Peacemaker Season 2 started with a bang. After being the first DCU project to be released after Superman‘s success and acclaim, it had the wind at its back. It helps that the first episodes of the series were full of intrigue, new characters, and narrative surprises that seemed poised to push the DCU into surprising new directions. As the final episodes premiered and took everyone by surprise, confirming major fan theories and teeing up a huge final episode, the series concluded with every TV fan’s biggest fear: a final episode that wasn’t very satisfying to watch.
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To make the disappointment of the Peacemaker Season 2 finale even more frustrating, however, is the fact that it’s not the first time superhero fans have seen the same mistakes being made. Now, seventeen years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and with decades of superhero movies before that, a series that was on track to push the genre to new places resulted in yet another aggravating step in the wrong direction.
Peacemaker’s Season 2 Finale Dropped the Ball
Though the make-up that everyone was hoping for did finally happen, as Chris and Harcourt’s relationship takes a step in a positive direction. That said, Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 8 clocked in at the longest episode of the season, double some of the other episodes, and was filled with two full song performances by different bands, a musical montage, and a lot of moping on the part of the title character.
This isn’t to imply there wasn’t narrative progression for the larger DCU, as the episode introduced the concepts of Checkmate and Salvation, two key pieces of lore that will no doubt be major touchstones moving forward. The trouble, of course, is that after seven episodes of build-up in the season, these developments didn’t feel on track with the rest of the story that had been told beforehand. Instead, these reveals and surprises took on a distinct shape: chess pieces moving on the board to set up a movie three turns away, not satisfying conclusions.
The DCU Is Repeating Major MCU and Snyder-Verse Problems
Series creator and DC Studios co-president James Gunn has already confirmed that no current plans exist for Peacemaker Season 3, instead teasing that the Salvation cliffhanger will be addressed in 2027’s Man of Tomorrow movie and, seemingly, other DCU projects down the road. For comic book fans, this set-up feels familiar. Marvel Studios has been guilty of doing the same thing, introducing characters and storylines to set up something else down the road at the expense of the current story.
Marvel has been especially guilty of this in the wake of success. 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was seen as overstuffed at the time, introducing Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Vision, and Ultron, all in addition to bringing back the core team. They’ve done the same in recent years, too, with their Disney+ TV shows like Moon Knight and Daredevil: Born Again arriving to mixed reactions and minimal impact on the MCU at large. Even still, Marvel’s breathless urgency to reduce the impact of their feature film’s endings and instead set up the next characters that have never been seen again is a recurring issue for them in recent years (EG: Eros in Eternals, Hercules in Thor: Love and Thunder, Clea in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, etc).
This was also a frequent complaint with the DCU’s predecessor, the Zack Snyder-led DCEU, aka the “Snyder-verse.” Following the middling box office of Man of Steel (coupled with Marvel’s billion-dollar success in The Avengers), Warner Bros. scrambled to stuff multiple heroes, teases, and narrative bait into 2016’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice before quickly rushing out a Justice League movie. Many other factors contributed to the DCEU’s decline in the wake of that trifecta, but a sizable amount of it was too much setup being pushed into stories rather than completing those narratives whole cloth.
To make this development even more frustrating, Gunn successfully navigated it with Superman, setting up a full universe with new characters and fresh takes on classic characters that felt like a complete story and a satisfying movie that stands on its own; Peacemaker Season 2 failed in that regard. Maybe in the end, it works out, the DCU pulls off the long game in the same way that Marvel’s seeding of Thanos fundamentally changed the franchise, but history tells us that was the exception and not the rule.
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