Inside ‘Doom Patrol’s ‘Wonderful & Wacky’ Musical Episode

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Doom Patrol Season 4 Episode 9, “Immortimas Patrol.”]

Unsurprisingly, Doom Patrol pulls off a musical episode that’s not only very entertaining but also, to use showrunner and executive producer Jeremy Carver‘s own term, “indelicate” at times — and full of catchy songs. In other words, everything you love about this weird and wild show? This episode takes it up to another level and somehow makes it better.

It all stems from Immortus (Charity Cervantes) creating an alternate reality in which she’s constantly adored (Immortimas Day is celebrated every day). Rouge (Michelle Gomez) is the first to realize something’s off; then she clues the others — Larry (Matt Bomer), Cliff (Brendan Fraser), Jane (Diane Guerrero), Vic (Joivan Wade), and Rita (April Bowlby) — in. Some are less willing to leave behind what seems like a better world, but by the end, they are back in their reality.

“We hope a lot of people see this one because it really deserves to be seen,” Carver tells TV Insider. “It’s just a lot of fun, and there’s so much heart in it.” Below, he takes us inside the musical hour.

I loved the musical episode. It was so fun.

Jeremy Carver: Thank you for saying that. Yeah, it definitely ranks up there as one of our favorite episodes, something that we’re very, very proud of.

Talk about crafting it and what you wanted to do with it. There have been musical episodes of quite a few shows already, but Doom Patrol stands out as it is, so obviously this has to, too ­— and it does.

We have two writers who are a team, Aliza and Talia Berger, who had really been plotting how to make their move in terms of how to make this episode work for a while now. They are both incredibly well-versed in musical theater and were just bursting with ideas and enthusiasm when it came to how to make this musical even a little bit different than other musicals that we’ve seen on other shows. And then, of course, it took Omar Madha, the wonderful director, to pull it together.

Daniel McFadden/Max

But then the entire crew — from choreography to everybody — just pulled this together, and not the least of it being our cast, who we basically asked to step, for many of them, out of their comfort zone, and they just delivered in a massively wonderful and wacky way. I would be remiss not to mention that’s just one more example of why we need everybody, actors included, back working, and I hope that they’re going to get a fair deal very soon here in their contract negotiations.

What were the cast’s reactions to doing a musical episode, especially like this?

I think everybody was really into it. The most common reaction seems to be that some people just don’t consider themselves strong singers. And I said to everybody, I really don’t care — and this is coming from the world’s worst singer, who’s myself — about the quality, I care about the enthusiasm and the effort and the emotion behind the singing, and I think that wins the day every time, regardless of perfect pitch. Now, it turns out that pretty much all of them are amazing singers, so that was not a worry. But they were all really game, and they all came to it with ideas and renewed energy.

We spent more people hours prepping this episode than any other episode we’ve done. We’re talking about hundreds of hours of preparation that we would normally not do for an episode, everything from vocal instruction, and vocal coaching to choreography. There were just a million different components required to pull this thing off. Everybody honestly really stepped into it with just massive enthusiasm, and I think you can see that on the screen.

We’re doing things that — I don’t really tend to compare our show with other shows, but that first number, it’s a six-minute song, which is pretty daunting in any form of media. And everybody just screwed on their chops and went at it, and it was just wonderful.

Speaking of that opening number (watch part of it above), all the songs are so catchy, but especially that one. How did you want to use that to kick off the episode?

You don’t just have an obligation here to sing songs, right? The real sort of accomplishment from where I sit was that the Bergers managed to, along with our composers, Kevin Kiner and Clint Mansell, pull off song and story. They still did an episode that fit completely within the world of Doom Patrol and fit completely within the story that we were telling this season; it was sort of pretty incredible to be a part of that, to watch that happen.

And so when you talk about what we wanted to accomplish with that first song, well, number one, we still have to set up the story of the episode and as it relates to the rest of the season. So the combination of establishing story, which is a whole new story and a whole new sort of framework of what this episode was, while also announcing that our viewers were in for something quite different than they’d ever seen before, was the goal of that first number.

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There have been quite a few musical episodes over the years. Did you look to any in particular when planning this one, or was it “let’s just dive in, forget about the others”?

I know the Bergers did a little bit more of a deep dive earlier on. For me, it was just dive in. There are a lot of Broadway music and stuff that we’ve referenced. We talked about emotional highs and — I’m not a musician, so I’m going to use very straightforward language here — just the catchiness of songs and everything. So there were certain Broadway musicals referenced, but from my vantage point, it was sort of sit back and let the writers and the composers do what they did best. And again, it was a tremendous, tremendous value with the Bergers having so much experience in musical theater. It really was sort of like their sweet spot. So, from the moment they pitched the episode to the endless hours they spent on the stages with cast and crew, they really carried this one forward.

Whose song and genre was easiest to figure out, and whose maybe took more time? They’re all so different, and they all work so well.

It was important to give something of a mishmash, you know what I mean? To exactly what you’re saying, to give a little smattering of everything to feel what was most important to the characters. There are a few more songs that are a little bit more indelicate than others. [Laughs] And so there was a real joy in watching, for example, Brendan Fraser really embrace sort of the silliness of some of what he was being asked to do and frankly come at us with dozens and dozens of ways to make it even better.

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It’s very hard for me — you didn’t specifically ask me to pick a favorite — just because I just adore how we sort of jumped different genres in the musicality of all these different songs. So, was any one more difficult? The song with Larry and Mister 104 [Sendhil Ramamurthy] was very technically difficult to pull off just because of all the things that had to mesh from the background dancing to some integrated VFX in that whole scene with the steps and everything. But every single song was a labor of lots and lots of hours and love.

Doom Patrol, Thursdays, Max