Peacemaker Season 2 Finale Review - ‘Making the World Better’

Full spoilers follow for Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 8 - “Full Nelson.”

After what has been a fun yet simultaneously heavy season, and certainly an uneven one in terms of pace, James Gunn’s Peacemaker Season 2 comes to an end with the weakest episode of the bunch. While “Full Nelson” – which is the longest segment of the season at 58 minutes – resolves the major character threads of the season, it only effectively does so for one of them, that of the Chris/Harcourt relationship. Everything else, from Rick Flag Sr.’s real plan to Adebayo’s marriage and career to that whole Nazi world thing – remember them? – gets short shrift in this finale, despite its extended running time. Also, all that talk about this season setting up the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow… well, I guess it kinda does?

First the good: John Cena as Chris Smith/Peacemaker and Jennifer Holland as Emilia Harcourt have been great all season, and the Moonlighting-style will they/won’t they plot finally comes to a cathartic place here. Gunn, who wrote the whole season and is back to direct the finale, finally takes us back to that “night on the boat” that we’ve been hearing about for the past two months, where Chris and Harcourt apparently hooked up in a drunken moment that at least one of them has seemed to regret.

Gunn, always a master when it comes to weaving pop music into his narratives, reveals that the night in question saw the two getting drunk and commiserating over Harcourt’s job situation before happening upon a “rock cruise” by the early-’90s duo Nelson. This is textbook James Gunn, and it works perfectly to sell the idea of Chris and Harcourt having a true moment of connection, even if it’s in the unlikeliest of places. It’s perfect and the actors once again sell the evolution these two have undergone since they first met, and it’s made all the better by the fact that it turns out that the “night on the boat” wasn’t some random hook-up. No, it was just a quick kiss and a look and a feeling. Way better than a random hook-up.

Unfortunately, not much else in the episode comes together as well as Chris/Harcourt.

I also like how the near-ass-kicking that Harcourt is ready to give that random dude outside the Big Belly Burger is thwarted because of Chris, and how his outlook on life – “Look at the moon! Look at the stars!” – serves to illustrate why Harcourt might fall for the big lug. Between that and being caught up in the magic of Nelson, how could she not?

Of course, Harcourt and the 11th Street Kids use that very same Chris-vibe to bring him out of his funk later in the episode, when he’s at his lowest and under the impression that he’s “cursed” because of all the bad things that have happened around him. “I believe in miracles because of you. I saw an eagle hug a human!” Ads (Danielle Brooks) cries, and it’s not in a funny way. It’s in a “Man, these guys do all love each other” way. But it still comes back to Chris and Harcourt, the latter of whom finally admits that, yeah, of course the night on the boat meant something – “It meant everything.”

Unfortunately, not much else in the episode comes together as well as Chris/Harcourt, with Frank Grillo’s Rick Flag Sr. really coming across as kind of a mess of a character at this point. Did I miss something? Why was he having a jolly-good time with the rest of the staff at Lex Luthor’s old command center while his A.R.G.U.S. men were out there getting their faces eaten off in Candyland and the such? (And sure, the other dimensions encountered by those poor guys in the QUC were cool, but we kinda saw too much of them in the trailer for this week’s episode.) I understand that Rick Sr. has a grudge to bear against Peacemaker and that he might very well never forgive him for killing his son, but his slide from a good guy in Creature Commandos to neutral/good in Superman and now outright villain in this finale surprises me. I like Grillo as Rick Sr. too much and it’s hard to buy that he would act the way he does here.

Which isn’t to say that his plan to lock away metahumans on that extra-dimensional prison planet (Salvation in the comics) doesn’t make sense for the character. And certainly this has to be where Peacemaker the show’s connection to the Man of Tomorrow movie comes in, with Rick Sr. now hanging so tightly with Lex’s old henchmen and admitting that he doesn’t like the billionaire villain but “he is the smartest man in the world. Why not use his brain to make the world a better place?”

Then there’s the scene between Ads and her wife Keeya (Elizabeth Faith Ludlow), which is well played but also feels like too little, too late, as the problems the couple have faced just didn’t get enough room to breathe over the past eight episodes. And as for Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante and Steve Agee’s John Economos… well, again, they had some fun moments this season (and this episode), but that’s about it. Of course this is John Cena’s show first and foremost, but an ensemble cast like this just needs a little more attention.

Speaking of fun, getting to see Foxy Shazam perform the season’s title track back on that same “rock cruise” is pretty cool, even as it’s intercut with the montage that sets up the group’s creation of Checkmate, the new super-spy org that they’re going to be running. That said, I’m not sure that I’ve fully followed the thread that led to the decision to just up and launch their own covert ops group? It comes in that moment when Harcourt and the rest are pleading with Chris to get back on track, but still.

And while we didn’t go back to the Nazi planet at all this week or get a visit from David Denman’s Keith Smith, we have to assume this isn’t the last we’ve seen of that character. It is a bit of a letdown that that particular story is left so open-ended here, and also that Gunn didn’t grace us with one last big action scene this week. Instead, Chris being stranded by Rick Sr. on Salvation has to pass for our big QUC twist, and there’s no denying that the prospect of Chris having to fend for himself Cast Away-style with nothing but the Foxy Shazam shirt on his back and his ingenuity is an enticing set-up for Season 3.

Thoughts From the Quantum Unfolding Chamber:

• Always be proud of your freckles like your mom taught you!
• Man, Vig is so mean to his mom.
• Speaking of Vig, looks like all that speculation among some fans that the wrong Vig came back from Earth X was, well, wrong.
• I guess I was wrong too about Michael Rooker returning as an alt-version of Red St. Wild. Well, there’s always next season!
• And so the 11th Street Kids are joining forces with some former foes in the creation of Checkmate, including Sol Rodríguez's Bordeaux, Tim Meadows' Fleury, and Nhut Le's Judomaster.
• Eagly and Economos, man!
• It’s been a while since I’ve done weekly reviews like this. I forgot how fun it could be. Hope to see you soon on another show!

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