It took me a few days to get off my butt and review this, and not because the show is bad. The show is brilliant. It took a few days because there has been an awful lot of conversation about whether or not this thing is gratuitous and over the top.

I’m talking about Peacemaker. We’re covering both of the first two episodes here, and we are going full spoilers.

What we’re really looking at is the second installment in James Gunn’s overarching DCU. Technically the third, if you count properly: it started with Creature Commandos, went into Superman, and has now come over to here.

Different Vibes, Same Cloth

A lot of people have been arguing: how do you go from that fun-loving, family, kid-friendly Superman to this much raunchier, much more over the top Peacemaker? That’s a valid question. I’m not taking anything away from it.

What I think is happening is that James Gunn is trying to establish out of the gate that the DCU, unlike the MCU, is going to have different vibes. And look, the MCU way back in the beginning had different vibes too. Then you get to Avengers, Joss Whedon introduces a house style, and that becomes the MCU look forever. Gunn is both one of the two heads of the studio and the head of the creative side, and the guy who writes, directs and puts these things together. He’s setting the course and the tone for the entire company, and he is trying his hardest to stamp a claim on the idea that the DCU will have different tones, different styles, different ways of being done, that still adhere to an overarching look and feel.

Because here’s the one thing I’ll say: Peacemaker and Superman feel like they’re cut from the same cloth. And some people will hear that and go, yeah, that’s right, it’s that James Gunn sense of humor, it’s terrible, whatever. That’s not what I mean. Superman is bright, it’s colorful, it’s all of those things. Peacemaker has the same palette, and I don’t just mean color. I mean tone.

Though here’s the thing: this season is clearly already onto a darker start, and it is building into something.

Watch the Recap

This is the one time I’ll tell anybody who hasn’t watched Peacemaker yet to watch the recap. You need it to establish where we are in time.

They do a very clever thing. The card says “previously in the DCU.” Not the DCEU. The DCU. Then you get the part where Adebayo is on the phone with her mother and says, can’t you send the Justice League, and they’ve re-edited the audio so she says, can’t you send the Justice Gang.

And then you get to the very end, the part everybody’s familiar with, where Peacemaker walks out and sees the silhouettes and essentially gets told to go away. In the original, those were Justice League silhouettes, and the joke was Aquaman and the fish. Now the silhouettes are Mr. Terrific, Superman, presumably Supergirl, Hawkgirl and Green Lantern. Instead of the fish joke, you get Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern going, that guy, he tells people I’m a puke freak, and Hawkgirl laughing at him the same way the Flash laughed at Aquaman. That is how they let you know we are now in the DCU.

That puke joke, by the way, was a bit that got cut out of season one. You find that out by watching the podcast, and The Peacemaker Podcast with James Gunn is one of the coolest podcasts ever. In one of them Gunn actually says there’s a multiverse, and somewhere out there is a universe that is exactly like season one, except it takes place in the old scenario. So the DCU is exactly the DCEU, except. And I was like, okay, I can dig that. I think most people can.

Before we go further: this is a very grown-up show. Much darker tone, much more adult than what you may be expecting off the back of Superman. Be aware.

Where Everybody Landed

Then you get to the actual episode, and we’re set a little bit after the events we know. Waller has been dethroned, as we saw at the end of the last series. Adebayo is currently separated from her wife and trying to start her own security firm. Harcourt has been fired. Everybody has been dealing with some stuff, and the only one still working for ARGUS is Economos, played by the very talented Steve Agee, whose name I actually only know how to say properly because of the podcast.

As you go through this episode, you start to realize it wasn’t all happy endings and ha-has. There’s a tension between Harcourt and Peacemaker that I appreciate, and we start to see a darker side of Harcourt here. Peacemaker comes to visit because she isn’t answering her phone. She goes to a bar, starts a fight, gets her butt kicked, and is happy about it. That is literally how the episode ends for her.

The Scene Everybody Is Arguing About

On the flip side, Peacemaker goes home in the middle of a massive rejection and tries to nurse his feelings with alcohol, drugs and presumably sex. We cut from him taking a rip off a bong to the same spot in a house where an orgy is happening.

And no, obviously I’m not showing you even a pixelated version of that. This is still a family channel. But it is flagrantly everything you think it is. They hide nothing. Welcome to HBO’s Peacemaker.

That’s why I’m starting to think they hyper-focused on the fact that this is an HBO original show and not some other version of it. Anybody who watched Game of Thrones seasons one, two and three understands how hardcore HBO will go for the sake of the story.

The internet clutched its pearls so hard. The discourse online has run from brilliant to terrible and gratuitous, with everything in between landing on “well, that’s just James Gunn being James Gunn.” Fine.

The truth is, and I’ll be honest here, so many people got hung up on that scene, and I barely noticed it. Here’s what I mean. I was so focused on the character of Chris, and what he’s dealing with, and watching that evolution. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I immediately picked up: he’s not happy. None of these trappings are making him happy. He’s hiding behind coping mechanisms. Alcohol, drugs, women, men, whatever. He tried to cover himself in the debauchery that normally would make him happy, and it didn’t. That’s what I got from that moment.

The Interdimensional Locker Room

Then he goes to the closet where his dad kept all his stuff. We always thought that was just his dad’s storage. Come to find out, no, it’s a pocket dimension. It’s like an interdimensional locker room connected to 99 other versions of reality.

He follows Eagly through and finds himself in one of them, where his family is very different. His brother is still alive there. And the biggest part of it is that his dad isn’t a racist in that world, unless somehow the entire world over there is, and it’s just a fascist reality. For the most part, though, his dad seems nice, and the dad, the brother and Chris are a trio, their own little superhero clique. He is blown away by this realization.

They throw a lot at you and it’s all very good.

You also get the dancing intro. It isn’t as catchy as the first season’s, but it isn’t bad, and now that we’re on episode two it’s growing on me.

Episode 2 Is Not a Filler Episode

A lot of people might feel like episode two is filler. It’s not. It slows down, but it is absolutely a character episode, and you get to see the aftermath of some things.

It opens on a flashback to eight months prior, and we see the moment Rick Flag Sr. takes over. The first thing he asks is for Economos to pull the file on the death of Rick Flag Jr. Economos does the “I don’t know if you want to do that” thing, and Flag says, I’m the director now, go get me the thing. And it does not go well, because he finds out, and he relives it. Once more they get to tread through the movie footage, and I keep thinking, how much more can you guys get out of that movie than you’ve already gotten? God bless them. The power and magic of editing and recycling. Now you understand exactly why Rick Flag is one hundred percent on this, and why he has Economos watching over Peacemaker, which Economos hates but has to do.

We also find out that Vigilante and Economos have become kind of friends now, after everything. That carries over when Peacemaker calls Vigilante to help clean up the mess, because at the end of the first episode he runs into himself in the other dimension, the other him tries to kill him, they fight, and in self-defense Peacemaker One kills Peacemaker Two. It’s the weirdest scene, because Vigilante is so giddy about getting to chop up his friend’s doppelganger with him. It is so crazy and so perfectly Vigilante in a way I love.

Economos also gets a partner, played by a very famous actor whose name I could not retrieve on camera because I decided to wing this whole review without notes on the prompter. That guy is super creepy, and he is definitely there to babysit.

Then Economos gets set up. They know he’s going to the 11th Street Kids reunion, so they decide that while he’s there, a tac team goes into the house. Each member of that tac team gets a moment, which I thought was interesting given how quickly they’re gone. The new guy leading them hands out nicknames based on their features: Economos gets Ginger Cool, and the rest get names like Mexicali, Pony Boy, Titties and Encino Man. Very unflattering. If you watch the podcast afterward you find out that in the script, when those names get assigned, Gunn physically changes the character’s name in the document from that point forward, including one guy whose name changes three times. It’s hilarious that they go to that level of depth. Coming from the industry, I love a tidbit like that.

So the tac team goes in, and who shows up to protect the house? Eagly. And when I say Eagly manhandles the entire team, I’m not even kidding. There’s eye trauma, which I was not expecting and which I hate. And then at the very end of it, Eagly gets a slow walk. I looked over at Mrs. Know-It-All and said, did they just give Eagly a slow walk? She said, I think they did. It’s the greatest thing ever. Eagly looks stupid good.

Meanwhile Harcourt has this crazy scene the day after the bar fight, bruised up in a pharmacy trying to find makeup to cover it, because she’s heading to the 11th Street Kids get-together. There’s a woman who very innocently tries to talk to her about abuse, and Harcourt rips her one. And then, on her way out, you find out just how desperate the situation actually is, because she sees a “for hire” sign and, for a brief moment, she’s tempted to apply. This is right after she torched any chance of ever getting that job.

The episode ends with Chris coming home from a party that went badly, drunk as can be. He finds Peacemaker Two’s phone and tries to text the other Harcourt, but he can’t get a signal, because obviously you can’t text across dimensions. So he goes into the dimensional room, and you can hear his dad’s voice over there talking to somebody, saying he’s really worried about him, he might have relapsed, he might be on the pills again, he’s missing. And then the phone goes, and it’s the other Harcourt, and he sits down. We leave him there, over the shoulder, sitting in that world.

To me that signals he has now gotten comfortable with the idea that he’s going to stick around over there for a while. Because his life here sucks.

Moving forward, I believe we are going to see Rick Flag repercussions. We’ve seen the season promos with Harcourt saying they have to go get Peacemaker back. So I think the next episode is the high point of “I’m living this new imaginary life,” and then we’ll see how that works out.

The Verdict

I actually really did dig the first two episodes, and I’m giving a unified score rather than splitting them, because episode one sets things up and episode two sets up more, and I like where this is going.

The first season was James Gunn being his James Gunn-iest. This season feels more like we know who these characters are, so there’s a shorthand, and we can settle in and actually get to know who these people are as characters. That makes a big difference in how the story is being presented. It’s a slower pace, a more purposeful pace, a slightly darker color palette and a definitely darker tone, while still maintaining the feel and the look overall.

Episode one on its own is a seven and a half or an eight. Episode two is an eight. Together, I’m rounding up: 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

I’m pleasantly surprised, I’m very happy with what they’re doing, and Peacemaker as a character is growing in a way that’s sticking with me.

Comment on the video and let me know what you think happens through the rest of the season. And I do want to hear the other one: the orgy scene. Did it serve the purpose of the story the way I contend it did, or was it gratuitous for the sake of gratuitous? And if that’s your read, what is it based on? I feel like I have a strong moral compass, and I also feel like that scene worked to convey the message it needed to convey. I also have a feeling that’s the first and last time we’re going to see that sort of thing.

Drop your verdict on the video above: story or shock? Never forget, everyone loves to know.