James Gunn is inescapable these days, freely talking about the good and bad of mapping on the DCU, but if there’s one thing he’s been relentlessly focused on, it’s his personal project of Peacemaker, which he now retconned to be a full part of the DCU. And that was on full display last night.
Gunn has said that Episodes 6-8 of Peacemaker were so big and important that he didn’t show more than a handful of people them. Critics certainly did not get screeners, and rated the season a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest-scored DC project ever (not just DCU), even before these episodes have aired.
So, was episode 6, at least, worth the hype? Yes and no, but that answer may depend on just how “online” you are, digging for theories and predicting twists that yes, did in fact pan out to be true.
There are two things that happened here that were big reveals of different sorts (spoilers follow):
The idyllic world Peacemaker wants to stay in is in fact an idyllic “Whites Only” world. The end of the episode reveals that this America appears to be in a timeline where the Nazis won World War II and have apparently locked up (or killed) all racial minorities, as evidenced by Adebayo being chased down the street with white people yelling “one got out!”
Fans uncovered this weeks ago, when many started to notice what Harcourt clocked immediately, that there were no people of color in the world, not at ARGUS, not walking the street, nowhere. There were no American flags anywhere before this, with the main reveal being that the flag had an actual swastika on it. There was no Eagly in this world, which would be a symbol of the old America. They pronounced “Blüdhaven” the German way. So while this wasn’t a shock to twist-hunters, Gunn certainly did a good job of weaving this subtly into the world before this reveal.
The second reveal was a DCU cameo, and there were only a handful of options of who would show up, given who we know is imprisoned at Belle Reeve at this point. The answer ended up being a limping Lex Luthor, fresh off his battle with Superman (and Krypto).
Rick Flagg turns to Luthor as someone who can track a dimensional portal, and makes a deal to port Lex to another, metahuman-free prison. But there are implications that perhaps more conditions were met.
We already know that the next Superman movie, Man of Tomorrow, will have Lex and Clark forced to team up to fight some third-party threat (likely Braniac, hints suggest), and Gunn has said that what happens in this season has big ramifications for the DCU. So, we may end up with Lex getting out of prison altogether, at this rate.
It was a good episode, and currently, the highest-rated episode of the series by fans at a 9.3/10. Round of applause for everyone.
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