This article contains spoilers for Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 6, “Ignorance Is Chris.”
A few days ago, Apple indefinitely postponed the release of the TV series The Savant, which was to star Jessica Chastain as a researcher whose job is to surveil and infiltrate right-wing extremist groups. The streaming and tech giant didn’t announce its decision and, when others discovered the show had dropped off the schedule, issued a vague statement citing only their “careful consideration.” But it seems likely that what they were considering was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and more specifically the furor that has greeted any suggestion that Kirk or any of his followers could be associated with white nationalism. The Savant—whose episodes are, at this writing, still available on Apple’s press site—doesn’t mention any real-life figures, although we do see a person handling a copy of Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke at a conference attended by several of the season’s white-supremacist baddies. But the only inference to be drawn is that merely asserting the existence of violent white nationalism is a potato too hot for a $3.8 trillion corporation to handle.
Fortunately, Warner Bros. doesn’t feel the same way. In One Battle After Another, which opens in thousands of American movie theaters today, a racist Army colonel played by Sean Penn executes left-wing radicals in cold blood and refers to a biracial teenager as a “mutt.” And Thursday night on HBO Max, James Gunn’s Peacemaker revealed that the alternate dimension into which the show’s violent antihero has tried to escape is a neo-Nazi utopia where people of color have been rounded up and imprisoned, and the stars on the American flag have been replaced by a swastika.
Sharp-eyed viewers noticed weeks ago that the world Christopher Smith (John Cena) had entered through a dimensional portal in his late father’s closet was suspiciously devoid of nonwhite faces. But Chris, who ended the previous season by shooting his father, a white supremacist vigilante called the White Dragon, in the head, was too overwhelmed by how much better this parallel dimension seemed to be to notice any of its shortcomings. Here, his father, Auggie (Robert Patrick), was a loving dad, and Chris’ brother, Keith (David Denman), was still very much alive—a second chance that Chris, who accidentally killed his brother in a fistfight orchestrated by their own father, never expected to get. Rather than being orphaned and alone, the alternate-universe Chris is part of a happy, close-knit family, who fight crime together to the cheers of an adoring public.
Peacemaker’s alternate dimension boasts just enough differences with our own—there, Def Leppard spells its name correctly, and Mick Jagger was the lead singer in the Beatles—to leave open the possibility that Auggie might simply have turned out differently in another timeline. But it turns out that he’s just a happy racist, at peace with the world he and his kind have created.
The Nazi rug pull is a well-worn trope in science fiction, but what’s noteworthy about the way Gunn, who wrote and directed the twist-revealing episode, stages it is that we’ve had little overt reason to suspect just how awry this parallel dimension was. Sure, there were the occasional attacks by a group of militants who call themselves the Sons of Liberty—a name cannily chosen to convey the appearance of ideology without any of its substance—but our dimension has its own problems with political violence, right? And everyone in this other universe just seemed so nice, at least until Chris’ Black teammate, Leota (Danielle Brooks), decides to go for a walk in his family’s suburban development, and the neighbors start sprinting after her like they’re reenacting Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Peacemaker is less narrowly topical than The Savant, in the sense that it’s set in a fantasy world where broad-shouldered men from alien planets can hold down a day job at a daily newspaper. And, given the way Gunn’s Superman dealt with beings who felt like it was their right to suppress a population they considered to be inferior, it feels safe to surmise he’ll find some way to set his fictional Fourth Reich right. But the fact that the series’ hero didn’t notice that he was living in a Nazi paradise—that despite repudiating his father’s beliefs, he could still feel most at home in an all-white world—is something the show will have to take head-on going forward. While Gunn’s comic-book fascism doesn’t reflect as directly on our world as his Superman, with its villainous tech-bro billionaires, did, it touches at least implicitly on how easy, even comfortable, it can be to live in a world ruled by fascism, as long as you don’t belong to any of the groups it targets.
Neo-Nazis have been to popular culture what Arab terrorists were to the 2000s and Russians to the 1980s: all-purpose villains that the audience can be counted on to despise without further explanation. And indeed, even many white supremacists take care to underline that they’re not that kind of white supremacist. But Gunn cannily suggests that may be a distinction without a difference, or at least that the Nazis next door can still pass themselves off as nice white people. It’s as timely a note as any in 2025. We haven’t passed through a portal into another dimension, but that doesn’t mean the whole world hasn’t changed.
