Tuesday, December 13, 2022

My Review of Doom Patrol's 4x02: "Butt Patrol"

 


Written by Eric Dietel
Directed by Christopher Manley

Victor (to Rita): "What would you say to a change in leadership?"

Apparently nothing very complimentary on the idea for a start. I think we all knew that Rita's leadership skills were going to be called into question but not this fast. Freaked out by future events was enough for everyone to demote Rita as leader and give a reluctant Laura the job instead. Needless to say Rita wasn't pleased with this turn of events.

However the only person she could vent her frustrations to were Larry and not only did he call out her bad leadership skills when pushed on the issue of her demotion but he was rather preoccupied with Keeg refusing to bond with him again. By the end of this episode, Keeg still hadn't forgiven Larry for the future but at least Larry was slightly more sympathetic to Rita's own plight than anyone else.

As for Laura taking over the team, she benched the rest of them and got Cliff to go and kill Darren Jones, which turned out to be a bit more complicated than either Cliff or Laura was expecting it to be. Complicated in the sense that Darren had been growing tomatoes in order to stave off his impulses to eat brains but when confronted with the idea of death, he embraced the idea of it.

I found Darren's willingness to die rather amusing with Cliff's reluctance to kill him until Laura had to resort to some drastic measures of her owns in order for Cliff to complete the mission. Then there was another butt to kill and that also proved to be somewhat complicated for Cliff. All the guy wants to do is feel his family but he keeps having to kill were-butts instead.

Speaking of were-butts, it was Victor and Jane working together and tricking the Butt Hunter (formerly the Beard Hunter) into handing over the second zombie butt to them. Victor and Jane made for a good team and it was nice to see the former give her a little insight into her ongoing problem with Kay as well for good measure.

Last but not least there was the return of Dr Yu and her own history with the were-butts. I'm not surprised that she managed to get Nicholas away from the Bureau of Normalcy and I thought their little living arrangement was rather cute. Is it bad that I want Nicholas not to be killed off? At least let one of these were-butts survive in peace.

- Rita's point system of good stars and demerits were definitely a bad motivational tool. Laura should've scrapped them.
- I genuinely thought Cliff and Laura were going to get infected with Darren's blood splattered all over them at one point in the episode.
- None of the jigsaw pieces had edges on them, leading to Jane's own frustration with the thing.
- Chronology: We saw glimpses of 2016, 2017 and 2019 with the Bureau of Normalcy and the were-butts as well as the present day.

Butt Patrol was as strong as the premiere episode and it's nice to see the team trying to be more practice, in between snarly nicknames (Crisis on Infinite Butts, anyone?). Two episodes in, this season has gotten off to a great start.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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