The Peacemaker season 2 finale was controversial, to say the least, an hour full of montages and rock band performances, with many feeling it failed to live up to the immense amount of hype that James Gunn gave it. Plus, it ended on a cliffhanger that will not be resolved in a season 3, which does not exist, with only vague promises about returning to the characters in the future of the DCU.
Fans are making their displeasure known in the only way they can do so mathematically, which I suppose, beats yelling at James Gunn on Twitter or Threads or wherever he’s posting all the time. As it stands, the season 2 finale of Peacemaker is now the lowest-scored episode of the series on IMDB by a significant margin.
Here are the bottom five, in reverse order:
- Season 2 Episode 8, Full Nelson – 6.8/10
- Season 2 Episode 4, Need I Say Door – 7.7/10
- Season 2 Episode 2, A Man is Only as Good as His Bird – 7.7/10
- Season 2 Episode 1, The Ties that Grind – 8.0/10
- Season 1 Episode 2, Best Friends, For Never – 8.0/10
So, that’s nearly a full point lower than any other episode, when the other four are within .3 of each other. Yes, it’s true that 4/5 here are in season 2, however, Episodes 6 and 7 are the two highest-scored of the series, both at 9.2/10.
Are people being babies about the finale because they didn’t get their Superman cameo? No, I don’t think so. I think part of this was on James Gunn for hyping the episode up beyond belief, only to reveal “Salvation,” which is a hugely important planet for the future of DCU, but 98% of viewers would have to Google what the hell it was, so you’d just end the episode confused.
In addition to that, I just don’t think this season, or episode, was especially well-structured:
- You built an entire season about Earth-X and its Nazi population, and that does not come up in the finale at all.
- You set up a revenge conflict with his brother who survives, and it does not come up at all, nor is there a third season of the show.
- You made a season where Peacemaker is in his costume exactly once. And there is one traditionally violent sequence where Peacemaker ended up killing the anti-Nazi group by accident.
I do not need Peacemaker to be a total action blockbuster, and I get that it’s about emotional journeys and such (this was the good part of the finale), but this was largely not well-executed, and this being one of the highest critic-scored DC projects of all time feels somewhat ridiculous now.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.