Doom Patrol Season 3, featuring Michelle Gomez as Madame Rouge, arrives on the 23rd of September
Even as Peter Capaldi appears on the big screen as DC villain the Thinker, his old Doctor Who sparring partner Michelle Gomez is about to appear as another. DC have announced season three superhero show Doom Patrol will premiere on HBO Max on the 23rd of September. And Gomez will be appearing as Laura de Mille/Madame Rouge, a shapeshifting member of first the Brotherhood of Evil and then the Sisterhood of Dada. In the comics, the Dada group unite in a belief that ‘evil’ is too small a concept. Instead they dedicate themselves to surreality, madness and lethal performance art. While Laura/Rouge is a woman with Jekyll/Hyde type personalities fighting for control but which eventually join forces against the men trying to ‘cure’ them.
Meanwhile, they’ve also released a first teaser for the new Doom Patrol season. Though it’s hard to tell if Michelle Gomez actually appears in it. There’s a woman in heavy prosthetics that appears alongside images of Brotherhood of Evil team-members the Brain (the disembodied brain in a skull shaped case) and Monsieur Mallah (the beret wearing gorilla guerrilla). Is that fellow team-member Rouge (Gomez) then? And are those Gomez’ tones saying ‘Piddle Paddle?’ And who owns that scarlet nailed hand hanging over the edge of a cart?
As well as Michelle Gomez, there’s a Doctor Who link with Ty Tennant, son of David and Georgia, as Edwin the Dead Boy Detective
Elsewhere the trailer hints at the other dangers the Doom Patrol will be facing next month. Last season ended on a cliffhanger with the team meeting apparently dying. And certainly the trailer seems to show them on the river Styx, in zombie like forms, or as ghostly spectres. Though we also see them in their normal forms so presumably make a journey back to life during the early episodes.
One of those shots might give us our first glimpse of Neil Gaiman’s Dead Boy Detectives, too. Played by David and Georgia Tennant’s son Ty, Edwin Payne died in 1916 and became best friends with Charles Rowland (Sebastian Croft) when Charles was killed by ghostly bullies haunting the same school a century later. The two set up their own detective agency and use their undead status to investigate the world’s most macabre cases. In the trailer they seem to be helping Negative Man (Matt Bomer) learn how to leave his body in an astral form.
We also see other members of the Sisterhood of Dada, and a return for the carnivorous Butts. Street wizard, and Doom Patrol ally, Willoughby Kipling (Mark Sheppard, Doctor Who: The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon) is back too, declaring they’re “all the way through the looking glass now.” And based on the trailer he’s right – Doom Patrol is set to be weirder and wilder than ever!
Doom Patrol returns to HBO Max in the US on the 23rd of September. It currently has no broadcaster in the UK, but Season One and Two are available on DVD and Blu-ray
