Summary
“Best Friend, For Never” provides a good mix of action and humour while complicating a few story elements.
This recap of Peacemaker season 1, episode 2, “Best Friend, For Never”, contains spoilers.
“Best Friend, For Never” devotes almost 20 minutes to dealing with the ramifications of the premiere’s cliffhanger, in which Peacemaker’s one-night stand turned out to be a murderous metahuman whom he exploded outside of her apartment. It’s probably too long for this kind of a sequence, but it works because it embodies all the action, comedy, and determined weirdness that is coming to define this show, while also slipping in some hints about the bigger picture. If you took this entire sequence and showed it to someone who had never seen Suicide Squad or the first episode, they’d probably get a good sense of who everyone is and what they’re up to.
Peacemaker season 1, episode 2 recap
That turns out to be one of the big questions that emerges: What is this task force up to? What is Project: Butterfly, and why does Harcourt, whom Chris calls for a pick-up, refer to his punk fling as one? Presumably, the butterflies are metahumans, but in that case, why is he being instructed to kill them? And what are the chances he’d end up meeting one in a random bar?
It takes Chris ages to get out of the apartment building, since he has to return to pick up “important stuff”, including the dossier of his first target, his outfit, and all the things he has stolen, including a vinyl collection of classic rock albums. He makes it up several floors before dipping into the apartment of a bickering couple, one half of whom he briefly considers sleeping with, and then has to make several terrible jumps out of the window and down some balconies until he’s eventually cornered by the police. Harcourt is able to bail him out with a tranquilizer gun, and the pair of them escape with Leota and Eagly.
“Best Friend, For Never” introduces two detectives in this whole sequence, Song (Annie Chang) and Fitzgibbon (Lochlyn Munro), who trace Chris’s license plate and fingerprints. Luckily, Economos has altered them to match Auggie instead. When they turn up there, he’s predictably racist to Song, but he doesn’t reveal anything, because he doesn’t know anything. Yet, anyway. As Murn points out, it was absurdly stupid to frame up the father of the man they’re trying to use as a contract killer, but nobody on this team, least of all Peacemaker, seems to know what they’re doing. The conversation turns to how the so-called butterfly, whose name was apparently Annie, knew to target Chris in the first place, and after everyone has accused each other, Chris finally decides to reveal that he had the dossier with him in the apartment and that Annie read it. Why that would turn her into a killer is anyone’s guess, but as Chris points out, nobody has even told him what a butterfly is, so how was he supposed to know?
Chris also neglected to mention that he left witnesses at the apartment building, so while he goes home and cries while berating himself about being a loser, Leota goes to pay off the couple from the apartment. We also get a closer look at Vigilante here, who may well be an out-and-out psychopath. Chris doesn’t know his real identity since he always keeps his costume on, even, it turns out, after a threesome with the woman from the apartment. It’s while they’re all laying in bed together that Chris starts fondling with the weird object he stole from Annie’s apartment, which looks like a fancy internet router covered in glowing glyphs. It activates and opens up into a kind of miniature flying saucer, its utility still mysterious.
Meanwhile, Auggie is arrested and sent to jail, where it turns out he’s a familiar face. He’s known by a different name among the inmates who kneel before him and throw up a Nazi salute, though: The White Dragon. All hail, I guess.
You can stream Peacemaker season 1, episode 2, “Best Friend, For Never”, exclusively on HBO Max.
