Warning! Spoilers for this week’s episode of Doom Patrol beyond this point! This week’s episode of Doom Patrol, “Youth Patrol” was a wild ride for the heroes as the consequences of Doctor Janus’ scheme against Rita is made clear. Rita wakes up from her long sleep and discovers that she’s begun to age with Willoughby showing up to explain that Janus has extracted Rita’s longevity, something that Niles Caulder had given them via bits of a sliver of the deity Immortus which Niles himself had worn in the necklace around his neck which kept him alive.
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This news leads Rita to do some exploring in Doom Manor to see what other experiments Niles may have been up to in the name of immortality and ends up breaking a vial containing a de-aging spell — but it will eventually de-age them until they are nothing. They head off to find Willoughby’s mentor, Ms. April, to reverse the spell with everyone impacted — including Willoughby — getting younger as they go. The group, including Jane, Vic, and Cliff, end up at a pool part where there is plenty of drinking and drug use and it’s at that party where Doom Patrol makes a hilarious Riverdale reference that has fans freaking out.
Near the end of the episode — as the spell really starts to accelerate — a now young Jane confronts Cliff and tells Cliff that they have to leave. He reacts badly and she asks why he’s being weird and, well. Cliff tells her — but he’s also quoting, or rather, paraphrasing, The CW’s Riverdale.
“I’m a weirdo. Look at my hand. Have you ever seen me without this stupid oven mitt on? That’s weird,” Cliff says.
As fans online quickly recognized, Cliff’s little speech is a paraphrase of Jughead Jones’ speech to Betty Cooper in the Season 1 episode of Riverdale, “Chapter Ten: The Lost Weekend”. In that episode, Jughead says to Betty, “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m weird. I’m a weirdo. I don’t fit in, and I don’t want to fit in. Have you ever seen me without this stupid hat on That’s weird.”
Upon recognizing the line, fans had a field day with it, but some took things a bit further than just being amused by Doom Patrol referencing the fan favorite The CW series. One noted that 2022 started off with a DC series referencing Riverdale and now, it’s ending the year on the same note. As fans may recall, Peacemaker also had a Riverdale reference of sorts with John Cena’s Christopher Smith/Peacemaker rattling off a lengthy list of people — real and fictional — that could have been framed for murder other than his father. That list included “the f-cking c-nts from Riverdale.”
Of course, while Cliff referencing Riverdale in Doom Patrol is hilarious, Cliff’s assertion about his oven mitt being weird isn’t actually, well, weird. As fans of the series know, he’s wearing that mitt because he’s gained some limited sense of touch and wants the first real thing he feels to be his baby grandson, Rory, but Cliff is also very much on his own journey this season.
“Cliff getting a sense of… I mean you’ve said as much, but getting his sense of touch is very, very special to him. He immediately decided that the first thing he wants to feel is his grandson, Rory. And that sort of stands in for what has been a very long arc for Cliff, which is family comes first … which Cliff hasn’t always done,” series showrunner Jeremy Carver told ComicBook.com. “So, it’s this sort of elusive sort of goal that he puts even more pressure upon himself because now he’s got this oven mitt over his hand, which prevents him from touching anything, but this sort of elusive notion of touching his grandson, Rory, which again, comes crashing down when he finds himself touching something entirely different than he expected in a way that he never expected. It brings in a sharp relief, his own monstrosity. And in doing so, that weirdly pushes the goal of seeing his grandson even further away because what kind of monster deserves to see his grandson?”
Carver continued, “So, it’s sort of a cascade. As is not uncommon with Cliff, Cliff is by no means an innocent, but he is a little Job-like in the way that the personal crisis seemed to pile up on him. So yeah, that speaks a little to his path there in the first couple of episodes.”
Doom Patrol airs new episodes Thursdays on HBO Max.
