10 Wild Ideas For The Perfect Suicide Squad 2
3. The Suicide Squad Needs A Supporting Cast
Ostrander’s iteration of the Suicide Squad incorporated supporting cast characters to interact with the colourful core cast: the employees of the prison, Belle Reve in Louisiana, that functioned as the Squad’s de facto base of operations.
As mentioned before, the 2016 movie chose to give the conscripted members of the Squad redeeming features and saving graces to make this bunch of career criminals and homicidal recidivists more relatable to the audience at home.
On a storytelling level, transferring that relatability to human/civilian characters in a supporting role allows you to retain the villainous qualities to your villains that made them compelling characters or ciphers in the first place.
It also allows you to create new relationships and interpersonal conflicts that don’t require the various members of your Squad roster to bond and ‘share moments’. This then frees said Squad members to have other, more interesting and arguably more realistic interactions with one another, both at home and in the field.
Examples of character filling these roles from the comics include psychiatrists Simon LaGrieve and Marnie Herrs, or the paternal prison chaplain Father Richard Craemer. As an example, the latter had a memorable encounter with Deadshot in the comics that featured the two of them walking the streets of Gotham and talking about Lawton’s violent past, as the padre tried to talk the unstable hitman out of embarking upon a killing spree.