‘Peacemaker’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap – This Show Is Very Funny, But Also Deeply Sad

For a comic book show, Peacemaker is becoming surprisingly character-driven in Season 2, and for such a funny comedy, it’s also deeply sad at its core. That feels really evident in Episode 2, “A Man Is Only As Good As His Bird”, but it’s really been essential to Chris Smith’s character from the beginning. This is a guy who doesn’t belong, and desperately wants to; who craves normality but can’t find it, connection while lacking the interpersonal skills to develop it, and meaning where there is none. For someone like him, the comic-book-y faithful staple of a multiverse isn’t a fun what-if idea – it’s potentially the only way to live with himself.

These are big, slightly depressing underpinning ideas, and you’d never suspect a show so funny of having them. But it’s really these sentiments – lack of purpose, the legacy of trauma, grief, revenge, and betrayal – that are baked into the show’s firmament, which is both why it feels so comfortable having a laugh all the time and why it’s enjoyable even in an episode like this, in which not a great deal actually happens.

Take Rick Flag Sr., for instance. After being sworn in as Director of A.R.G.U.S. following Amanda Waller’s forced resignation, Peacemaker became his sole focus, since Peacemaker killed his son, Rick Flag Jr., in The Suicide Squad. This is why Flag has Chris’s house under 24-hour surveillance, why he’s so adamant about catching him in the act. But what act? He isn’t sure yet. But he’ll find something, since there’s a lot more going on in Chris’s house than anyone really thinks.

It isn’t just the orgies, as we know. Ever since Chris discovered a door to a parallel universe in the pocket dimension where he keeps his gear, he’s even more miserable, especially since he has now murdered – in self-defence, granted – that universe’s version of himself. And disposing of the body isn’t an easy thing to do. It makes the orgy participants still lounging all over the house, and Adebayo turning up on his doorstep, even more problematic.

And amidst all this, Flag’s surveillance continues through a reluctant Economos and his new handler, Langston Fleury, who is brilliant fun in Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 2. Everything he says is hilarious, from his “bird blindness” to his habit of giving everyone deeply offensive nicknames. All of this episode is funny, or at least most of it – Chris trying to downplay his quantum unfolding storage area as being essentially the same thing as Adebayo growing up Methodist is another highlight – but Fleury is like James Gunn’s rawest sense of humour in human form.

Less funny is Chris and Vigilante cutting up Alt Chris’s dead body with a bone saw. Even putting aside the general grimness of the act, it’s pretty sad that Chris only calls Vigilante, who’s endlessly desperate to spend time and bond with him, to help him dispose of a corpse. He doesn’t exactly help himself. But Chris’s self-loathing runs deep, and is only worsened by the discovery of his doppelganger’s phone, which includes a bunch of happy pictures with Harcourt. Chris isn’t just dealing with not living the life he wants, but being proximate to a version of himself who did.

Chris’s support system assembles in “A Man Is Only As Good As His Bird” for a rooftop party to celebrate Economos’s birthday, but they’re all as damaged as he is, so even their companionship isn’t much help. Harcourt is close to the bone, Adebayo’s relationship is on the rocks, Economos is spying on his best friend for a living, and Vigilante is… well, Vigilante. But seeing them all together is good fun, even if it’s juxtaposed with Fleury and his team breaking into Chris’s house to investigate the disturbance caused by dipping in and out of the quantum realm.

The home invasion doesn’t amount to much, thanks to Eagly, who pecks all of the intruders half to death. But Chris’s secrets being preserved – for now – don’t constitute his problems being fixed. The rooftop party naturally descends into a drunken argument with Harcourt, bringing his pining into even starker relief. And the worst possible thing Chris could have access to in that moment is his doppelganger’s phone, since it gives him the opportunity to communicate with a more receptive, less damaged version of the woman he so obviously loves, and maybe even get the response he wants. It’s a compelling angle for a multiverse story – what happens when the alternate world is more alluring than the one you live in?

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