This week on Doom Patrol, while Vic and Larry came to the aid of Danny the Street, Rita and Cliff found themselves dealing with one of Jane’s more rarely seen personalities, the dangerous, rom-com obsessed Karen. While Karen, and her powerful “love spell” ability, were determined to have her own twisted form of Happily Ever After, things didn’t go quite as planned. Jane was left without a dominant personality in charge and in a preview for next week’s “Jane Patrol” it looks like Cliff will find himself going into The Underground to help her.
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In the preview, which you can check out above, the Karen personality ends up in a psychological drunk tank of sorts, hanging out behind bars until she’s sufficiently cooled off, but Jane still isn’t able to come back to the surface and be the dominant personality again. That vacancy is a problem and it looks like we will see Jane trying to work her way through that — while meeting some new personalities along the way. The journey also looks like it will be illuminating for Cliff as well. Cliff — as a person and not Robotman — is also in The Underground, attempting to apologize to Jane for his thoughtless and hurtful comments and actions previously this season.
The episode appears to be Doom Patrol‘s take on a significant chapter from the Doom Patrol comics. In Doom Patrol #30, after a devastating confrontation with the Fifth Horseman, Jane’s dominant personality vanished deep into The Underground, leaving her body in a catatonic state. In an attempt to save her, Cliff entered Jane’s psyche and worked his way through The Underground to locate Jane at the Well, a dark part of her mind where the worst of her traumas lives. For fans of the Doom Patrol comics, they know that the worst of those traumas happens to be the horrific neglect and sexual abuse the “real” Jane, young Kay Challis, suffered at the hands of her father when she was a small child.
While it’s not clear exactly what next week’s “Jane Patrol” will reveal about Jane’s past or The Underground, based on the preview the Well will come into play. Jane is seen speaking to one of her personalities, the three-in-one Weird Sisters, who tell her to go to the Well to replenish — a potentially devastating proposition. However the Well ends up factoring into things, the episode will at a minimum make for an intriguing exploration of Jane and her mental health concern, something that Diane Guerrero, who plays Jane, told ComicBook.com is something she loves that the show gets to work with.
“But I think that we’re looking to sort of like enter a world like this that makes us think a little bit,” she continued. “I love the characters because everyone is sort of grappling with a deep rooted issue that has nothing to do with one another and has nothing to do with their present status, it has to do with something they haven’t dealt with that has occurred to them in their past and I like dissecting the human brain, I think that’s the most challenging and I think that mental health is something we don’t talk enough about anywhere around the world, and in this country and I think that the show is just a big therapy session for all the characters and so the mind is beautiful, the mind is scary, I love that we get to dissect it on the show.”
Doom Patrol airs on DC Universe with new episodes dropping every Friday.
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