Creature Commandos episode four dropped yesterday on Max and brought some surprising revelations and interesting first looks with it. I have to say, while I still don’t love it, the show is starting to grow on me.
SPOILERS for Creature Commandos episode four below.
This episode brings with it the revelation that Princess Ilana is actually going to be responsible for the complete destruction of the United States and seemingly World War III. In the last episode, the Creature Commandos beat Circe and captured her. In this episode, she is delivered to Amanda Waller. Viola Davis’ voice acting is a bit better in this episode, but she still sounds like she rolled out of bed and read the script into the mic one single time and called it good. I wondered if it was intentional during the first episode, but it seems to be clearly intentional now. Regardless, it’s not a good choice.
Circe shows Amanda Waller a future in which Princess Ilana leads her soldiers with suits that are a crossover between Iron Man and a fifteenth century knight into the United States and as far as the White House with Ilana herself sitting there. Then, the most surprising shot is one that includes the holy DC trinity, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, crucified. We get the clearest view of Superman which makes sense because he’s the only one of the three that are cast and fully designed. What’s interesting is that we get a very close up shot of Batman, but not Wonder Woman. It seems like Gunn might already have a design for the Caped Crusader in mind and, I have to say, the small amount we see looks great.
The main plot of the show progresses as Waller believes the vision Circe gives her and orders the death of Princess Ilana causing Flag to go AWOL. I didn’t expect him to fully turn against A.R.G.U.S. after this as he’s seemingly only spent a few days with the princess, but it does make sense that he would be against it. As he tries to warn the princess, but is stopped by somehow not having her number and encountering a language barrier he also somehow can’t get across, he is interrupted by Frankenstein, perfectly voiced by David Harbour.
Frankenstein is a character who is chronically insecure and suffers from childlike fits of rage. Unfortunately, this is used almost exclusively as a gimmick for cheap laughs instead of being something actually interesting, but I suppose in a twenty minute runtime and the backstory of many characters to explore, there isn’t a lot of time to do a character study on the complexities of Frankenstein. The upside to his inclusion is the amazing voice acting from David Harbour. Harbour is an excellent actor, so I don’t know why I didn’t have high expectations of his voice acting, but it is truly masterful. It’s almost as if he has been voice acting for decades. He’s truly great at his job.
Frankenstein saw Flag and The Bride talk for a few seconds and immediately assumed they were an item, killing multiple people in the process. When he confronts Flag, they have a brief fight that really seems like it should’ve at least crippled Flag, then very quickly become friends. The fight was fine, but what comes after it was a bit too much like sitcom comedy for my taste. It was meant to be funny, but it simply wasn’t.
In this episode, we learn the backstory of Weasel. Honestly, I was dreading this. I found Weasel to be nothing but an annoying way for Gunn to shoehorn in jokes about crotches. However, it was done surprisingly well if not extremely predictable. Just like GI Robot and The Bride, his backstory boils down to this: monsters are just misunderstood. It’s a theme that’s been done a million times before and Creature Commandos does it no better or worse than anything else. Weasel didn’t really kill twenty seven children. In fact, he killed zero children and was only trying to rescue them. He’s just a poor, grotesque, misunderstood, crotch licking monster. The plot is mediocre, but the execution is solid. When Weasel is trying to save the children from the burning school, it does end up being a fairly emotional scene, and it’s all due to the animation and the music. Weasel’s face goes from weird and gross to genuinely sad and helpless when he’s trying to save his friend. I fully expected something like We Didn’t Start the Fire to start playing during this scene, but Gunn used an actual score that really complimented the scene.
This episode, just like the rest, was fine. I’ve been attempting to do these reviews objectively, giving each episode a score based on what I think it deserves overall, not just based on how much I liked it. I can’t tell exactly what it is, but the show is slowly growing on me. Maybe it was Gunn and the animation team’s ability to actually make me feel for a character I thought was exclusively annoying, but I’m starting to like it more. Still, I want to be objective. I give this episode a great 8/10.