This article contains spoilers for Creature Commandos Season 1.
After seven action-packed and often traumatizing episodes, Season 1 of Max’s Creature Commandos wrapped its final mission with Episode 7, “A Very Funny Monster.” Not only did the episode have a ton of twists and turns, but not everyone in the main cast made it out alive – and some even came back to life. So with that in mind, you might need a bit of the ‘ol Creature Commandos ending explained.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered, particularly when it comes to untangling that last-minute wild swerve with The Bride (Indira Varma) and Princess Ilana (Maria Bakalova). Plus, we’ll break down what happens in the Creature Commandos end credits scene in case you missed it, how the finale sets up a potential Season 2, and blowing it out even further, how the show set up a slew of threads to pick up in DC Studios’s DCU (DC Universe) at large.
Creature Commandos Ending Explained
The crucial info to know here is that despite a lot of back and forth over the seven episodes… Princess Ilana is, indeed, the bad guy. And Circe’s (Anya Charlotra) clairvoyant vision of the future, where she saw Ilana laying waste to the DC Universe was, in fact, a real vision of the future. At least as far as you believe clairvoyance is real (this is an ending explained for Creature Commandos, not an “Are psychic powers real explained,” just FYI).
So in the finale, as The Bride, Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), Nina Mazursky (Zoë Chao), and Weasel (Sean Gunn) headed to kill Ilana, they were doing the right thing. But when Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) woke from his Clayface (also Tudyk) induced coma and told Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) and John Economos (Steve Agee) just enough info to get them to find out Themyscira professor Macpherson (Stephanie Beatriz) had been replaced by Clayface, something that got Waller and Economos to get the Creature Commandos to stand down? They were doing the wrong thing. Weird that “not murdering someone” is the wrong thing, but that’s how the show rolls.
But that, as we discover, was Ilana’s plan all along – confusing as it may be. First, Ilana seduced Flag Sr. to get him on her side. She figured him being an old, lonely man finally having sex for the first time in years (though as Doctor Phosphorus noted, he has remarkable stamina for a man his age) would be enough to convince him to kill Circe for her. What Ilana hadn’t counted on was that Flag Sr. is a stand-up guy, and he instead captured Circe and brought her back to Belle Reve.
At this point – and this is the part that may have flown under the radar for some viewers – MacPherson was still alive, and indeed a professor with knowledge of Themyscira and Circe’s clairvoyant powers. Ilana had sent one of her knights to spy on the Commandos in America, and he got word back to her that MacPherson was on the scene and would confirm Circe’s vision of Ilana destroying the world. So Ilana made the only move she could… As The Bride explains to Ilana when she confronts her in her study, Ilana recruited Clayface to make it look like MacPherson “wasn’t who she was,” says The Bride, “even though she was who she said she was when she and Waller spoke.
Does your brain hurt yet trying to wrap your head around this? The short version is that Ilana was a power-mad dictator bent on destroying the world and tried to confuse the situation to save her own life. The Bride figured it out and killed her – not because she was going to cause World War III, but because Ilana stabbed The Bride’s only friend (that would be Nina Mazursky) to death.
And the grateful nation of America, through Economos, gives her a new team of Commandos to lead: Weasel, Doctor Phosphorus, a rebuilt G.I. Robot (also Sean Gunn), what looks like She-Bat (aka Man-Bat’s wife), Khalis (a mummy-type villain), and King Shark (Diedrich Bader).
“Well, you in?” asks Economos. “What else I got to do?” shoots The Bride right back.
That’s cool and all, but Ilana’s unnecessarily convoluted plan is based on Waller making multiple assumptions about Clayface and MacPherson. It also depends on Ilana having known what Circe’s vision of the future was about… Something that we’re never given an indication of throughout the series (did they ever talk prior to the events of this series? Do they even know each other?)
It also strangely takes the strong theme of toxic masculinity through Circe leading a group called the Sons of Themyscira (SofT) to take over the all-female island that was presented in the first three episodes… And then instead gives Circe an entirely different motivation, and makes a woman the villain, another woman her killer, and seems to ignore the initial ideas of the first half of the season entirely. In fact, Frankenstein (David Harbour), the living embodiment of toxic masculinity, is almost literally an after-thought in the episode: as soon as he comes to retake “his” Bride, she knocks him out of a tower and presumably kills him almost instantly, spitting on his face (more on that in a second).
While the first half of the season was all about varying levels of toxic masculinity, the latter half, and this last episode in particular, doubled down on the theme of “what makes you a monster.” You could perhaps tie the two together – the SofT boys were a different sort of monster, after all – but with Circe disappearing in the second half of the season, and Nina dying for no reason other than to motivate The Bride (she tried to kill Ilana, but Weasel stopped her, giving Ilana enough of a chance to kill Nina first), there’s a lack of clarity in the theme and plot direction that doesn’t help with the confusion over Ilana’s weird plan.
Regardless, the show is over, and everything is wrapped up with a neat bow by the end of the episode, right? Wrong!
Does Creature Commandos Have Post Credits Scene?
…But wait, that’s still not all. After the credits roll we get one final scene. Eric Frankenstein is alive, and like after his initial encounter with The Bride hundreds of years earlier, is being nursed back to health by yet another old lady. He explains that the events of this episode make him even more in love with his perfect Bride, and then asks the old lady what soup she’s feeding him.
The answer? Spider-dropping soup. “Taste’s disgusting,” says Frankenstein. “Yes,” agrees the old woman. And Season 1 of Creature Commandos ends, for real, as they keep eating the soup. To paraphrase Adam Driver on Girls: bad soup.
How Does The Creature Commandos Finale Set Up Season 2?
First things first: yep, there will indeed be a Creature Commandos Season 2, as it was renewed by Max on December 23, 2024. However, it’ll likely be a new mission, with a new team led by The Bride. While Nina is dead, that team would likely include Weasel, G.I. Robot, Doctor Phosphorus, Khalis, She-Bat, and King Shark.
That said, it very much depends on what happens with any of these characters going forward in the DCU, and actor availability given time. Since animated series tend to take about two years to craft seasons, unless Creature Commandos Season 2 has secretly been in the works for a while, we likely won’t see it until 2026, earliest; and there’s a lot to come in the DCU before that. Speaking of which…
How Does The Creature Commandos Finale Set Up James Gunn’s DCU?
The clearest way Creature Commandos sets up the DCU is the inclusion of the Creature Commandos, who could now show up in live-action – or further animated series – if the story demands it.
More specifically though, Rick Flag Sr. is no longer in charge of the Creature Commandos at the end of Season 1 and is recovering from his coma. We know that Grillo will be reprising his role in both Peacemaker Season 2 and Superman, and whether we’ll see him dealing with the events of this series is TBD. But he is, at this point, in Amanda Waller’s employ, just not in charge of a team.
There are a slew of other setups for the DCU throughout the series, though, and we won’t run them all down but here are a few dangling plot points:
- Clayface seems very much dead as of this episode. There are ways out of that, of course, but that points to the version of the character we’ll see in Mike Flangan’s Clayface movie as either a prequel; or a new Clayface entirely.
- In Circe’s vision of Ilana’s global apocalypse, she was standing side by side with what looked like Gorilla Grodd, a classic The Flash villain. Seeing as otherwise the character didn’t show up in Creature Commandos Season 1, that certainly seems like an eye-popping inclusion that could be followed up on somewhere.
- Back during the G.I. Robot episode we met Dr. Will Magnus (once again, Tudyk) who was using G.I. Robot’s design to create heroes The Metal Men, something that likely could be followed up on at some point as well.
- But the biggest elephant in the room is Wonder Woman and Themyscria. The season started with Circe leading her SofT (Sons of Themyscria) into Pokolistan, the late MacPherson studied Amazon culture and had a very Wonder Woman-reminiscent helmet in her house, and we even got to see a dead Wonder Woman in Circe’s vision. We know the DCU has plans for Superman and Batman, but what about the third part of the Trinity? There’s a lot of setup here in Creature Commandos for, as far as we know at this point, no payoff. Come on, Wonder Woman. The whole world’s waiting for you.
