Fridge / The Suicide Squad

Remember that spoilers are unmarked in Fridge!

Fridge Brilliance

• The Warner Brothers logos in the trailers and film are in red and yellow, the shirt colors worn by Rick Flag and Peacemaker. This foreshadows the moral schism and conflict that they go through in the film.
• It looks like the Task Force X managers learned from the previous film:
  • This Squad is composed of more disposable mercenaries and outlaws, rather than gods or magical beings.
  • The team now avoids Superhero Speciation, with several characters having similar Improbable Aiming Skills and Walking Armory gimmicks (Peacemaker, Bloodsport, Savant, Javelin, possibly Blackguard). In the first squad, the most reliable member of the team was Deadshot, whose Boring, but Practical "superpower" was, more-or-less, carrying lots of guns and being really good with them, while many of the flashier characters did next to nothing. Waller's more-or-less stocking the Squad now with people who have similar skillsets, likely to make them more efficient for their desired goal.
  • Rick Flag seems to be a little more maverick and ready to go loose and fast, as opposed to his by-the-book attitude in the previous film. Which makes sense given how in that film he was proven wrong about Deadshot and the first team at large, which would not only break down the "by the book" attitude but also make him more likely to be himself around the team.
  • Amanda Waller has less fancy machinery to work with. While the downgrade could be caused by reduced government funding after the near-catastrophe in the first film, Waller seems willing to employ simple machinery that won't get easily be hacked and/or put out of control. In the first film, the villains tried to construct a Doomsday Device. From that it's no surprise that afterwards Waller would prefer to use simpler, non-alien technology in the Squad.
  • Bloodsport being in the Suicide Squad fits Waller's desire for a "Superman deterrent". What better fits that requirement than someone who once shot Superman with a Kryptonite bullet?
• It makes perfect sense that Belle Reve inmates wear Crocs beyond the meme. They’re durable (and can thus be reused), easily cleaned of dirt/urine/blood/feces, and they don’t have laces. Perfect for a prison, especially one with such bad living conditions and housing extremely violent inmates.
• The film really emphasizes the sanctity of children and the youth:
  • Bloodsport accepting to be a part of the Task Force X just to keep his child from going to prison and also having Waller to agree to never harming Tyla as long as he keeps Project Starfish classified to the rest of the world.
  • Ratcatcher II, who’s actually in her 20s, embodies an innocent, kind child who is friendly to almost everyone and everything. Dubois makes a promise to her that he'll keep her alive till the end of their mission and that she reminds him of his own daughter. In turn, she promises she'll make sure he gets through the mission alive.
  • Flo Crawley and the rest of the support team decide to let Task Force X stop Starro and retaliates against Waller as she's horrified by the potential mounds of children killed by the creature.
  • John Economos is horrified that Waller would go as far as to send a 16-year old girl to a prison with the highest mortality rate as leverage.
  • Rick Flag argues with Peacemaker that everyone should know what happened in Jotunheim, with him exclaiming, "THEY EXPERIMENTED ON CHILDREN!"
  • Harley Quinn swiftly kills Luna the second he reveals that he plans to feed his political enemies' children to Starro.
• Starro is taken down by an army of rats. STAR-RATS. They make a perfect foil!
• With the revelation that the first team to deploy was the decoy team, it might seem strange that Flag was in it, given that he's a heroic soldier and not one of the expendable criminals trying to work off his crimes. In the end, however, we see why: the real mission is covering up American crimes, something Flag refuses to do. Placing Flag in the decoy crew was an attempt to avoid the very confrontation we see play out between him and Peacemaker.
• Additionally the members in the second team make a lot of sense as the ones chosen to complete the proper mission. Peacemaker is needed in order to show the evidence of American involvement is removed, King Shark is added due to his durability and the fact he never would have died in the attack team one was wiped out in. Ratcatcher II can serve for espionage with her rats and Polka Dot Man is another heavy hitter for the team, both equally vital due to how easy it would be to kill them in the event that Peacemaker has to do so. Bloodsport also serves as a useful backup in the event of Peacemaker's death.
• Bloodsport's annoyance with the seeming inconsistency between Waller's words ("a team with unique skills") and her choices (picking Peacemaker, who has Bloodsport's skillset) is a funny moment at the time, but it is foreshadowing the way putting Flag on the "distraction" team was: Peacemaker boasts that he's "better" than Bloodsport at what they both do, which suggests that Waller is gambling that he'll be able to eliminate Bloodsport - if he ever were to go rogue-, much as the distraction team debacle will hopefully eliminate Flag. Additionally, Bloodsport is slightly wrong about his assessment that he and Peacemaker are the exact same. Bloodsport was put on the team to serve as a leader for them, something Peacemaker could never do due to his personality.
• The only member Peacemaker or Bloodsport couldn't kill is King Shark. This oversight is fine though once one realises King Shark is dumb enough to not realise the importance of the evidence. Since great white sharks can bite through metal, he might actually be there just to Eat the Evidence if need be.
• Javelin giving Harley his signature javelin seems like a completely arbitrary move made entirely for comedy at first... but consider he's built his entire supervillain career on being an Olympics-level gymnast, and probably prides that ability and respects it in others. Given how famous in-universe she is, it's likely that Javelin knows of her gymnastics ability by reputation and actually DOES consider her one of the few people in the world to be on his skill level, even outside of her being the only one there.
• During the scene at the bar, Flag agrees with Peacemaker's idea for everyone to have a drink together as they wait for the Thinker to arrive. The team, up until this point, had been fairly antagonistic to each other, but this improves their camaraderie and teamwork considerably. Of course Flag would know this; in the first movie, he bonded with the original team in the scene they all sat at the bar for a drink!
• When Rick Flag and Bloodsport surrender at the bar they also offer up Peacemaker, who acts surprised and worried. This makes sense as a gag but upon finishing the film takes on an extra layer. Peacemaker isn't concerned about just being caught, he's worried that he won't be able to intercept the evidence of America's involvement with the mission before the rest of the squad finds it.
• The Corto Maltese army is shown using Cold War-era U.S. Army equipment (first-generation M16s, humvees, and even a helicopter that looks like a cross between an AH-1 Supercobra and an AH-64 Apache). It makes sense considering that the previous dictatorship was a US ally.
• Savant having his Explosive Leash detonated for desertion seems harsh, but justified considering he’s a villain. There’s some realistic subtext to this action. In US law, if a soldier deserts during times of war, it’s punishable by execution.
• All of the humans under Starro's control speak with Scottish accents. Why? The voice he's likely been exposed to the most over the last thirty years is The Thinker's. It also sends a clear signal that the people it’s controlling contain none of their original minds.
• Harley telling The Thinker that "If you have personalized licensed plates, you die!" is played as a throwaway joke. In the 2016 Suicide Squad, a defining character moment for Harley was when Joker drove his Lamborghini into the river and left Harley to die as a distraction. His car, naturally, had personalized plates reading HAHAHA.
• Team A being a decoy team just sent to die as a distraction makes sense when you stop and look at who was on it. Flag, Harley, Boomerang, Javelin, Savant, and Blackguard are more-or-less Badass Normal characters whose skills aren't particularly unique on the Squad, with the latter two also proving to be psychologically unfit for service. Weasel's more-or-less a barely sentient wild animal, with seemingly no useful abilities beyond looking strange. TDK is a Joke Character with a completely ineffective superpower beyond causing mild annoyance. Mongal is a Proud Warrior Race Guy who almost immediately gets herself and Captain Boomerang killed while drawing a lot of flash and attention. Overall, the team were built of characters who Waller could throw away without losing anything of value, whereas in comparison, Team B includes only two Badass Normals who at least also have much better weaponry and psych profiles, while also containing an unkillable demigod, a highly powerful metahuman, and a woman with Heart Is an Awesome Power in play, all much more useful and certainly a team you wouldn't want to risk losing anyone to a stray bullet from a beach sentry.
• Lloyd Kaufman's cameo in the film doubles as a subversive reference to his film debut in Rocky. In that film, he briefly appears as a drunken bar patron who is helped by Sylvester Stallone's character. In this film, he once again plays a drunken bar patron, but in an ironic twist, Stallone's character is shown to have been waiting outside the bar, never encountering Kaufman.
• Early in the movie, Peacemaker notes how "starfish" is the slang for butthole. Later, Ratcatcher II threatens The Thinker with summoning a dozen rats to crawl up his ass. What happens at the climax of the movie? Ratcatcher II summons dozens of rats to crawl up into a giant "starfish" that (technically) belongs to The Thinker.
• Word of God states that TDK managed to survive the beach landing. While Rewatch Bonus is at work here (his status display says critical condition), there's also the fact that he doesn't get hit in any vital organs, just his arms.
• The Thinker remarks on the possible applications of the Ratcatcher wand technology, which is the first thing that we've seen aggravate Cleo. It's all that's left of her father. She has every right to be.
• In Greek Mythology, Argus was a giant with one hundred eyes who had the ability to sleep with 2 eyes closed at a time, which enabled him to be vigilant and observant with the remaining 98 eyes. In the movie, A.R.G.U.S is in charge of the Suicide Squad and was vigilant in their search for major threats.
• No surprise that Polka Dot Man would be the only one of the Squad to care what happens to Milton or notice the man's demise: he's the only one to envy Milton for being A) an ordinary person, and B) dead.
• When Bloodsport first meets the Thinker, the former sticks his gun onto the back of the latter and commands him to "smile", which the Thinker does. Now, the viewer is prone to believe at this point that the Thinker's smile is either a smile of A) Simply complying with was he's being told to do at gunpoint because he doesn't want to be shot or B) A sort of "reflex" that happens out of pure fear. But later in the movie, in response to Ratcather II threatening to torture him with her rats, the Thinker answers is a manner that reveals that he would actually ''enjoy'' torture. So the smile the Thinker flashed when Bloodsport threatened him? It was a 'genuine smile, he was getting off'' on the moment!
• The names of (General) Luna and Sol (Soria). Their names are "Moon" and "Sun" respectively. Used symbolically, these are opposites: the Moon is associated with the night, and therefore darkness, which is itself associated with evil; and the Sun is associated with day, with making crops grow, and ultimately with providing the source of all life on earth. ^note Without photosynthesis no life could exist. This ties in perfectly with the former person being an evil dictator and child killer, and the latter person bringing freedom and a better time for all in the country.

Fridge Horror

• Weasel is still alive at the end of the movie. It's okay because he's Ugly Cute, right? Never mind that he's a confirmed serial child killer loose on an island whose infrastructure and government is now functionally nonexistent. However, in an interview, James Gunn has suggested that Weasel may be innocent of the crimes attributed to him.
• We have no way of knowing if there are any more Starros out there or whether they all died in Corto Maltese. And even if they died, their bodies can still be studied and experimented on.
• Polka Dot Man sees everyone around him as his mom. When he and Ratcatcher II have to escort the Thinker outside, they pass a room full of naked women, so he must have seen a room full of his naked mother.
• Cleo's presence on the team is pretty disturbing if you think about it. A non-violent criminal whose ability comes from a piece of technology her dad built, condemned to serve as a soldier to undergo extremely dangerous missions with a bomb planted in her head. Just how many others like her have been sent through the meat grinder for committing minor crimes with the aid of special abilities?
• Waller having the means to send a 16-year old girl for minor charges to be tried as an adult and sent to the worst prison in the US correctional system with a high chance of being killed, surely there would have been others than just Bloodsport's daughter who suffered this fate, possibly even people innocent of the charges. Probably even the 16-year Ratcatcher II was sent to Belle Reve by Waller!
• And then we combine the above two bits of Fridge Horror - it does seem awfully convenient for Waller that Ratcatcher was charged with armed robbery instead of petty theft on the basis that the rats counted as deadly weapons in her hands, and was thus available to participate in Task Force X. Given her apparent ability to manipulate the legal system, it's likely slapping much more serious charges on Cleo was Waller's machination in the first place.
• It's a throwaway line, but (through his hosts) Starro says that among other things, the Thinker has "had his way with me". That's a pretty common euphemism for sex. Given we've already seen the Thinker's fetish-happy nature (Ratcatcher II threatening him with ass-exploring rodents didn't faze him), it's a possibility, but surely not... until he gives a sleazy, remorseless smile and sarcastic shrug when Ratcatcher II looks at him for a response. Given his nature, his mandate, and the fact he's had thirty years to find every way to torture, examine, dissect, and dominate Starro so s/he can be controlled... who's to say he wouldn't have tried rape, too?
• This quote from Harley to Luna as to why she’s killing him might imply that the Joker didn’t leave her alone after their breakup and even killed her Hyena, Bruce.
  Harley Quinn: I know. I know. I know what you're trying to say. "Harley, why not just leave?!" And I'd say, "Why are you screaming at me?! I'm not deaf! I'm standing right here!" And then I'd say, "When your taste in men is as bad as mine, they don't just go away quietly. They slash your tires, and they kill your dogs, and tell you that the music you like ain't real music at all. And all the cruelty... tears you apart after a while."
• Save those killed in action, those thousands of rats Cleo summons to take down Starro presumably went back to their regular lives as city vermin. No biggie, they'd been living there all along... except now, any rodent-phobic residents of the capital city have seen for themselves just how many such animals are present in their communities, whether firsthand or on news footage of the event. It's a safe bet that a lot of locals will be moving to less-infested locations ASAP, horrified by the size and lethality of Cleo's rat swarm.

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