[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 2 episode 1, “The Ties That Grind.”] James Gunn’s Peacemaker is back, but not quite how you remember. The season 2 premiere begins with a “previously on the DCU,” recapping how Chris Smith (John Cena) and the 11th Street Kids — including field handler Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), black hat John Economos (Steve Agee), the masked Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), and Amanda Waller’s (Viola Davis) daughter Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) — saved the world as part of Project Butterfly. Except that was the old DC Extended Universe (DCEU), not the new DC Universe (DCU), which kicked off with Creature Commandos and officially launched with Gunn’s Superman movie.
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Gunn retconned the Justice League cameo that ended Peacemaker season 1, making it so that Leota asked her mother to call in the Justice Gang instead: the metahuman team that officially counts Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) as members, with Kryptonian cousins Superman (David Corenswet) and Supergirl (Milly Alcock) on reserve, and has now defended the retcon as a logical step, given Peacemaker was always the black sheep of the DCEU: “You could say there are [an] infinite amount of timelines and the DCU timeline is almost exactly the same as the [Peacemaker] Season 1 timeline with very very minor differences,” Gunn wrote on the social media platform Threads. “I mean I think it’s fair to say a lot of aspects of Season 1 fit in even less with the DCEU than the DCU so season 1 is kind of an outlier to begin with.”
In the revised version of events, the DCEU Justice League — including the Man of Steel (Henry Cavill), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), the Flash (Ezra Miller), and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) — never arrived too late to help save the day, as the Justice League doesn’t yet exist in the DCU. Put another way, remove Zack Snyder’s Justice League and mentions of other heroes, and season 1 of Peacemaker could retroactively take place in the DCU.
James Gunn Explains the New DCU Canon in Peacemaker Season 2
While Peacemaker started as a spinoff of his 2021 film The Suicide Squad — also loosely attached to the DCEU, having featured the likes of Suicide Squad‘s Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), and Davis’ Waller — Gunn acknowledged that the first season was incongruent with the wider DCEU at the time.
When a user pointed out that season 1 referenced “a Batman who DOESN’T kill people, which the DCEU did not have,” referring to Ben Affleck’s Dark Knight killing in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Gunn replied, “Yeah. That, Bat-Mite, Matter-Eater Lad, on and on. There were so many things that didn’t fit as it was a transitionary period anyway.” (Gunn has since confirmed that Bat-Mite might not be DCU canon, but that the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Matter-Eater Lad conceivably exists in the future.)
It’s also worth noting that the alternate dimension that Chris discovers in the premiere in which his father Auggie (Robert Patrick) and brother Keith (David Denman) are still alive is not the DCEU, but a parallel reality to the DCU.
“It isn’t the multiverse,” Gunn explained in a recent interview. “This is more like a novel I really love: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It’s the idea of this one other life that’s very different from our life, and how you deal with this [alternate] version.”
Gunn continued, “Peacemaker sees this reality that’s like his — but better in seemingly every way — and so, how does he deal with that from an emotional standpoint? And how does he face those ghosts from his past, of the people that he loved and killed? That’s what he’s dealing with, emotionally.”
New episodes of Peacemaker season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO Max.
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