Summary
“Monkey Dory” delivers big on action and gore while also doing some good character work and delivering another major last-minute turn.
This recap of Peacemaker season 1, episode 5, “Monkey Dory”, contains spoilers.
A morning routine is important, and Peacemaker’s involves eating raw eggs with Tabasco, drip-feeding his pet alien butterfly with whatever amber nectar provides them sustenance, and sulking about the fact that he lives in a grimy trailer park and his racist dad is in prison. At least he has Eagly, who tries to win him over with a delivery of dead vermin, but there’s a bit of a communication barrier there. Either way, Peacemaker’s commitment to peace at all costs isn’t giving him much peace in his own head.
Peacemaker season 1, episode 5 recap
Chris isn’t being subtle about his lingering frustrations either. During a PowerPoint presentation about the Butterflies, which teaches us nothing new — they’re extraterrestrial bugs that burrow into the brains of celebrities and people of influence to give them super-strength, and they consume only the amber liquid that may or may not be bottled at Gwan Tai, a connection discovered by Leota at the end of the previous episode — he lays into Economos about the quality of the presentation, which is really just a way to unload on him about setting up Auggie. (Cena reeling off an incredibly eclectic list of celebrities and cartoon characters is hilarious.)
As it happens, Auggie can facilitate his own release. He summons Detective Song, and after a barrage of racism, he finally gets to the point — if they take his prints and compare them to the ones found in the Butterfly’s apartment, they’ll find they don’t match his, but instead his idiot son’s. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens. Of course, nobody, least of all Song and Fitz, wants to free the White Dragon from prison, but the law is the law, and if they want to arrest Chris, that’s precisely what needs to happen. However, since Murn has already despatched an old, apparently psychotic compatriot to make sure none of this happens, Auggie is forced to remain in custody despite Song knowing for a fact he’s innocent. Luckily, she has an uncle who just so happens to be a judge.
Chris, meanwhile, goes with Vigilante, Leota, Harcourt, and Economos to the Gwan Tai bottling plant, where his X-ray visor reveals that everyone there is a Butterfly. This is a good excuse for action (Chris immediately starts gunning everyone down), practical gore (he guns them down with a shotgun, often at point-blank range and in the face), plot development (Harcourt finds hundreds of boxes all stuffed with the amber liquid), and comedy (Chris straps a grenade to a Russian tank shell, since the grenade on its own simply doesn’t blow up enough people.) Unfortunately for everyone, the Butterflies are protected by a giant talking martial artist gorilla that Economos is forced to kill with a chainsaw, thus endearing himself to Chris, finally. And that’s honestly not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.
Morale is high after the successful mission — Harcourt even creates an “11th Street Kids” group chat, after the Hanoi Rocks song. For the first time, Chris begins to feel accepted; when he invites Leota in, he even begins to well up a little when she’s nice to him. It’s a shame, then, that she plants the diary given to her by Waller when he goes to the bathroom, but crucially, she doesn’t do so easily. The weight of this betrayal keeps her up at night, so she heads back to the HQ, where she finds Murn alone. Donning Peacemaker’s helmet, she plays around with the X-ray vision and accidentally sees the Butterfly squatting in Murn’s brain. He immediately chases her outside and corners her as the episode ends.
You can stream Peacemaker season 1, episode 5, “Monkey Dory”, exclusively on HBO Max.
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