In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on HBO MAX's great queer superhero show DOOM PATROL.
Therapy episodes are the writer's version of a thirst trap. We watched the SOPRANOS, we saw just how good those moments between Tony and Dr. Melfi were, and we want that in our story.
But in practice therapy sessions are really hard to do well. They are the very definition of Telling instead of Showing. And they're usually predictable. In order to create a sense of problem or conflict, the patient has to be unwilling in some way. And the game of the sessions is really just about getting the patient past that resistance just enough to share some one bit of new insight into their lives, which is by the way not something they've gained from the back and forth of therapy, as you might expect, but just some secret they've been withholding. Making the entire sequence really just a concocted way to hide the fact that this is an Exposition Dump.
In DOOM PATROL 107, writer Neil Reynolds opens on the idea of our main characters sitting together to do a group therapy session together. But then--in classic DOOM PATROL style--it both subverts the conceits of the therapy story and creates a truly compelling therapy-like experience from them.
Reynolds' first great insight is to dismiss the whole "sit and share" conceit. Having shown them all sitting together, Reynolds then jumps back to earlier in the day and lets us follow each of the characters from there to the point where they're now sitting together.
Just like that, the scene goes from a passive lull in the story to active and alive. And rather than doing the typical Kabuki fan dance of trying to hide what our hero's real struggle is, Reynolds immediately shows you what each person is dealing with.
Jane is literally fighting herself over whether to destroy the work Niles
has done with her; Rita is desperately trying to re-form her body as she tries to get to
the meeting; Cliff is finally freaking out about being trapped forever in a metal shell.
Coming after we've already witnessed each of their struggles, the"therapy" moment now actually functions like real therapy, with characters gaining insight.
At the same time, this approach also allows less to ride on the therapy moment. Jane can say fuck this, not because the author needs a sense of conflict in order to distract us from the exposition to come, but strictly because she's already learned what she needs to learn. The therapy happened elsewhere.
So if you're going to do a therapy episode, consider:
How do I keep this active and organic to the story, rather than an interruption or lull? Therapy does not have to be just the patient and therapist sitting talking to each other.
How do I keep the scene from becoming just an Exposition Dump masquerading as a quest for insight? A good test: Is the therapy sequence bringing them to some genuinely new insight, or is it really just about convincing them to reveal something they already know?
Does what they learn set them off in a new direction or give them new momentum? That’s the funny thing about these kinds of episodes; even if they seem like the character is being forced to take a beat, and thus a pause in the main action, done right "taking a breath" should actually create new energy.
It’s like when you’re working on a screenplay and you get super blocked, and you keep pushing and nothing happens. But then instead you give up and I don’t know, watch your kittens fight. (Vicious creatures.) And then when you come back, everything you need is now there. The gear shift was not a distraction after all, but the path forward.
TOMORROW: DOOM PATROL ALSO KNOWS HOW TO META
