Season 2 of James Gunn’s over-the-top superhero dark comedy Peacemaker launches with an episode that may prompt major déjà vu. Given how much has changed on the show, however, it takes a closer look to figure out why. In season 1, Gunn put the title character through a lot of changes, socially and emotionally, and it let him make progress as a person and as the hero he so desperately wants to be. So it’s startling to see where season 2’s premiere eventually dumps him — especially when you start to see how closely that premiere parallels the series pilot. The two episodes leave emotionally vulnerable anti-hero Peacemaker (John Cena) in painfully similar (and similarly painful!) situations.
But the end of the season 2 premiere, “The Ties That Grind,” doesn’t just sync up with the series pilot. It also aligns with two other major watershed moments in Peacemaker’s life — events that season 2 reckons with as central plot points. The differences in each case are important, but the fact that Peacemaker, aka Chris Smith, keeps winding up in the same place as he struggles for respectability and recognition is more than just a coincidence. The parallels are too cruel to be a running gag, and in the episodes provided for critics ahead of release, he still hasn’t noticed the connections. But it feels like we’re meant to notice, and to think about why his life keeps looping back to the same point over and over.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for episode 1 of Peacemaker in seasons 1 and 2.]
Peacemaker’s very first episode ends with a memorable bang. (Or a couple of them, if you want to be as raunchy as the show frequently is.) Chris follows one of his handlers, Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) into a bar, and hits on her in a clumsy, demeaning way. (“I haven’t been with any woman in a long time. I’m not asking for emotional connection here, I’m just asking for fun. Genital-to-genital contact.”) She shuts him down definitively.
Instead, Chris goes home with a random woman from the bar. After they have sex, the woman tries to kill him. She turns out to be a super-strong metahuman, and Chris gets badly hurt while failing to fight her off. Finally, in a panic, he activates the sonic-boom power on one of the high-tech helmets his abusive father, Auggie (Robert Patrick), made for him, and it obliterates the woman. The episode ends with him sitting, stunned and disconsolate, in the parking lot outside her apartment building, clearly wondering what the hell just happened to turn such a physically and emotionally satisfying scenario into a murder scene.
Compare that to season 2’s opening episode, where Chris again approaches Harcourt looking for a connection. It turns out they hooked up recently while drunk. Chris sees an opening for a relationship, but she calls it “a fuck-up” and clearly doesn’t even want to remember what happened. Once again, Chris goes away hurt and rejected, but this time, he goes bigger: Instead of finding a single sexual partner, he throws a drug-fueled orgy.
Then, still seeking a sense of connection he isn’t finding amid all the debauchery, he enters an alternate dimension he discovered earlier in the episode, where his brother Keith and father Auggie are both still alive, and the three of them have a supportive, loving relationship. He has an emotionally fulfilling conversation with the two of them, but after they go to bed, his own alternate-dimension equivalent finds him in their house and attempts to kill him. Exactly like in the series premiere, Chris is hard-pressed, wounded, and on the verge of dying when he instinctively activates one of his father’s devices, instantly killing his opponent. Once again, the episode ends with him sitting with the bloody remains of someone he didn’t set out to kill — and didn’t even want to kill — with a “What just happened?” expression on his face.
The parallels are thorough — reaching out to Harcourt, being rejected, seeking solace in flesh, and making an important emotional connection that ends in murder. In both cases, the fact that Chris instinctively kills his opponent with a device made by his father feels particularly significant, especially since season 1 shows us again and again that pretty much all Peacemaker’s emotional issues stem from his father. Auggie’s example (and his abuse) gave Chris his warped idea of justice, disregard for human life, overwhelming hunger for acceptance, self-esteem issues, toxic masculinity, and his habit of instinctively rejecting and offending other people. It’s symbolically important that in both of these premiere episodes, one of his father’s gifts proves more lethal than Chris intended, leaving him stunned, bereft, and with a body to clean up.
Season 1 was largely about Peacemaker reckoning with his father’s legacy, coming to terms with Auggie’s rejection (in a limited, dysfunctional way), and definitively breaking that bond by killing his father. Season 2 has him awkwardly trying to create the relationship they never had, even if he has to steal it from an alternate-universe version of himself.
But two more significant deaths also haunt him in season 2, and they’re both part of the same complicated web. As the show periodically reminds us, Chris accidentally killed his brother Keith when they were both kids, during a bare-knuckle brawl Auggie pushed them into. Growing up without Keith left Chris isolated and more vulnerable to Auggie’s abuse, particularly his classic “The wrong son died!” mind-game, where he blames Chris for Keith’s death, instead of owning his deserved guilt.
And in Gunn’s 2021 movie The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker killed his handler, Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), in a misguided attempt to “keep the peace” by preventing Flag from exposing America’s grotesque experiments and abuses of power in the island nation of Corto Maltese. That killing comes back to haunt him in season 2, as Flag’s father (Frank Grillo) seeks revenge.
It’s curious how season 2 of Peacemaker gives the audience a selectively edited flashback version of Chris killing Rick, where Rick’s death seems to parallel the situation Chris wound up in with the barfly in season 1 and with AU Chris in season 2. Desperate, wounded, about to lose the fight, and on the brink of death, Chris stabbed Rick through the heart with a broken shard of tile. The Peacemaker edit of this scene fight doesn’t show how Chris forced that fight in the first place by repeatedly trying to murder Flag, or dig into his motives. Zooming in solely on his desperation and pain makes killing Rick seem less like a choice, and more like the accident that killed Keith, or the instinctive acts of self-preservation at the end of each premiere episode.
Rick’s death does parallel the others in one way. Chris claimed he had to stop Rick in order to preserve the peace, but it’s fairly evident that Chris was trying to obey Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) by destroying the evidence. He wants her approval and wants to be seen as a useful asset and a great American hero, instead of something halfway between a villain and a perennial, unreliable fuck-up. That longing for sanction, for some version of the accolades he never gets from the public and the validation he never got from his (original-universe) father, keeps driving him throughout season 2 as well.
Part of the reason that drive keeps landing Chris in the same place — beaten, bloodied, and baffled over a corpse — is that Peacemaker is a dark comedy, and it’s constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable on a superhero show. Peacemaker keeps trying to clean up his act in one way or another, but the string of bodies he leaves behind is a testament to how badly — and how permanently — he keeps messing up. Or if you want to be kinder about it, how little luck he has with just finding a good thing and hanging onto it. Either way, the end of season 2’s first episode circling back to the beginning of the show — and, with the parallels to Chris’ childhood and The Suicide Squad, to events before the show even started — is just one more reflection on how “hurt people hurt people,” and how the legacy of abuse can be cyclical and hard to escape. Season 1 sometimes felt like Chris was recognizing the treadmill he was on, and escaping it. Season 2’s opening act drops him right back on it.
The eight-episode second season of Peacemaker premiered on HBO Max on Aug 21. Further episodes roll out on Thursdays through Oct. 9.
