Warning: this story contains spoilers for Peacemaker Episode 4, “Chapter 4: The Choad Less Traveled.” After the revelation that August “Auggie” Smith (Robert Patrick) is the White Dragon, Episode 4 of Peacemaker reveals the armored costume worn by the white supremacist supervillain. In “The Choad Less Traveled,” Christopher Smith (John Cena) and self-professed best friend Vigilante (Freddie Stroma) step into the quantum unfolding storage area leading to a dimensional nodule outside normal space. It’s there that Auggie, who Vigilante points out is “pretty brainy for a racist,” stores the White Dragon armor inspired by the costume of William Heller and Daniel Ducannon in the DC comic books.
Introduced in the pages of 1987’s Suicide Squad #4 as “William Hell,” Heller was the neo-Nazi founder of the Aryan Empire. An enemy of Hawkman and Hawkwoman, Ducannon was out to start a race war and was aligned with the neo-Nazi supervillain organization the Fourth Reich.
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In the world of the DC Extended Universe, Auggie was “very hard to write” because he’s “such a piece of sh-t racist,” Peacemaker series creator and writer James Gunn told SYFY WIRE. “I didn’t want to pull back on who he was as a racist, and to make him this McDonald’s-lite version of what a racist is, which is what you would normally see in television shows. But I didn’t want to serve his bullsh-t, either.”
“That to me was the most delicate stuff in the show that I really was careful about and tried to do the best that I could to be sensitive and also be authentic at the same time,” Gunn added.
Auggie’s White Dragon is a trained killer to be feared, according to Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwudi), the mercenary tasked by ARGUS Director Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to lead the mission to locate and assassinate alien-controlled metahumans under Project Butterfly.
Starring John Cena, Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, Jennifer Holland, Chukwudi Iwuji, Steve Agee, and Robert Patrick, new episodes of DC’s Peacemaker premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.