WARNING: The following article contains spoilers from Task Force Z #6, on sale now.
In Task Force Z #6 (by Matthew Rosenberg, Jack Herbert, Adriano Lucas, and Rob Leigh), more information came to light about the zombification process of Task Force Z. Aside from the origins of the Lazarus resin itself, Two-Face also revealed that the zombies have a fatal weakness: If their heads are lost or destroyed, they cannot be brought back from the dead.
This confirmed that the old trope of “destroying the brain” actually works on zombies within the DC Universe. Though the trope itself has some scientific merit behind it, the fact that these zombies are also susceptible to it invalidates the point of the team’s creation.
The “destroy the brain” trope, is exactly what it sounds like. In typical zombie horror, the only real way to kill a zombie for good is to destroy its brain. As the creatures are undead, they have little to nonexistent pain responses. As a result, they can suffer through wounds that a living person could not, such as lost limbs or vital organs being destroyed. According to this trope, however, there is still one organ that it would need: the brain. It would be responsible for dictating where the zombie would move and processing what it sees. As such, most zombie stories that try to explain what brought them back in scientific ways usually have some sort of illness infecting the brain.
The trope holds true here. The zombies of Task Force Z can withstand a great deal of punishment, like being pushed off a building, but so long as their brain remains intact they can be reanimated by their superiors. So when Two-Face revealed that they could not revive Deadshot or Man-Bat because both their heads were either missing or destroyed, he confirmed that the zombification process does require the brain to be attached to the body. This makes even more sense given that depending on how much Lazarus resin is applied, the subject can regain a sense of self instead of being a mindless drone.
However, with these revelations come some problems for the group. The project itself was an experimental one, designed to see if sending an undead team of villains on black ops missions was a feasible idea. The goal was that this could be a team that kept going even if they all died because so long as the bodies could be retrieved, they would just keep coming back. In essence, they lack the vulnerabilities of normal soldiers. It would seem though that they retain a critical weakness that living beings must deal with: needing the brain to remain alive.
A normal soldier can get shot in the head and die. A member of the Suicide Squad, whose lives are significantly less valued, could get shot in the head and die. A zombie of Task Force Z can get shot in the head and die. If they share this weakness with their living counterparts, then there is no point to the team existing. There are a number of professional shots in the DC Universe who could easily kill them in this way. So to confirm this weakness not only gives them a vulnerability, it makes them irrelevant.
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