I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for James Gunn. Yeah, there’s some valid criticism of his cinematic crutches: his reliance on licensed music, the gratuitous shock factor he employs, and the repeated trope of mercenaries and their found families. But his movies and TV shows often have strong character arcs and lots of emotional fidelity—the meat and potatoes of a satisfying narrative, which most superhero properties fail to bring to the table.
That said, Peacemaker Season 2 left me a little malnourished.
It’s a bummer, because Season 1 was fun and poignant in a lot of unexpected ways. I love stories about lesser known comic book characters. Peacemaker is unencumbered by any preexisting fandom, which lets Gunn tell an original story, with a nuanced take on masculinity and generational trauma—that is, in between alien butterflies hollowing out people’s brains and piloting them like undead meat mechs.
On that note, it’s interesting how often Gunn’s stuff centers on angry, zombified masses—a reasonable obsession for someone who became the internet’s Villain of the Month, exiling him from Marvel and forcing him to wander the DC deserts for a while. From Starro commandeering the Corto Maltese army in The Suicide Squad, to Lex Luthor’s brigade of shitposting monkeys in Superman, the man is understandably getting some catharsis after tangling with the terminally online mob.
Anyway, in comparison to Season 1, Peacemaker Season 2 felt very uneven. Half of the episodes felt interstitial at best, the characters slowly ambling towards the next plot device while volleying some very hit-or-miss barbs. The action sequences were energizing but also very sparse for a superhero story.
I will say, the multiverse angle of Season 2 had more pathos than anything Marvel has done with its entire Multiverse Saga (save perhaps Loki). Early in the season, Peacemaker gets swept into an adjacent dimension where his father and brother are still alive and they’re a trio of celebrated, kaiju-slaying saviors. In some ways, it’s James Gunn continuing to digest the perils of internet culture: the idea that if you just walk through the right portal, you can live in a small but perfect world where nothing is wrong and you’re always the hero.
Of course, nothing in a Gunn story is that clean. Peacemaker’s perfect world turns out to be one in which the Axis powers won the war, and he’s the unwitting beneficiary of a Nazi-run America. But this big reveal is a blip on the radar, glazed over with a single flurry of heartbreaking violence that Peacemaker is forced to flee. The show never burdens him with processing what it meant to feel at home in that world, a missed opportunity given that Peacemaker’s entire arc is about him escaping the legacy of his white supremacist dad. In a show about taking a macho douchebag through a journey of emotional complexity, what did it mean to Peacemaker that his alternate universe dad was not a Nazi but unwilling to fight it with the full force of his heroism? Guess we’ll never know.
All that said, I could’ve watched a supercut of Freddie Stroma’s trivia-loving psychopath Vigilante and still gleaned the best parts of the season.
Does Peacemaker need a Season 3? Probably not. But as long as the Gunn keeps aiming for the heart, I don’t mind if he misses now and then.