Cleo Cazo (DC Extended Universe)

Ratcatcher II (real name Cleo Cazo) is a sweet and endearing thief armed with a special remote that allows her to control rats. Part of the primary Suicide Squad team sent to Corto Maltese, she was integral to destroying Starro during its rampage.

History

Origins

Cleo Cazo was born in Portugal to a criminal known as Ratcatcher, a drug addicted genius who built a special device that allowed him to control rats to steal or do any number of tasks for Cleo and him. Despite his imperfections, Cleo loved her father dearly, and their bond was likely the main source of her kind and compassionate nature. Unfortunately, when Cleo was a young girl, her father died of a drug overdose, leaving her alone with his device and his rats.

Taking the name "Ratcatcher II", Cleo moved to the United States to start a new life with her most faithful rat friend, Sebastian, but was arrested for armed bank robbery, with the police counting the rats as a weapon. Ratcatcher was incarcerated in the Belle Reve Correctional Center, where she was drafted by Amanda Waller into joining the black-ops unit Task Force X, better known as the Suicide Squad, in exchange for time off her sentence.^[1]

The Jotunheim Mission

In 2020, Ratcatcher and Sebastian were sent on a mission with the Squad to Corto Maltese to destroy Jotunheim, a laboratory containing the powerful and dangerous Project Starfish, located in the capitol of Valle Del Mar. Their team was lead by Bloodsport, a hate-filled assassin convinced of being a terrible person, and consisted of herself, Peacemaker, a self-righteous patriotic vigilante, King Shark, a spectacularly stupid but nigh-indestructible and super-strong shark-like humanoid, and the Polka Dot Man, a depressed criminal able to expel incendiary polka dots from wrist-mounted gauntlets.

Arriving on Maltese shores, the team began forming rivalries among themselves, with the most pronounced being Bloodsport and Peacemaker over their similar abilities, and Bloodsport and Ratcatcher, with Bloodsport being terrified of her abilities. Only Ratcatcher attempted to positively connect with the others and make friends. On their first night there, Bloodsport had to stop King Shark from eating her while she was asleep, but when she woke up, she decided to try and befriend the beast rather than attack him. While this worked in bringing her and King Shark closer together, as well as making sure he wouldn't eat any of the Squad members, the simple display of kindness only made Bloodsport's hatred for her even stronger.

The next day, the Squad picked up Colonel Rick Flag, the leader, and believed sole survivor, of the first Squad team sent to a separate beach on the island to distract the Maltese Army so that Bloodsport's team could invade safely, from a rebel military camp deep in the Maltese jungle. Adopting Flag as their new leader, the Squad took a bus to Valle Del Mar. During the ride, Ratcatcher made a connection with Bloodsport based around mutual respect. He revealed that his fear of rats was inflicted on him by his abusive father at a young age, as was his cold nature, but Ratcatcher's kindness had begun to soften him. He became a surrogate father to her, her closest friend aside from King Shark.

Once in Valle Del Mar, the team kidnapped the Thinker, Jotunheim's chief scientist, and discovered that Harley Quinn, another member of Waller's distraction Squad, was still alive and was being held captive in the palace of Maltese dictator Silvio Luna. The Squad picked her up as a member after she broke out herself and met up with them, broke into Jotunheim with the Thinker's help, and began planting plastic explosives around the building's interior to destroy it.

While placing the explosives, Ratcatcher, Sebastian, Flag, and the Thinker made their way to the facility's lowest level, housing Project Starfish and its source: a massive starfish-like alien creature nicknamed Starro the Conqueror by the Thinker, thanks to its mind-controlling spores, which were used in the project in experiments that killed thousands of innocent Maltese civilians, and tortured Starro.

When the Thinker revealed that the United States had funded the project, and that the Squad's true mission was to cover up their part in it, a furious Flag took the drive from Jotunheim's computer, containing the evidence. He was attacked by Peacemaker, who had known all along, and was instructed by Waller to complete the mission at any cost. As Jotunheim began collapsing from Bloodsport's team setting off their explosives too early, Peacemaker killed Flag, which Ratcatcher witnessed, leading her to take the drive and be chased by Peacemaker before he was shot and presumed killed by Bloodsport, who had just arrived from Jotunheim's now destroyed upper levels.

Ratcatcher gave Bloodsport the drive and explained everything, but just as the rest of the Squad reached them, Starro burst from Jotunheim's remains, with the surviving Squad members barely escaping with their lives. The furious creature took control of every Maltese citizen it could, and with its new army, made its way to the center of Valle Del Mar, destroying much of the city and killing hundreds of people. Seeing all this destruction, Bloodsport led the team to the city to fight it, disobeying Waller's orders to leave Starro be.

When they caught up to Starro in the city's center, the team fought it under Bloodsport's expert leadership. Bloodsport, King Shark, and Polka Dot Man were able to wound it, though the latter was tragically killed. This allowed Ratcatcher to amass an army of all the rats from across the city with her remote, which, led by Sebastian, swarmed and disoriented Starro. Harley pierced its giant eye with her javelin, creating a hole through which the rats crawled and ate Starro's internal organs, killing it and saving Corto Maltese.

With the help of Waller's traitorous aides, Bloodsport was able to upload the drive's contents to a secure server and blackmail Ratcatcher, Harley, King Shark, and himself out of the Squad. They were sent a helicopter that took them home to the United States, now free of the Suicide Squad. On the flight home, an exhausted Ratcatcher took a nap leaning on King Shark, with her experiences with the team having now made them all better and more heroic people.^[1]

Powers and Abilities

Abilities

• Animal Training
• Multilingualism
• Thievery
  

Paraphernalia

Equipment

• Rat controller

Notes

• This version of the character is exclusive to the continuity of the DC Extended Universe and is an adaptation of Ratcatcher. The original character was created by Alan Grant, John Wagner, and Norm Breyfogle and first appeared in Detective Comics #585.
• Ratcatcher II is portrayed by Daniela Melchior, and in flashbacks by Maya Le Clark.
• An early script draft for The Suicide Squad saw Waller kill Ratcatcher by detonating her brain bomb for trying to save the drive from Jotunheim, but James Gunn rewrote it because he saw it as too dark.^[2]
  

Trivia

• Cleo was the only criminal brought on to the Suicide Squad to not be a convicted killer, and is only even known to have taken one life, that being Starro.^[1]
  

Recommended Reading

• The Suicide Squad

Related

• 2 Appearances of Cleo Cazo (DC Extended Universe)
• 26 Images featuring Cleo Cazo (DC Extended Universe)
• 1 Quotations by or about Cleo Cazo (DC Extended Universe)
• Character Gallery: Cleo Cazo (DC Extended Universe)

External Links

• Ratcatcher II at the DC Extended Universe Wiki

Footnotes

Suicide Squad member This character is or was a member of the Suicide Squad, a team of imprisoned super-villains who perform high-risk missions for the U.S. Government in exchange for commuted sentences, in any of its various incarnations. This template will categorize articles that include it into the "Suicide Squad members" category.

Peacemaker Villain(s) This character is or was primarily an enemy of Peacemaker. This template will categorize articles that include it into the category "Peacemaker Villains."