Spoilers

The team starts to investigate…

In many ways Eagly is like a loving pet dog, able to sense when its owner’s feeling down and respond by bringing Peacemaker treats. Except it’s a bald American Eagle who Peacemaker can talk to.

This kind of sums up the show.

In many ways it is entirely familiar but it takes that familiarity and clothes it in unexpected outfits which, to be honest, are extremely pleasing.

This week we hit the storyline I’d expected us to get to last week. The team works out there are many more butterflies than they’d anticipated and go to investigate what might be the centre of their activity. They still don’t know origins, motivations or even capabilities, but they have a mission and they get on with it.

However, tensions continue to escalate among team members until they reach levels where I honestly wondered how it would be resolved. I’ve seen teams who reach that nadir and there’s often no coming back.

In particular the bad blood between John Economos and Peacemaker reaches levels which had me shifting awkwardly in my seat and there’s a fantastic discussion about bullying that is both on the nose and, delightfully, entirely misses the point.

The way the show resolves this tension between team members is masterful – instead of a specific sequence where this is addressed in its own right, the story wraps it up with the rest of the plot and everything is weaved together in a simple and highly effective sequence where the team have to have one another’s backs or perish. It’s easy to admire the craft here but much more importantly it was fun to watch – thrilling and exciting and never less than funny.

Out of this sequence comes a huge change in the team dynamics which had me smiling almost as much as the team themselves. Each of them realise they might be able to count on the people who, literally on the morning of the same day, were promising to kick them up the backside.

Nothing is that simple for a show like this and pressures abound from all sides that, while not yet undoing this newfound family feeling, reveal threats are there menacing them from the window.

It’s safe to say I have fallen for this show. There’s more going on than what I’ve described here (not least the ongoing saga of Peacemaker’s father remaining in prison and the police investigation surrounding that). What I’m most interested in how the elements here shouldn’t work.

DC has made a poor showing in the movies except for The Suicide Squad (and the notable entries with Harley Quinn as the lead). It’s somehow never managed to find the right tone. The tv series have been for people other than me – I’m not interested in billionaire playboys playing hero or approaches that are so tongue in cheek they clean their own ears.

Peacemaker is different – like The Suicide Squad it’s thrown convention to the wind. It approaches the genre with a sense of absurdity at its heart, which, given it’s a genre about people who wear spandex and take the law into their own hands to fight other morons in costumes feels fitting.

Beyond that Peacemaker doesn’t let its characters off without facing the consequences of their actions. What’s super interesting here is that it’s not soap opera with a superpowered cast. What we have here is a strangely gritty realism with a veneer of the bizarre. When Peacemaker sits on his porch you can feel how sad he is and we understand too why he is sad. It’s not because of the hyperreality we see in soaps but because of the outcomes of his own actions – no matter how strange and extreme they might be. In fact, when they’re extreme we’ve seen even more depth in the responses.

I have nothing against soap operas except they exist to perpetuate themselves and in this they have much in common with superhero stories which are, after all, serialised on the same basis. One of the things you can’t have in a perpetual serial is people committing extreme acts and living with them because extreme acts break us – rendering our ability to survive reduced or compromised. There is no reset, no going back, no forgetting.

Peacemaker has ignored this plasticised feature of superhero stories so far and is all the better for it. How long that (or the illusion of that) will last I can’t say but I’m enjoying it while the show insists on showing us the cost of people’s actions.

This episode felt fairly self-contained. The story teeters on breaking out onto a scale vastly larger than the team involved but has reined it in each time so far. As mentioned already, we don’t know the agenda of the supposed antagonists and nor do we understand the different layers or motivations of key members of the cast.

There’s quite a lot more road to run in this story, so I expect to see more big twists and turns. I find myself not knowing where the story is going all over again and I like it. This is definitely not a show for everyone but it works for me.

Rating? 8 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston