When we last checked in with Peacemaker, a.k.a. Chris Smith, and the 11th Street Kids, they’d just saved the world from a quiet alien invasion, after which point Adebayo outed her mother, Amanda Waller, and Task Force X. Six months later, we’re reminded that saving the world is not a high-paying position, and that even a newly-saved world is still full of problems.
NOTE: We’ve seen the first five episodes of Peacemaker, but will be reviewing them one by one as they release rather than as a single unit.
This review may contain some spoilers for Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 1.
This season seems like it’s going to deal a lot more with the internal lives of its characters. By all accounts, our characters should be on top of the world, but that’s anything but the case. Amanda Waller and her replacement, Rick Flagg Sr., have taken measures to make the lives of its characters more difficult.
Flagg has Chris under constant surveillance that has nothing to do with the fact that Chris killed his son under orders from Amanda Waller. Harcourt is blacklisted from every intelligence organization in the United States. Adebayo has plans to start her own private investigation agency, but has the albatross of revealing top secret information hanging around her neck. John Economos and Adrian Chase are mostly just miserable because they are who they are.
At the center of this season is the inter-dimensional door in Chris’s home, left behind by his father. In the first few minutes of the episode, Chris takes Eagly into the pocket dimension for a late-night flight and discovers another door that looks just like his–and uses the same combination. There, he discovers a gorgeous mansion inhabited by the father he killed last season–a better version of his world.
Next, we join Chris as he interviews to join the Justice Gang. While Mister Terrific is otherwise occupied, Guy Gardner and Hawkgirl are interviewing potential candidates for the group. This feels like the most ‘James Gunn’ moment of the show; the two heroes and their boss, Maxwell Lord, argue back and forth about Chris’ qualities or lack thereof, not knowing that he can hear every cruel, insulting word they’re saying about him. It ties the show back into Superman and has the kind of dialogue we often expect from Gunn’s writing. It’s a mean sequence, but it’s still really funny and feels authentic to everything we know about all four characters.
A lot of what we’re seeing is Chris seeking external validation to salve his internal wounds. He killed his dad, he killed Rick Flagg Jr., and immediately regretted it, and he spent the last season realizing that his worldview was based on lies and wrong-headed ideas. He looks to the Justice Gang and to Harcourt. When they don’t give him the feedback he needs, he arranges an orgy at his house. I can’t help but wonder how he got so many people together so quickly, but that’s not really the point. He’s on a self-destructive bender, and it can be hard to watch at times.
The alternate reality he steps into immediately seems better. Not only does his father live in a beautiful mansion, but his brother is still alive there, and both brothers live with their dad, with whom they act as a trio of superheroes, the Top Trio. It feels like a trick, a world designed to his exact specifications, and maybe even better than that. How good this world is makes it immediately unnerving to watch, even as things seem so good for Chris. The sequences in this world aren’t filmed in a way meant to foreshadow anything, but they’re just too good to be true.
The episode also makes no bones about how violent this season will be. A brawl between Harcourt and some bikers is the highlight of the show, but Chris continues his bender when he encounters his possibly-better self in that alternate reality, and the two come to blows, with both of them being the type of person who is capable of killing someone in combat. He’s literally beating himself up even as he ignores his friends and the world he’s already living in in favor of a potential world that, if we had to guess, isn’t as perfect as it initially looks.
If this first episode is any indication, this is going to be a dark season.
