Season Two of the ‘Peacemaker’ Somehow Makes the Multiverse Fresh Again

Warning: Contains spoilers for Season 1 of Peacemaker.

Plenty of commentators have already speculated as to why multiverse narratives have become so common in recent years. From a creator’s perspective, it permits the opportunity to try out ideas that don’t necessarily have to stick: A whole story could take place in a non-canonical setting, and reset when the characters return to where they came from. An actor can reinvent a character they may have started to find a little boring. Maybe most potently these days, a viewer can imagine what it would be like to step into a world without so many problems — or, at least, different ones. And while multiverses have been so ubiquitous lately that one has to wonder if any ground remains untrod, the new season of Peacemaker figured out how to make this viewer care about one — show it through the eyes of a sweet bonehead who dares to yearn.

Peacemaker, aka Christopher Smith, comes to us from the Batman universe. John Cena first portrayed him in in the 2021 film The Suicide Squad (not to be confused with 2016’s Suicide Squad, no “The,” in which Jared Leto played the Joker and tortured his co-stars with offscreen “pranks”). The titular squad is made up of convicts recruited by the ruthless Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to carry out a highly secret government mission. In exchange, their sentences will be commuted. When squad member Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) decides to leak information about Waller’s operation, Peacemaker, whose “peace at any cost” ethos permits murder as needed, fights Rick over the intended leak, ultimately killing him. 

Both Rick’s death and his last words — “Peacemaker. What a joke” — haunt Peacemaker into his own HBO Max series, which premiered in 2022. The details of the new task force he’s assigned to don’t really matter that much (yes, they have to save the world, what else is new). What’s important is the way he bonds with the comrades who call themselves “The 11th Street Kids,” after the location of their downmarket HQ in an old video store. These include government agents Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and John Economos (Steve Agee), both introduced in The Suicide Squad; Adrian Chase/Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), a local friend of Chris’ who’s doing his own cheerfully sociopathic thing; and Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), secretly Amanda Waller’s daughter and feeding information back to her until Adebayo turns on Waller at the end of Season One.

No one’s doing great as the season starts. Harcourt can’t get a job at any government agency and is coming to the end of her savings. Adebayo has split from her wife Keeya (Elizabeth Faith Ludlow) over the effects Adebayo’s whistleblowing has had on their relationship. Economos is back at A.R.G.U.S., bitterly surveilling a depressed Peacemaker. And Adrian is… actually, still a cheerful sociopath, eager for his friends to quiz him about his favorite animals — owls, manta rays, spiders — but generally failing every time.

Back in the series premiere, we got our first glimpse at a unique feature of the home owned by Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick), Peacemaker’s virulently racist father: Behind a seemingly normal closet door in Auggie’s bedroom is a “quantum unfolding chamber,” full of doors to other worlds. Peacemaker hasn’t seemed particularly curious about it until one night when his pet eagle Eagly pecks him awake and. Not wanting to go outside in the cold, Peacemaker opens the chamber to let Eagly fly around in there, eventually following him to another door Eagly keeps pecking, next to a rack of Peacemaker helmets like the one Peacemaker’s father kept for him just inside their door. When Peacemaker opens it, he finds himself in a handsome study full of memorabilia and honors for the “Top Trio”: Peacemaker and two other costumed heroes. The more Peacemaker learns about it, the more convinced he is that the dimension he’s stumbled upon is better than his own — and the more he’s drawn to spend time there. What if he just never came back?

I saw this summer’s big-screen Superman, so I know its titular character and Peacemaker now exist on the same timeline; beyond that, I refuse to learn what it means that Season Two is in the DCU, whereas Season One was in the DCEU. Luckily for me, it doesn’t seem like I need to. Though Peacemaker gestures to other properties, creator James Gunn — who also happens to be co-CEO (with Peter Safran) of DC Studios — hasn’t built Peacemaker exclusively for superfans. (See also: its Batman-universe cousins Harley Quinn and Kite Man: Hell Yeah!.) You could even drop straight in to Season Two: flashbacks and dialogue fill in what you missed from Season One and The Suicide Squad before it, smoothly and organically and not because the showrunner seems not to trust that you’re actually paying attention; I’d tell The Residence to take a note, but it’s already been canceled.

By carrying its lore lightly, instead of seeming burdened by it, Peacemaker can engage the viewer with its universally relatable stakes. When must you ignore your professional obligations in favor of your friendships? How can you convince a very guarded prospective romantic partner that you’re worth risking a relationship for? What do you do when you think your friends are hanging out without you? Then, it can move on to thrills. How can an unarmed person neutralize a team of domestic terrorists taking a full government building’s worth of hostages, and what carnage could he create once he’s found an emergency fire axe? What do you do when you find an alien in the woods? If you found yourself in a better version of your own life, how far would you go to keep it?

Unlike most superhero movies, in which the comedy gets shoehorned in between action setpieces, Peacemaker is actually funny. This is probably the only show I watch in which one guy accidentally kills someone and calls a friend to ask, “You still have those bone saws?” as casually as if they were garden tools. In one of the first scenes with new A.R.G.U.S. agent Langston Fleury (Tim Meadows), he’s watching Peacemaker’s house with Economos. When Eagly walks out, Fleury asks, “What’s with the parrot?” It turns out he has bird blindness; he later describes Eagly as a “large duck.” 

After a confrontation with a stranger in a drug store, Harcourt notices a tall gawky redhead watching them and snaps, “You got a good view, there, Beaker?”

“‘Beaker’?” he asks. 

“He’s a Muppet,” says another shopper. 

“Do I look like him?”

“A little.” 

“And that’s bad?” the guy asks. 

“It’s not good,” the shopper drawls. 

When Adebayo takes out an ad in Pro Soldier magazine for her new PI business, featuring a sexy female silhouette, she’s excited to get her first nibble; it takes Adrian to tell her that her half of the conversation made it sound like the caller will be expecting her to do sex work. “Don’t worry about me,” he adds. “I never kill prostitutes. Their lives are hard enough.” 

An ensemble as strong as this one could be at risk when new cast members come in, but for the most part, the newcomers fit in well. Meadows is, of course, the standout, but action vet Frank Grillo could not be more at home as Economos’ new boss at A.R.G.U.S. I’m not supposed to say what David Denman is doing, but after his memorable recent supporting performances in Rebel Ridge, Joy Ride and Laid, I’m happy to see the Denaissance continue. Sol Rodriguez, as A.R.G.U.S. agent Sal Bordeaux, is a little awkward, but as the season goes on, it started to seem more like an intentional choice.

Peacemaker’s ongoing efforts at self-discovery and reinvention — distancing himself from every wrong thing Auggie taught him — are meaningful but can sometimes lean a little maudlin, which is why it’s so important to have Adrian around as the only one of Peacemaker’s friends who won’t automatically affirm him. I realize this is weird to say about a killer who’s merciless because he lacks the capacity for mercy (among many other human emotions), but: Adrian is such an adorable weirdo. The show deploys him very judiciously, but I don’t think a tiny bit more of him would be the worst thing. 

Amid Peacemaker’s epiphanies — which, by the way, Cena performs so convincingly that it’s easy to forget where he came from — Peacemaker is still the most hilariously violent, violently hilarious show on TV. If you think there’s anywhere else you can see five government black-ops agents defeated by a domestic pet eagle, a corpse dismemberment staged like a scene from Perfect Strangers, or an alien getting yelled at for poor manners, you can go ahead and look. You just might need a quantum unfolding chamber with doors to other dimensions in order to find it.