“I cherish peace with all my heart,” Peacemaker told his Task Force X teammates near the start of their secret mission in 2021’s The Suicide Squad. “I don’t care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it.”
It’s been four years since John Cena made his debut as Peacemaker in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and three years since he got his own spinoff TV series, Peacemaker, with Gunn returning as its showrunner. And a lot has happened in the DC Universe since then.
The DC Extended Universe that Peacemaker was born into is no more, and Gunn has been chosen to lead DC Studios into a new era as its cochairman and co-CEO. In December 2024, the DCU opened with Gunn’s Creature Commandos, an animated series that centered on Amanda Waller’s (Viola Davis) replacement for Task Force X: Task Force M, a new black ops team composed of monsters and its human leader, General Rick Flag Sr. (voiced by Frank Grillo). In July, Gunn’s Superman kicked off the new DCU in earnest as it became the first live-action film of the DCU’s first chapter, “Gods and Monsters.”
This week, Gunn is back in action yet again to relaunch Peacemaker in its new cinematic universe as the series finally returns for its second season. Cena reprises his role as the peace-loving killer Chris Smith, along with much of the cast from Season 1. And as Thursday’s season premiere demonstrates, Peacemaker is now just as concerned about establishing the wider DCU as it is with picking up where its story left off in February 2022.
Given such a lengthy (and eventful) hiatus between seasons, the Season 2 premiere’s “previously on” segment serves as a much-needed refresher for the audience—and it also reveals how Gunn and Co. are navigating this rather complicated transition as the series leaves behind the DCEU for its new cinematic home. The episode notably opens with the text “previously in the DCU,” rather than “previously on Peacemaker,” before the sequence recaps the key events from Season 1. But more glaring than the segment’s title is the clear alteration of past scenes to better align the series with its new universe.
In one clip, Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) phones her powerful mother to ask her to call the Justice Gang—the superteam introduced in this summer’s Superman—instead of the Justice League. Peacemaker spreads childish rumors about Green Lantern in a new line of dialogue added to another scene, which sets up the biggest change of them all: Instead of the Justice League appearing in a season-ending cameo, the Justice Gang is shown standing in its place. The new material features the returns of Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) as they assume the roles previously held by Ezra Miller’s Flash and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman. And although their actors’ faces aren’t shown, the shadowy silhouettes of Mister Terrific, Superman, and Supergirl are flanking them, with Wonder Woman’s presence erased from the scene entirely.
It’s a bit jarring to see the show’s past revised so quickly and casually, even if retconning is an easy and logical solution to cleaning up continuity issues that has plenty of precedent in the comics. But Peacemaker goes even further to weave DCU characters and concepts into the new season itself.
After Peacemaker helped save the world from an alien invasion in Season 1, the former Task Force X member believed he would finally be embraced by the public as a true superhero. In the Season 2 premiere, “The Ties That Grind,” he quickly learns that nothing has changed for him. In an attempt to land a spot in the Justice Gang, Chris goes in for an interview, which is conducted by two of the group’s founding members, Gardner and Hawkgirl, plus Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn), whose company, LordTech, funds the superteam. And, well, Peacemaker storms out of the building before they can even formally reject him.
The scene is largely an opportunity to squeeze in some comedic cameos from Fillion, Merced, and Sean Gunn, all three of whom appeared in Superman as the Justice Gang took on a prominent role in the summer blockbuster It also provides a bit of world-building context for the emergent conflict between humans and metahumans that was introduced in Superman.
“Peacemaker, we at the Justice Gang try to avoid casualties, Lord tells Chris during the interview. “Metahumans like the ones in our organization are becoming more and more distrusted, and we can’t afford to stoke the fires.”
Superman ends just as this tension—and anti-metahuman sentiment—is really starting to grow. After Superman prevents Boravia from invading Jarhanpur earlier in the film, the Justice Gang ends the geopolitical conflict once and for all. Hawkgirl kills the tyrannical Boravian president, and the Jarhanpurians celebrate the Justice Gang as heroes. But in the United States, which was previously allied with Boravia, the government is becoming weary of the metahumans’ unchecked and unparalleled power. As the secretary of defense warns Grillo’s Rick Flag Sr. near the end of the movie, the metahumans are now “the ones making the rules.”
The second season of Peacemaker pulls on this narrative thread directly as Grillo reprises his role as Flag once more, with the general stepping in as Waller’s replacement as the head of A.R.G.U.S. In Flag’s reintroduction in the premiere, he’s at the agency’s headquarters watching a news clip about the latest metahuman escape from either Belle Reve or Arkham—two of the DC universe’s most famous prisons—and the “existential threat” that these metahumans pose. Flag is interrupted by one of his agents, who reports an anomaly detected at Peacemaker’s house that’s “similar to what we picked up this summer in Metropolis,” which Flag in turn refers to as the “Luthor incident.”
This anomaly is another crucial plot point that the season uses to connect Superman to Peacemaker’s previous episodes, as the series merges a minor detail from Season 1 with one of the most important concepts introduced in Superman. As the “previously on” segment recounts, Chris’s father built a “quantum unfolding storage area” in his house, which “leads to a dimensional nodule outside normal space.” Although it serves as little more than a glorified closet for Chris’s helmets in Season 1, it functions the same as the pocket dimension that Lex Luthor created in Superman—which eventually rips apart Metropolis—and therefore poses all sorts of potential danger to the world.
Flag’s presence in the new season connects Peacemaker to not only Superman and Creature Commandos but also the DCEU movie that first introduced Cena’s Peacemaker: The Suicide Squad. Flag’s son, Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman), was killed by Peacemaker in the 2021 film, and now the A.R.G.U.S. director is using his new position to have Peacemaker monitored at all times. And although this directive grew out of Flag’s hatred for the former Task Force X member, it helped him stumble into the interdimensional threat that Peacemaker now presents. “Last thing we need is another dimensional rift tearing up this planet,” Flag tells his agent.
From metahumans to the Justice Gang to pocket dimensions to Flag’s ulterior motives, the second season of Peacemaker starts by tying a considerable amount of lore into what is effectively the first live-action series of the DCU It’s not exactly a fresh start for the audience, but the series is in a tricky position as one of the few holdovers from the DCEU, since DC Studios has opted to start its new era with a mostly clean slate. As a result, for better or worse, Peacemaker’s new season is constructed like a typical MCU TV show Perhaps more than anything else, this decision appears to be an outgrowth of Gunn’s efforts to balance his duties as the DCU’s busiest filmmaker and the primary architect of its interconnected universe.
Peacemaker still has the same heart and humor that it had in its first season, but now it has other narrative responsibilities that run the risk of becoming distractions. When Peacemaker discovers that his father’s interdimensional closet (and spacious flying area for his pet, Eagly) can also serve as a bridge between other universes, he stumbles into a door that grants him access to a world where his life is better in every conceivable way. The series is shaping up to be yet another multiverse story at a time when the narrative device is omnipresent in superhero projects, and it could prove to be another ploy for Gunn to do more retconning in his new DCU. Still, the Season 2 premiere ends with an intriguing hook as Peacemaker kills his doppelgänger, opening up the (literal) door for him to step into a perfect life where he’s loved by his family—including his brother, who never died as a child—and regarded as an actual hero by the public.
As the season unfolds over the next seven weeks, we’ll see if Peacemaker can strike a balance between serving its new cinematic universe and developing its own story or whether it will become more focused on the DCU’s future than its present.
Daniel Chin
Daniel writes about TV, film, and scattered topics in sports that usually involve the New York Knicks. He often covers the never-ending cycle of superhero content and other areas of nerd culture and fandom. He is based in Brooklyn.Source link
