We finally made it to the big reveal. I hope you’re ready.
If you haven’t seen the episode yet, what are you doing here? Go watch it first, because we are spoiling everything. No doubt about it.
This is the episode where it all comes to a head, so hopefully you’ve been paying attention. I know I have.
It’s not the penultimate episode, but it’s setting up what I hope is going to be an amazing penultimate episode next week. And we definitely get the reveal. Oh yeah. That happened, without a shadow of a doubt.
Everybody Makes It Over
So that’s the thing. Everybody makes it over.
Adebayo saw everything Peacemaker had been doing, which is how the quantum unfolding chamber ends up getting set up in Vigilante’s basement. I love that we got to meet Vigilante’s mom and see a little slice of that life. It was a bit cliche for me, but I’m okay with it, because it made sense. Hearing her personality, her quirks, and then hearing the things Adrian has to say to her in order to look quote unquote normal, that was brilliant.
The whole bit where he tells her he and Harcourt were dating and had to break up because she was a little bit too much, if you know what I’m saying? And mom is just delighted her son had a girlfriend at all. He’s losing his mind completely. I thought it was so funny.
Harcourt gets caught right out of the gate by Keith, and the conversation those two have is arguably one of the funniest scenes in the show. If you listened to the Peacemaker podcast with James Gunn, most of that scene was improvised. They just went with stuff and it worked out the way it did. And if you watch the post-credit sequence, which isn’t really a post-credit scene in the traditional sense, it’s just other cuts from the show, you get an alternate version of that same scene. Worth sticking around for.
Keith offers Harcourt a ride to ARGUS, because she’s trying to buy Peacemaker some room.
The Nuances She’s Squinting At
In the car, Harcourt hears the music Keith is playing, and you find out the Beatles have a different front man over here. That’s the level we’re operating at. Little nuances of things that are slightly off.
James Gunn makes a real effort to let us watch her notice. She squints. She scrutinizes. Something is wrong with this picture and she can’t name it yet.
I’ve got to admit, I don’t know that I’d be as quick to notice something was off. That’s just me. Moving on.
Vigilante Meets Vigilante
Meanwhile, Adrian slips away to go find himself, which is the thing he has been more excited about than anybody has been about anything all season.
He goes to the house and finds out his dad is still alive over here. He says, well, I guess in this universe my dad’s no longer gay. And you’re sitting there going, or maybe he is and he’s just not allowed to say it here.
Then he goes downstairs and meets himself, and they have a pretty fun meet-cute, if you will. The other him has no problem accepting everything that just got said, and they’re going back and forth and back and forth.
And that’s where the penny starts to drop.
The Blood Money and the Drug Dogs
Back in Vigilante’s bunker, he keeps everything he confiscates from criminals. He calls it blood money. The 11th Street Kids are quick to be like, yeah, don’t call it blood money, that’s horrible, and then they take it anyway.
He also keeps the drugs. Even Economos is like, dude, you can’t just stash it like this. And when the door does its exploding outward thing, everybody gets covered in the stuff, so they have to spend time cleaning themselves off. Little by little by little.
Which pays off the moment Harcourt walks into ARGUS with Keith and the drug dogs key up on her and pull her aside.
Peacemaker shows up right as she’s being taken off to the side. He makes eye contact. “Hi, Amelia.” So he knows that is in fact his Harcourt.
The Best Scene Jennifer Holland Has Gotten
That’s when they have an incredible heart to heart, and it’s probably the most character development we have ever gotten out of Jennifer Holland’s Harcourt. Not that she can’t act, she can act very well. But this is depth we haven’t been given before.
She’s being torn apart. She’s essentially saying, look, I know I’m losing my chance, I’m screwing it up on my side, but I can’t screw it up, because I lost you to this other world. He says he can’t leave everybody behind. She says yes he can. Come on, right now, let’s go.
She’s completely in that moment, and I feel her. She says out loud that she sucks, she knows it.
And then he says probably the greatest thing he could have said. Under any other circumstance I might have thought it was cheesy, but the way James Gunn has set up Chris and this show and everything else, I believe it when he says he doesn’t care, that he doesn’t have access to his feelings the way she does. It just came across real to me in that moment.
People have busted this show’s balls since the beginning. There was the orgy scene, there was other stuff, and you sit there and you question them. Then you get to a place like this and you realize we are so far away from that. So far away.
The Penny Drops
They finally let her go, and that’s when it lands.
We’re cutting back and forth. On one side, Vigilante is running his mouth about everything, and he says my best friend’s Peacemaker. And the other Vigilante goes, your best friend is Peacemaker? I hate that guy.
What?
And literally from that, we cut over to Adebayo walking with Peacemaker, and she starts asking, are you not seeing anything weird? She points out that she hasn’t seen anybody of color at all, which I find to be the funniest possible way to say it, because I’d have been like, there’s a whole lot of white people here. Where are the Asian people? Where are the Spanish folks? Where are the Black people? What is going on? I find it unique that Hollywood won’t let them ask that literal question and instead phrases it as “where are all the people of color.” It was a weird way to build the sentence, but whatever.
That’s when Chicky comes out to try to stop this, and they see the flag on the table. At the same time, we learn the other Vigilante is part of the Sons of Liberty, that terrorist group from earlier in the season. So he’s with the people fighting against the system over here.
And then Peacemaker picks up the flag, opens it up, and there it is on the blue.
That’s right. It’s Earth-X, or a version of it.
They won. That’s the world they’re on. This is his perfect world.
The Scene That Felt Incongruous, and Should Have
Adebayo leaves Peacemaker’s house, it’s just her and Economos at that point, and she starts walking down the street. What follows is probably the most brutal scene in the episode. Everybody stops. Look, it’s one of them. It felt incongruous with everything else around it, and I think that’s the point.
They’re skirting a line and I am here for it, because the story is amazing. The story they’re telling supports all of it, and this fits inside that sphere. That’s what it means to tell a solid story, and nothing else matters. The story is what matters. Clearly there’s messaging going on, but I like that we’re seeing this world for what it is, and we’re going to have to deal with that.
Then Blue Devil catches Economos, and Economos spills the beans right out of the gate. I’m John Economos, I’m from another dimension, I’m here to get our friend Peacemaker, who’s your son, except he’s not really your son. Saying way too much. He is not the guy you hand the secrets to. But that’s par for the course with him, and honestly it’s exactly what I’d expect from that character.
The Verdict
This episode is getting a solid 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
This is how you tell stories. This is how you tell stories where the story is the most important thing. The messaging is wrapped inside the existing universe. You don’t alter and change scenarios to fit a message. You ask what story you’re telling, and then you tell it. They told a brilliant story here. I think it’s wonderful. I think it fits perfectly, and I like everything they’re doing in terms of how they’re moving forward.
And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.
Nobody’s going to be shocked that the reveal happened, but was there something about it that surprised you, or would you have preferred it be something else? Too on the nose, or exactly the fan service we deserve? Drop it in the comments on the video above and we’ll talk about it again next week.
