Chris Smith and the 11th Street Kids have saved the world, and all it cost them was everything. But Chris has a plan, and by a plan, he means running away.

The pre credits sequence of this episode elegantly sets up the new stakes, recaps the previous season and answers the question of how the project fits in with the new DCU.

It even does so with the grace and patience to let viewers decide what’s canon and what’s not. It’s a really subtle, efficient piece of storytelling and it’s just the start.

Peacemaker’s catastrophic journey to be a real boy continues and he finds the last thing he thinks he deserves: a second chance. The set up is beautiful, locking the show into Gunn’s recent and excellent Superman movie through Chris’s dad’s pocket universe. Lex Luthor’s run at the technology was sufficiently dangerous that the government is paranoid about who else has it. They know Chris does and at the exact point he finds an alternate dimension where his dad and brother are alive (and maybe not racist?) Rick Flag starts moving on the man who killed his son. Partially because he cannot be trusted with the tech but mostly for vengeance.

So we have arc, meta arc and character arc all in one. It’s enhanced by check ins with Harcourt, Economos, Adebayo and everyone’s favourite murder puppy, Vigilante. None of them are in the same place as they started and none of them are quite on the same page. Even if they really want to be.

Oh and everything is Eagly’s fault. Kind of.

Verdict: There’s a surprising poignancy to this episode, as well as the usual gloriously crude humour. This feels like the show and Peacemaker himself stepping into complex and new territory and it looks set to get messy in the best of ways. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart