The following contains spoilers for Doom Patrol Season 4, Episode 2, "Butt Patrol," now streaming on HBO Max.
The quirky Doom Patrol offers a unique take on superheroes compared to more traditional fare. The TV series' fourth season -- returning on December 8th -- promises to be as weird and wacky as ever. The premiere finds the team revving up Madame Rouge's time machine and accidentally landing in 2042. It's there that they discover most of the team are now deceased and that the planet has been ravaged by the vicious Butts. Once they return to the present, the Doom Patrol must decide what to do with that knowledge as multiple threats begin to emerge, including Mr. 104, Immortus, and Cod Piece. Meanwhile, a shadowy organization is running crucial, critical, and strange experiments. In true Doom Patrol fashion, something is bound to go horribly wrong.
Showrunner Jeremy Carver recently spoke with CBR about the upcoming Season 4 of Doom Patrol. He dove into the Doom Patrol's mortality, Madame Rouge's leadership role, exploring the Butts, the introduction of Space Case, and alternate realities.
CBR: The Doom Patrol takes an unexpected jaunt to 2042. In what way does that chain of events, and what they learn, send the team into a tailspin?
Jeremy Carver: Not to put too fine of a point on it, but they are seeing a future where both they and the world are pretty much destroyed. For each of them, it sends them into a zone of "What exactly am I going to do about it?" They ask themselves, "Are we going to fight back? Am I going to put my affairs in order? What kind of person am I going to be in what could be the end of days?" For each of them, it sends them on a slightly different path.
One of the ways they decide to push back is to try and change the course of the future. They do that by voting in a new leader, namely Madame Rouge. What makes her more or less qualified than Rita?
The Doom Patrol, when we come into this season, are deeming to call themselves something of a team and having a run of success until they go off course in the timestream. They end up in the future, and all hell breaks loose. One of the things about becoming a team, much like when you decide to become a band in high school in your garage, is [deciding] what kind of band are you going to be. They have a very stark choice in front of them. If they don't make a change, they are going to die.
What Madame Rouge offers them is a leader who is both good and bad, and when it comes right down to it, she's incredibly ruthless. She is willing to make the very hard decisions, as we quickly see in Episode 2. What the team hasn't quite planned on is how Madame Rouge is responding to her own ruthlessness, which is something new in the mix in terms of how she is starting to view herself after a string of ruthless decisions.
Rouge doesn't even want the role of leadership, yet she has to take on these responsibilities.
There is a deeper thing going on there. You are having Madame Rouge, who has never fit in anywhere, whose modus operandi is to run when the going gets bad, to suddenly being called upon to be even more involved with this team of super misfits. She unexpectedly finds herself drawn to a family situation that she had never really felt before. It's causing all kinds of mixed emotions inside of Rouge.
What made the Butts interesting enough to feature front and center this season? What did you want to explore with them?
We wanted to take something that initially felt like a one-off gag and see if we could get people to really empathize with the Butts and understand that there was a much deeper personality and emotional state and a higher IQ to the Butts. They may have been created in-house, as it were, but they have come to represent something much more special if the powers-that-be were only to acknowledge it. We see glimpses of that in Episode 2, but we actually spent an inordinate amount of time trying to humanize these creatures.
The show often straddles that line between a little bit goofy and a little bit serious. It doesn't get much crazier than the Butts singing and dancing. How did you land on that musical number? What were some of the conversations in the writers' room about that?
I don't want to say everything on the show happens for a purpose because sometimes it doesn't, but in the case of the Butts, we worked backward. Again, we wanted to create a species that was more highly evolved than previously thought. The idea that they had a love of music and musicals was one way of doing that, but that is not a one-off thing itself. That is a very important aspect of the Butts that will come into play as the season progresses.
Introduce us to Casey "Space Case" Brinke. Who is she, and what does her presence allow you to explore with some of the other characters?
Casey is a character from later versions of the Doom Patrol comic, who I believe first appears in the Gerard Way run of the comic. Her real name is Casey Brinke, but her superhero name is Space Case. Dorothy has fallen in love with her comics, in particular. The first contact with Casey in the real world is largely through Dorothy's eyes and watching her comic book hero come to life and finding a kinship with her based on both of their daddy issues. Casey falls in with the rest of the Doom Patrol, and over the course of the season, we will see her grow much closer to different members of the Doom Patrol as she works her way into the team and into their hearts.
The Doom Patrol visits alternate realities this year. Which one stood out for you due to its zaniness or aesthetic?
There is a different world in the comics that we had spent a couple of seasons trying to figure out how to pull off. We will finally, in Season 4, see the Doom Patrol going to Orqwith, which is a different reality. We have shifted it up a little from the books. We will actually be spending a couple of episodes in Orqwith. That's where some very big season-shifting events are going to happen. I think we have come up with a great visual design but also a reworking of the Orqwith backstory and having it connect with some beloved Doom Patrol characters.
Early on in the year, the name Immortus gets dropped. What makes him a formidable foe?
I don't want to jump to any assumptions and say that Immortus is a him. The existence of Immortus is an ever-looming threat. I will say it is a parallel threat to the Butts destroying the Earth. So, they have a couple of very big battles on their hands. The search for Immortus and the effort to stop Immortus is going to unearth some seasons-long mysteries that have been dangling out there. It's going to help the Doom Patrol understand themselves and their creations just a little bit more.
This season, we have a Buttpocalypse on the horizon. There's Immortus on tap, and more importantly, the Doom Patrol's mortality is at stake. How are the individual team members handling all these curveballs?
In terms of the characters and some of their journeys, with Vic, he is by choice not Cyborg. He made a pledge to find his bliss. At the top of this season, where he has to sort of put up and shut up to himself and sort of say, "What does that mean?" and more importantly, as this season goes on, "What does that mean for his future?" For Rita, she has always struggled with this question of what it means to be a true leader. That is an easy way of saying what kind of person does she want to be? Selfless or not? Vain or not vain? She is constantly struggling with that.
Jane is asking herself what happens when there is suddenly no one left to make decisions for the body except her. She will be asking that of herself this season. Larry is asking himself how does he make sure he doesn't fail yet another child of his, having seen a very bleak future for himself and Keeg. Cliff is asking himself whether he is finally going to put family first or not. Rouge is asking herself, "How do I learn to love all the parts of myself, the good and the bad, and can I truly ever do that?" While it seems there are a lot of plotting things, the heart of it is always character and their humanity... and their want of that, or their rejection of that, is always at the core of every season.
Doom Patrol Season 4's first two episodes are streaming now on HBO Max.