Peacemaker Just Made The Suicide Squad's Worst Death Worse

Warning: Contains spoilers for Peacemaker episode 7.

HBO Max's The Suicide Squad worse. Picking Peacemaker from the surviving of The Suicide Squad to have his own TV show might have seemed like an odd choice as he seemed largely unrepentant and obnoxious. However, Gunn’s take on the character for the Peacemaker DCEU TV series has made him nuanced and interesting at the cost of making his original appearance seem uncharacteristic.

In The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker (John Cena) was given a secret additional mission by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis): make sure the files related to Project Starfish never get off Corto Maltese and embarrass the United States Government. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) makes the decision to try and take the files as he views it as right, and Peacemaker kills him in a face-to-face struggle as he attempts to destroy the files. In Peacemaker episode 7, “Stop Dragon My Heart Around,” the circumstances surrounding the death of Chris Smith’s brother, Keith, are revealed as Peacemaker continues to reflect on the man that he has become.

The early episodes of the Peacemaker series showed Peacemaker wrestling with the fact that he killed Rick Flag, haunted by his final mocking words. However, in later episodes, Peacemaker's pain at killing his brother.

Peacemaker does define the death of Rick Flag as a turning point for Chris Smith. Gunn makes it clear that Peacemaker and Vigilante’s exploits would sometimes result in them killing innocent people by mistake and then not worrying about it and Peacemaker’s confrontation with White Dragon shows that he regrets who he was before and blames his father for the brainwashing that he was put through. However, that turning point is undercut by Peacemaker itself as it works to emphasize all the ways that Peacemaker already hated who he had become and then ultimately showing that his response to Flag’s death did not take place until well after the fact. For Rick Flag’s death in The Suicide Squad to truly work as a redemption point for the character, he would have needed to react to it immediately, rather than ignoring it at first despite Rick Flag’s mocking of Peacemaker's name, which ultimately leaves the turning point to feel more driven by his eventual failure and Bloodsport (Idris Elba) almost killing him.

The Peacemaker TV series has done a lot to show the importance of Rick Flag’s death to the changes in Peacemaker’s character, which began to redeem the decision to kill that character off in The Suicide Squad. However, because Peacemaker’s journey is muddied by the past narrative about his brother, his immediate response to killing Flag in The Suicide Squad becomes an uncharacteristic problem. Based on what is shown in Peacemaker, Chris Smith should have had a moment of shock at realizing what he had done and begun to make a change within The Suicide Squad, rather than continuing on to try and kill the rest of the team.

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Peacemaker releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO.