Doom Patrol: Why Laura De Mille Always Turns Into A Magpie

In Doom Patrol season 3, Laura De Mille, AKA Madame Rouge, is repeatedly shown turning into a magpie, but the show never explains why. While her powers have been shown to enable her to shapeshift into many different things, the magpie seems to be a personal favorite for Laura De Mille. The answer lies at the heart of her character and how her powers represent her personality.

When Laura De Mille (Michelle Gomez) was first introduced in Doom Patrol season 3, she had no memory of who she was or what her powers were. She was very excited to learn that she could turn into a bird and thought that it was her only power for some time. It has since been clarified that Laura De Mille can transform into anything, including a cat, an ottoman, and other people (including a baby). While she clarifies that she turns into a bird in the Sisterhood of Dada recording because Shelley Byron (Wynn Everett) is allergic to cats, she goes on to escape Rita Farr (April Bowlby) more than once by turning into a magpie.

If Laura De Mille was simply keen to be able to turn into any creature that could fly, there are a huge number of birds that she could choose from; yet, she seems to always settle on the magpie. This appears to be a stylistic choice from the Doom Patrol showrunners as the magpie’s appearance, traits, and mythos make it an excellent symbol for her character. Magpies are black and white, which represents her binary way of viewing the world; De Mille sees herself as only having two options at any point, a trait that leads to her turning her back on the Sisterhood of Dada and the Doom Patrol.

More importantly, in many cultures, magpies are seen as symbols of shrewd intelligence and of deception, so the magpie being her bird of choice does a lot to hint at her mercurial loyalties between the Bureau of Normalcy and the Sisterhood of Dada. When she speaks about the creation of Dada art in a flashback in Doom Patrol season 3, episode 9 “Evil Patrol,” Laura De Mille says that turning into a bird for the film is not about showing her metahuman powers but rather about showing her true nature. While this is treated as a statement about art and the understanding of the human condition, it has clear implications about how the magpie reveals her deceptive nature in a more overt way than her power simply making it easier to deceive people.

While there is limited evidence to support the idea, popular myths portray magpies as collectors of shiny and interesting objects (in reality magpies are largely startled and scared by shiny things). This image of magpies in the social consciousness helps to further highlight elements of Laura De Mille’s character as she herself has worked to collect not shiny objects, but interesting people. This has happened three times over in Doom Patrol with her working as a recruiter looking for interesting metahumans for the Bureau of Normalcy, her formation of the Sisterhood of Dada, and her eventual co-opting of the Doom Patrol themselves. On many levels, Laura De Mille doesn’t just turn into a magpie because it is convenient, but because it is representative of who she truly is.

Doom Patrol releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO Max.

About The Author

Faefyx Collington
(489 Articles Published)

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Faefyx Collington (They/Them) is a senior features writer for Screen Rant. They’re a British writer of both fiction and non-fiction, focussing on science fiction, fantasy, and mystery for the former and on culture, gender, and current affairs for the latter.
Never content to settle to one thing, Faefyx is also a co-host and producer of the podcast and video series “Unramblings,” and can occasionally be found making music around the internet as well.
Having acquired degrees on both sides of the Atlantic, Fyx has settled (for the moment) in the southern United States where they live with their spouse and an entirely appropriate number of cats.

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