For the past several years, superhero storytelling on the big and small screens has been mired in the multiverse. From Sony’s animated Spider-Verse movies to the many TV shows and movies featured in the MCU’s ongoing Multiverse Saga to DC’s The Flash, superheroes have seemingly been exploring alternate universes everywhere, all at once. Yet that didn’t stop James Gunn from incorporating the concept into this summer’s Superman and leaning even further into it in the latest season of Peacemaker.
On Thursday, the second season of Peacemaker concluded with the show’s titular hero stranded in another dimension, with no hope of ever returning home. It’s an abrupt cliff-hanger to cap off an uneven, underwhelming finale that followed two of the strongest episodes of the entire series. However, it’s also a crucial setup for the future of the DCU.
Episodes 6 and 7 showcased Peacemaker at its best, combining Gunn’s distinct brand of absurd comedy, action, and character-driven, emotional drama. But following the penultimate installment, in which Peacemaker (John Cena) and his friends fled Earth X—a twisted world in which the Nazis won World War II—after killing Peacemaker’s father and leaving his brother on the brink of death, the finale winds down the season by focusing on smaller character moments, two live rock performances, and (even more) alternate universes.
“Full Nelson” feels more like an epilogue than a true final chapter of the season. After Chris Smith leaves behind his brother and his “perfect”—or so he thought—life for good, he returns to his home dimension to wallow in his misery in prison. Led by the ever-loyal Adebayo, the so-called 11th Street Kids bail Chris out and eventually bring him out of his rut. Together, the fully formed squad—along with a few other disgruntled A.R.G.U.S. employees, Sasha Bordeaux (Sol Rodríguez), Langston Fleury (Tim Meadows), and Judomaster (Nhut Le)—establish a new intelligence agency of their own, called Checkmate.
Meanwhile, General Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) and A.R.G.U.S. begin to explore the vast potential of Smith’s Quantum Unfolding Chamber (QUC), with a little bit of help from none other than Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). And it’s here where Peacemaker really lays some groundwork for Gunn’s upcoming Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, and potentially additional DC properties.
In Episode 6, Hoult reprises his role as Superman’s archnemesis when Flag pays Luthor a visit at Belle Reve. Flag cuts him a deal, offering to move Luthor to another prison—free of metahumans—in exchange for his help in tracking down Peacemaker and his interdimensional technology. It’s a tenuous start to a partnership that becomes crucial to Flag’s sudden foray into the fight against metahumans, as he shifts away from the more ambivalent stance that he held in Superman. By Episode 8, Flag is all in on Luthor’s anti-metahuman agenda, following his advice—and even hiring his former employees—to use the QUC to find a new prison capable of holding this emergent threat to humanity. While Luthor never appears in the finale, his influence is still present as he deepens his alliance with Flag and positions himself for eventual, inevitable release.
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In “Full Nelson,” Flag sends expendable A.R.G.U.S. agents, like Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), through other transdimensional portals in the QUC in search of this ideal prison. While it takes a few duds to get there, including a nightmarish Candy Land with monstrous imps, they eventually find the perfect destination: an uninhabited planet with natural resources that A.R.G.U.S. dubs “Salvation.” And Flag wastes little time in presenting this plan—Luthor’s plan—to the U.S. secretary of defense, Stephen Mori (James Hiroyuki Liao), for approval.
“Arkham and Belle Reve, they’re not capable of holding individuals who have extraordinary abilities,” Flag explains. “They’re not. Every single month, someone escapes. No one … no one will escape Salvation. I promise.”
“I gotta say, Rick … you’ve come a long way from lambasting Luthor in this room a month ago to now being the one to proactively implement his plans,” Secretary Mori says, referring to a scene from Superman.
“I do not like the guy, but he is the smartest man in the world,” Flag replies. “Why not use his brain to make our world a better place?”
At the end of the finale, Flag is already beginning to put the Salvation plan into place—starting with Peacemaker. In a quick turn of events that disrupts the new, idyllic life that Smith has built with his friends, A.R.G.U.S. captures Peacemaker and sends him through the trans-dimensional door that leads to his next, natural prison cell. And before closing the portal for good, Flag takes a moment to gloat to the man who killed his son in 2021’s The Suicide Squad.
“Before we move all the metahuman prisoners here, I thought a little due diligence is required,” Flag tells Peacemaker. “See what effect this dimension has on the human body.”
Before the end credits begin, Peacemaker—who has no weapons or supplies to help him survive—looks around as a cacophony of monstrous calls echoes in the distance. At the start of the episode, Chris wanted nothing more than to be left alone to live out the rest of his supposedly cursed existence by himself. Now, he’s been banished to another dimension, making his former wish come true after he’d regained the hope—and sense of belonging—that he’d lost. Although there are two post-credits scenes in the finale, they’re gags—as is Peacemaker tradition—rather than further plot points, and there’s no indication of what’s next for the antihero. Speaking at a virtual press conference moderated by Variety on Tuesday, Gunn said that he has no plans for a third season of Peacemaker.
“This is about the other stories in which this [cliff-hanger] will play out,” he explained. However, Gunn didn’t rule out the possibility, either: “Never say never. But right now, this is about the future of the DCU.”
The introduction of Salvation borrows a concept from the comic books, as a 2007-8 limited series called Salvation Run—based on a pitch from Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin—featured many of DC’s most infamous villains, including Lex Luthor and the Joker, being imprisoned on the distant planet. It remains to be seen which project this narrative thread will be picked up in or how much Cena’s character would be a part of it. However, Gunn did specify in the same press conference that it wouldn’t be a direct adaptation of the comics run.
“It really is about the concept,” Gunn said. “The part that really spoke to me was the beginning of it, where Rick Flag Jr. and Amanda Waller [said], ‘Fuck it. Metahumans are a pain in the ass. They keep escaping. Let’s just get rid of them permanently.’ And of course, there are a bunch of repercussions about sending a bunch of bad guys to another dimension. In this case … the sole person there right now is a good guy who has to survive on his own.”
With its Season 2 finale, Peacemaker creates these new narrative pathways to explore in the DCU, spending much of the episode’s extended running time on establishing Checkmate and Salvation, which Gunn referred to as being “pretty instrumental” to the overarching story that he’s telling in the DCU. Yet as a result, Peacemaker is less concerned with following up on the events that occurred on Earth X, such as the state of Chris’s brother (who seemed intent on avenging his slain family at the end of Episode 7), which served as the main focus of the season.
Peacemaker had some great moments across its latest, and potentially final, batch of episodes, but it sacrifices a satisfying conclusion to look toward the DCU’s future—a bad narrative habit that Gunn may have picked up from his former employer Marvel Studios. The DCU is still young, consisting of only three projects to date, all of which have been written and/or directed by Gunn himself. It’ll be interesting to see how everything plays out in the interconnected story that he’s weaving together in Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters. But more important may be how Gunn continues to balance his responsibilities as a filmmaker, a studio executive, and the architect for a fledgling cinematic universe all at once.
