Peacemaker Season 2 ended on a decidedly downbeat note, but according to writer-director James Gunn, that wasn’t always the case, with his first draft much more optimistic. SPOILERS ahead…
Season 2 of Peacemaker was tough on Christopher Smith, with the character discovering that his father and brother are still alive, then learning that they might be Nazis, while he also comes to believe that he’s the ‘Angel of Death.’
But there were also positives for the character during Episode 8, with the 11th Street Kids becoming his de facto new family in our world, and Harcourt realising she loves him, a feeling that’s clearly mutual.
But just when everything appears to be going right for Peacemaker, it suddenly goes very wrong. Though that wasn’t always the case…
Peacemaker Season 2 originally had a happy ending
Peacemaker Season 2 Episode 8 finds current and former A.R.G.U.S. agents realising that they are being allowed to die in service of finding a prison location for meta-humans. Which doesn’t sit right with them.
So they team up and use Vigilante’s secret blood money to form a new agency called ‘Checkmate,’ which will endeavour to make the world a better place.
As the end of the episode approaches, that Checkmate team strides through their new office in slow-motion, with big smiles on their faces at the prospect of this fresh start. Which is where the episode initially ended, as writer-director James Gunn explains on the official Peacemaker podcast:
“We see Checkmate making the world better, and we look up, and we see Eagly, who last we saw hiding in a corner, flying happily around the sky… the first draft ended there!”
Gunn continues: “I gave it to [DC Studios co-chair] Peter Safran, and said, ‘I had another thing I wrote that I put on the ending,’ and he’s like, ‘what?’ We knew Salvation was a part of our future. I didn’t know I was going to put it here [but] we knew it was a part of the DCU plan. And I told him what it was, and he goes, ‘oh, you got to put that in there.'”
Salvation is a prison planet in the comics, where supervillains are incarcerated by the Suicide Squad, and thanks to that conversation with Safran, it becomes the location for Peacemaker’s final scene in the series. Here’s how Gunn describes the sequence:
“We have this last little moment where Peacemaker is abducted wearing his Foxy Shazam T-shirt, of all things, and taken and thrown onto this new world of Salvation, which they’ve now figured out a way to have it lead directly from the warehouse to the other dimension. They throw him out there saying that he volunteered for this, even though he’s not a meta-human.
“Rick Flagg Sr. gets his ultimate revenge, telling him “this is for Ricky, you piece of shi*t.’ He walks around, as ‘Reckoning’ by the Cruel Intentions starts to play, and although the planet is supposed to be a safe haven – even though they’re putting prisoners there – we realize this is not the case, because we hear some hellish squeals from some sort of beasts all around Peacemaker.
“They close the portal, and the season ends as they shut them in there.”
Meaning the Peacemaker Season 2 finale that was initially happy, becomes pretty grim for the title character, setting up a new storyline that will either pay off in Season 3, or even the next Superman movie, Man of Tomorrow.
MG lancia Match Point, vantaggi su tutta la gamma fino a 3.250 euro