Spoilers

The team are running out of time to stop the Butterflies…

The finale ends well. It has cameos, action and resolution. If anything it felt a little short and I would have liked to have seen more about the consequences of certain choices. There were questions left unanswered and some absolutely hilarious scenes (not least of which one involving people blowing raspberries).

Thing is, the finale was good, great even. However, now we’ve reached the end of the series I want to talk about the themes this show touched on through its run.

To my mind, Gunn chose three themes he wanted to write about with Peacemaker. The first of these was family – actual flesh and blood family and how it screws you up. The second of them was found family – about how none of us succeeds alone. The third is about the hankering after a kind of structural racial hierarchy of the United States even in the DC universe. He does this from the point of view of a White man but on the latter point in particular I think he’s more or less successful.

First let’s have a look at the issue of family.

Most of us have been for family dinners where the gaps between us and other generations or attitudes have been so wide as to make it feel like we were forced to eat with infuriating strangers. In keeping with the aesthetic of the show, Gunn takes this further and has Peacemaker, Chris Smith, as played by John Cena, entangled with a family I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

Chris Smith arrives in the series not with a real name but solely known as Peacemaker. A nom de guerre which hides his humanity and presents him as a stereotype libertarian douche bro (technical term there).

Slowly, over the course of the show, we see Chris Smith emerge from behind the (literal) mask until in the finale he’s not even wearing the helmet which is the very definition of Peacemaker’s identity. More than that, the reason for Chris to abandon the helmet is deeply rooted in his journey from Peacemaker to being Chris Smith.

The abandoning of his superhero persona leads directly to his humanisation. It is glorious to see what is effectively a reverse origin story. I can’t praise this aspect enough. In a world of superhero narratives where we are essentially taken from loser to hero and inherent to that is putting on a mask, this reversal of the trope is welcome but also deeply emotional.

Chris Smith’s journey out from under the mask is remarkable in many ways but where his family is concerned it is even more interesting because Peacemaker’s origin comes from wanting to do the right thing. It also comes from guilt over tragedy and living in an utterly toxic environment. If those tropes seem familiar *coughbatmancough* then here they’re shown for they would be for real – deleterious to being human, to being well mentally and socially. Chris Smith had a family but they were toxic, abusive and downright evil. That he came out of it with his oxymoronic oath to fight for peace no matter how many people he had to kill is both remarkable (if we take it seriously) in its tragedy and in how it was the best of impulses corrupted by the soil in which it grew.

There is no redemption for Chris’ family in this series. Instead there is resolution and, perhaps, the first steps on the road to freedom. What I loved was that even with the final separation of Chris from his physical family it is made clear to us that their legacy will haunt him for the rest of his life. Chris’ freedom is constructed as knowing the choices he wants to make. That haunting presence in his life represents the totem or, perhaps, a negative moral compass from which he can strike out by making the exact opposite decisions it would advise.

Gunn hasn’t made Cena’s character smart and that is a whole other level of genius. What it has allowed him to do is face Peacemaker with moral and emotional challenges which, from the viewer’s point of view, might appear straight forward. Yet, for the characters within the frame, the choices are not easy, clear or even obvious. The emergence of a humanised Chris Smith is therefore all the more poignant for he comes with flaws, missing steps and acres of internal devastation. If you don’t read this as an allegory for both how society can emerge from bad places and times but also for how individuals can still make these journeys then I don’t know how else to read it. What’s critical though is that Peacemaker is shown as quite distinct from his family, for whom the choices Chris comes to see as a vital part of being himself seem frivolous or, worse, blasphemous.

One of the most interesting comments Gunn appears to make here is we are the sum of those who surround us. Chris Smith emerges not because he has a Damascene moment but because those surrounding him change. He’s not aware of the change but that doesn’t appear to matter. The community around Chris Smith changes. In many ways they’re as uselessly rubbish as his blood relations but the truth is they are different and in their own way put up with none of his shit.

Chris inherits rampant misogyny and racist ideas, even where he has done his best to reject them. He freely expresses these through the series but, each time, he finds the world doesn’t sit back and simply accept what he has to say. Sometimes they ridicule him, sometimes there is a debate and a discussion, but never blind acceptance.

Most of all he’s faced with people with whom he has to work and they demonstrate simply by being alive that his attitudes and expectations about the world aren’t fit for purpose.

Which nicely brings us to our second theme – found family.

In parallel to Peacemaker’s disastrously evil family we have his friends and his team. This is a world in which superheroes are real, so when an eagle hugs a man that little bit of magic is acceptable and, in this case, even welcomed.

His found family are not a foil to his blood relations. It would be too on the nose for this kind of show. Instead what we have are a group of people with their own agendas, their own values and their own motivations. Just like a family in many ways. Where this show succeeds is in giving each of these potentially stereotypical characters depth and flavour beyond what might be expected. This allows Gunn to weave them into something we care about – a team who go through the entire cycle of forming a team.

They start with a sense of who they are and that gets stripped away through failure, challenge and internal clashes. They then, slowly, reform, grow to accept one another for who they are, and then, at the end, see the boundaries of their relationships as supportive and steadfast. The crucial fantasy here (and the aspiration we all have for these kinds of relationships) is that, coming through the fire together, they now see one another for who they really are and acceptance is still there, unquestioned.

Whether it’s Leota kicking Chris’ ass for his unquestioned assumptions about people or Economos’ fabulous realisation that regardless of what separates him from people like Leota and Adrian, there is as much that brings them together.

Equally, the proof of their bond is their sense that they get to expect certain things from their team; loyalty, support, trust and friendship. The calling out when people fall short is sharp and well observed because these people have been close enough to have had their spikey edges get lodged right into each other.

As a counterpoint to the tragedy of real families (and let’s not forget that Leota and Murn also have families whose approach to life are… questionable), this team provides real insight into what acceptance looks like.

Acceptance isn’t silent and nor is it blind. It is open eyed, steadfast and has a voice. Acceptance speaks about what it needs to maintain it, about what each person should expect and what they should deliver. Gunn gets that on screen and it’s highlighted because of how it contrasts with actual family but also because of the way the team itself starts out atomised and slowly coalesces into a cohesive unit.

I guess there’s one more thing to say about this team and it’s that they grow. They start out as having a purpose but in the end they’re together because they are full of trust. The situations they’ve faced, externally and internally, have bound them.

The last theme? To say it was about White Supremacy is to miss the point I think. Gunn presents here nearly every kind of racism (and misogyny) you can find. However, it feels like he wants us to see these things as the backdrop to a deeper problem.

Chris Smith and his family are poor. They come from exactly the part of the spectrum that is being furiously sold the lie that there’s a racial hierarchy and White people in the West should be at the top. It’s the kind of racist structure and narrative that comes at racism with a ninety-degree arc. It’s not interested in whether racism and adjacent prejudices are right or wrong per se. This format for seeing the world has racism as a result not as an input. It is close in nature to colonialist thought and completely parallel to ideas about community where the boundaries are sectarian rather than inclusive.

It’s deeply insidious to argue that racism isn’t bad because it’s just recognising ‘natural’ differences between the races. It’s complete bunk but if accepted makes discrimination a natural ‘rational’ position not an aberrant attitude.

Through Peacemaker’s father, Gunn amply demonstrates that those who profit from this mindset don’t care who gets hurt because they, themselves, profit from the situation. He also demonstrates how damaging they are but also how parochial they end up being. It doesn’t minimise the harm they cause but it puts into context just how pathetic they are.

In contrast, Chris Smith’s racist moments and his misogynistic treads are those of the ignorant, of the one who was told this was the way and had never encountered anyone who might call bullshit.

I am fortunate to have met people in my life like that, who became fast friends and who were able to admit to me that they’d changed because they’d met me – a person of colour, perhaps the first person like that in their lives – and it had a transformative effect. Not because I’m a saint but simply because I was normal.

The team Gunn draws around Peacemaker is flawed but they’re flawed like ‘normal’ people. They struggle with work, with family, with talking about how they feel and you can see because Cena shows Peacemaker processing how these people he’d been told were at best inferior to him break down his world view.

It is the strongest argument for compassion and bridge building I’ve come across in a while. It’s not an argument for centrism – racism, misogyny and other prejudices are plain wrong – there is no middle ground – but Gunn doesn’t leave Peacemaker high and dry to dwell on why he’s hated and rejected. He shows us one road to bringing someone like Chris Smith out of the place they find themselves.

You could argue this is the request of the privileged – to always keep talking. I’m not sure it is, because Peacemaker’s father is afforded no such leeway. Now the more difficult discussion is about who gets to decide when to stop talking. I can forgive Peacemaker for not addressing this.

In my own thinking about these subjects the challenge of class as it intersects with racism and poverty is a huge issue I don’t find us addressing often enough or with sufficient passion. The less advantaged should be natural allies against those who suck up resources. Instead the privileged too often keep everyone else at each others’ throats explicitly to stop that kind of alliance.

Peacemaker shows these alliances are possible, even if it is fiction. It also shows just how hard they are to build.

This review can’t really end without shouting out to John Cena for taking on a role that it would have been easy to sidestep. The same should absolutely be said for Robert Patrick who brings Auggie Smith to the screen with a wild-eyed intensity and vicious self-assurance that sold in a second a role that could easily have been turned down by many.

There are almost too many other things to mention – the use of music, cameos, the opening dance sequence, the one liners, the references to George Lucas.

Verdict: This show was a jumble which could have been a complete mess. What we got was a story which had clear things to say about the world we live in delivered with humour, guts and some really brave choices. I am very much looking forward to season 2 and, for the first time, think the truckloads of DC material out there might be able to generate something compelling when put onto the screen.

Rating? 9 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston