Summary
Creature Commandos is very James Gunn in a two-part premiere that plays up its direct connections in plot and tone to The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker.
Welcome, says the two-part premiere of Creature Commandos, to the new DC Universe. Well, new-ish, I suppose. Episodes 1 and 2 of Max’s adult animated series, titled “The Collywobbles” and “The Tourmaline Necklace”, are undoubtedly about making the necessary introductions to a new team of antiheroes in a new version of DC molded in the image of co-CEO James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), who wrote the series in its entirety. But they’re also a bit of a reassuring reminder that not everything that came before has been forgotten about.
Particularly, Gunn’s redo of The Suicide Squad and the first season of Peacemaker still stand. That becomes obvious early when Amanda Waller (Viola Davis again – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) reminds Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo – Little Dixie) and the audience what happened to his son in Corto Maltese. You may recall that in Peacemaker’s Season 1 finale, Leota Adebayo (Waller’s daughter) gave a press conference exposing Project: Butterfly as a government-sanctioned extension of Task Force X, meaning that Waller can no longer use human test subjects for her clandestine off-the-books missions.
Enter, then, Task Force M, otherwise known as the titular Creature Commandos. The “M” stands for “monster”. Waller’s loophole is that they can send Belle Reve Prison’s contingent of non-human inmates on missions instead, and it just so happens that there’s a mission of pressing importance to be completed. A rogue Amazonian sorceress named Circe (Anya Chalotra from The Witcher) is leading an extremist group, The Sons of Themyscira, into the small Eastern European nation of Pokolistan, which is of petrochemical value to the U.S. and needs its princess, Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), protecting.
Creature Commandos Episode 1 explains all this in a glob of trim exposition and then provides a Suicide Squad-style introduction to Task Force M: There’s the Bride (Indira Varma – Obsession), a walking corpse; Dr. Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk – Raya and the Last Dragon), who can manipulate radiation and keeps his burning body aflame with an unlimited supply of energy; G.I. Robot (Sean Gunn), a decommissioned Nazi-killing robot from WWII; the Weasel (also Gunn), from The Suicide Squad; and Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao), an amphibian with a fish tank on her head who is also Flag’s best chance of keeping the team in line (along with the usual method, which is a remote that delivers a debilitating shock if they get too carried away.)
With the introductions out of the way, the rest of “The Collywobbles” is about getting the team on-site to set up some stuff for Episode 2 of Creature Commandos. In short, Princess Ilana is determined to get Flag into bed, the Bride has some kind of dark history with Pokolistan that she hasn’t shared with anyone, and sneaks out of the royal palace with Nina in pursuit, and the rest of the team still aren’t totally comfortable with their new responsibilities.
There isn’t much action in Episode 1, but the standout is a knock-down-drag-out fight between Flag and Dr. Phosphorus when the former catches the latter trying to disable the remote zapper. It’s a fun sequence, but oddly, the plot feels more enticing, with a last-minute stinger introducing David Harbour’s Frankenstein. It should have been obvious from “The Bride”, I suppose.
Dr. Phosphorus, the Bride, and Rick Flag Sr. in Creature Commandos | Image via WarnerMedia
Episode 2, “The Tourmaline Necklace,” is particularly focused on the Bride’s backstory, which is intermingled with Ilana’s repeated—and eventually successful—attempts at seducing Flag and the Bride and Nina’s present-day exploration of the old manor where many of the flashbacks take place.
Here’s a brief summary: In 1831, Eric Frankenstein demanded that his creator, Victor, build him a wife. He did, but she was terrified of Eric, and, dismayed, he left the castle. While Victor taught the Bride to be human, the two of them had fallen in love, the former gifting the latter the necklace from which the episode takes its title. When Eric eventually returned, it was to catch the Bride and Victor having sex, sending him into a murderous rampage.
Eric killed Victor, set fire to the place, and chased his fleeing Bride out of there. He has been relentlessly – and toxically – pursuing her since.
If you’re wondering how all this relates to the plot of Creature Commandos, the Sons of Themyscira report the Bride and Nina’s location to Circe, who descends on them before the rest of Task Force M can arrive to support them. At the end of “The Tourmaline Necklace”, in a showcase of Circe’s power and a classic Gunn-ism, both the Bride and Nina are presumed dead.
In most shows, I wouldn’t expect this to be committed to, but with Gunn, you never know. He was perfectly happy to kill off a good chunk of the big-name cast in The Suicide Squad and that may well be a strategy he repeats here, but we’ll have to wait and see. Either way, the DC Universe feels like it’s in very good – albeit very recognizable – hands. I wouldn’t want the entire slate to feel like this, but Creature Commandos is very much of a piece with its closest contemporaries in The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, lending this fledging reboot a touch of needed internal continuity. It’ll be interesting to see where it all goes.
