Summary
Peacemaker Season 2 hasn’t been in a hurry to get anywhere, but everything happens at once in “Ignorance Is Chris”, finally giving the action some real stakes and excitement.
I’ve been waiting ages for Peacemaker Season 2 to really get going. I thought the process might be incremental, but in Episode 6, it happens all at once. The 11th Street Kids finally follow Chris into his idyllic alternate dimension, where it turns out things aren’t as rosy as they first appeared. Sure, his brother and father are alive, and he gets to live his best life as a beloved vigilante, and he’s in a relationship with a version of Harcourt, but the suspicious absence of people of colour hides a much more sinister reveal, and “Ignorance Is Chris” ends with all the main characters suddenly imperilled in ways they didn’t anticipate.
Oh, and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor shows up for a cameo. While not the best-kept secret in the world, given that the marketing has consistently intimated something big would happen in this episode, it’s still nice to see James Gunn continuing to weave a connected universe, and in a way that feels largely organic, too. Rick Flag Sr visits Lex, who’s serving a life sentence in Belle Reve alongside the metahumans whose “blight” he was incarcerated for trying to prevent in Gunn’s Superman, to find a way to trace Chris’s dimensional portal. That makes sense to me. And it gives Hoult the opportunity to lament his situation in a TV-MA way, which he never quite got the liberty to do in a tentpole blockbuster.
Anyway, this is the only thing of significance that happens in the Prime universe, so we might as well address the swastika-shaped elephant in the room. The alternate universe Chris is so fond of is actually a planet of Nazis, with its own version of the Stars and Stripes that may well be coming to a White House near you in the not-too-distant future. It takes Harcourt about ten minutes to figure this out. I’m not sure what it says about Chris that he didn’t notice, but he was so excited to finally have his dad and brother back and to be sharing a bed with Harcourt that I can forgive him for not paying too much attention.
Unfortunately for Leota, she doesn’t realise until she leaves the Smith household and starts roaming through suburbia. But it quickly becomes clear enough. People turn and stare, cars screech to a halt, and shouts of panic are exchanged. Keith, Chris’s brother, points and screams, “A black!”, which is a bit of a giveaway. Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 6 ends with her being chased down the street by an army of racists. It’s a pretty striking visual for a knockabout comic book show.
This is also far from the only problem the 11th Street Kids are faced with in “Ignorance Is Chris”. Immediately upon arriving in the alternate universe, they split up. Stupidly, Economos remains at the Smith house, helping himself to the food and hoping that Chris is the first member of the family to return home. Of course, he isn’t. Auggie turns up, foils Economos’s extremely lacklustre attempt to hide, and skewers his hand to the ground with a knife. Economos, in his terror, reveals not only who he is and where he’s from, but who Chris is, and the fact that he killed this universe’s Chris and took his place. That will likely have terrible repercussions.
Speaking of terrible repercussions, Adrian unsurprisingly tracks himself down and is jubilant to discover that he’s almost identical except for one key detail. Chris isn’t his best friend – he’s his arch nemesis, and the primary reason why Adrian joined the Sons of Liberty, the “terrorist” group that Chris thwarted in the third episode. With the new Nazi context, this universe’s version of terrorism takes on a whole new meaning, so not only has Chris somehow not figured out the obvious in all his time here, but he may have also set civil rights back quite a distance.
On the plus side, Chris and Harcourt share the best scene of the season in this episode, with Jennifer Holland delivering an unexpectedly great turn when she and Chris finally have a frank conversation about their real feelings for one another. Harcourt can’t quite bring herself to say that she loves Chris back, although it’s obvious she does, but her vulnerability is telling enough. The only small problem here is that they’re having the conversation at A.R.G.U.S., where alt-Harcourt works. By the time they both decide to leave, having just discovered the Nazi Stars and Stripes, alt-Harcourt has recognised herself and ordered her to be arrested. All of the gang end the episode on the back foot, reeling from reveals, and with nothing but trouble waiting for them back in their own universe. It took a while, but it seems like Peacemaker Season 2 is finally off to the races.
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