning the Candlemaker to put a permanent end to Baby Doll, which also results in the death of Flaming Katy.
• Tag Line: What doesn't kill you makes you stranger.
• That Man Is Dead: When Mr. Nobody appears to Dr. Caulder, Caulder calls him "Mr. Morden." Nobody replies, "I haven't been Mr. Morden since 'Aaah! No! Help me!'"
• Those Wacky Nazis: Fuchtopia has shades of this, with the way its "staff" acts.
• Time Traveler's Dinosaur: Played with, in the episode "Immortimas Patrol", tyrannosaurs are part of the iconography of Immortimas, the holiday celebrating the time-manipulating god Immortus.
• Trenchcoat Brigade: Willoughby Kipling, being a deliberate Expy of John Constantine. (He was only created in the comics because Grant Morrison wasn't allowed to use Constantine himself.)
• Uniqueness Decay: Used for comedy. Apparently the Ant Farm has encountered dozens of human brains kept alive in crude mechanical bodies over the years and so see nothing interesting about Cliff.
• Unseen No More:
  • The Doom Patrol's iconic adversaries the Brain and Monsieur Mallah are first mentioned in the first season (the former mentioned by Mento in "Doom Patrol Patrol" and both mentioned by Mr. Nobody in a flashback of his time as Eric Morden in "Penultimate Patrol", the former by name and the latter indirectly) before finally appearing in person in the third season episode "Vacay Patrol".
  • Dorothy Spinner is first shown from the back at the first season's conclusion, but has her face shown at last starting with the second season.
• Villain Song: The Musical Episode "Immortimas Patrol" ends with Immortus singing "You're All Doomed", which mainly consists of her lashing out at the Doom Patrol for standing up to her and refusing to continue playing along with the fantasy world she's put them in.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Chief, though one who retains a sympathetic POV. Niles is regarded by many as an upstanding and heroic individual who has helped organize superhero teams, helped people recover from trauma, and his extensive connections with the weirder world make him appear as the Big Good. Very few know that he's personally caused many of the traumas he "helps" with, and the many shady things he has done in the past. The ones who do all regard him as a monster.
• Void Between the Worlds: Mr. Nobody's domain appears this way. In an interesting case of Leaning on the Fourth Wall, it's because of how comic book panels are separated by white lines; the void is the empty space between story, which can only be visually represented in a comic book-originated story.
• Weirdness Censor: No one notices the Brain, in Robotman's body, dancing with a widow, at the retirement community. Then again, they didn't seem to notice that he was a brain in a metal container who lived with a talking gorilla, so...
• Wham Line:
  • "Penultimate Patrol" drops a massive one:
    Niles Caulder: The tragedies that befell you were not accidents. I was responsible, for everything that has happened to each of you.
  • From "Portal Patrol," when Jane finally realizes what her alters have been trying to get her to say out loud:
    Jane: I was raped by my father.
• Where No Parody Has Gone Before: One of Rita's movies shown in "Nostalgia Patrol" is a sci-fi flick and blatant Star Trek send-up titled Spartacus 452, which Cliff funnily enough confuses with the actual Star Trek.
• Witch with a Capital "B": In "Fame Patrol", Rita at one point refers to Isabel Feathers as a "witch" in what is clearly a derisive context.
• Written-In Absence: In season 4, Jane is cut off from the Underground, because several of the key actresses there, like Hannah Aline (Pretty Polly) and Anna Lore (Penny Farthing) were filming other shows at the time (Mayfair Witches and Gotham Knights, respectively.) Dorothy also pops in and out of the season because Abi Monterey was filming The Curse Of Bridge Hollow.

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"They really are quite doomed."