‘Creature Commandos’ throws in a pointless team member just to make us cry

I just finished the finale of Creature Commandos, and while there were actually individual episodes I really enjoyed, the way it all came together at the end was… very strange. And not terribly satisfying. Spoilers ahead.

I’m not just talking about the evil princess double-fake, where if you examine that story very closely, nothing about anything she does makes much sense. But more than that, the finale answered a question I had from the beginning.

Why was Nina on this team?

I thought this was all building up to something, and I think the answer to that question was…there is no coherent answer. There are no answers at least in the show, but in the meta context, just designing a tragic scene that makes us sad, even if the character who was in the show didn’t make sense.

We learn Nina’s story in the finale, which makes everything even more confusing. For example:

• Nina was just a girl trying to survive after being born with a terrible medical condition.
• She ran away to live in the sewers. She is captured because she is a “monster” and her father is shot in front of her.
• She doesn’t kill anyone (I thought she was going to tear the cops apart) and she isn’t actually charged with any crime.
• She is thrown into a prison wing with a bunch of other violent monsters.

So far, I can buy the “well she’s treated as subhuman because she’s different” idea, but after that, it doesn’t make sense that Waller put him on the team who is tasked first with a defense mission against an army of chuds and a massively powerful sorceress, then to kill a princess surrounded by her army.

• Again, Nina has shown zero propensity for violence. She’s not even a criminal, and Waller is smart enough to know that.
• Nina has no real powers other than being able to swim underwater with her gills. This makes her more likely to die than the other members of the Immortal Frontier team, because one tear in her suit or a crack in her helmet and she will expire in no time. She almost dies many times and the other team members have to risk themselves to save her. Not to mention that this is also a 100% land-based mission, except for a swimming pool at the end.
• This might make for a good character for her protector, Nusen, but no, I don’t buy that tough Waller, trying to pull off one successful mission above all others, is putting Nina on the team to melt the heart of frozen bride when she has the King Shark sitting there who could probably eat a witch for breakfast.

This all culminates in Nina failing the only job she’s supposed to do, getting killed in an underwater assassination attempt because Weasel can’t keep her mouth shut. Is this sad? Yes, it is very sad. But I agree with the post-finale analysis that Nina is written as a “tragedy character”. It seemed like there was an idea that they were going to kill off the “pretty” at the end, but they ended up writing her off as…nothing and no one before that, and her appearance on the team is downright weird.

I think a simple change could have fixed this, and that’s what I said before. When she sees her father shot, Nina could finally snap and kill a group of police officers present. This would A) show that she’s capable of violence and B) still make her likable given the context, C) make it more logical that she’s on the team, and D) give her options to be really 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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