SPOILER WARNING: This story includes major 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 -- either an animalistic human or a human-like animal, depending on your point of view -- had not actually killed 27 children, contrary to the indictment that landed Weasel in Belle Reve prison.
"I didn't know the specifics of it, but I always knew that it wasn't fair," Gunn says.
It wasn't until Gunn brought Weasel back for the animated DC series "Creature Commandos" that he finally got to sort out the details of how this gentle beast was unjustly branded a child killer. As the titular squad works through their mission involving Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), each episode of the series, all of them written by Gunn, examines one of their backstories. Episode 4, titled "Chasing Squirrels," is Weasel's turn in the spotlight. And good gravy, is it bleak.
"I get really sad talking about it," Gunn says, his voice growing uncharacteristically quiet. "I remember finishing [writing] it. I was in Colorado with my wife, and I remember I said, 'I think I just wrote the saddest thing that I've ever written in my entire life.'"
Unfolding over a series of flashbacks, Weasel's story begins when he emerges from the woods behind an elementary school, where he encounters a group of kids playing during Thanksgiving break. Where Weasel came from, and what he actually is, are left a mystery, but it's plainly obvious to the children that he's a sweet natured animal who means them no harm. They all have a blast playing together, but when an old man passes by, he misinterprets Weasel's behavior as threatening -- for no real reason other than he assumes a giant furry animal would be innately menacing -- so he races back to his cabin to call 911 and grab his shotgun.
At that same moment, one of the kids discovers that the back door to the school was left unlocked. When they all run inside, Weasel follows, and keeps playing with the kids as they mess around and wind up in the school's basement boiler room. A series of happenstance 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 firing at Weasel. The boiler explodes, killing the man and all of the children save for one little girl -- which is when two cops peer down into the basement, and see Weasel surrounded by their bodies while he tries to drag the girl to safety amid the raging fire that's consuming the school.
Like the old man, they automatically assume the worst, and open fire at Weasel as he desperately tries to bring the child to safety. The cops succeed in incapacitating Weasel right as he's about to reach the door, and they hold him down as the school crumbles around the girl, burying her alive.
"It is incredibly sad," says Sean Gunn, who played Weasel via performance capture in "The Suicide Squad" and does his voice in "Creature Commandos." Having worked with his older brother James since the mid-1990s, Sean says he's not surprised that Weasel's story is so bracingly tragic: "James himself is has a darkness, and there's a darkness to a lot of his work." The specifics of that darkness, however, did catch Sean Gunn off guard.
It started with James Gunn's instruction to Sean that he play Weasel as if he was "a big dog." "Weasel doesn't think in dialogue," Sean Gunn says. "But for any of us who have and love dogs, you know that your dog has a pretty complex emotional life. So you put this character through the ringer, and it becomes very relatable -- but also new. It's tragic and sad, and also, I've never really seen anything like that on television."
Sean Gunn recorded the final sequence over a few recording sessions to get it right, performing Weasel's actions over an unbroken take up to his final, anguished scream as the cops drag him away.
"I was a little sick when we did it the first time, and the scream wasn't even like 1/5 of what it needed to be, really," he says. "When we went back, we knew we really needed to get the scream."
Animated, the sequence proved to be just as challenging, given the harrowing reality that multiple children were dying on screen. "We went through a lot of iterations of that whole sequence," says executive producer Dean Lorey. "It was difficult to find exactly the right tone for it. We did want you to feel the emotion and the horror of what was going on. But we didn't want to be exploitive."
For James Gunn, the episode is the latest example of his penchant for focusing on characters who are grossly misunderstood by wider society. "At the end of the day, [Weasel], in a lot of ways, is the most noble character in the show," he says. "This is a pretty innocent creature who is treated like something else because he looks different than other people."
And it seems 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 talk about the characters existing on some sort of continuum from good to bad, he's pretty much on the good side."