Doom Patrol Showrunner on New Villains, New Direction in Season 3

Doom Patrol is back for its third season with the first three episodes now streaming on HBO Max and with a new season comes new challenges for the team of heroes both in terms of villains and more personal challenges for the characters. Even before Season 3’s debut, fans knew that the mysterious Madame Rouge (Michelle Gomez) was coming, as well the Sisterhood of Dada, an alien named Garguax (Stephen Murphy) and the Brotherhood of Evil – complete with Monsieur Mallah – would be part of the landscape of the new season. Now, showrunner Jeremy Carver teases how these new characters fit into the overall trajectory of the season.

Warning: spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of Doom Patrol below.

One of the big themes of Season 3 is grief and the show wastes no time in establishing who the Doom Patrol is grieving. The first episode, “Possibilities Patrol”, reveals that Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton) died while the team was encased in the Candlemaker’s wax. It’s a present loss, but it’s just one more thing on top of decades of tragedy for the heroes.

“We’re seeing a group of individuals, each in their own way, trying to climb out of the despair they’ve been in for many decades,” Carver told Entertainment Weekly. “Some find more success than others, some need to go even more rock-bottom before they can surface. But all of them will, by the end of the season, be at least pointed in a new direction.”

He also explained how some of the new characters play into that, noting that the team actually meets Garguax while dealing with that grief and the alien is in a situation that is, in a sense, similar to theirs though their losses are quite different.

“He used to be the leader of an alien world and was quite a fearful presence back in the ’50s when he was an ally of the Brotherhood of Evil,” he said. “Since then he has been living a very different existence and has been on one very particular mission, which has basically tested his faith in what he believes to be true. Will he continue to be loyal to an evil leader, or will he be loyal to himself? It’s not unlike the Doom Patrol questioning where they stand in the aftermath of their own tragedy and loss.”

And as for the other characters? Carver said that the show has put their own spin on them, in true Doom Patrol style.

“We have taken these really sort of beloved characters from the comics, such as the Sisterhood of Dada and the Brotherhood of Evil … and we put a little bit of our own spin on them as we’ve done with other characters in the past,” said Carver. “Hopefully everyone will enjoy the approach we’re bringing to them and the commentary we’re making on what a Brotherhood of Evil from the ’50s might look like in today’s world. We have a lot of fun matching up the old and the new.”

The first three episodes of Doom Patrol’s third season are now streaming on HBO Max. New episodes arrive on Thursdays.