Doom Patrol Star Timothy Dalton Says Season 2 Is More “Moving” Than Season 1

As television shows go, Doom Patrol is certainly a crazy one. The DC Universe series — which is also available on HBO Max — has featured everything from a magical farting donkey, a sentient teleporting street, carnivorous butts, an evil Nazi scientist, a hair-eating villain, and even an evangelical cockroach — and that’s just in season one and not to mention doesn’t even count the show’s heroes who each have their own wild and weird predicaments. But for all the oddities of Doom Patrol, the series is also full of heart and according to series star Timothy Dalton, Doom Patrol‘s second season builds on that heart and is ultimately more moving than the first.

Speaking with Looper, Dalton, who plays Niles Caulder/The Chief, explained that the show is very much about its humanity and that even though the characters themselves may not exactly be human and are a bit on the strange side, there’s something about them everyone can identify with.

‘I don’t think there’s a character in the show that you can’t identify with in some way as being human yet, they’re not human at all,” Dalton said. “Real people don’t dissolve into a blob when they get stressed.”

He went on to explain that despite that, those stories are still moving — more so than in Season 1.

“I find it very moving — maybe more moving emotionally than season one,” he said. “We’ve somehow been able to contain a genuine understandable humanity with a totally absurd, weird fantastical series of events that these characters come across in their lives.”

He continued, “You think of these people, even if they’re made of steel, they’re human. Even if they’re surviving in a way that no one could have ever survived from radiation, they’re human, they’re real. It all works together. I love the show. I’ve never seen anything or been in anything like it.”

The idea that the show is ultimately about humanity is something that Matt Bomer, who plays Larry Trainor/Negative Man, also echoed in a recent conversation with ComicBook.com.

“Well, somewhat the show is unprecedented,” Bomer said. “I had never seen that, I didn’t know about Doom Patrol before this. And so, I had never seen… I mean, I’ve seen things like Deadpool that were a little bit more self-aware, but I’d never seen something as offbeat and quirky and abstract and absurd as this show. With a great sense of humor, but it’s also so much about the human condition and the capacity for even the most marginalized people to find their hero.”

New episodes of Doom Patrol land Thursdays on both DC Universe and HBO Max.