After Rewatching The Suicide Squad For The First Time, Now I Really Want To See One Of Its Killed-Off Characters Reimagined For The DCU

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Back in 2021, The Suicide Squad was released as DC’s lone movie of that year, playing in theaters and being available to stream with an HBO Max subscription simultaneously. Although there are a few scenes I’ve rewatched in the years since, it wasn’t until recently that I finally rewatched The Suicide Squad in its entirety, and it was alongside someone who’d never seen the movie at all. Now that this full series of events is fresh in my mind again, I’m hoping that one of the characters killed off in the James Gunn-written and directed feature will be reimagined in the DC Universe franchise.

I’m talking about Peter Capaldi’s Gaius Grieves, a.k.a. The Thinker, the scientist who spent 30 years experimenting on Starro and was promptly ripped in two by the gigantic alien starfish once it was freed from captivity in Jötunheim. Capaldi played an original take on Thinker rather than an adaptation one of the characters who’ve gone by that supervillain moniker from the comics. Frankly, there wasn’t anything in The Suicide Squad to distinguish Grieves as superintelligent rather than just a gifted scientist other the electronics in his head, which made him resemble the New 52 version of The Thinker.

Before going further, I should remind everyone that The Suicide Squad is technically set in the now-defunct DC Extended Universe. So while certain events from the movie are also canon to the DC Universe, like Peacemaker killing Rick Flag Jr., the movie as a whole is not considered to be part of the DCU. This means that aspects of the events in The Suicide Squad can be tweaked to fit within the DCU lore. So I’m envisioning an alternate version of that movie where a different super-smart character, or even just any generic scientist, is substituted in for Thinker, and Gaius Grieves not involved in the story at all.

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Clifford DeVoe, the original incarnation of The Thinker, is one of DC Comics’ oldest supervillains, having debuted in 1943’s All-Flash #12. The Flash TV show featured DeVoe as the main antagonist of its fourth season, where he was played by Neil Sandilands, and I’d like to see the DCU put its own spin on him. Specifically, I’d like to see him depicted as a supervillain who was active decades before the present-day DCU events, harkening back to when he was a major antagonist to the Jay Garrick Flash during the Golden Age of Comics.

Metahumans have been known to the world for 300 years, when Superman begins, and Golden Age heroes like Sandman (the Wesley Dodds version), Max Mercury, Bulletman, Bulletgirl and Zatara are confirmed to have existed in the DCU thanks to the mural in the Justice Gang’s headquarters. Even if Jay Garrick is potentially off limits from being used in the DCU in order to avoid confusion when the more familiar version of The Flash, be it Barry Allen or Wally West, eventually appears, that doesn’t mean Thinker couldn’t have still been an adversary to one of these other heroes during the 1940s. It’d be great to see him as a villain in some kind of Justice Society project.

None of this is meant to disrespect Peter Capaldi’s performance in The Suicide Squad; I just don’t think Gaius Grieves added much to the story. I don’t want his death to prevent a more faithful version of The Thinker from being utilized someday, as he’s way too good a villain to keep on the proverbial shelf.