How bad is the job market these days? Here’s one troubling economic indicator: Not even saving the world has earned Chris Smith, or the rest of the 11th Street Kids, anything more than a condescending, dead-in-the-water job interview.
But if Chris Smith, a.k.a. Peacemaker, is unhappily settling back into life as a D-tier superhero, the world around him has changed. Arriving more than three years after the conclusion of its first season, Peacemaker season two finds the DC Universe itself in a very different place. Back then, Zack Snyder was still the chief architect of DC’s film slate; though Peacemaker was a spinoff of James Gunn’s film The Suicide Squad, the show’s first season ended with a cameo appearance from Snyder’s Justice League (including Jason Momoa’s Aquaman defending himself from the rumor that he, uh, enjoys intimate relations with fish).
If you needed any further proof that the Snyderverse is truly done and dusted, look to Peacemaker’s season-two premiere, which literally rewrites the show’s history to align with the continuity established by Gunn’s Superman earlier this summer. When Gunn revisits that Justice League cameo during a “Previously on Peacemaker” segment, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and the rest have been replaced by Superman’s Justice Gang: Green Lantern, Mister Terrific, and Hawkgirl, alongside Gunn’s Superman and Supergirl. The Snyderverse is dead; long live the Gunniverse.
Fortunately for anyone who might otherwise find the transition jarring, Peacemaker’s second season provides a relatively gentle entry point: Neither the Justice League nor the Justice Gang has any interest in working with Chris Smith. In a meeting organized by Maxwell Lord and held at a defunct toy store — itself a deep-cut DC reference — Chris makes the impassioned case that he deserves to be admitted to the Justice Gang: He’s the finest marksman in the world, a skilled hand-to-hand combatant, and the owner of many chrome helmets with a variety of powers.
The Justice Gang doesn’t even listen to the pitch, spending most of the interviews bickering among themselves and talking shit on Chris. (To be fair, telling everybody that Green Lantern enjoys being puked on probably didn’t help Chris’s chances.) And with that door firmly closed, Chris is back to his humdrum suburban life, hosting wild but depressing orgies and owning the world’s coolest bald eagle.
His fellow Project Butterfly castoffs aren’t faring much better. Having exposed the existence of Task Force X at the end of the first season, Leota Adebayo has been blackballed by her mother, Amanda Waller, and thrown out again by her wife Keeya. Adrian Chase, a.k.a. Vigilante, is waiting tables at a crappy-looking restaurant. John Economos is still working for A.R.G.U.S., but only because he’s willing to spend all his time spying on Chris; his boss, Rick Flag Sr., has ordered 24/7 surveillance because he wants revenge on Chris for killing his son in The Suicide Squad.
And then there’s Emilia Harcourt, whose association with Peacemaker & Co. has derailed her once-promising career. Diagnosed by a psychiatrist with “toxic masculinity,” she’s been rejected for jobs at the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, and DHS — “the entire fucking alphabet of intelligence agencies,” she snarls.
Here, at least, she and Chris might be able to commiserate: two troubled but undeniably talented people being shut out of the only line of work they’ve ever known. But while their sexual tension has apparently blossomed, offscreen, into at least one hookup — there’s a pointed reference to a drunken night on a party boat — Harcourt isn’t willing to entertain the idea of Chris being an actual romantic partner. Her therapy, instead, is going to a dive bar and insulting the biker who makes a pass at her until she’s kicked enough ass, and had her ass kicked off, that she can pass out with a bloody smirk on her face.
Can you blame Chris, who has tried so hard to make amends for his past misdeeds, for wanting a better world — some sort of cosmic payoff for finally mending his ways? And that’s why it’s so tantalizing when he discovers a door in the quantum area that opens into a parallel universe, one where Peacemaker is a founding member of a group of superheroes as beloved as the Justice Gang.
Better still, the other two members of the so-called Top Trio are people he knows very, very well: His father, Auggie, who seems infinitely kinder and cuddlier here than the abusive white supremacist from Chris’s own universe, and his brother Keith, who is alive and well. Chris may have spent season one attempting to recover from guilt over accidentally killing his own brother as an adolescent, but this parallel universe offers a karmic shortcut: a world in which that formative trauma didn’t happen at all.
There is, of course, a catch: the arrival of this universe’s own Chris, who immediately attacks his mysterious doppelgänger. But as the episode ends, our Chris kills his attacker, leaving a Peacemaker-size hole in the parallel universe — one that he can easily slip into.
Stray Bullets
• In the parallel universe, Keith tells Chris Prime that his ex — heavily implied to be Harcourt — is now dating “some jarhead.” My best guess: an unannounced appearance from Joel Kinnaman, since it seems unlikely Peacemaker killed Rick Flag Jr. in this alternate universe.
• If you’re wondering why Rick Flag Sr.’s hair is black in Peacemaker but white in the animated series Creature Commandos, James Gunn has an answer: “Because that motherfucker Frank Grillo was shooting Tulsa King when we were shooting Peacemaker.” (For the record, Gunn’s in-canon answer is that Rick Flag Sr. is vain enough to dye his graying hair.)
• The episode’s multiple lines about the awfulness of Thirty Seconds to Mars — including a post-credits sequence designed entirely around getting a couple more burns in — falls squarely in line with James Gunn’s proudly anti–Jared Leto stance. Probably safe to assume Leto’s DAMAGED take on the Joker won’t be reappearing in the DCU.
• In case it weren’t clear enough from his ultra-WASP-y name and perpetually quizzical expression: Michael Ian Black says his news-commentator character, Cleavis Thornwaite, reappearing here after turning up in Superman, is “basically Tucker Carlson, only with the initials ‘CT’ instead of ‘TC.’”
• Sasha Bordeaux (Sol Rodriguez), Rick Flag Sr.’s right-hand woman, is best known in the comics as a Batman ally (and sometimes love interest).
• According to the framed newspapers in the alternate universe, the Top Trio’s conquests include the Rainbow Creature — a villain mostly remembered for a famously goofy 1960s Batman comic cover — and Ultra-Humanite, a superintelligent albino gorilla with more than 80 years of DC Comics history.
• The parallel universe may seem great, but I don’t know, there’s something very disturbing about a world where Def Leppard’s biggest hit is “Pour Some Honey on Me.”
• More parallel-universe differences: Metal bands have really leaned into cool misspellings. Hanoi Rocks has become Hanoi Roxx; Scorpions has become Scorpionz.
• Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I’m sorry to say season two’s new title sequence feels like a downgrade from season one’s widely celebrated opening credits. I like Foxy Shazam just fine, but “Oh Lord” just doesn’t have the gloriously cheesy punch of Wig Wam’s “Do You Wanna Taste It.”
• Other hair-metal bangers in this episode: “Guestlist,” by Hardcore Superstar, “Dreamer,” by Foxy Shazam, and “Outrage,” by Sister Sin.
• “You’re living in the worst level of Grand Theft Auto” is a pretty good line, but come on, we’re supposed to believe that Economos wouldn’t know the Grand Theft Auto series doesn’t have “levels”?
• “Dude, I’m like Rain Man, but with owls.”