In Peacemaker season 2, Chris Smith (John Cena) is making peace with himself. The new season of James Gunn‘s HBO Max series takes place in the aftermath of Superman, with A.R.G.U.S. Director Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) gunning for his son’s killer and the man in possession of a dimensional portal like Lex Luthor’s. It just so happens they’re the same person: Peacemaker killed Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman) in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, and he inherited the QUC — Quantum Unfolding Chamber — from his white supremacist father, Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick), aka the armored villain the White Dragon.
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“I’m going to make a life in the other world,” Chris says in the trailer, which shows a glimpse of another dimension where the helmeted mercenary is embraced as “a real hero.” Meanwhile, Flag mounts a task force to close a dimensional rift like the one that tore through Metropolis and the fabric of reality itself in Superman.
James Gunn Reveals Alternate Peacemaker Season 2 Villains
But in another world, season 2 of Peacemaker was completely different. Gunn initially planned on featuring Auggie’s gang, the Aryan Empire, as the villains sought to avenge their Grand Dragon.
“Originally, the first time I wrote a rough outline of season 2, a very rough outline, it had to do with other white supremacist superheroes who were after Peacemaker for killing his father because he was their comrade,” Gunn said on the Crew Call podcast. “For me, it actually played a little bit too much like season 1 and I think I wanted to turn the story on its heels a little bit more.”
For season 2, “I wanted Peacemaker to be this character who had to really deal with the ramifications of his actions in season 1, and deal with his emotional reality of the demons that he discovered,” Gunn added.
Gunn is referring to Chris’ traumatic backstory: he accidentally killed his brother Keith as a child, then killed his father when Auggie went after Peacemaker as the White Dragon. But by bringing in an adult Keith (David Denman) in this other world, Gunn could explore “how does he face [his demons]? And so this seemed to work much better for that.”
While Peacemaker season 1 featured the QUC, it was only after Superman that Gunn had the idea to incorporate another dimension to showcase, well, another dimension of Chris Smith.
“Once I wrote Superman and started getting into [Peacemaker], once I had the idea for the alternate dimension and how we were going to deal with that, I didn’t want to deal with it in a way that we’ve been seeing in comic book movies of the multiverse,” he said, adding, “It isn’t the multiverse.”
“This is more like a novel I really love: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife,” Gunn continued. “It’s the idea of this one other life that’s very different from our life, and how you deal with this [alternate] version. 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 — starring John Cena, Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Holland, Freddie Stroma, Steve Agee, Robert Patrick, Frank Grillo, David Denman, Sol Rodriguez, and Tim Meadows — premiere Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO Max.
