Peacemaker… What a Joke

Despite being a box office flop due to its release during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Suicide Squad (2021) received immense praise, exciting fans for the team’s future. However, no one expected Chris Smith (John Cena), a.k.a. Peacemaker, one of the film’s most despised characters, to get his own solo show. Director James Gunn proved people wrong and turned the wacky antihero into a soulful and compelling lead in the first season of Peacemaker (2022-2025). Gunn confirmed the titular character would return for a second season set in his new DCU, but audiences were unsure how the continuity could be maintained. Though Season Two had great character moments and an interesting premise, its uneven pacing significantly hindered it. 

The season takes place after Superman (2025) and rewrites the events of Season One to fit into the DCU. A recap at the start of the first episode places Superman’s Justice Gang in a scene that originally featured the DCEU’s Justice League. In this season, Peacemaker possesses a Quantum Unfolding Chamber (QUC), a device capable of opening portals to other dimensions. After being rejected for membership in the Justice Gang, a drunk Chris enters the QUC to look for other dimensions, stumbling into one where his dead father and brother are alive. This universe traversing does not go unnoticed. Following the events of Superman, Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) is the new director of the Advanced Research Group Uniting Super-Humans (ARGUS). Chris killed his son, Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman) in The Suicide Squad, so Flag Sr. plans to imprison Chris as revenge. Using the similarities between Chris’s portal and Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) dimensional rift from Superman as an excuse, Flag puts ARGUS on high alert and orders them to hunt down Chris. Meanwhile, Chris struggles to choose between this new, seemingly-perfect universe and his home. 

The cast delivers compelling performances throughout the season, much like its predecessor. Cena’s Peacemaker is captivating, showing new levels of emotional depth due to his loneliness and confusion. Throughout the season, Peacemaker continuously grapples with his decision to stay in his home or leave for this new world. This leads to a powerful emotional arc across the season as he finds solace in his friends and realizes he can’t stay in the “dream” world. The supporting cast shines as well; Peacemaker’s friends, the 11th Street Kids—John Economos (Steve Agee), Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and Vigilante (Freddie Stroma)—are a hilarious group that bounce well off each other. Leota consistently steals the show this season. She was an engaging character in the first season, but truly shines as the glue that holds her group together in this one. Flag’s ARGUS agents, although certainly underutilized, also serve as memorable antagonists. Langston Fleury (Tim Meadows) was the most prevalent example of this, as he delightfully bounced off Economos and introduced the hilarious “bird blindness” running joke (inexplicably, Fleury can’t tell bird species apart; he mistakes Eagly, Peacemaker’s pet eagle, for a duck). However, unlike in the first season, the 11th Street Kids were rarely featured as a full team this season, appearing mostly in smaller pairings—a choice that undercut the ensemble energy that defined the previous installment.

Much like its characters, the season’s premise and storyline remained consistently engaging. The season’s emotional core—Chris being torn between his home and the new world—truly drew the audience in through its exploration of his interactions with characters from the alternate universe. As established in Season One, Chris remains haunted by both the deaths and lives of his brother and father. He killed his brother as a child and was blamed by his sadistic father for it. Years later, he fought and killed his father, a white supremacist supervillain. The family storyline is excellently developed, from Chris’s initial joy at seeing his brother and father alive and changed to his final confrontation with them that echoes his guilt over their fates in his world. Though somewhat repetitive, the ARGUS storyline remained entertaining and effectively added tension throughout. Despite the agents’ many failed attempts to catch Chris becoming increasingly frustrating, their dynamics, especially Fleury’s nicknaming of the agents, were hilarious to watch. Flag’s pursuit of Peacemaker added an additional layer of complexity to the moral storyline, leaving viewers torn between sympathizing with Chris and Flag because of their losses. The new premise allowed for far more introspection this season, placing the characters’ journeys front and center through emotional moments and completed arcs that ended in a satisfying way. 

Though the characters and premise were well thought out, the pacing significantly detracted from the season’s quality. Following a promising premiere that introduced the central plot well, the pacing halted to a stop. The season then meandered, spending multiple episodes rehashing Peacemaker’s exploration of the new Earth and Flag’s attempts to catch him. While many of these individual episodes were entertaining, the lack of progress towards the overall story until the sixth episode was noticeable. This was worsened by the shorter runtime. Despite both having eight episodes, Season Two is over half an hour shorter than Season One. Episodes Six and Seven—easily the season’s best—are thankfully faster paced and further the central plot. Despite this, a relatively stagnant first five episodes left too much to be resolved in the final episode, even with an hour-long runtime. The finale ended up neglecting most of this responsibility, failing to resolve many plotlines. Instead, it’s a series of montages to James Gunn’s favorite rock songs that speed through moments that should have been earlier in the season. This mismanagement of pacing proves the season lacked a clear vision and wandered until it was too late. In the end, the uneven rhythm made the second season of Peacemaker feel less like a cohesive story and more like a collection of great moments in search of structure.

Peacemaker’s second season is by no means a bad season of television. Its character exploration resonates deeply, especially with the depth presented through loss and loneliness. Also, the setting of the new world and its tie to Chris’ journey amidst Flag’s chase increases the stakes and emotional weight. However, the pacing ultimately hindered the season’s quality: too much was left for the finale, which rushed through crucial plotlines and omitted several others. This is the final season; these cliffhangers will end up being resolved in other DCU shows and films, leaving these character arcs unresolved in their own show’s finale. Though the season had clear potential, its impact was ultimately diminished by a mismanaged vision and served as an unsatisfying ending to Peacemaker.