Peacemaker Premiere Reveals a Shocking Amanda Waller Twist

DC's new Peacemaker series on HBO Max may feature only one member of the Suicide Squad in a prominent role, but that doesn't mean the team's ruthless leader isn't involved in some capacity. Amanda Waller, the cold and calculated overseer of the Squad, has her fingerprints all over Peacemaker's first three episodes. Viola Davis even makes a brief appearance on a video call in the premiere! Waller is inescapable, and she's hiding a secret that will likely shake things up as the first season of Peacemaker progresses.

WARNING: This article contains spoilers from the first three episodes of Peacemaker! Continue reading at your own risk...

In Peacemaker, Waller has commissioned a secret task force to handle John Cena's titular antihero, helping him take down mysterious beings known only as butterflies. Of course, being Amanda Waller, she doesn't fully trust anyone. She needed someone on the inside. That's where Adebayo comes in.

Played by Danielle Brooks, Leota Adebayo is the newest member of the team, but her new co-workers don't know everything about her. It's revealed in the premiere that Adebayo is actually Amanda Waller's daughter.

She isn't anything like her mother, which is a good thing for everyone else on the Project Butterfly team. Adebayo is much more caring than Waller, but it's also clear that she isn't exactly in control. She and her wife both lost their jobs, and Waller used that to coax her daughter into a line of work she wants no part of.

Adebayo is clearly a compassionate person, a trait she didn't get from her mother. For James Gunn, who created Peacemaker while working on The Suicide Squad, compassion became one of the main themes of the series.

"I think that for me, really, it was about Peacemaker's political belief system, and some of the masculinity issues are part and parcel with that," Gunn told ComicBook.com. "It was about having somebody like Peacemaker, who has this umbrella of beliefs over him and believes everything he reads on the internet. And then having Leota Adebayo, played by Danielle Brooks, who has a completely different way of looking at the world. Yet, somehow, they find something in each other that is common — and actually, they really love each other. That relationship, to me, is the central love story. It's not romantic. It's not sexual. It's just about two people who can see beyond the exterior of what people are, to who they really are as human beings. It is that understanding, and that compassion, that I think allows for change in this world, and I think that it's something that is not given out very easily. We aren't very generous, especially on social media. And generosity is something that we could all use a little bit more of, including me."

Did you expect to see Amanda Waller in the Peacemaker premiere? What do you think of the show so far? Let us know in the comments!