Last week’s season premiere of Peacemaker established with startling sincerity that spiraling feeling of being stuck where one does not want to be. Christopher Smith (John Cena) and his fellow 11th Street Kids, the victorious heroes of the classified Butterfly Invasion, now march bitterly in defeat, their road leading not to reward but despair, desolation instead of happiness. It was a bummer development for this kinetic, riotous series, and, so far, its most dramatically exciting.
Because while this snarky cadre of black-ops stooges and maladjusted masked avengers are hardly the most relatable figures on television, James Gunn’s gift for drawing sympathy from even the most odious among them has been Peacemaker‘s greatest superpower. After all, who among us hasn’t felt like the world’s tilted off its axis into some darker reality? Last week, Gunn executed moments of regret alongside his most indulgent hard-R-rated montage yet—a genitals-flailing orgy rooted in self-pity—launching a new season of antihero TV that effectively turns the screws on the souls of its repentant characters. And as we learn this week, Chris & co. are still nowhere near rock bottom.
“A Man Is Only As Good As His Bird,” written by Gunn and directed by Greg Mottola (Superbad; Confess, Fletch), thickens the miserable stew that life is currently serving the 11th Street Kids. It opens in flashback, with Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) given the grand tour as the new director of A.R.G.U.S., the replacement for deposed Amanda Waller (Viola Davis)—or “A-Dubs,” in the not-so affectionate parlance of Economos (Steve Agee). Once the prickly pleasantries are done, Rick’s first task for our dye-bearded friend is to retrieve the secret files concerning the death of his son, Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman). After a private debrief, where Flag mentally unpacks the fatal clash between Rick Jr. and Chris—taking note of his boy’s final words (“Peacemaker…what a joke”), Flag makes his next move.
From there, “Bird” returns to Chris Smith, still reeling from last week’s accidental dispatch of his alternate-reality self. After a bit of macabre physical humor (Cena is in his wheelhouse here, as seen when he frantically tucks the cadaver into a cabinet only for it to roll back out again and again in a bloody heap), Chris makes a call: “Do you still have those bonesaws?” Later, Adrian Chase, a.k.a. Vigilante (Freddy Stroma with his fresh skibidi haircut), arrives with serrated solutions to Chris’ home, where anonymous sex partners swung by for hedonistic frivolity the previous night. (Though not entirely anonymous: We did meet a helpful brunette named Zora.) Adrian, wounded that he wasn’t invited to the festivities, nonetheless obliges with the grunt work of corpse disposal, a grisly sequence that I will come back to shortly.
First, a stop by the chilly Adebayo home, where Leota (Danielle Brooks) is greeted by her pups and her estranged wife Keeya (Elizabeth Ludlow). A quick look around their quiet apartment, Keeya in her fast-food uniform, her gaze flat with disappointment, says everything we need to know about Leota’s sudden, destructive pivot to “spy business.” (“We were supposed to go home to Gotham!” Keeya says.) At least love, however tenuous, still exists there. Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) continues her sad trudge alone, making a pharmacy run for concealer to cover up her rearranged face after last week’s bar brawl, resulting in an altercation with a well-meaning stranger: “Whatever you’re going through…I have resources that can help.” Harcourt: “Thanks; that’s not what this is.” On her way out, she clocks the “Help Wanted” sign on the door, a karmic twist of the knife that makes it feel that life is reserving its cruelest ironies just for her.
Meanwhile, outside the Smith residence, Economos’ mandatory vigil is interrupted by an uninvited guest by the name of Agent Langston Fleury (Tim Meadows). “What’s your preferred greeting? Are you a hugger?” No matter where Economos rests his laurels, unwanted foils find him. Predictably, his hostile first impression with Fleury results in a new nickname: Ginger Cool. “Do you mind if I call you that?” (Yes, he minds.) As his new surveillance partner makes himself comfortable, taking liberties with his horde of snacks and chuckling to himself, Jon reflects, yet again, on the latest indignity in his A.R.G.U.S. career.
Fleury, as it happens, is a trip: He ogles Adebayo at Chris’s door with the resigned admiration of a Tex Avery wolf, then confesses to having “bird blindness” upon mistaking Eagly for a parrot. (“It’s my sole weakness,” he confides.) Any other show would treat this as a gag that turns out to be bullshit. Meadows, like a gale-force hurricane of smarm and charm, sells it to the degree that later, when Fleury meets Eagly in person, his malady functions as both true and hilariously idiotic. Paradoxically, we discover that antagonistic, rude Fleury also keeps a mental dossier on manners; later, he informs his fidgety A.R.G.U.S. soldiers on the finer—and correct—points of considerate party etiquette.
With all this introduction, introspection, and yearning, this week’s episode can feel like the back half of the premiere. That said, its major set piece at least tightens its two major threads: the Flag-sanctioned home invasion, which is interwoven with a reunion party for the 11th Street Kids. Ads, Economos, Harcourt, Vig, and Chris crack some Bud Lights (the ones Economos doesn’t drop), and Chris makes a toast: “No one will ever break us apart.” Foreshadowing is rarely this obvious. As the Kids share chips and dip, Fleury deploys with his goons to infiltrate Casa del Peacemaker. Their discovery of Chris’ cosmic closet, which is emanating all kinds of strange energies, is interrupted by Eagly, who defends the home with the same eye-plucking brio he brought to his showdown with the White Dragon and his racist goons last season.
Back at the party, Chris and Harcourt share a brittle one-on-one. Chris notes the wound above her eye and suggests that she went looking for a fight, to which she spits right back: “We both know that’s what you’d like…[to be] some sort of damaged, broken bird, ’cause water seeks its own level and all that. Sorry. I’m not as fucked up as you, Chris.” She leaves Chris to marinate in Bud Light and self-loathing, quite hungover and haunted by the dismemberment of his doppelgänger just hours earlier. “You don’t want to meet yourself. It’s chilling as fuck,” he said to Vigilante, just before he stared into his own blue eyes dimmed by death and sawed off limbs that may as well have been his as Vigilante gave him an encouraging, “corpses, amirite?” grin. (Stroma is, as ever, great at playing a wonderful, demented buffoon. By the time he gets his beer shower, he’s already been spiritually rinsed of his latest foul deed.)
This brings us to this week’s final moments, where Chris texts the alternate-reality Harcourt to see what’s shaking on her side of the cosmic divide. (Gunn, a consummate nerd, clarifies that cell coverage does not hop across dimensions.) Her reply, a broken-heart emoji, sparks a flicker of hope on his face. Chris makes himself comfortable in a reality he doesn’t belong to but can slip into easily. He’s likely to have an easier time mending this Emilia’s heart; it can’t be as calloused as her alternate’s. What kind of person this alt-Chris was, or why he was estranged from alt-Emilia in the first place, are questions for another day. For now, in a desperate attempt to mend a fractured heart, Chris indulges his, thoughtlessly careening toward an emotional reckoning so intense that its devastation will be measured in megatonnage.
Stray observations
- • For those who only mildly enjoy Peacemaker’s new opening dance/credit sequence compared to season one, did Flag’s grief and fury in this week’s opening scene recalibrate those feelings? Grillo’s line just before Foxy Shazam’s “Oh Lord” queues up—”Fuck ‘The Peacemaker'”—threw gasoline onto the song’s soaring opening bars as Chris, in all his chromed glory, faded into view, the object of Flag’s channelled rage. It certainly made a fan out of me.
- • It took me a minute to realize Sol Rodríguez is playing Sasha Bordeaux, who other DC heads will remember was Bruce Wayne’s bodyguard during the “Bruce Wayne: Murderer?” arc. She was created by Greg Rucka and Shawn Martinbrough.
- • A quick update on that Quantum Unfolding Closet in Chris’ house: It’s a nexus connected to 99 other universes, according to our hero.
- • Among Fleury’s Dubiously Monikered Heroes are “Mexicali” (Reinaldo Faberlle); Agent Angler (Anissa Matlock; dunno if I should bother with her nickname), Agent Tillerson, a.k.a. “Encino Man” (Patrick Logan); and “Ponyboy” (Brandon Stanley), the latter of whom objects to his nickname and is summarily demoted to “Barely Legal,” then to “Kewpie Doll.” (“Fuck!” is his final, awesome protest.)
- • The Eagly home invasion sequence parallels a bit in Superman, where Krypto (another loveable, computer-generated super-pet) defends the Fortress Of Solitude against unwanted intruders. The scene even ends with a Superman-style strike from Eagly, who attempts to reset Fleury’s bird blindness with a drop on the head from on high. Fleury, afterwards: “A fucking duck attacked me.”
