Peacemaker Season 2 SPOILER Review
The season finale of Peacemaker season two dropped last night. I have some thoughts on the season as a whole. As it is said in the title, this will be a SPOILER filled review of the season. Let’s talk about it!
The Review
- I thought that Peacemaker season two was a good season but not a great season. I loved season one, I thought it was a total blast and it really surprised me. When they announced that season two of Peacemaker was happening in this new DC universe I was very excited and curious as to how it was all going to tie together. They found a way in episode one to explain the multiverse change and how The Justice Gang was there in the season finale instead of the Justice League. I’ll say this, I really dug the season just as much as season one until the finale and I think the finale really brought out a lot of the frustrations with the season as a whole.
- As I was watching the show week to week, I was enjoying every episode and what James Gunn was offering. It was doing another multiverse story but it found ways to be more character based. We know Peacemaker as a character to be very insecure with himself, he views himself as a monster. In season 2, he finds a world where his brother is alive, his father loves him, Harcourt loves him, only for him to realize that maybe this world isn’t as great as he thought it was. It provides this emotional journey for Peacemaker that also feels like a continuation of what came in season one. With films like No Way Home, Multiverse of Madness, and Deadpool & Wolverine they’re multiverse films that use the multiverse for cameos and gimmicks. This season uses the multiverse gimmick for character arcs and makes it a more emotional experience as we know what Peacemaker wants and he finds a world that lets him have all of that. I think it goes back to what James Gunn is good at where he took this D-list character, Peacemaker, made him a jerk in The Suicide Squad and then found ways to redeem him and make him interesting in the show Peacemaker. He didn’t use the multiverse gimmick in ways to support the other characters except for fun moments here and there with Vigilante and all of that stuff. The twist of the world being a Nazi planet wasn’t too surprising to me, that’s been a theory and a rumor very early on. But it was just this very dark moment where you realize what’s going on.
- It has all of the fun and crassness that you expect from a rated-R James Gunn project. It’s so interesting to watch this show months after he did Superman. Superman is the most patriotic and good natured superhero out there. The film is designed to be family friendly. You watch Peacemaker, in particular the first couple of episodes and it’s the polar opposite of that movie. There’s nudity and orgies happen and it leans into Gunn’s dark sense of humor and his crassness. The show is still really funny there’s multiple moments in the show, multiple moments in each episode that had me laughing out loud. The stand out here was Tim Meadows’ character. I’m not super familiar with a lot of his comedy work, I know he’s been on SNL and stuff like that for years. But I’m not super familiar with it. His conversation with Economos in episode 2 is hilarious and the mid-credit scene being an extension of that joke was just so funny. The way that he delivers all of it is great, he plays so straight and it works so well. John Cena commits to the comedy, he’s able to be so effortlessly funny but also be dramatic. There’s multiple scenes where we don’t get to see Peacemaker the persona and the angel of death, we see the human side of him when he’s interacting with his brother and father. It shows you that Cena is a fun personality, but he’s also a solid actor. Around when this season started The Hollywood Reporter put out a ranking of the best wrestlers turned actors. Dave Bautista was #1, The Rock was #2, and John Cena was #3. I saw a lot of people on Twitter debating that ranking and if Cena should be higher. Maybe, maybe not but I think this season showed that he’s more than just the fun persona.
- The big issue with this season is what I said earlier was the finale and that episode made me rethink the season as a whole. The finale is basically a montage of the episode where it has multiple episodes worth of plot. You have Peacemaker in prison, the team trying to break Peacemaker out of prison, the team starts their own agency, he gets kidnapped by ARGUS, and then ARGUS is exploring the multiverse to find a planet to put metahumans on. That’s what the plot should’ve been for the back half of the show. Episode 6-8 should’ve been what episode 8 was about. You make Rick Flag Sr the villain manipulating everything and you create this ticking clock that creates urgency in those episodes. Instead of that, they spend multiple episodes of ARGUS breaking into Peacemaker’s house to try and close the portal and you have Peacemaker enjoying life in the alternate dimension. You do all of that, it’s fun and has its moments. But then it just montages through the plot of the finale and it was very underwhelming. There’s multiple music cues in the episode that are basically used to montage over the plot. It was very odd, it didn’t have a sense of urgency and where the episode ended felt like nothing. I’m not sure how much of this ties to audience expectations. Where James Gunn did multiple interviews teasing the importance of the finale, how it sets up Man of Tomorrow, and that he didn’t want anybody to see the final three episodes because he didn’t want anything to be spoiled or leaked about what happens. Episode 6 has Lex Luthor and I'm trying to keep that a surprise. There’s nothing in episode 8 that had it been leaked would’ve been that big of a deal. Was the big cameo he was referring to was Foxy Shazam? If so, he was hyping up this finale to be something more than it was, that’s odd.
Final Thoughts: In general, I liked Peacemaker season two but it left me very frustrated and disappointed after how much I enjoyed season one. There’s still plenty of entertainment value, the way they use the multiverse provides character arcs that feel like something different. But the overall structure of the season and the finale was the big aspect that held this season back.
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