Summary
Creature Commandos gets the balance wrong in Episode 6, bogging down the penultimate episode with flashbacks.
Creature Commandos has been at its best and worst based on the strength of its flashback sequences, and Episode 6, “Priyatel Skelet”, is no different in that regard. But it gets the balance a little off. The best integrate fairly seamlessly and/or are enjoyable on their own terms, like that sweet episode about the Weasel. The worst feel laborious or that they exist just to prove an unrelated point, like the GI Robot ones. Alexander Sartorius’s backstory is fine, if a little overly familiar, but it hogs up so much of the runtime that it relegates the Task Force M stuff to a B-plot ahead of the season finale, which doesn’t seem like an especially good idea.
There is a Batman cameo, though, so every cloud and all that.
I do like Dr. Phosphorus, for what it’s worth. His powers have made for some of the best action in the series. But “Priyatel Skelet” is predominantly focused on his origin story, picking up with him back in Gotham City when he was trying to cure cancer via nuclear fusion. The present-day sequences are fairly scant – Phosphorus is mostly hiding, the Bride and Nina take shelter in a brothel, Rick Flag Sr is in a coma following his fight with Clayface, and Eric has a single brief scene in which he – hilariously, admittedly – commandeers a plane to return to Pokolistan.
Most of Phosphorus’s backstory involves Gotham gangster Rupert Thorne, who sells his experiment data to an oppressive regime, kills Sartorius’s family, frames Sartorius for it, and then boils him in his own nuclear contraption. I thought, naively, that we were building to the idea that Dr. Phosphorus was largely innocent of the crimes he was convicted for, but to be fair he does take violent revenge on Thorne and his crew, annihilating them with his new powers and taking over his criminal operations.
The Batman cameo is perfunctory – he’s the one who apprehends Phosphorus, which leads to him ending up in Belle Reve. All of this is fine. But it doesn’t have the character of the Eric flashbacks in the previous episode, and it doesn’t add much to the present-day sequences, in which Phosphorus sits with a young girl who caught him hiding in her house. I think there’s supposed to be a Con Air-style ambiguity to this, like Garland Greene having a tea party, but I never felt worried for the kid.
Elsewhere, Nina and the Bride get into a fight with some metahumans in the brothel they’re hiding in, but the Craic Brothers are uninteresting, both in terms of their powers (just basic electricity stuff) and their personalities (overtly evil misogynist rapist thugs). This is all okay but feels misplaced so close to the season finale, and the same can be said of Weasel befriending a pack of wolves, which is totally disconnected from everything else.
Still, Creature Commandos Episode 6 does at least reunite all of Task Force M right in front of Castle Rostovic. The gang doesn’t yet know that they’ve been misled into killing Princess Ilana, and Flag is laid up in hospital. With that in mind, it might only be Eric, who’s currently on his way to Pokolistan, who will be able to thwart the attempt on the princess’s life. But he, as we know, has ulterior motives. I don’t expect things will go well for him, but his romantic overtures could inadvertently save the day. And wouldn’t that be fitting?
