Season One Review
Creature Commandos premiered on December 5, 2024 on the Max streaming service and continued with one new episode weekly until January 9, 2025. Greenlit by James Gunn and all 7 episodes were written by James Gunn, it's fair to say Creature Commandos was a passion project. In the long run, Creature Commandos was the first shot fired for the newest continuity put forth by DC Studios. In the James Gunn-Peter Safran era, different mediums will be used to tell stories and rather than start with a theatrical live-action movie starring an A-list superhero, here we are with a streaming animated series about a lesser known government-sanctioned team of monsters. The first set of projects are collectively released under the umbrella of Chapter One: Gods and Monsters. Creature Commandos addresses the latter: monsters and how they are perceived while laying down the groundwork for the newest DC universe on the block.
From start to finish, Creature Commandos is serial storytelling. For DC animation fans, this isn't anything new. In fact 2024 was heavy with serial storylines rather than stand alone tales week to week. My Adventures With Superman. Kite Man: Hell Yeah! Suicide Squad Isekai. Essentially, Creature Commandos is a movie chopped into seven chapters while telling the tragic origins of each member of the team while secretly molding one into a leader and starting the world building for the new continuity. Amanda Waller, director of the federal agency A.R.G.U.S., has been restricted by Congress from using human prisoners for highly dangerous black ops missions so she exposes a loophole and uses monster prisoners instead to protect America's interests in small European country called Pokolistan but what starts as a mere economic concern quickly escalates into preventing an apocalyptic World War III and the waters are muddied as to who the real enemy is.
The Bride of Frankenstein goes from the uncaring immortal creation of Dr. Victor Frankenstein endlessly pursued by an unwanted suitor to a somewhat caring team leader who couldn't care less about saving the world but what else is there to do? Dr. Phosphorus was once a scientist trying to cure cancer but he turns to the wrong crowd and is turned into a sociopathic killer whose irradiated skin can burn through anything and anyone. The sarcasm doesn't help much. The Weasel is an anthropomorphic being that resembles his namesake but it's unclear if he's an animal or a human. G.I. Robot is a robot build to kill Nazis in World War II. Nina Mazursky was cured of her birth defects by her scientist father but turned into an amphibious being as a result. Rick Flag Sr. is a by-the-book boy scout of a general who has served the military for decades and is assigned by Amanda Waller to supervise her new task force, Task Force M, or colloquially the Creature Commandos. Eric Frankenstein, the Bride's unwanted suitor and the doctor's first creation, believes without question he and the Bride are meant to be and seeks to prove it to her even though she leaves him for dead at every turn over the course of nearly 200 years.
The villains initially are fairly straight forward. Circe is a rogue Amazonian sorceress hell bent on destroying a European country named Pokolistan. She enlists a militant group of right-wing nuts named the Sons of Themyscira who are hellbent on conquering Themyscira, the island nation of the Amazons from which Circe is originally from. They help her take down Pokolistan, she leads them to Themyscira. America just so happens to have started negotiations with Pokolistan for their untapped oil reserves. Waller decides to intervene and sends her Creature Commandos. Sounds like your standard black ops secret mission of the week. Wrong. Like any good espionage tale, there's a twist. Circe saw a vision of an apocalyptic future where Pokolistan went to war against America and won and she was trying to prevent it. By killing the heir apparent Princess Ilana Rostovic. Waller comes to believe this vision is legitimate and sends the Commandos to kill Ilana. If you know this genre, there never is just one twist. Some intrigue is abound when Rick Flag and Eric Frankenstein enter a quid pro quo situation and enter into a brutal battle with the shapeshifter Clayface, seemingly proving Ilana's innocence and reinforcing Circe's villainy. Or does it? Yeah, there's another twist but more on that later.
The R nature of the series has drawn mixed results. While some may welcome over the top violence, action, humor, and brief sexual situations, others may not. Variety is the spice of life as they say. DC animation started with strictly PG fare but slowly grew and expanded to where you can find everything under the rainbow – G, PG, PG-13, and R. While at times it can get crass and sadistic, the show really means to take you on a roller coaster ride of hilarious moments, intense violence, shocking reveals, and heartbreak depending on where the story is going. If you've watched anything by James Gunn, Creature Commandos isn't exactly broaching new territory. More so if you've seen "The Suicide Squad" or "Peacemaker" season one, "Creature Commandos" mostly follows the same tried and true formula of a group of misfits and rejects with severe personal defects who remain mostly static and don't change their ways. Although what "The Suicide Squad" or "Peacemaker" lacked, "Creature Commandos" had in spades: tragic backstories that made our leads who and what they are today. And not just that, some are the victims of circumstance while some cross the line. The Weasel turns out to not be a child serial killer. Misinterpretation, bias, and fear took hold and Weasel was a victim assumed to be the assailant. Dr. Phosphorus have his family murdered, being framed for it, and being left to die from his own research was an awful thing but then he did the same thing back to his offender, mob boss Rupert Thorne – killing not just him but his wife and two children then becomes a mob kingpin himself. The world building doesn't hit you over the head. Some DC locales are visited, some are mentioned, Batman exists, here's a vision previewing a bunch more heroes, metahumans are around, robotics is pretty advanced, aliens, these myths are real. Another difference I oddly welcomed was the season finale lacked a giant action set piece. No giant alien starfish. No body snatching alien butterflies and their cow. No sticking it to Waller. Just an unexpected gesture for a fallen friend that also happens to save the world. For now.
Like a good espionage or noir, the mystery and/or villain isn't completely spelled out to the audience. They have to look at the puzzle pieces and draw their own conclusions. Alexi mentions Pokolistan was an isolated nation for a long time and only opened up communications to America weeks before the events of the series. Ilana Rick she loves American rock and roll and wanted to take her country into the 21st century. Look at the books Bride sees in her study in the season finale. Ilana basically studied the West and got radicalized. A very simplistic comparison is in medieval times, Japan revered China then when Japan opened to the West in the 19th century and modernized, they tried to conquer China in World War II along with the rest of Asia and forcefully create a new prosperous Asian empire. Ilana revered and idolized America then started studying it and the West. We could see the start of modernizing with the Amethyst Knights, the contrast of the airport, the humvees, the soldiers with the cramped village and castle setting. Ilana's study had an oddly hi-tech holographic globe of Earth. And in Circe's vision, she's suddenly got an air force raining bombs on America and somehow took down a bunch of superheroes.
All these flashbacks showed how the Creature Commandos were turned into as monsters against their will and they are who they are because of it. The Craic Brothers were monsters, but like Ilana they looked like regular humans. Ilana was a monster because of her privilege. Raised as royalty, way ahead of the average person in her country, she had access to more, she was about to take the highest level of power - and what did she want to do with all that? Light a match and watch the world burn down. I wouldn't be shocked if Ilana were responsible for her mother's catatonic condition. It all ties back to the overarching theme of perception. As the Bride deduced, Ilana really was a monster. Not a monster created like the Creature Commandos but a monster that was born.
When it comes to Grodd being in the vision and being totally ignored by Circe and Waller, it's intriguing suffice to say. In short order, Ilana was able to operate in channels that led her to hiring Clayface. Not much of stretch she would seek out Grodd as a general. In past interviews, Gunn has said there's a lot of metahumans out in the world to the point of it being a problem. So I think we're at a point where superpowered villains are also operating as mercenaries for hire on the international scene. Though curiously, one of Ilana's books was "Jacques le Fataliste," which was basically the relationship between valet Jacques and his master, who is never named. And who's never named? Grodd. We've seen in past works like "Batman Beyond" that Kobra golden child Xander was tutored by season 2-villain-of-the-week Dr. Cuvier. What if Grodd is/was a mentor of Ilana. Could that come up in Creature Commandos season two? Maybe, maybe not.
The weak point of the series for me were the reinterpretations of certain characters. Circe is a self-serving goddess out to cause chaos. In this show, she's now an Amazon that dabbles in magic who wants to prevent the end of the world. There wasn't someone else they could have used? I admit it does create a potential future plot for Wonder Woman in the modern era (i.e. tasked with gathering the scattered Amazons in Man's World on Hippolyta's orders to return home). Then with Circe, some definite headbutting over jurisdiction. Would Waller simply hand Circe over to Wonder Woman to be extradited to the prison on Themsycira or wherever they settle as the new home? Another was Eric Frankenstein. Where to start with him. He's turned into an obsessive stalker and killing machine who has a very jaundice world view who meanders between pseudo-intellectual and a petulant man-child.
The series doesn't try to put a bow on everything thankfully. What will be the state of Pokolistan moving forward? Ilana's dead. Her mom is catatonic. Civil war? Another country invades and annexes it? Bialya has been mentioned in the series. We saw in the "Superman" trailer there's a bit of that unrest going on around the same area of Jarhanpur and Boravia. Waller got outed by Leota for Task Force X in Peacemaker season one. I doubt anyone left in Pokolistan has the pull to out Waller for Task Force M. But there's still Elizabeth Bates, Weasel's lawyer. Or Rick Flag for that matter. Once rehabilitation is complete, is he going back to work for Waller and move to oust her and reform A.R.G.U.S. himself? I'm sure Waller had a team collect Clayface. Usually Clayface recovers from electricity in other depictions. Will he in this case? Will Belle Reve scientists try to revive him? Use his remains to turn another person into Clayface? With the live action movie in the works, you have to wonder. More important than looming questions and what if's, the series ends with a new status quo. Task Force M continues on with some new members, a clubhouse of sorts, and G.I. Robot is back! But sadly, Eric still doesn't get it.
Aside from some personal nitpicks about villain reinterpretations, the story not resonating completely with me, some violence and humor not landing, Creature Commandos is a fairly solid DC series and is the opening salvo in what will hopefully be a long lasting new continuity for the world of DC Comics. Creature Commandos tells a cohesive, serial story rife with comedy, tragedy, death, intrigue; all flavored through the eclectic lens of one James Gunn and anchored by a stellar cast, mesmerizing score, bonkers soundtrack, and the collaboration of animation crews in America (Warner Bros. Animation), Europe (Bobbypills), and Asia (Studio IAM).
Rating: 3.5 out of 5