The White Dragon makes his move…

This is supposed to be the penultimate episode but for much of it I couldn’t help feel we were seeing payoffs like it was the finale. Moment after moment, scene after scene, the episode smashed into me, delivering surprisingly emotional punches while throwing action at us from every direction.

The team starts the episode split up, one part of them trying to avoid getting jammed by the butterfly controlled police, the other half trying to avoid getting jammed by Peacemaker’s Nazi asshole of a father.

So far, so much picking up the end of the last episode. Instead of focusing on this, the show starts with Peacemaker and where he’s come from, the single biggest incident that defined the rest of his life. We see it in full, witness the entire heart-breaking episode and it’s wrenching.

Peacemaker started this series as he left The Suicide Squad – a huge douche whose banal evil was only eclipsed by how dumb he was. A figure to be disliked and ridiculed. A really odd choice for a spin off TV show.

By the time you learn what happened to him as a young man and have witnessed his journey here in the show there’s something else going on. Peacemaker is still a huge fool but there’s something more there too – a man who’s learning about himself and not liking what he sees, wishing he could be different and trying his hardest to make that real. He’s not good at change, he’s making lots of mistakes but then I think Gunn is deliberately putting him on screen as a reflection of the rest of us.

We make mistakes. What we did before might not be who we are now or who we might be in future. All through this episode we have a sense of Chris Smith wrestling with the person he is, the person others tried to make him and who he might just be able to become if only he gets the chance.

At the same time, Gunn does something fascinating with the team. In all quarters it’s clear that no one gets this done on their own. No one survives without others.

The old saying that it takes a village to raise a child couldn’t be more relevant here. There are grand standoffs but no one succeeds alone. Despite their differences, their idiocy, their flaws and their bravery, it’s only together that they manage to get through.

I was bowled over by this because I wasn’t expecting for how tight it was – the writing here is superb with barely a word or scene wasted. After many series where entire episodes could have been cut, Peacemaker has made good use of every minute of runtime and nowhere is this better demonstrated than here. Every sentence, every shot, every strand of plot works together to tell the story. This mastery is then realised in just how each character slams into place at the perfect moment to deliver the next step in the show.

I am full of awe of the masterful story telling on show here. I’ve said it before but it deserves saying again – this is so much better than it deserves to be.

We still have one episode to go and the smart thing here is what happens: Peacemaker has his showdown with his father and it’s brutal and I honestly didn’t know who was going to make it through – which for a superhero show where death is too often weightless, is a proper accomplishment.

What’s even better is that the Nazis get smashed and it’s not even the finale of the show – they’re shown as being so inconsequential they don’t make it to the end of the series. A friend asked if I’d watched with subtitles on, which I hadn’t, but after what he told me I can only recommend you do so as it definitely adds a certain extra level of raspberry to any idea that these White supremacists should be taken seriously.

So how does the finale look at this point?

With one threat dealt with the team are together again but they remain ruptured by betrayal and hurt. Will they be enough to take down the actual enemy in the last episode? I don’t know but it’s going to be brutal fun finding out.

Rating? 9 out of 10.

Stewart Hotston