Page 45 Review by Stephen
"There is another world. There is a better world. Well... there must be."
In which everything and everyone falls apart as one of our resident freaks and misfits discovers that none of them were the results of accidents, but a single experiment, carefully choreographed very close to home.
There's an agonising chapter devoted entirely to Cliff helplessly enduring an increasingly horrific explanation of what has gone before, his deactivated robotic body housing his very human brain, straining to express his mental agony. It's all about Catastrophe Curves and unpredictable events. There's another one coming.
But let's not forget all the fun. Morrison packed DOOM PATROL with outlandish inventions, and here the Chief comes up with molecular-sized processors held in colloidal suspension, which are able to "interact in a way that simulates the electrical activity in the neurons of a human brain" to create the most powerful neural net ever assembled.
"The Think Tank is the future of artificial intelligence."
And it looks just like a swimming pool.
It's always entertaining to blaze out with an apocalypse, and this concluding chapter in Morrison's ode to insanity comes with not one but two. The first of these is catalysed by Dorothy letting The Candlemaker out of her head. It's not the first time she's done that, either, her chief childhood bully paying the bloody price.
A product of her willpower and imagination, The Candlemaker's apocalypse is likewise one of ideas, setting out to destroy the anima mundi - the world's soul:
"Listen: if you want to destroy a people, first destroy its dreams.
"Generations of missionaries have lived by that noble creed.
"Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly toward oblivion.
"We've been experts at this kind of thing for centuries..."
Also: the ultimate incarnation of Rebis, some more bodywork for Cliff, the emergence of Sane Jane from Crazy Jane, and a massive expansion of everyone's favourite stretch of sentient, semi-detached, but foundation-free housing, Danny The Street. Who needs planning permission when you can teleport? Bona to vada, Danny!
This whole series was about ideas and wonder and strangeness, Morrison's own imagination running wild, and it ends on a deliberately ambiguous note which may cause you to rethink everything you've read after a distressing post-script in which a doctor determines to kill Crazy Jane's: her imagination, her ideas, her wonder and strangeness.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies DOOM PATROL's world better than a scene deep in the subterranean bowels of the Pentagon as a plot is hatched to unleash a homicidal maniac on the screamingly insane Presidential candidate Mr. Nobody and his Brotherhood Of Dada:
"Didn't this 'Brotherhood Of Dada' transform a police officer into a toilet in France a couple of years back? What happened to him, Ms. Roddick?"
"As far as I know he's hanging in the Beauborg Gallery."
At the bottom of the page we discover that the military commander and Ms. Roddick are bouncing down the midnight corridors on animal-headed Space Hoppers. It's a joke that's revisited in different ways time and again.
Finally, as an added bit of fun - and I mention this partly as a warning, because I wouldn't want you to think you still had thirty more pages of DOOM PATROL left to read - the DOOM FORCE one-shot parody of Marvel's height of infantilism, the original X-FORCE, is tucked on at the end, each artist lacerating Rob Liefeld's art as ably as Morrison nails the wretchedly piss-poor dialogue.
