(Major spoilers for “Suicide Squad” below. So, watch out if you’re worried about such things.)
By any reasonable standard, Amanda Waller’s Task Force X (aka the Suicide Squad) was a complete disaster. Yeah, I mean they kinda saved the day, but also the thread they saved that day from was a person that was supposed to be in the Suicide Squad until she went rogue and tried to kill every person on Earth.
Oh, and everybody in a major American City got turned into a faceless goo monster.
Anyway, at the end of “Suicide Squad,” it’s a bad time to be Amanda Waller and she knows it. Fortunately for her, Task Force X was a black ops program, and pretty much all the witnesses of the crazy stuff that went down in Midway City either got turned into monsters, was a member of the Suicide Squad, or was one of the soldiers backing up the Suicide Squad.
So the cause of the incident remains under wraps for now, but Waller is worried everything will come to light and she’ll end up in Belle Reve alongside her squad of felons.
And so she asks Bruce Wayne for help, and he tells her that she will be under his protection. What that means, exactly, is unclear — but it’s likely that she’s looking for the kind of protection the head of a multi-billion-dollar megacorporation with tons of government military contracts can provide, rather than the kind a bat-masked vigilante would give. It doesn’t seem as though she knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman, in any case.
In exchange for that protection, Waller gives Bruce a big file containing info on metahumans: with pages on June Moone/Enchantress, the Flash and Aquaman shown as he briefly flips through the packet.
Waller wants to know what he’s going to do with it. Bruce says he wants to make some new friends, and Waller replies that “making friends” is just another way to say “gaining leverage.”
The subtext there is one of ideological divide: Waller’s Suicide Squad is the same general idea as the Justice League that Batman is forming, but one is cynical and essentially destructive while the other is hopeful. And as he leaves, Bruce drives the point home on that difference, telling Waller to shut down the Suicide Squad or he and his friends (aka the Justice League) will do it for her.
That said: with a cast like the one that’s been put together for “Suicide Squad,” it’s not super likely they’re going away forever. So Waller probably will shut it down, but keep it in her back pocket for a rainy day.
In the meantime, we’ve got an uneasy alliance between Batman and Amanda Waller — in which Batman, of course, has all the leverage. How he ends up using that leverage will be the other interesting thing to see play out.