SPOILER WARNING: This story contains key plot details from Season 1, Episode 4 of “Creature Commandos,” currently streaming on Max.
When James Gunn first introduced Weasel in the 2021 feature film “The Suicide Squad,” he knew that the DC Comics character — an animal human or humanoid, depending on your point of view — hadn’t actually killed 27 children. unlike the charges that landed Weasel in Belle Reve Prison.
“I didn’t know the details of it, but I always knew it wasn’t fair,” Gunn says.
It wasn’t until Gunn brought Weasel back for the DC animated series “Creature Commandos” that he was finally able to figure out the details of how this friendly beast came to be wrongly labeled a child killer. As the titular team carries out their mission with Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), each episode of the series, all written by Gunn, explores one of their backstories. Episode 4, titled “Chasing Squirrels,” puts Weasel in the spotlight. And good gravy, it is gloomy.
“It makes me really sad to talk about it,” Gunn says, his voice turning unusually soft. “I remember when I was done [writing] It. I was in Colorado with my wife and I remember saying, “I think I just wrote the saddest thing I’ve ever written in my entire life.”
Weasel’s story unfolds in a series of flashbacks and begins when he emerges from the woods behind an elementary school, where he encounters a group of children playing during the Thanksgiving holiday. Where Weasel came from, and what he actually is isremain a mystery, but it is clear to the children that he is a gentle animal who does not want to harm them. They all have a blast playing together, but when an old man comes along, he misinterprets Weasel’s behavior as threatening – for no real reason, other than assuming a giant furry animal would be naturally threatening – so he races back to his cabin to call 911. and take his gun.
At the same time, one of the children discovered that the back door of the school was unlocked. When they all run inside, Weasel follows and continues to play with the children as they mess around and end up in the school’s boiler room in the basement. A series of accidental mistakes – playing with (but not drinking) a teacher’s bottle of booze, striking a box of matches next to a box of dirty rags – leads to a fire just as the old man appears and starts shooting at Weasel. The boiler explodes, killing the man and all the children except one little girl – and that’s when two officers peer into the basement and see Weasel surrounded by their bodies as he tries to drag the girl to safety amid the raging fire that is there. consume the school.
Like the old man, they automatically assume the worst and open fire on Weasel as he desperately tries to get the child to safety. The police manage to take out Weasel just as he is about to reach the door, and they hold him back as the school collapses around the girl, burying her alive.
“It’s incredibly sad,” says Sean Gunn, who played Weasel via performance capture in “The Suicide Squad” and provided his voice in “Creature Commandos.” Sean has worked with his older brother James since the mid-1990s and says he’s not surprised Weasel’s story is so tragic: “There’s a darkness to James himself, and there’s a darkness to a lot of his work too. ” The specifics by however, that darkness overwhelmed Sean Gunn.
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It started with James Gunn’s instruction to Sean to play Weasel as if he were “a big dog.” “Weasel doesn’t think in dialogue,” says Sean Gunn. “But for any of us who have and love dogs, you know that your dog has quite a complex emotional life. So when you put this character through the ringer, it becomes very recognizable, but also new. It’s tragic and sad, and besides, I’ve never seen anything like it on television.
Sean Gunn shot the final scene over a few recording sessions to get it right, performing Weasel’s actions over one uninterrupted take until his final, anguished scream as the police dragged him away.
“I was a little sick the first time we did it, and the scream actually wasn’t even 1/5 of what it was supposed to be,” he says. “When we went back, we knew we really needed the shout.”
Animated, the series proved just as challenging, given the harrowing reality that multiple children died on screen. “We went through a lot of iterations of that whole series,” says executive producer Dean Lorey. “It was difficult to find exactly the right tone for it. We wanted you to feel the emotion and the horror of what was happening. But we didn’t want to exploit.”
For James Gunn, the episode is the latest example of his penchant for focusing on characters who are wildly misunderstood by wider society. “At the end of the day, [Weasel]is in many ways the most noble character on the show,” he says. “This is a fairly innocent creature who is treated as something different because he looks different from other people.”
And it looks like Weasel’s tragic story isn’t over yet.
“You’ll see everything with his backstory come into play in the later episodes,” James Gunn teases. “If you’re talking about the characters being on a kind of continuum from good to bad, he’s pretty much on the good side.”