Now that Peacemaker’s second season has finally painted its big picture and the Best Dimension Ever has been revealed as Earth- X, a universe where the Nazis won WWII, it’s beyond time for the show to ramp shit up and get to business. When we left our hapless characters, the penny (or should that be Deutschmark) had belatedly dropped and Chris Smith realised to his horror that the dimension he’s been so vehemently hyping is a big old fascist empire that’s seen people of colour moved to work camps and a sizable swastika plonked on the American flag in favour of those 50 stars.
Despite the show taking care to bring its cast to this cliffhanger organically (or as organic as you can get when you’re talking about Nazi controlled planets) it’s high time that the show needed to cut loose, go for broke and either pay off all of Peacemaker’s angst – or at the very least make it far worse. Brace yourself, it’s time to visit Earth – X with Smith’s idiot blinders off and things aren’t quite what you’d expect.
The jig is up and now, thanks to Harcourt pointing out the giant mural of Hitler on the office wall of ARGUS (“How’d I miss that?”), Chris now realises that the universe he was planning to move to for a happier life for is definitely not what he was hoping for. However, while he and Harcourt stage a daring, jetpack-based escape, the rest of the 11th Street Kids have also made this sobering discovery after following Chris through the Quantum Unfolding Chamber in an effort to bring him back. While Economos has had a run in with Chris’ alt-universe father, Auggie, who has stabbed him through the hand and tied him to a chair, Adebayo finds her walk through a vehemently white neighbourhood has resulted in her getting chased through the streets by an angry mob.
Thankfully, Adebayo is saved by Judomaster of all people, who also had snuck through the portal while working for ARGUS and after breaking his record for amount of people previously killed in a swimming pool, the two take refuge and plan their next move. However, arguably fairing off best by this visit to Hitler-ville is Vigilante whose visit to meet his alt-self has born fruit by the fact that the two are almost exactly the same and as the pair of babbling Adrians meet up with Adebayo and Judomaster, they plan to rescue their friends who have just been apprehended by Auggie and Chris’ brother, Keith.
Keith is incensed that this doppelganger Peacemaker from another dimension murdered his brother (even if it was an accident), but the normally brutal Auggie seems to be built of more rational stuff in this universe. Could it be that in a world ruled by Nazis, Chris’ white supremacist father doesn’t actually prescribe to the same views? We may never know because while ARGUS and Rick Flag is finally closing in on the portal from the other side, Adebayo and Adrian’s rescue could end up having dire consequences.
I have to admit, I’m a little alarmed that the runtime for Like A Keith In The Night clocks in at barely over thirty minutes considering that it’s taken so long to get to that big, universe reveal. But while I’m wondering why they didn’t just merge two of the shorter episodes together to give us a slightly faster paced 7 installments rather than a more sedate 8, Peacemaker’s penultimate entry manages to keep the energy up, deliver a bunch of surprises and ensures that the existence of Christopher Smith is comparable to a waking nightmare. While the episode doesn’t lurch into batshit action craziness as much as I’d like, it’s actually the smaller moments that make the episode actually rather sweet.
After being benched for most of the season, Adebayo is once again showing her worth as the most normal and rational member of the cast which leads to a rather genuine moment as she builds a truce with Judomaster over both being people of colour in a Nazi world and bonds over a spirited game of “Scrobble” (alt universes are weird). Of course, it helps that Judomaster saved Adebayo by electrocuting around a dozen people in a swimming pool, but it’s nice that the show hasn’t forgotten that Danielle Brooks “straight woman” (straight meaning not a comedy character) is invaluable to keep all these costumed freaks and misanthropes bonded together. Also proving to be having a late-season renaissance is Adrian whose team up with his alternate self is giving Freddie Stroma plenty to play with as he riffs off his equally excitable self – but it’s exactly this excitable nature that leads to the season’s greatest tragedy.
After getting out all their repressed emotions in the last episode, Chris and Harcourt finally share a wordless moment together as she clings to him on the back of the PeaceCycle with a rare (and ironic) expression of peace on her features as the police give chase. However, this leads to the biggest surprise of the season when Auggie and Keith swoop in in full superhero armour and wipe all the officers out. It seems that despite his role as a beloved hero in this world, Auggie isn’t actually the devestating, damaging piece of racist shit he was in Chris’ world and actually takes pity on the remorseful doppelganger that accidently killed his son. However, while Auggie is willing to let the 11th Street Kids go, Keith is blinded with rage and cannot believe his father would agree to such a thing after the death of his brother – but it all becomes moot when Adrian’s rescue kicks in and one of them bursts through a window and immediately stabs Chris’ father repeatedly in the throat. It’s a shocking moment, both for us and especially Chris who has already been responsible for the death of his father one time already and James Gunn’s script seems to be positively getting off on the unfeasibly cruel irony that it’s Smith’s friends who slaughter Auggie and maim Keith in the name of a well-meaning rescue.
As the episode wraps up, we find that the experience has all but broken Chris who now sees that it was neither world that was the problem (although I’d personally debate that) – instead he believes that the major contributing factor is him. He killed his brother Keith as a child, he shot his supervillain father at the end of the last season and now his multiversal tampering has resulted in a more decent version of Auggie to have his carotid artery rent asunder and his brother stabbed and clawed. As a result, upon returning to his own universe, Peacemaker immediately hands over the Quantum Unfolding Chamber and turns himself in in an attempt to make amends.
It’s quite the downbeat ending and it leaves us wondering exactly where the final episode is going to go. After all, with Peacemaker apprehended, the 11th Street Gang technically aimless and the doorway to Earth – X closed, there’s the rather sizable matter of the claims Gunn has made that the final episode connects to the next DC movie in a big way. Will this mean that Peacemaker’s second season has only been a mere stepping stone in the progression of the fledgling connected universe? Fuck, I hope not – but if the climactic installment doesn’t justify the season’s rather sluggish middle while helping it to stand on its own, all the bloodshed, cum jokes and that orgy sequence in the first episode will all have been for naught.
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