[COLUMN] In its Second Season, Peacemaker Is an Intimate Exploration of the Multiverse | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece includes spoilers for the first episode of the second season of Peacemaker, which released on HBO Max this week. At time of writing, I’ve seen the first five of the eight episodes, and it’s a really great season of television. So check it out.

One of the smarter aspects of the second season of Peacemaker is the way that the show manages to mine the logistics of comic book and superhero continuity for earnest human drama.

Since the second season of Peacemaker was announced, there has been a lot of discussion about how it fits within the larger context of the new DC Universe, the revamped cinematic superhero universe that soft-launched with the animated Creature Commandos in December 2024 and which was properly unveiled with the release of James Gunn’s Superman in July 2025. It was a fresh start for the brand and the characters, a reset from the previous DC Extended Universe.

There is an inherently logical contradiction here. The first season of Peacemaker had spun off Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which was itself a direct sequel to David Ayer’s Suicide Squad and so must have been part of that earlier iteration of the characters. The first season finale of Peacemaker even included a cameo from the Justice League, featuring appearances from Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Flash (Ezra Miller), placing it squarely in continuity with Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

To an outside observer, this is all impossible to reconcile. It does not make sense. To a comic book reader, this is just Tuesday. The continuity entanglements created by carrying over Peacemaker from one iteration of the cinematic shared universe to the next are just par for the course, comparable to the challenges that the comics publisher DC faced with characters like the Legion of Superheroes or Hawkman in the wake of their continuity reboot Crisis on Infinite Earths.

As a rule, the best solution to these problems is to ignore them and focus on telling good stories. However, a significant amount of the coverage of the second season of Peacemaker has been built around the question of what is or is not “canon.” In the lead-up to the release of the second season of Peacemaker, Gunn has launched a podcast that devotes a considerable amount of time and effort to parsing what is and is not canon within the show.

Peacemaker’s second season premiere opens with an almost trolling “previously in the DCU” segment that includes reshoot footage replacing the Justice League with the Justice Gang from Superman, and specifically replacing Aquaman and the Flash with Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). It’s a cute joke, but it also serves as something of a statement of intent for the second season. The second season of Peacemaker is going to be about this change.

This is a risky creative decision. The multiverse has become a major part of popular culture over the past decade or so, with critical and commercial successes like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once. Alternate timelines and multiversal adventures are no longer primarily the concern of comic book nerds and science-fiction devotees. These are accepted and standard storytelling devices.

It is possible to use the multiverse as a metaphor, a vehicle to tell human stories. Into the Spider-Verse and Everything Everywhere All At Once both feel like heightened metamodern stories about the overwhelming experience of living in a hypermediated world. Everything Everywhere All At Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are both midlife crisis stories, about how easy it is for a person to get lost in pursuit of some alternate reality where they are happy.

However, the multiverse has also become a rather cynical tool of corporate brand management in films like Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Flash and Deadpool & Wolverine, an excuse to smash recognizable intellectual property together. In cynical hands, the multiverse becomes a vehicle for cameos, nostalgia and fan service. It becomes a collection of trivia and references, with no underlying substance beyond the most shallow sort of recognition.

The second season of Peacemaker works because it uses this idea of superhero continuity as a vehicle to explore the anxieties of its central characters. This is a show that is caught in a liminal space between two separate iterations of a shared universe that is explicitly about characters who are trapped in lives that seem to have no greater meaning or purpose. The show’s contradictory continuity becomes a metaphor for the emotional state of its core cast.

After saving – or perhaps dooming – humanity at the end of the first season, Peacemaker (John Cena) is ready to move onwards and upwards. “I don’t want to be a joke any more,” he tells Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks). “This is all I’ve ever wanted, you know? To be a real hero.” Early in the first episode, he auditions for a place on the Justice Gang, an interview that begins to go awry once Max Lord (Sean Gunn) brings up that he “served time for first-degree murder.”

Even in this continuity reset, Peacemaker cannot get a clean slate. It would be much easier for the character to start over in this continuity reboot, to be absolved of his past sins. Instead, Peacemaker is cursed to live with his mistakes. While the movie itself might be in limbo, Peacemaker still lives with the shame of what he did in The Suicide Squad, with Rick Flagg Sr. (Frank Grillo) leveraging all his power to punish Peacemaker for the murder of his son Rick Flagg Jr. (Joel Kinneman).

The rest of the cast are trapped in a similar situation. Adebayo is separated from her wife Keeya (Elizabeth Faith Ludlow), and “living in the worst level of Grand Theft Auto.” Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) has been blacklisted from the intelligence community. “I have only been trained to do one thing my entire life, doc,” she complains to a psychologist (Vince Pisani). “So you tell me: what the fuck am I supposed to do now?” As she storms back to her car, she sighs, “What a fucking life.”

The plot of the second season is motivated by Peacemaker’s discovery of a doorway to an alternate dimension where he is living his best possible life. His father Auggie (Robert Patrick) and his brother Keith (David Denman) are still alive, alleviating his feeling of guilt about his involvement in both of their deaths in his own universe. Peacemaker is presented with a world that seems designed entirely for him, a fresh start free of shame and responsibility.

In press, Gunn has cited a particularly literary inspiration for the second season of Peacemaker. “I think of Peacemaker as more of a high-concept story about one other world,” he explained. “It's more akin to Philip Roth's The Counterlife than it is to the third Spider-Man movie, which I love that movie, but it isn't about that. It isn't Deadpool & Wolverine. It's really a very simple, simple story about his relationship to this one other world.”

The Counterlife is a particularly interesting basis for a story like this. Roth’s novel is full of internal contradictions and discontinuity. Events that transpire in one section of the novel do not fit with the narrative advanced in other segments. It is a metaphor that translates fairly cleanly to comic book continuity, which is full of these sorts of tensions. Peacemaker unfolds in one of them. However, Roth uses these conflicts as a thematic and narrative device, an expression of more fundamental ideas.

The second season of Peacemaker is about midlife crisis. It finds characters looking at the lives that they have, comparing them to the lives that they feel they deserve, and trying to close the gap. Peacemaker lives in a town called “Evergreen”, and the series is about wondering if the grass is greener on the other side. The season’s opening credits are set to Oh Lord by Foxy Shazam, a song about waking in the morning satisfied, knowing that “there is always a wrong to your right.”

In this sense, as in The Counterlife, the continuity tension within the series feels like a metaphor for the discontinuity that people tell when they attempt to narrativize their lives. “People may call what happens at midlife ‘a crisis’, but it’s not,” argues Brené Brown. “It’s an unraveling—a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re ‘supposed’ to live.” Boiled down to its essence, this is the central thematic arc of the second season of Peacemaker.

It is a very thoughtful and mature use of the narrative conventions of superhero storytelling – the continuity resets, the multiverse, the discontinuity, the internal contradictions – to tell a story that is squarely rooted in a very universal human experience.