Doom Patrol: Why The Underground Alters Are Turning On Jane
Doom Patrol season 3 sees Jane facing another mutiny from the alters, but with Miranda gone, what is their motivation for trying to limit Kay?
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Warning: Contains spoilers for Doom Patrol season 3 episode 7.
In Doom Patrol season 3, the Underground has been moving toward a mutiny against Jane, with Doctor Harrison leading the alters. While Doom Patrol season 2 explored an uprising in the Underground headed by Kay’s trauma masquerading as Miranda, the situation in season 3 seems different. This new storyline allows Doom Patrol to explore another facet of mental health issues through its storytelling.
Doom Patrol’s Jane (Diane Guerrero) is the primary for Kay Challis (Skye Roberts) who lives with dissociative identity disorder, made more complicated by the fact that each of her alters has their own individual superpower. At the beginning of Doom Patrol season 3 the alters stood up to the manifestation that had kept Kay quiet and shut away for so many decades. After defeating it, the alters ate the jigsaw pieces that made up the trauma manifestation and with it gone (for now), Kay has been able to come out of her shell and begin to explore the real world for herself. While Jane has been supportive of this, the alters have pushed back hard and seem to have their own agenda.
So why are the Underground’s alters turning on Jane and Kay in Doom Patrol like this? By defeating the trauma, they have changed the balance that had been established in the Underground for decades throuh which everybody served their own purpose in the larger goal of protecting Kay. The alters fear that if Kay gets “better” then she will not need all of them anymore and they will become obsolete, leading to their own form of death. While Jane feared her death from obsolescence, she had the opportunity to meet Kay’s abuela (grandmother) during her temporary death in Doom Patrol season 3, episode 3 “Dead Patrol.” This enabled her to come to terms with the fact that there might be something else for her and reminded her that protecting Kay was the most important thing, but the rest of the alters were not present for this and did not appear in the Doom Patrol’s afterlife to receive that clarity.
While the driving force for this mutiny is most likely their own fear of death, this might still seem like a character shift for the alters. In Doom Patrol season 2, most of the Underground are happy to accept Miranda as a potential new primary as they trust that it is best for Kay, even when Jane suggests that Miranda might have killed some of the other alters. Another possible explanation is that by eating the jigsaw puzzle pieces that made up the trauma manifestation, the alters have embodied some of those toxic elements themselves. However, it is unclear why this would have such a pronounced effect on Doctor Harrison and Pretty Polly (Hannah Alline) and not on Jane herself. Right now, Jane seems to be the only alter to remember that their collective goal and why they exist is to help Kay.
Doom Patrol’s mutiny on the part of the alters is actually a good representation of how many coping mechanisms for mental health issues can become so entrenched that they can actually persist after the original issue has dissipated. This can ultimately help to cause relapses in some cases and there have been observations of some mental health conditions effectively working to defend themselves through similar vicious circle situations. Doom Patrol has been careful to be consistent about showing Jane’s mental health in a way that doesn’t stigmatize the issue, helped by almost entirely dropping the offensive “crazy” from the character’s name outside of the first episode and some marketing material.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/doom-patrol-underground-alters-jane-turning-mutiny-why/