Warning! Spoilers for Suicide Squad #3!
Speedsters like The Flash and his extended Flash Family are always hard to defeat in the heat of battle, but Amanda Waller, leader of the Suicide Squad and all around master strategist of DC Comics, just found a super obvious way to effectively beat one: trip them up! It might seem like a laughable plan at best, but it’s one that makes way more sense than Waller gets credit for.
Seen in the pages of the Infinite Frontier initiative’s Suicide Squad series by Robbie Thompson and Eduardo Pansica, Amanda Waller and her ragtag group of wannabe heroes – including the one-track minded Peacemaker, the crazed Court of Owls enforcer, Talon, the Superman/Lex Luthor clone, Superboy, as well as a handful of other extremely dangerous and questionably sane criminals – are doing their best to build a new team to help carry out Waller’s highly unethical bidding. Usually made up of a few big name characters along with a bunch of smaller, more obscure ones, this new version of the Squad is one that Waller needs to put together as soon as possible, with one huge member still needing to join.
Telling Peacemaker that she needs some speed on the team, Waller hones in on a Teen Titans Academy student named Bolt. Saying that she’s, “…a Speed Force wannabe,” Waller goes on to clarify that Bolt “has bursts of speed” and “can’t run continuously like The Flash,” but acknowledges that she is quite possibly one of the fastest metahumans on the planet. Yet when it comes to her master plan as to how her team will go about capturing her, well, that’s one that’s much more obvious than fans could have possibly expected.
After making a deal with Bolt on the side that allows Waller to hold her accountable for accepting an invite to the team, Waller comes up with the idea to quite literally trip Bolt up by using a “tripwire” made by the leafy character known as Branch, should Bolt go back on her deal. Telling Peacemaker and the rest of the team to kill her if she refuses, Branch is to use his powers of controlling the plant-like appendages on his body to extend what is basically a long stick in the way of Bolt’s running path in order to get her to slow down, and thus, easily be captured. But, being the infamous and oftentimes unprofessional team that the Suicide Squad is known to be, things goes sideways fast, and the most simplest, obvious, and fool-proof plan that Waller may have ever devised is immediately ruined, leading to Bolt’s unfortunate escape.
Yet regardless of this outcome, the idea that tripping a speedster was the best plan Waller could come up with actually speaks volumes to her smarts and logical understanding of the situation rather than her ineptitude at developing the idea. Usually needing some kind of high-tech gadget, luck, or as Batman found out – lots and lots of money and resources to even attempt to take down someone like The Flash, getting a leg up on heroes that can run faster than people can think is a tough task to accomplish, and one that Waller clearly didn’t need to overthink or oversell.
So although Amanda Waller’s plan went up in smoke the second it began, the idea of literally tripping a super fast character like Bolt or The Flash is one that isn’t as crazy as it sounds. But who knows? Waller might keep this particular plan in her back pocket for the next time her Suicide Squad faces a speedster, and if her track record is any indication, things might just go according to plan the second time around.
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May 05, 2021 at 05:31AM
