It’s fitting that Peacemaker season two should focus on alternate realities and new beginnings, as change has come to define the DC Universe since we last enjoyed the sordid exploits of Christopher Smith (John Cena). Hell, even the streaming platform where our favorite antihero hangs his chromed helmet has rebranded in the interim. (Welcome back, HBO Max.) As the third installment in a revitalized DCU under the stewardship of series creator James Gunn, building on the momentum of Superman and last winter’s Creature Commandos, Peacemaker returns energized by positive creative shifts and the new dramatic possibilities of its reality-hopping premise—plus, it still packs the chaotic punch that made its first season such a riot to watch.
For all the delays, it’s comforting, and a little miraculous, that Peacemaker still rocks as thoroughly as it does. Story-wise, the fallout from last season’s astonishingly violent Butterfly invasion sets a mood best described—at least in this week’s premiere—as “gloomy.” Chris, along with his best buddy Eagly (a chirpy digital triumph voiced by Dee Bradley Baker), has relocated from that flag-festooned trailer from season one into his father’s house, which he inherited after he killed Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick), the racist supervillain known as the White Dragon. This home is less a place for closure and one for tearing open old wounds, a dwelling where Chris can confront the regret and abuse that have since calcified into his toxic antihero persona, The Peacemaker.
The gloom spreads to the surviving members of the “11th Street Kids.” Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), last season’s reluctant sleeper agent, has embraced a new badass persona at the expense of domestic stability: Estranged from her wife (Elizabeth Ludlow) and now a private security consultant, Adebayo has found her swagger by losing the one person who anchored her. “I’m the hardcore shit now—that’s what I do,” she says, awkwardly jamming out to Hanoi Rocks’ “Don’t You Ever Leave Me” in her beige-colored sedan and holding court in a filthy motel room, or “the worst level of Grand Theft Auto,” as Economos (Steve Agee) later puts it. Adebayo has evolved into a full-on Midwestern rocker washout, an unexpected turn for her character that Brooks manages to render both adorable and sad.
Harcourt’s (Jennifer Holland) life update is grimmer. She blames Adebayo’s whistleblowing on Task Force X and her mother, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), for collapsing her career. “You suffer from a particularly severe form of toxic masculinity,” is her psychotherapist’s diagnosis for this mid-life L, which Harcourt denies throughout the episode, bloodily taking her angst out on her car dashboard and a pack of barroom goons alike. The question lingers: Is Waller secretly blackballing her ability to get a job in the government? The “nos” piling up from the alphabet soup of U.S. agencies seems to suggest it, but maybe her shrink is onto something. Harcourt’s inability to connect puts up some insurmountable barriers of their own. Take her and Chris’s inevitable hookup after last season’s victory (off-screen, on a party boat): Was this just an adrenaline-sating fling, or the beginning of something more? Why are Chris and Harcourt left to suffer their failures alone when the obvious path to happiness (or something resembling it) is staring in each other’s faces?
While Harcourt stalls out, Chris spots a chance to move up in the DCU, with Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn) inviting Peacemaker to audition for the Justice Gang. “I don’t want to be a joke anymore,” he tells Adebayo as she drops him off. “This is all I’ve ever wanted, y’know? To be a real hero.” Fate, however, proves a harsh mistress: His interview—observed by an indifferent Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and a mocking Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion)—goes about as well as you’d expect. It’s hostile, degrading, and, once his body count (of both kinds) is questioned, demoralizing. “I don’t want to be ruled by past experiences and anger” is his sincere confession, reduced to background noise amid fratty banter about asses and Hawkgirl’s new carb-light popcorn diet. Chris goes home, defeated.
This crescendo of failure erupts into the premiere’s set piece: an orgy set in Auggie’s living room, where breasts, butts, and swinging dongs flail about as Chris puts copious amounts of powder in his nose, a pity party for one in a sea of willing flesh. (Is this Gunn’s sneering response to The Boys‘ Herogasm?) Despite his emotional isolation, Chris isn’t completely alone: Economos surveys his home—between quizzing Vigilante (Freddy Stroma) on all things owls, natch—on behalf of Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), father to Rick Jr. (Joel Kinnaman), who was killed by Peacemaker way back in The Suicide Squad. Flag’s ascension to director of A.R.G.U.S. is an unexpected development following Adebayo’s whistleblowing; he can now abuse the unit’s resources to spy on his hated enemy, waiting for Chris to make one wrong move so Flag can cut loose with a long-gestating vengeance.
As a second-season premiere for a rowdy superhero series, “The Ties That Grind” is a surprisingly lachrymose and tidy table-setter. Gunn indulges his usual shaggy-dog digressions—the Justice Gang sequence overstays its welcome—but the episode’s function is primarily restorative, gathering its scattered, damaged cast and resituating them before the dramatic weight of Chris’s reality-shifting discovery at the end of the episode detonates all over the place. For now, signs of Gunn’s larger narrative architecture hum faintly at the edges: Cleavis Thornwaite (Michael Ian Black in Tucker Carlson mode) blares paranoia about breakouts at Belle Reve and Arkham Asylum (cameos forthcoming?), and we discover that Chris’ interdimensional arsenal shares energy signatures with the pocket dimension Lex Luthor (Nicolas Hoult) used to rip Metropolis a new one during Superman.
Parallel universes are narrative devices that literalize regret and rely almost entirely on easy gimmicks, like dramatic what-ifs, strange new character skins, and inverted pop-culture references. (The amount of hair metal discrepancies in Chris’s parallel-Earth bedroom is fodder enough for its own article.) What will matter this season, not just for Chris but the series around him, is what Gunn mines from this premise, how he manages to poignantly explore the ache of what could have been while also carving out an R-rated alcove for his tawdry, Troma-tinted tendencies. Look at Cena’s face as he crosses the cosmic threshold for a drink with his alternate-dad—lucid and free of hate—and his living older brother, Keith (David Denman). More than simply presenting the disparity of two lives, one with love and one without, this moment demonstrates reality’s many injustices, where personal choices yield cruel, unbending consequences that reverberate across generations. Not too bad for a show that presented us an engorged dick just moments earlier.
Across his DC tenure, John Cena has nurtured Chris Smith from cartoon thug to a character defined by his hangdog, Keatonesque features, a maudlin bruiser whose granite-sculpted mug reveals vulnerability that transcends Peacemaker‘s rock-‘n’-roll bravado. The closing shot of Chris cradling his interdimensional doppelgänger’s corpse, an awesome if existentially terrifying sci-fi beat, asks impossible questions of an unknowable future. Cena sells the moment. What kind of man was this? What might have been had love and stability been possible for Peacemaker?
Cena weaves this speculative ache throughout the premiere. Chris is a man white-knuckling his way to decency, still undone by substances and sex, still haunted by the shadow of Rick Flag and his hate-saturated father. Yet the counter image of the man he could have been suggests new (and possibly shortsighted) possibilities for him. In this sense, Peacemaker has landed on its richest terrain yet. The DCU at large is still cooling after its seismic reset, experimenting with tone and grasping for coherence. Gunn doesn’t stabilize things through grandeur; instead, he zeroes in on the smaller, more scalable intimacies of arrested development, thwarted love, the paths never taken—the elements that make growth possible. Its violence is still nuts, its humor still juvenile, but beneath this second season of Peacemaker beats a wiser, more chastened heart.
Stray observations
- • The new opening credits sequence speaks to the slight tonal shift this season, from Wig Wam’s power anthem to a rock ballad by Cincinnati-based rock outfit Foxy Shazam. Set to “Julian,” the intro is just as dancy, a bit more populated, and notably more downbeat despite all the colorful monkeyshines on display.
- • The passcode to Auggie’s dimensional warchest (or “Quantum Unfolding Storage Area”) is still “2-6-1-0-1-1,” and its significance remains beyond me. (TV Tropes has a doozy of a theory.)
- • Krank Toys is the brainchild of the Toymaker, a D-grade villain from the animated series The Batman. Beyond that, its biggest claim to fame was appearing as Bane’s secret base in Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City and an episode of Gotham. You’re coming up in the world, Krank!
- • That sobbing mess clattering out of Krank Toys is the White Rabbit, another Batman also-ran. Between her and Superman’s new Jim Lee-looking duds, I’m beginning to think Gunn has a soft spot for the New 52, you guys.
- • Harcourt: “I’m not on good terms with 30 Seconds To Mars, how dare you.”
- • Ah, yes, the “orgy of financial shortcomings”/literal exposition dump of unpaid bills. Harcourt and Spider-Man’s Aunt May ought to start a support group.
- • It sure looks like Economos has finally learned how to dye his beard properly.
- • Parallel-headline that caught my attention: “Top Trio Saves Gotham From Ultra-Humanite.”
- • At least nature has balanced in one respect. Economos accidentally air drops a dick pic to Adebayo after her “intimacy WhatsApp snafu” last season.
- • I could be letting nostalgia get the better of me, but I could swear Parallel-Auggie’s home looks just like the mansion headquarters of the Legends Of Tomorrow—which, by the way, also existed in a pocket dimension. Will have to investigate further.
