[COLUMN] Peacemaker Asks if Its Hero is Beyond Salvation | by Darren Mooney

The second season of Peacemaker grapples with a weighty question — is true forgiveness ever possible?

Christopher Smith (John Cena) has done terrible things. As a boy (Quinn Bennet), Chris beat his brother Keith (Liam Hughes) to death at the direction of their father, Auggie (Robert Patrick). Although Chris was only a boy, he carries this guilt and shame with him for the rest of his life. It is part of what motivates him to become the superhero known as Peacemaker. He vowed to fight for peace “so, unlike Keith, no one would ever die for no reason again.”

However, Chris is also haunted by the things that he has done as an adult. In The Suicide Squad, he killed his brother in arms, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), at the behest of Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), to prevent the leaking of information about American activity in the South American island nation of Corto Maltese. Rick Flag was a hero, a celebrated veteran. He was universally beloved, a seemingly fundamentally decent man in an indecent system, and Chris murdered him.

Peacemaker is sympathetic to Chris. The show presents the character as fundamentally well-meaning, even if he is the product of a toxic upbringing that poisoned his worldview. Chris tries to be a good person, to be a hero. He tries to make the world a better place. There is something fundamentally audacious about Peacemaker as a television show, a spin-off from The Suicide Squad that asks the viewer to empathize with and root for a character who has done these terrible things.

The deaths of Keith Smith and Rick Flag haunt the second season of Peacemaker. The season begins with Rick Flag’s father, Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), assuming control of A.R.G.U.S. and using the apparatus of that government organization to target the man responsible for his son’s death. At the same time, Chris discovers that the love of his life, Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), was also Rick’s best friend and lover, which seems to create an impossible rift between the pair.

Simultaneously, Chris discovers a doorway that leads him to an alternate world where his brother is still alive, now an adult and superhero known as Captain Triumph (David Denman). In this alternate world, Chris has a happy relationship with his father and Emilia loves him unreservedly. This serves to dredge up Chris’ feelings of guilt, shame and inadequacy. Has Chris broken things so fundamentally that there is no path to redemption? Is forgiveness beyond his reach?

In the season’s fifth episode, Chris abandons his friends to go live in that alternate world. He leaves them a letter. “I’ve tried again and again to make up for my mistakes, but I’m not sure redemption is something that’s truly possible – at least not here,” Chris explains. “So I’m going to make a life in the other world. I’m going to be a brother to my brother, a son to my dad.” He writes, “I love you all – even Harcourt after all that fucked up cunty bullshit she did – but I don’t belong here.”

This is a letter that reads a lot like a suicide note. It’s a character saying goodbye to their friends before moving on to what they believe to be another life in a better world. This subtext of self-destruction is reinforced by Chris’ murder of his own alternate self at the climax of the season premiere. It’s a very weighty idea. If redemption does not exist for people like Chris, what place exists for them on this planet?

It is, in this context, something of a grim (if well-observed) joke that Chris ends up retreating from his own reality into Earth-X, an alternate world run by literal Nazis. It feels like a commentary on the tendency of disgraced personalities (such as Louis C.K. or Russell Brand) to respond to public scandal by embracing extreme right-wing ideology, often as a way to avoid accountability or the hard work of repairing a deeply damaged reputation.

This subtext makes a great deal of sense in the larger context of creator James Gunn’s career. In July 2018, Gunn was fired by Disney from his job as director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 when a series of provocative tweets that he had sent as a younger writer came to live. Gunn was publicly shamed and disavowed. He was cast out. This was in the broader context of a larger cultural reckoning with public figures who had done bad things – often much worse than bad-taste tweets.

One of the big challenges of so-called “cancel culture” or “accountability culture” is the question of whether those individuals who have been held to account can have a path back towards rehabilitation. Gunn is in many ways a test case for this. He emerged from this scandal arguably more successful and influential. He would be re-hired by Disney to finish Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 and was hired as the steward of Warner Bros. rival DC movie brand.

As such, it makes sense that this cultural moment would become a major thematic preoccupation for Gunn as a filmmaker. Gunn’s public shaming and exile form a recurring motif across his films. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, Rocket (Sean Gunn, Bradley Cooper) is cast out of the High Evolutionary’s (Chukwudi Iwuji) gigantic space conglomerate for not meeting the standards that the literally faceless corporate monster demands in those who create for him.

In The Suicide Squad, mad scientist Gaius Grieves (Peter Capaldi) exploits and abuses the captured Starro, only to scramble a clumsy stock apology when the creature breaks free. “Let’s talk about this,” he pleads. “I understand where you’re coming from. I crossed a line. Okay, I crossed a line! I realize that, but I’m ready to change. I am ready to change. And I didn’t mean to hurt you.” It could have come from a notes app. Starro is unconvinced by the rote apology, and tears Grieves limb from limb.

Even in Superman, the eponymous hero (David Corenswet) is brought low by secrets from his past exposed on social media and is irritated by the hashtag #SuperShit. Josh Horowitz pointed out the obvious similarities between Gunn’s personal experience and the emotional arc of Superman, only for the director to insist that he never thought about that while writing the film. Still, to any outside observer, there’s a clean line through Gunn’s work since 2018.

These ideas all come to a head during the second season finale of Peacemaker, with Gunn tying together larger plot mechanics and character arcs into a meditation on what it means to be redeemed and to be saved. The bulk of the episode focuses on Chris, first running from and then accepting the love of his friends. Believing that he is cursed, Chris cuts him off from them, only for them to track him down – just as they chased after him into the alternate world.

This feels like a reflection of Gunn’s own experience with public shaming and disgrace. He has talked about how the most remarkable aspect of that whole ordeal was discovering that there were people who loved him. “When that happened,” Gunn recalls. “I felt like everything in my life had been taken from me at one time. But in that moment, all of a sudden, all these people loved me in a moment when I thought my career was over. Yeah. And I felt so I felt loved for the first time in my life.”

The culmination of the character and emotional arcs of this season of Peacemaker is Chris allowing himself to feel loved for perhaps the first time in his life. However, the beauty of the finale is the way that Gunn ties this character beat and theme to larger plot mechanics. For most of the season, Rick Flag Sr. has been trying to seize control of the pocket dimension employed by Auggie Smith. In the finale, Flag has that dimension, and sends teams exploring it, looking for habitable worlds.

It turns out that Flag is looking for a prison planet. He is looking for an environment that is capable of supporting human life, where he can exile any metahuman criminals that cannot be held at secure facilities like Arkham Asylum or Belle Reve Prison. There is very obviously a political commentary to this, evoking extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay. It is also, once Flag reveals the codename for the project, an obvious shoutout to the DC comics crossover Salvation Run.

With fitting irony, Flag names this planet “Salvation.” Pitching the proposal to the Pentagon, Flag boasts that the planet is inescapable. “Nobody could ever come back,” Flag insists. “No one will escape Salvation, I promise.” In his own words, “Salvation is a gamechanger.” As his lover and colleague Sasha Bordeaux (Sol Rodríguez) warns Harcourt, “It’s a fucking prison. That’s what the planet is for.” The goal was to find “some place they can’t get back from. Forever.”

In other words, “Salvation” is the crystallization of the belief that a person can be beyond redemption – that prison is punitive, not rehabilitative. To be sent to Salvation is to have no path back to civilized society. It is to be forgotten, to be abandoned, to be unloved. In the season’s final moments, Flag has Chris abducted and thrown on to Salvation as its first inmate. “What the fuck is this, Flag?” Flag responds, “This is for Ricky, you piece of shit.” Some things cannot be forgiven.

It's a nice structural mirror. Around halfway through the season, Chris escaped into an alternate world because he believed that redemption was impossible, only to be pulled back by his friends. In the season finale, Chris is exiled onto an alternate world because Flag believes that redemption is impossible. It’s a pretty elegant piece of storytelling for a narrative device that is very clearly also being used to set up future projects in the shared universe.

It’s a nice place to end the season of Peacemaker. Chris has finally forgiven himself, and accepted the love and forgiveness of the people close to him, but now has to grapple with the bigger question of what it means to be forgiven by the systems and structures of larger society. It’s a very clever way of developing the central engine of the show. Salvation awaits.