Doom Patrol: The Complete Fourth and Final Season - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Doom Patrol: The Complete Fourth and Final Season



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:

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Movie
Hold on to you lug nuts boys, it’s time for an overhaul!

OK, super hero fatigue IS a thing, and I think the genre has hit peak saturation several years ago. Marvel has been fading faster than a vodka drunk after a 4 hour bender, the CW DC live action shows have all gone the way of the dodo bird, and the last remnants that are holding on have just finished wrapping up in 2023 over on the HBO MAX channel (now just MAX). But surprisingly, the final two shows (Titans and Doom Patrol) were probably some of the better super hero shows out there, and for completely different reasons. Titans went full bore comic book mixed some SLIGHTLY more adult stylings than the CW shows, but it still suffered from too much angst and teenage drama to really be great. Doom Patrol pretty much flew under the radar, managing to outlast the amazing Swamp Thing and Star Girl (both of which were fantastic), while probably being the absolute weirdest and least general audience friendly show out there.

Based off of the 1989 Grant Morrison run, Doom Patrol dares to be bold, dares to be insane, and generally doesn’t giving a flying (insert expletive here) about what people thought about it, but instead chose to simply be FUN. Filled with an all star cast of previous A list actors and some highly under rated B listers (April Bowlby is a gem) Doom Patrol managed to be consistently good to great for over 4 years, and actually ending the series on a good note instead of fading off into cancelville, or getting progressively worse each season until the producers pull the plug on it (cough Arrow and The Flash cough).

Season 4 ends our “heroes” journey with a 12 episode arc that brings us full circle after completing the character arcs started back in 2019. However, there are a few minor quibbles with the last season. Mostly to do with some of our characters spending too much time early on in the season wallowing in past misery, giving us a few episodes where it feels like filler instead of pushing the plot forward. Luckily those episodes occur in the first 1/3rd of the season, leaving the rest of the time for us to get back to butt kicking and dealing with Immortus (the main villain this go around).

The 4th season luckily forgoes adding a ton of new characters to the cast ala the previous three, but it does do a little bit of that with a shapeshifting new team member named Laura De Mille/madame Rouge (Michelle Gomez) who was around during the finale of season 3. Otherwise the cast sticks to the basics, winding up various character arcs (the best being Robotman, as Brendan Fraser acts himself to a near emmy in this show) and actually finishing the show off PROPERLY, instead of the usual “oh we have to end the series, lets see if we can wrap things up or just leave it on a cliffhanger” method.

I’ve said it before, but Doom Patrol is probably one of the best DC shows out there, and has maintained a consistent level of quality across all 4 seasons. It doesn’t get the big advertisements like the DC CW shows, nor was it as popular as more audience friendly series like Titans, but and it manages to blend adult humor and Comic book origins in a way that doesn’t feel overly forced or cheesy. Sure, the show IS cheesy, but everyone leans into it and just has fun with the concept while going full bore crazy in a way that reminds me of less edge lord version of The Boys at times (I love the show, but it’s always leaned heavily into the edge lord trolling nature of it’s inception).




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Doom Patrol has maintained a healthy consistency in its video quality over the years as well, with a very good, and sometimes great, 2.20:1 AVC encode that is home to a strangely stylized world that they live in. Bathed in amber and muted gray hues, the show looks fantastic in many ways, with insanely well saturated neon highlights, and a visual aesthetic at its base that makes it look very dreamlike and demure. There’s some mild banding in darker shots (pretty typical of WB shows like this) and some black crush, but fine details are generally good and nuances in textures and background detailing is excellent. Some of the CGI means certain scenes have some softness to blend the edges, but overall this is a nice 3 disc set to house a 4 pack of episodes were disc.







Audio:

The 5.1 DTS-HD MA lossless track (the only track on the disc) is quite nice, and weirdly unpredictable. At times you feel like it’s almost under pronounced with large swathes of the show being very dialog centric and front heavy, only for the bass and surround usage to literally bowl you over with an incredible sense of power and ferocity. There are times where you think subs are going to kick into high gear (such as a classic car turning over and rumbling down the road) only for other sequences where you’d assume things to be pretty benign just grab you by the throat and pummel you with an earth shaking good time. Surrounds are active and copious, sometimes really poking their heads out of their holes and making their presence known, and other times content to sit back and utilize ambient bird noises or the like in a forest shot. Overall, very impressive.




Extras:

• Unsung Heroes
• Transformation Patrol
• Off-Off-Broadway

Final Score: ​

I’m sad to see it go, but I’m also glad that Doom Patrol ends on a high note. It was one of the few super hero shows that I actually looked FORWARD to watching after getting burnt out of so much “product” that the rest of the series devolved into (or were summarily canceled, like Swamp Thing). The final season is a bit devoid of extras, but it has a good looking encode and a great audio mix to make fans happy with the purchase. Definitely recommended.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Diane Guerrero, April Bowlby, Timothy Dalton, Matt Bomer, Timothy Dalton, Riley Shanahan
Created by: Jeremy Carner
Aspect Ratio: 2.20:1 AVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Warner Brothers
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 586 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: April 9th, 2024

Recommendation: Fun Watch