Diksha Sundriyal
The second half of Max’s ‘Doom Patrol’ Season 4 takes the titular team of misfits into the heart of the enemy lair in Orqwith. Immortus, the cosmic supervillain whose return is imminent, is set to make a comeback, but the end of the seventh episode gives the audience something unexpected. Instead of a supervillain, we get Isabel Feathers, the actress from Cloverton, who went missing in the first episode of Season 3. This isn’t the first time we have seen her this season, but it’s certainly the first time she has exhibited superpowers. What are they, how did she get them, and how do they connect to Immortus? Let’s find out. SPOILERS AHEAD
How Does Isabel Feathers Have Superpowers?
Best known for playing the Blob Lady in Cloverton’s ‘Our Town’ play, Isabel Feathers’ life went haywire when Madame Rouge time-travelled to 2021. This was the night Isabel and her play received hearty praise from the audience, which was really exciting for her. At the end of the episode, when Isabel walks out of the building, celebrating the success of her play and performance, she is distracted by a machine that drills its way out of the ground.
From the machine, Madame Rouge walks out. At the time, she wasn’t part of Doom Patrol and was looking for Niles Caulder. Isabel is shocked by her and is flabbergasted when Rouge takes her form. The actress is so horrified that she takes a step back without looking and falls into the hole from which the machine came out. Later, the device goes back, and the hole is closed, leaving none the wise about what happened to Isabel Feathers.
Isabel appears again in the first episode of Season 4, when the Doom Patrol is in the time machine, hoping to go five minutes in the future, but end up years ahead, where the world is ravaged by Buttpocalypse. In the Time Stream, they encounter Isabel, who collides with the time machine. Rita and Rouge recognize her but don’t do anything about getting her out of there.
In the Time Stream, Isabel exists outside of time and space. It is unclear what happens to a person when they are stuck in a place where time happens all at once and death is merely an illusion. Still, it could be the sort of place where one would expect to cage “an inter-dimensional deity capable of swallowing the entirety of existence whole,” as described by Willoughby Kipling.
Perhaps, during her time in the Time Stream, Isabel came in contact with Immortus, who was looking for a way out of his cage. His followers and the others think he is sleeping, but that’s just another word for dormant. Nobody knows what Immortus might have been up to in the Time Stream while he was not active in the real world. While his followers got back all the pieces of his essence from the members of Doom Patrol, Immortus found Isabel and has now used her as a form to exist in the world.
One of Immortus’ powers is to rewrite reality, which we see Isabel do several times in Season 4, Episode 8. It also feels like she is in a Jekyll and Hyde sort of situation. On the surface, she is in control. She is the Isabel everyone had been looking for all this while. She doesn’t remember that Immortus has hitched a ride through her into the world and is probably waiting for a few things to come together before he can come out in all his glory.
Isabel sometimes talks about things she shouldn’t because Immortus becomes the dominant personality, which is also when her voice changes from a normal woman to a supervillain’s. But, for some reason, Immortus is not ready to come out yet, so he turns back time, basically erasing the thing that happened and rewriting it to make it seem normal. This way, no one even realizes anything is wrong, especially with Isabel. No one will pay attention to her if no one sees her as a threat. Fortunately for the Doom Patrol, Rouge seems immune to Immortus’ rewriting reality and picks up on the clock turning back every time Immortus fiddles with time. What remains to be seen is why he’s bothering with this charade.
Read More: Where is Doom Patrol Filmed?
