With all that messy business with the Aryan Empire squared away (and this is a superhero show, we wouldn’t want to dwell on that too long, would we?) it’s time for Peacemaker to bring the peace, no matter how many men, women, alien bugs, officers of the law, or barn-sized bulbous milk slaves it has to kill in order to get it.
Peacemaker has remained an interesting – if somewhat uneven – ride so far, and even if doing away with most of its serious topics last episode might have tipped the show’s hand as to its priorities, it also allows the finale to fully deliver a gleefully violent final act. With Adebayo and Smith still on the outs after her betrayal, the team down a member after the death of Murn, and time running out until the Cow is teleported to parts unknown, the stakes are appropriately high for the team to go bug zapping.
Here’s five thoughts on the season finale of Peacemaker, “It’s Cow or Never.” Spoilers below.
1. Ghosts of White Supremacists Past
I’ve already mentioned that Peacemaker wrapped up its White Dragon subplot last episode, but it’s worth pausing to highlight just how little this episode has to do with the Aryan Empire. This isn’t entirely a problem for this episode, as it absolutely delivers as an action-filled shootout. However, it’s tough not to notice the difference between the balance the show was striking in prior episodes and what note it decides to end on. It was already somewhat jarring for a show with a major subplot surrounding a white supremacist cult to rarely mention race at all, and it feels like a missed opportunity for the finale not to find some way to work in those themes to its otherwise effective thematic conclusions.
Who does come back (in a manner of speaking) is Chris’s own very dead father, Auggie, a figment of Chris’s imagination sparked by the collision of his childhood and very present traumas., and, relatedly, the digs Auggie’s ghost gets in on his son are sanitized from what Auggie said in real life. Faux-Auggie doesn’t spout off strings of racial slurs, he mostly just calls his son weak and blames him for everything that went wrong in their lives. It will be interesting to see if that stays consistent when Peacemaker returns for season 2, but this being the final note of Auggie’s character this season suggests that Auggie’s racism was mainly set dressing for Chris’s backstory rather than something the show is willing to dig into.
2. Helmet Shuffle
The squad rolls up to the Butterfly secret HQ with half a plan at best, which of course immediately goes awry. After Smith runs through all of what his helmets can do (they run on a spectrum from “completely useless” to “I guess that could be vaguely helpful in some circumstances” to “will kill you if you glance at it the wrong way”) the team works out that if they can get the sonic boom helmet to the right spot, they can activate it remotely to destroy the barn and the Cow with it. After accidentally sending the antigravity helmet into the stratosphere and overestimating Eagly’s ability to follow a command, the team ends up landing on plan C.
Mostly this section of the episode feels like it’s killing time before it gets to go ham with the action, but it does allow for some fun character beats and some excellent riffing from the ensemble. On a comedy level Peacemaker is fully successful. Vigilante as always remains a standout – “If you’re gonna be sarcastic, you should really warn people so there’s no confusion” – but everyone in the squad gets a good gag in here or there. The dual purpose it serves, however, is to remind you just how much fun this group is together so that when they’re all in mortal peril mere minutes later, the stakes are high.
3. The Raid: Redemption
As the only team member the Butterflies won’t recognize on sight, Economos is tasked with going undercover to deliver the helmet into the barn. He’s just passably good enough of a spy to get the helmet most of the way to its destination, but upon seeing the Cow – an enormous pink spider-larva hooked up to a gigantic milking machine – he nopes right out of there and immediately gets made. Adebayo blows the helmet just in time to save him and cause serious damage to the surrounding structure, but not enough to finish the job.
Continued belowThe shootout that follows is extremely exciting, and it manages to have a real sense of danger to it. As Vigilante, Peacemaker, and Harcourt storm the castle, they’re having to simultaneously fight a gunfight and fend off an infestation – the threat of the Butterflies fleeing from a corpse and into one of their bodies feels almost more dangerous than them getting caught by a bullet. The fight peaks when Harcourt, shot multiple times and bleeding out on the ground, has a Butterfly pulled from her mouth by Adebayo just in the nick of time.
Speaking of Adebayo, the raid serves as one of her two major character beats this episode, as she accepts that she is in fact made for this job and jumps into the fray, saving her teammate and then running after Peacemaker into the crumbling wreckage to save her friend and finish the job.
4. Whose Side Are You On?
Peacemaker, meanwhile, gets perhaps his largest test yet as he finally learns the full extent of what the Butterflies are up to. After briefly trading blows with the Butterfly leader, she confesses to him that they are taking over the world in an effort to save it. After they caused the destruction of their own planet through their own neglect of it, they arrived on Earth to find the humans making the exact same mistakes. Without the Butterflies, she insists, humanity is doomed.
It’s a nice reversal of Chris’s often repeated mantra, promising to create peace through the sacrifice of a boatload of innocent lives. It’s the natural extension of the fascism that underpins his beliefs (and, in a very abstract way, links his own supposedly well-meaning and just beliefs back to those of his father) and you can see in his face that she nearly wins him over. Ultimately, though, he triggers the human torpedo helmet on Adebayo’s head, sending her charging into the heart of the Cow and ending the threat of the Butterflies once and for all.
Later, as the team recovers at the hospital, he confesses to Adebayo that he actually rejected the Butterfly’s offer because he knew that if he didn’t they would hurt or kill all of his friends. It’s an interesting reveal that is fitting for the character, and for where the show leaves him at the end of this season. Chris isn’t out of the woods yet, and his more toxic beliefs haven’t magically disappeared. But rather than making his decisions from his warped sense of justice, he’s at least making them now from a place of love and empathy. That’s definitely a step forward; we’ll have to see if it sticks.
5. Justice is Served
Speaking of a warped sense of justice, the show’s final beats treat us to a fun cameo from the Justice League themselves – or, at least, a couple Superman/Wonder Woman shaped silhouettes accompany the Flash (Ezra Miller) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) as they show up to the farm too late to be of any help. It’s a fun moment to tie the series to the larger DCU before the montage of resolutions.
In another DCU tie-in, Viola Davis makes her second cameo of the series as Waller watches her daughter airing all of Task Force X’s dirty laundry on national television, clearing Smith’s name. It’s a story beat that brings Adebayo season arc to a satisfying conclusion; after going back and forth between doing an Amanda Waller impression and seeming fully out of her depth, Adebayo found her own, more honest path forward. As for the rest of the team, Harcourt recovers at the hospital, accepting that she needs to rely on others rather than being a steely lone wolf; Economos sets up his desk at Belle Reve with a framed picture of his new friends; and Vigilante and Peacemaker get back to their old tricks, blowing up a car in the woods together in celebration of their victory. The final shot of the season finds Smith on his porch with Eagly and the now hostless Butterfly leader, haunted by the ghost of his father and still seeming somewhat lost.
It’s the right note for the episode to end on, particularly given the promise of a second season. Smith hasn’t been redeemed or fully deprogrammed, and what little progress he’s made towards becoming a better person feels somewhat tenuous. He’s back home, he’s blowing off steam with his sociopathic (third) best friend, and overall he seems somewhat aimless. His moral compass needs to be recalibrated, and that feels like fertile ground for the character’s future.
