It took some viewers longer than most to come around to the new opening-credits dance number for Peacemaker, but it’s easy to see why. Season one’s opener kicked off with “Do Ya Wanna Taste It?” by Wig Wam, a high-voltage hair-metal anthem that amped up viewers for the raucous, irreverent, and surprisingly dramatic twists through Christopher Smith’s (John Cena) redemption tour and the 11th Street Kids’ thwarting of the alien Butterfly invasion. Foxy Shazam’s “Oh Lord” carries a different charge, one that hits where Peacemaker lives at the start of season two: in a fugue state of disappointment, disillusionment, and isolation. Foxy Shazam got its encore during the deliriously alive closing sequence of this week’s finale, breathing new life into the series just before writer/director James Gunn stole it away again. Through soaring emotion, “Oh Lord” flexes its tremendous value to the series. These lyrics sum it up quite beautifully: ‘Cause there is always a wrong to your right / And there will always be a war somewhere to fight / And God knows I’ve had some rough fucking years / Oh, oh, Lord, oh, Lord, keep on keeping on.”
This season’s opener was designed specifically to give the series a new kind of meaning. To demonstrate, through Charissa Barton’s playful and inventive choreography, that the battle-worn ensemble of Peacemaker had grown, and that greatness could yet come from their chaos. Viewers saw through dance (dance—in a comic-book TV show!) that powerful emotions could pull Chris away from his friends, including Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), whom he loved in his all-or-nothing way. It also showed that his fellow Kids—Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), John Economos (Steve Agee), Harcourt, Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), and Eagly (Dee Bradley Baker)—would be scattered amid the fallout. In the end, as this episode revealed, they found the grit within themselves (yes, even Economos) to come back stronger than ever.
Chris discovered this week that his friends could also be pulled away from him by forces more powerful than he. The Kids were spared the wrath of Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), but Chris bears the brunt, exiled to a new prison planet called “Sanctuary.” But before diving into the shocking final moments of Peacemaker season two, let’s appreciate the episode’s flashback to Big Belly Burger, where, one month ago, Harcourt and Chris shared what sure looked like a date. He regaled her about the sleaze rock movement (“It’s what Mozart would be playing if he were still alive today,” he says) before breaking into song in full view of the restaurant (naturally, to Hardcore Superstar’s “Someone Special”). Next come shots. Lots of them. Then, a stroll down a pier to the fateful “boat incident” that solidified something more between Chris and Harcourt, something that has haunted both of them throughout the season.
That shimmering memory collides with the present, where Chris, the self-styled “Angel of Death,” cools his heels in an A.R.G.U.S. cell, resigned to his fate and refusing visits from his friends. Meanwhile, Harcourt, Agents Fleury (Tim Meadows), Kewpie-Kline (Brandon Stanley), and Judomaster (Nhut Le) lead a hazmat crew through the Quantum Closet, where they hope to find Flag’s secret objective. What could possibly be so important inside this nigh-infinite nexus, home to at least a hundred different realities and all the oddball aliens and fascists they contain? Is the sacrifice of agents worth the risk of creating a new “Metropolis rift” (as Economos calls it)?
I mean, it’s pretty grody in there. One path leads to a sort of Candy Land, where Harcourt’s team is descended upon by hungry little goobers (those imps mentioned by Robert Patrick’s August Smith during the season premiere), claiming poor Kewpie’s face as a trophy. There are others, as seen in a killer montage set to Steel Panther’s “Fucking My Heart In The Ass”: An Earth that’s been swallowed by a black hole (that one gets a thumbs up from Lex Luthor), a zombie-Earth, and even that screaming hellscape of monster skulls gets a reprise from the premiere. As these excursions continue and the A.R.G.U.S. base descends into debauchery—cocaine and laughter greet the agency’s returning dead and dying—Agent Bordeaux (Sol Rodríguez) joins the silent resistance who believes that Flag has overstepped his authority, namely, Economos and Harcourt. “When has anything we’ve ever done actually been for the good of the people?” Economos asks, rightly.
This calls back to the premiere, when a hopeful Chris interviewed with Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn) and his Justice Gang for a chance to meaningfully ascend from his mercenary ways. The 11th Street Kids—chaotic, disjointed, cranky, somewhat dim—remain a positive influence in Peacemaker’s life, and he in theirs, as heartfully articulated later by Ads (in one of the series’ two tremendous moments of performance, Brooks absolutely decimates). What might happen if Harcourt and Economos ever broke free from A.R.G.U.S., if Ads did the right thing by letting Keeya (Elizabeth Ludlow) go, if Vig started being nice to his mom, and Eagly had a diet beyond bologna and chips? They’d be unstoppable, a check against the self-righteous forces out there ruining people’s lives by sheer dint of their manipulative, government-sanctioned powers.
Harcourt eventually scores Flag his find: a livable planet, safe, abundant, and—most importantly—remote. Flag takes the findings to Secretary of Defense Mori (James Hiroyuki, returning from Superman) and pitches a plan to remove all metahumans from Earth and place them in this newly dubbed “Sanctuary.” “I gotta say, Rick… You’ve come a long way from lambasting Luthor [to proactively implementing] his plans,” Mori says. “He is the smartest man in the world,” Rick retorts. “Why not use his brain to make the world a better place?”
With all this talk of rifts, “Full Nelson” makes a doozy. It retreats once more to that “boat incident,” where a yacht concert with glam-rock band Nelson as its headliner leads to that emotional thunderclap between Chris and Harcourt, essentially pausing the episode’s momentum to reestablish its stakes. It’s hardly a surprise; the second season of Peacemaker has often taken the long route to reach catharsis. It’s been filled with padding—entertaining, garish padding, but padding all the same—with beats that linger a bit too long, like Fleury’s anecdote this week about Agent Kewpie barfing all over a stripper’s impressive décolletage, or that extended Justice Gang cameo from the premiere, or that whole thing with Eagly and Red St. Wild (Michael Rooker). It’s all there so Peacemaker can hit the same eight-episode length as the previous season. If you squint, this finale looks like two episodes stitched together—but then, more Peacemaker, even B-sides Peacemaker, is hardly a bad thing.
Take, for example, Economos’ disaster of a lobster joke, meant as a ruse to distract A.R.G.U.S. while Bordeaux and Harcourt track down Chris after he’s bonded out of jail by Vig’s cache of blood money. It’s terrific. Stuff like this only makes the big moments land harder, like the two scenes stashed in this finale that explain why Harcourt and Chris have been swaying through the season like two sentient, love-starved punching bags. The Nelson yacht performance is a peak moment for the series: Chris and Emilia dance, catch each other’s hungry eyes (in an awesome echo of the opener’s choreography), and embrace at last, briefly allowing these dopes to feel something other than the shitty death-cycle that has been their professional lives.
Then there’s the extended scene where Chris has a “get With God” conversation with his friends. “Full Nelson” turns out to be a big episode for Adebayo, and Danielle Brooks flexes her Oscar-caliber talents to drive emotions into the heart of what Gunn has built for sixteen episodes. “I believe in miracles because of you!” she says to Chris. “I saw an eagle hug a human!” Her sentiment is unanimous among the Kids, and thus Chris decides to remain in Evergreen and build something new—but not before he gets an answer out of Harcourt concerning their chance romantic encounter. Did it mean anything? “Of course it did, you fucking asshole,” she says. “It meant everything.”
From here, Gunn ups the ante with a live performance by Foxy Shazam, who shred over a euphoric montage of the 11th Street Kids rallying under a new banner: Checkmate. The name is appropriate as a middle finger to A.R.G.U.S. while also potentially opening a big can of DC worms (see the stray observations below). The weight of guilt once slowed Chris to a shuffle; now, he struts shoulder to shoulder with his crew (which now includes Fleury, Bordeaux, and Judomaster!), free from the likes of Amanda Waller, the Flag dynasty, Auggie Smith—every awful thing that’s held him back from being an awesomely flawed hero on his own terms.
The good vibes aren’t made to last. “This is for Ricky, you piece of shit,” Flag tells his new guinea pig, abandoning Chris to a new cosmic purgatory to test out Sanctuary’s untested living conditions. Flag’s final betrayal may be jarring, and it’s wild to see a cliffhanger of this magnitude executed during what sure feels like an epilogue, but where Chris winds up at the end isn’t what season two is about. That’s for later. What matters this week is the cauterizing of wounds that have been left open for far too long. With “Full Nelson,” James Gunn provides closure while ripping open new rifts in the status quo, saving the best for last, and once again leaving us in his grip. This development will certainly suck for Chris. For us, his latest calamity is a promise: Peacemaker’s story is far from over.
Stray observations
- • In a radicalization of DC canon, Big Belly Burger now serves booze. Maybe Soder Cola produces alcoholic seltzers now, too.
- • A welcome pop in from Otis (Terence Rosemore), Luthor’s right hand, who supplies Flag with support during Harcourt’s interdimensional mission.
- • I nearly died when I saw Eagly hiding in that closet. Poor Eagly! Get him some chips!
- • Some fun comic-book criticism from Flag: “Arkham, Belle Reve—every single month, someone escapes!”
- • Somebody ask Gunn if that zombie world was supposed to be DCeased.
- • Not only is Checkmate a big deal in the comics—Maxwell Lord seizes it for nefarious purposes in the leadup to DC’s 2006 event Infinite Crisis, though I seriously doubt that’s what Gunn has in mind for either the character or the organization—it was also where Sasha Bordeaux wound up after her stint as Bruce Wayne’s bodyguard. I doubt the Kids will be sporting Checkmate’s nifty yellow-and-black armor, though.
- • Fun fact: Agent McCoy is played by Natasha Halevi, the wife of Sean Gunn.
- • Economos got Agent Jessop to laugh. Could that be Cupid floating overhead?
- • What are the odds that Chris’ Sanctuary situation gets resolved in Man Of Tomorrow instead of Peacemaker season three? Could James Gunn pull a Book Of Boba Fett?
- • I am genuinely going to miss this ridiculous show. Until next time, thanks for reading!
