‘Doom Patrol’ Boss on Cliff’s Alternate Ending, Series Finale & Next Chapter
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Doom Patrol series finale.]
Well, that seemed like a definite ending to Doom Patrol… for some of the characters, at least.
The Max Original ended with Cliff (Brendan Fraser) dying, Rita (April Bowlby) in the afterlife, Larry (Matt Bomer) and Rama (Sendhil Ramamurthy) becoming the new sun (as the penultimate episode teased), Jane (Diane Guerrero) figuring things out and the entire underground now existing all at once as Kay as she joins Casey (Madeline Zima) in traveling in the spaceship, Vic (Joivan Wade) Cyborg 2.0 and helping Deric (Elijah Rashad Reed) with his class, and Rouge (Michelle Gomez) burning down the Ant Farm.
Showrunner Jeremy Carver takes us inside the finale below.
When we spoke about the musical episode, you said that this finale is the end of a chapter. So at what point in the series did you realize you wanted this chapter to end with the Doom Patrol going their separate ways?
Jeremy Carver: I think it was always the idea that at a certain point they’re going to have to really work on themselves even more. We knew they would probably go on their separate ways from an early point in the show. We were prepared to stretch it out. I don’t know if I can pinpoint the exact date. I know the intention was always that this felt like the ending we should have, and that was partly predicated on how much of Doom Patrol they would allow us to tell at this time.
A couple of the endings felt much more like endings than the others, like Cliff dying and Rita in the afterlife. Then Vic, Jane, and Rouge’s felt more like definite beginnings, and Larry’s kind of felt somewhere in between that. Which characters ending to this chapter did you come up with first and whose were the hardest to figure out?
I think because Cliff was sort of our entry point into the show as we sort of followed his POV into this world back in the pilot, that we had a notion of what his ending would look like. I can say it changed stylistically, but not substantively in terms of Cliff’s emotions.
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I think Jane’s was difficult just because we wanted to make sure we got it as right as we felt it could be. She’s been dealing with so much and we didn’t want to suggest that there were easy solutions or a cure even to what she has been going through. So it was a question of hitting the right notes, and it felt like allowing her to find a certain amount of peace in the kaleidoscope and then go on to find other opportunities after she found that piece felt like the right sort of one-two step to take with her.
Did you consider any alternate endings for any of the characters?
I’m certain we threw around different things while we were sort of arriving to the place where we landed. Like I said with Cliff, this is the thing that just jumps to mind, was that rather than that crystal being sort of like a portal to him seeing [his grandson] Rory’s future, we had played around with the idea of actually taking the spaceship through the time stream to visit each one of these moments in Rory’s life. Ultimately, we went with the crystal.
If you had gotten another season and knew ahead of writing these final episodes, what would the end of this season have looked like?
Oh, that’s very hard to say because from the beginning of the season we were planning this out. We didn’t change mid-course or anything in the season. We had a strong enough indication that we wouldn’t be coming back, that we decided very early on before we started breaking the season that we would write it towards the end of this chapter.
So did you have a list of must haves for these final episodes, such as bringing back Niles (Timothy Dalton) in some way like you did?
I think it’s one of the hardest things to chart out any closing of a chapter on any show. So I think we all go through the things we’d love to see. And I think also there is a certain amount of deference to the fans as well and what do the fans deserve to see as well. What sort of closure moments have they been waiting patiently for?
Can you say anything about what a next chapter could look like now that we’ve seen how this one ends?
Well, being Doom Patrol, I would just say knowing where these characters have landed, and like you said, some with what seemed like newish beginnings and some seeming pretty final, I think there would be a lot of fun, albeit a certain amount of pain in bringing these people back online, as it were, which is just about the right dose of everything that makes Doom Patrol go. So I can’t get much more specific than that except it has been discussed and it’s relished would we ever be given the chance.
Is there anything that you really wanted to do in this final season that you had to scrap? Or anything you wanted to spend more time on, such as specific storylines?
Without getting into too many specifics, I think there were some storylines in the comics, in the later runs, Gerard Way and Rachel Pollack runs that we would’ve probably loved to have gone into since there’s some wonderful stuff in there. That’s just in terms of what’s there in the archives. But at the moment, I can’t think of any one thing that we sort of left on the table.
How will you remember Doom Patrol?
For me, it was quite simply the most rewarding creative experience of my time working in television. It was an extraordinary world that I was gifted. When they asked if I wanted to take on the show, I had never even heard of the Doom Patrol before it was brought up to me. Four days later, I had read a bunch of it and I said yes. And the idea that we were able to find such a talented, diverse group of artists from the writers to the cast to the crew who were willing to take that ride and really embrace everything that was sort of weird and wonderful about Doom Patrol and to find that partnership in the studio — and we were at two different networks over our run — and they gave me and us a level of artistic freedom that I can only hope for in incoming projects, it was a magnificent experience.
Yeah, the show is so wild and wacky, but it has so much heart and you really feel that in the finale.
Yeah, the show is always looking for that balance. That’s, to me, one of the things that made the show special is that balance between pathos and humor and pain and surprise and absurdity, and we tried as writers to be true to that to the very end. And I thought one of the greatest things for me was watching Ezra Claytan Daniels and Shoshana Sachi write the finale, just as two writers who sort of came up on the show and then taking on this enormous responsibility with such grace and vigor — that’s a weird combination. But they did an absolutely wonderful job, so it was really marvelous to sort of sit back and watch even someone else’s interpretation of what a Doom Patrol finale should look like. It was very rewarding.
Doom Patrol, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Max
