'Doom Patrol' Season 2 Ending Explained: Cliffhanger finale feels incomplete and we're desperate for Season 3
Spoilers for 'Doom Patrol' Season 2 Episode 9 'Wax Patrol'
'Doom Patrol' Season 2 has come to a rather incomplete end with Episode 9 'Wax Patrol' and the coronavirus pandemic is to blame. The finale ends on a major cliffhanger and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, so let's unpack them now, shall we?
By the end of the episode, the team is incapacitated and frozen in wax with Cliff Steele / Robotman (Brendan Fraser) actually disassembled. Clearly the team is in no shape to fight the Candlemaker (Lex Lang) but that's just as well because there's only one person who can face the monstrous entity. Dorothy Spinner (Abigail Shapiro) has accepted her duty to fight the Candlemaker and taken up arms. The episode ends with her and the Candlemaker disappearing into a mystical flame so we're guessing they're going to have some kind of epic battle that will decide the fate of the Earth.
The Chief / Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton) is basically on the verge of death and while we do hope he gets to see his daughter succeed, there's a very good chance that he might pass on before that. Of course, that won't matter if the Candlemaker manages to defeat Dorothy and destroy humanity.
However, while all of that is pretty clear, the one thing that's still got us confused is what happened to Jane (Diane Guerrero). By the end of the episode, we see her discovering Miranda's (Samantha Ware) lifeless body at the bottom of the Well, suggesting that the Miranda who appeared to come back to life is an impostor. Kay Challis (Skye Roberts) discovers the same thing and "Miranda" confirms that she's not who we thought she was. What we don't know is who this person actually is.
There's a possibility that the fake Miranda is actually Kay's nightmarish representation of her father. However, fake Miranda has been a lot less aggressive than everything we have seen of Kay's father so we're not quite sure that that's the case. Alternatively, it's possible that something entered the Underground when the Candlemaker attacked the psychic construct. We don't know what or who but clearly their intentions are less than heroic.
Ultimately, we're just going to have to wait till Season 3 to get answers to our questions. Season 2 was initially meant to have 10 episodes before being shortened due to the pandemic. So all the scenes that actually explain the mystery and resolve the season's storyline have now been pushed to the next season. This is quite similar to the approach taken with 'Titans' Season 1, which also ended one episode too early and had to wrap up the previous season's storyline in the first episode of Season 2. Though at least in this case it was because of outside factors and not inexplicable internal decisions.
'Doom Patrol' Season 2 is currently available for streaming on DC Universe and HBO Max.