All right, so this time I swear I’m going to catch up. I’m putting this out before the next episode drops, which is literally tomorrow night, but before is before.
Everybody watched this one and said the same thing: oh, they’re setting us up, they’re moving the story forward. And yeah, they are. We were all hoping to find out once and for all whether the place Chris keeps walking into is Nazi world or not, and we did not get that. Hopefully very soon we find out exactly what world he’s in.
What we got instead is a piece of information I did not see coming, and it reframes the entire premise of the season.
Auggie didn’t make the door.
Thirty-Five Years Ago, In the Woods
We open thirty-five years back, with Auggie taking a young Chris and a young Keith out hunting in the woods. And that’s where the interdimensional doorway, or as they so affectionately call it, the quantum unfolding chamber, gets its actual origin.
They found an alien. The alien had the door.
I want to be honest about how much that landed for me, because I had built a whole theory in my head. I thought Peacemaker’s father was some kind of super genius. Ed, I was right there with you on that one. Turns out the man didn’t make it past eighth grade, or tenth, depending on how you count the story he tells. He flunked out. He did not invent a portal to another dimension. He stumbled onto one.
And you see young Chris pick up this weird, almost hubcap looking thing. It reads a little like his helmet without being his helmet, and it is not a decoration. That is the device that makes the quantum unfolding doorway possible. Hold onto that, because it becomes the whole chase.
That is everything we get from the past. Then we jump to the far flung future, otherwise known as present day.
A.R.G.U.S. Comes for the Closet
In the present, A.R.G.U.S. is led by Sasha Bordeaux and they are ready to mount a raid. They are heading straight for Chris’s residence, and the goal is to seize the quantum unfolding chamber and arrest him for what is realistically going to be the rest of his life.
Economos, love the guy, tries very hard to stand his ground and cannot. So he does the next best thing and covertly warns Chris. Get out. Get out of your house immediately. Or maybe immediately, I don’t know, that’s the level of subtlety we’re working with.
Then Chris realizes what’s actually happening, grabs the device, the same device we watched him pick up as a kid, and runs out of the house with it. All while trying to get Eagly out too, and Eagly does not understand what’s going on either.
Because A.R.G.U.S. thought of that. They hired an eagle catcher named Red St. Wild.
He calls Adebayo for a ride, she picks him up, and they take off for Settler’s Hills, where his grandfather had an old hunting cabin. Same place, same woods we opened the episode in. He can apparently set the thing up somewhere else, so the plan is get there, get it running.
On the way out, Chris has to confront Rip Jagger, Judomaster, in the woods. They fight, and Rip gives him the line that tells you exactly where everyone’s head is at right now: you screwed the world once, I won’t let you do it again.
Why Everybody Is Overreacting, Except They Aren’t
Remember where this episode lives in time.
The events of Superman just happened inside this universe. We are all still recovering from Lex Luthor ripping a hole in the planet and nearly swallowing Metropolis whole. So the idea of any one person sitting on interdimensional or extra dimensional technology is not a debate anybody in this world wants to have. Arrest first, ask questions later, or just drop you in a deep dark box in section whatever.
That’s how serious it is, and to the show’s credit, they are playing it that seriously.
Economos Has Receipts
Meanwhile, Chris is on the phone telling Economos to stall, and Economos has to be an utter idiot in front of Sasha while she is demanding he open that closet door. The tension is great, and then you get the drop.
By the way, did you know any of this about Economos? Didn’t you hack into the CIA when you were fourteen? I did. That’s how I got recruited.
You sit there and go, huh. You don’t realize the bona fides this man has. We met him in The Suicide Squad as one of the guys in the van, and it turns out no, he actually has skills. I am genuinely happy they’ve given Steve Agee that much more to play. He’s no longer the dye beard guy. He gets to be a person now.
He finally gets the code done, it looks like it’s going to happen, and then Peacemaker manages to get the device set up on his end. There’s this crazy explosion as the door sucks itself closed, Sasha can’t open it, and then suddenly she can.
It’s just a closet.
He made it.
Red St. Wild and the Wink
Then there’s Red St. Wild, and I want to talk about him for a second, because you’re going to recognize the face. That’s Michael Rooker, one of James Gunn’s go-to actors, and it’s because Rooker is such an amazing actor that he keeps coming back. He really can do anything.
So he jumps completely into this deeply inappropriate character, dressed very Native American, the whole nine yards, and it is funny. His job is to hunt down Eagly and potentially put him down while everybody else attacks.
Is it culturally inappropriate? Absolutely. And if you listen to the Peacemaker podcast, you’ll know Gunn knows that. Which is exactly why I’m fine with it. This is how you do these kinds of things, with a wink and a nod, very self aware, while still doing the story and still doing the character work. It isn’t insensitive Hollywood people writing a stereotype and not noticing. It’s a character who has an affectation, the show knows what the affectation is, and it gives him depth.
Rooker plays the heck out of it. Gunn writes the heck out of it. It works on a lot of levels, and I’m enjoying that level of freedom in this whole production. That’s the thing I feel like we’ve been missing lately.
And then he gets a lot more interesting. At the end of the episode Red performs a ritual, something like a rain dance, and has an out of body vision. The guy has actual skills. This is Doctor Fate territory, Constantine territory, out of mind and out of body. As much as he looks like a jerk and has genuinely rough conversations with Rip Jagger, there’s a world where this guy is kind of a badass, and I’m here for it.
And he finds Eagly. Which means he’s found Chris.
Rick Flag Sr. and the Betrayal I Think Is Coming
Amid all that failure, Rick Flag Sr. does the next thing he can. He calls Emilia Harcourt.
Hey kid. General. You do not have to call me General, it’s Rick. You know that.
He’s basically telling her: I will give you your shot, but I need Peacemaker. And she is stuck between a rock and a hard place, because she has gotten used to having her electricity on. Go figure.
Now, from a predictive place, because we’re all fans of this stuff. I think she is going to betray him on some level. We still have not seen the scene we’ve been shown where Rick Flag Sr. is punching on Peacemaker. We still have not seen the scene where Emilia says all right, we’re going in there to get him. And I don’t necessarily know that getting him means breaking him out of A.R.G.U.S. It totally could. It could also be the other thing.
Sure enough, after Flag makes his commitment to her, Harcourt gets a text from Peacemaker saying he’s back and he needs help. She tells him where to meet. And she knows for a fact what’s going to happen, because she tells them where he is. She wants her life back.
I think we’re going to see big changes for Emilia Harcourt. And if not, we’ll still see what happens in time.
Where This Season Is Going
Here’s what I know. We are getting very close to the end of the season and there is a lot of big plot still sitting unresolved.
We’re supposedly still owed a bigger cameo. Some people argue that was Rick Flag Sr. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s someone from Superman. To be honest I don’t know that it is Superman, it could be anyone, but I do think we’re seeing more characters before this is done.
Overall I feel like we’re moving toward a cliffhanger, and I think season two runs straight into a to be continued. And I’m kind of okay with that, because that’s really how a lot of comic books live and feel. It would make the story we’re experiencing feel bigger.
Season one was, interpretively, the intro. The beginning of things. This season feels like we know the characters now and we’re into the actual story they’re telling. According to Gunn, the season should carry us into whatever the next pieces of this are. That doesn’t mean it jumps directly into one of the movies coming out, but the storylines and the beats are going to come together.
And Peacemaker is not for kids. I also don’t believe Superman is exclusively a child’s movie. These things marry very well in a way the MCU never really has, if that makes sense. The pieces come together smoother here. Part of that may just be planning, and part of it may be that it’s easier to come in and do correctly what Kevin Feige and company already figured out and broke pieces of. Gunn gets to look at it and go, oh, I see what you guys screwed up, let me do it better.
That’s the feel. Very familiar territory, but not.
Am I crazy? Does this feel more cohesive to you, or are you on the hate train? I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts on that one, drop them in the comments on the video.
The Verdict
This episode isn’t bad. It’s building, and it’s doing a good job of it. It gave us the actual origin of the door, it put A.R.G.U.S. in the house, it gave Economos a spine and a resume, it introduced a character who can leave his own body, and it set up a betrayal that I think is coming. It maintains the through line I’ve had on this season all the way down.
Peacemaker season 2, episode 4 gets an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
So there you go. Now you know.
Was I off my rocker on this one? I’ve seen some genuinely weird takes floating around, including that this is the worst show ever, and I want somebody to walk me through what exactly is the worst thing about it. I’m just curious. The conversation is in the comments on the video above, and we’ll talk again next week.
