I just finished the finale of Creature Commandos, and while there were in fact individual episodes I liked quite a bit, how it all came together in the end was…very strange. And not terribly satisfying. Spoilers follow.
I’m not just talking about the double fake-out of the evil princess, where if you examine that storyline too closely, nothing about anything she does makes very much sense. But rather the finale answered a question I had since the start.
Why was Nina on this team?
I thought this was all building to something, and I guess the answer to that question was…there is no coherent answer. No answer in the show at least, but in the meta context, simply designing a tragic scene that makes us sad, even if the character being in the show did not make any sense.
We learn Nina’s backstory in the finale, which makes everything even more confusing. For instance:
- Nina was simply a girl trying to survive after being born with a horrible medical condition.
- She runs away to live in the sewers. She gets caught because she’s a “monster” and her dad is shot in front of her.
- She does not murder anyone (I thought she was about to tear those cops apart) and she’s not even actually accused of any crimes.
- She is thrown in a prison wing with a bunch of other actually violent monsters.
Up until now, I can buy the “well she’s just treated as subhuman because she’s different” idea, but past this, it does not make sense that Waller puts her on the team which is tasked with first a protection mission against an army of chuds and a massively powerful sorceress, then assassinating a princess surrounded by her own army.
- Again, Nina has shown zero proclivity to violence. She is not even a criminal and Waller is smart enough to know that.
- Nina has no actual powers other than being able to swim underwater with gills. This makes her way more likely to die than other borderline immortal team members because a rip in her suit or a crack in her helmet and she’ll expire in short order. She almost dies many times and other team members have to risk themselves to save her. Not to mention this is also a 100% land-based mission except for a swimming pond at the end.
- This may produce a decent character arc for her protector, The Bride, but no, I do not buy that Waller the hardass, attempting to run a successful mission above else, is putting Nina on the team to thaw The Bride’s frozen heart when she has King Shark sitting right there who could probably eat a sorceress for breakfast.
All of this culminates in the failure of the single job Nina is supposed to do, getting herself killed attempting an underwater assassination because Weasel can’t keep his mouth shut. Is this sad? Yes, it’s very sad. But I agree with the post-finale analysis that Nina was written as a “tragedy character.” It felt like there was this idea they’d kill “the nice one” at the end, but they ended up writing her as…nothing and no one before this, and her appearance on the team at all is baffling.
I think one simple change could have fixed this, and it’s what I said before. When she sees her father shot, Nina could have finally snapped and killed a bunch of the police present. That would A) show she is capable of violence and B) still leave her sympathetic given that context, C) make it more logical she’s on the team and D) may give her opportunities to actually be useful in the field. Of course none of this happens.
Creature Commandos was okay in the end, but I hope it can fix some of these weird choices in season 2.
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